Fatalities in west Austrian prisons

The purpose of this study is to review 23 causes of death that have occurred in Western-Austrian prisons from 1974 to 1989. The majority of them (11 cases) were due to suicides. Among 9 cases of natural death there was a 25 years old man, who died of an unknown purulent meningoencephalitis. Two drunken prisoners had not been supervised and therefore died of alcohol poisoning. In one case the police jail physician did not recognize an epidural hematoma.     

Antitrust in China: The Problem of Incentive Compatibility

This paper reviews China's recent efforts to enact a competitionpolicy (antitrust) law. We focus on three issues: (1) What isthe substance of the proposed law, and how does it differ fromexisting antitrust law in other countries, (2) How will thelaw be implemented or enforced, and how will those who mustimplement this law interpret their mandate, and (3) What willbe the likely effects of this law given China's unique historyand cultural heritage. We emphasize China's economic, legaland regulatory contexts in which an antitrust law may be enforced.Our central focus is the problem of establishing a substantiveand procedural legal framework that is incentive-compatiblewith economic efficiency and growth. The draft law could beimproved, both to increase its clarity and to make its enforcementmore consistent with the goal of achieving improvements in economicefficiency. Nevertheless, there is much merit in the draft,especially its strong focus on reducing anticompetitive practicesof state-owned enterprises (SOEs) and other government bodies.However, our major difficulty with the new law is that, in theabsence of a tradition of reliance on the rule of law, Chineseand foreign enterprises will find it very difficult to relyon the antitrust statute or the actions of the courts in Chinaas a basis for predicting the antitrust liability that mightresult from various business practices. Therefore, the principalvector by which antitrust law (or indeed any law) affects economicbehavior is absent from the Chinese scene. Unless the bureaucracythat enforces the new antitrust law actively pursues a policyof consistent enforcement based on written guidelines, staredecisis, or other sources of predictability, the substance ofthe statute itself will have little significance. That outcomewould represent a significant loss for the economic welfareof the Chinese people.     

DOES ECONOMICS PROVIDE A RELIABLE GUIDE TO REGULATING COMMODITY BUNDLING BY FIRMS? A SURVEY OF THE ECONOMIC LITERATURE

This article surveys the voluminous economic literature on commoditybundling. While bundling has been widely studied, the vast majorityof the literature has focused on theoretical treatments of bundlingthat demonstrate a wide range of reasons why firms might engagein bundling. These papers generally contain restrictive assumptions,including assumptions regarding the existence of monopoly insome markets, and the nature of rivalry in others. The modelscontained in these papers also generally suppress the more obviousand ubiquitous reasons firms may use bundling. Moreover, thesemodels have not been subject to robustness checks, nor havetheir assumptions been tested empirically. This review of theeconomic literature generally confirms the US Solicitor General'sview in 3M v. LePage's regarding the underdeveloped state ofthe economics literature and its position that the US SupremeCourt should defer promulgation of antitrust standards for bundling.While the literature has demonstrated the possibility that bundlingcan generate anticompetitive harm, it does not provide a reliableway to gauge whether the potential for harm would outweigh anydemonstrable benefits from the practice. As a result, the widespreadapplication of the antitrust laws to bundling by firms can generatesignificant error costs by erroneously condemning or deterringefficient business practices. In the future, economists shouldseek to expand their understanding of both the anticompetitiveand procompetitive reasons firms engage in bundling. This willentail studying the reasons why bundling is adopted by firmswithout market power, relaxing the assumption of monopoly intheoretical models, and generating testable hypotheses and thedata to test them.     

Social justice as a Holy Grail: The endless quest

This paper gives the author's impressions on the following aspects of justice: desert, equity, equality, need, and intergenerational equity. The author concludes that these different aspects cannot be reconciled but instead must be compromised. An example of such a compromise is provided by a discussion of welfare reform. The author claims that rights are correlative with duties, and that asserting the former has little meaning without specifying the latter. He then discusses justice toward groups rather than individuals. He proposes that maintaining cultural variety in the presence of a homogeneous superculture is a major problem of the contemporary world. The paper concludes with a discussion of various forms of power, particularly the integrative power that people acquire over each other by virtue of ties of loyalty and identity.