A critical part of adapting to the higher temperatures that climate change brings will be the deployment of existing technologies to new sectors and regions. This paper examines the evolution of the temperature-mortality relationship over the course of the entire 20 th century in the United States both for its own interest but also to identify potentially useful adaptations that may be useful in the coming decades. There are three primary findings. First, the mortality impact of days with a mean temperature exceeding 80° F has declined by about 70%. Almost the entire decline occurred after 1960. There are about 14,000 fewer fatalities annually than if the pre-1960 impacts of high temperature on mortality still prevailed. Second, the diffusion of residential air conditioning can explain essentially the entire decline in hot day related fatalities. Third, using Dubin-McFadden's discrete-continuous model, we estimate that the present value of US consumer surplus from the introduction of residential air conditioning (AC) in 1960 ranges from $83 to $186 billion ($2012) with a 5% discount rate. The monetized value of the mortality reductions on high temperature days due to AC accounts for a substantial fraction of these welfare gains.
The variant of new institutionalism that is our focus is a pan-disciplinary theory that asserts that actors pursue their interests by making choices within institutional constraints. We organize our review of the theory around its behavioral assumptions, the operation of institutional forms, and processes of institutional change. At each stage, we give particular attention to the potential contributions of sociology to the theory. The behavioral assumptions of the theory amount to bounded rationality and imply transaction costs, which, in the absence of institutions, may frustrate collective ends. The principle weakness of these behavioral assumptions is a failure to treat preferences as endogenous. We categorize the institutions that arise in response to transaction costs as to whether they are public or private in their source and centralized or decentralized in their making. In detailing the resulting categories of institutional forms, we identify key interdependencies across the public/private and centralized/decentralized dimensions. The new institutionalism is in particular need of better theory about private decentralized institutions, and theorists could turn to embeddedness theory and cognitive new-institutional theory as a source of help on this topic. The dominant view of institutional change is that it is evolutionary, driven by organizational competition, and framed by individual beliefs and shared understandings. Sociology can refine the change theory by adding better explanations of the behavior of organizations, and of the processes by which institutional alternatives come to be viewed as acceptable or unacceptable.
Two conflicting predictions have emerged regarding the effect of low–cost information on price. The first states that all Internet retailers will charge the same low price for mass produced goods. The second states that Internet retailers will differentiate to avoid intense price competition. Using data collected in April 1999 on the prices of 107 books in thirteen online and two physical bookstores, we find similar average prices online and in physical stores and substantial price dispersion online. Analysis of product differentiation yields no clear results. The substantial premium charged by Amazon provides indirect evidence of product differentiation.
P eer-to-peer (P2P) file sharing networks are an important medium for the distribution of information goods.However, there is little empirical research into the optimal design of these networks under real-world conditions. Early speculation about the behavior of P2P networks has focused on the role that positive network externalities play in improving performance as the network grows. However, negative network externalities also arise in P2P networks because of the consumption of scarce network resources or an increased propensity of users to free ride in larger networks, and the impact of these negative network externalities-while potentially important-has received far less attention.Our research addresses this gap in understanding by measuring the impact of both positive and negative network externalities on the optimal size of P2P networks. Our research uses a unique dataset collected from the six most popular OpenNap P2P networks between December 19, 2000, and April 22, 2001. We find that users contribute additional value to the network at a decreasing rate and impose costs on the network at an increasing rate, while the network increases in size. Our results also suggest that users are less likely to contribute resources to the network as the network size increases. Together, these results suggest that the optimal size of these centralized P2P networks is bounded-At some point the costs that a marginal user imposes on the network will exceed the value they provide to the network. This finding is in contrast to early predictions that larger P2P networks would always provide more value to users than smaller networks. Finally, these results also highlight the importance of considering user incentives-an important determinant of resource sharing in P2P networks-in network design.
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