Although development in China is quite heterogeneous across regions, little research has explored how the value of Chinese firms’ political ties is contingent on the institutional and economic development of firms’ regional environment. This article explores some of the factors that moderate the benefit of political ties, differentiating between ties to central and local government. The study investigates how benefits of ties to central and local government are moderated by regional market and economic development, respectively. The study is based on a quantitative analysis of 858 listed Chinese firms. The results suggest that firms enjoy a positive effect of political ties but mainly ties to central government. The analysis, furthermore, finds these ties to be less valuable in economically well-developed regions. Market development, on the other hand, does not moderate the effects of local or central government ties.

The article discusses the use of algorithmic models in finance (algo or high frequency trading). Algo trading is widespread but also somewhat controversial in modern financial markets. It is a form of automated trading technology, which critics claim can, among other things, lead to market manipulation. Drawing on three cases, this article shows that manipulation also can happen in the reverse way, meaning that human traders attempt to make algorithms ‘make mistakes’ by ‘misleading’ them. These attempts to manipulate are very simple and immediately transparent to humans. Nevertheless, financial regulators increasingly penalize such attempts to manipulate algos. The article explains this as an institutionalization of algo trading, a trading practice which is vulnerable enough to need regulatory protection.

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Capacities for abstract thinking, category-formation and problem solving are central to human cognition. Processes of abstraction allow the transfer of experiences and knowledge between contexts helping us make informed decisions in new or changing contexts. While we are often inclined to relate such reasoning capacities to individual minds and brains, they may in fact be contingent on human-specific modes of collaboration, dialogue, and shared attention. In an experimental study, we test the hypothesis that social interaction enhances cognitive processes of abstraction, which in turn improves problem solving performance. Through three sessions of increasing complexity, individuals and groups were presented with a problem-solving task requiring them to categorize a set of visual stimuli. To assess the character of participants’ problem representations, we investigated the extent to which participants generalized observations from known to new stimuli during training sessions. Furthermore, after each training session they were presented with a transfer task involving stimuli that differed in appearance, but shared relations among features with the training set. We found that groups were more likely to correctly generalize their observations during the training sessions and performed superior to individuals in the transfer phase, especially in the high complexity session, suggesting that groups formed more abstract problem representations. Crucially, variation in performance among groups was predicted by semantic diversity in members’ dialogical contributions suggesting a link between social interaction, cognitive diversity, and abstraction.

Based on an empirical study of the British think tank Demos, the article deliberates on the nature of current political ideas. The key argument is that such a deliberation must take into account not only ideas of production but also ideas of mediation. The article argues that the ability to disseminate, brand, and market political ideas in the public sphere through the mass media is a crucial part of the activities of modern idea producers such as think tanks. Ideas are normally conceptualized as statements. As an analytical tool, the article makes a distinction between the two components of a statement. The two components are utterance (or impartation) and proposition (or semantic unit more generally). By so doing, it is possible to focus on (1) the necessity for think tanks to be an `impartational node' in communicative networks and (2) the importance of attributing certain meanings and values to the political ideas (to brand ideas). From this theoretical outset, the article then describes the logic or nature of the mediation, marketing and branding of political ideas.

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