Corporate Governance in Spain (with an Application of the Power Indices Approach)

This paper describes the governance system of Spanish listed firms in the early 1990's. Although the institutional setting of the Spanish Stock Exchanges differs little from other European national markets, we found important differences in several aspects of corporate governance. In particular, some of the standard mechanisms of control (e.g. boards and institutional shareholders) do not play an active role, whereas ownership is relatively concentrated. Moreover, power indices suggest that controlling blocs of large shareholders are very likely to form. We thus conclude that the ownership of shares is a pivotal mechanism in the governance of Spanish corporations.     

Regulating Autonomy: An Assessment of Policy Language for Highly Automated Vehicles

Self‐driving cars (also known as driverless cars, autonomous vehicles, and highly automated vehicles [HAVs]) will change the regulatory, political, and ethical frameworks surrounding motor vehicles. At the highest levels of automation, HAVs are operated by independent machine agents, making decisions without the direct intervention of humans. The current transportation system assumes human intervention though, including legal and moral responsibilities of human operators. Has the development of these artificial intelligence (AI) and autonomous system (AS) technologies outpaced the ethical and political conversations? This paper examines discussions of HAVs, driver responsibility, and technology failure to highlight the differences between how the policy‐making institutions in the United States (Congress and the Public Administration) and technology and transportation experts are or are not speaking about responsibility in the context of autonomous systems technologies. We report findings from a big data analysis of corpus‐level documents to find that enthusiasm for HAVs has outpaced other discussions of the technology.     

Diversity in times of austerity: documenting resistance in the academy

What happens to feminism in the university is parallel to what happens to feminism in other venues under economic restructuring: while the impoverished nation is forced to cut social services and thereby send women back to the hierarchy of the family, the academy likewise reduces its footprint in interdisciplinary structures and contains academic feminists back to the hierarchy of departments and disciplines. When the family and the department become powerful arbiters of cultural values, women and feminist academics by and large suffer: they either accept a diminished role or are pushed to compete in a system they recognize as antithetical to the foundational values of feminist priorities of social justice. Collaborative work to nurture diversity and interdisciplinarity does not register as individual accomplishment. This paper considers the necessity of this type of academic work to further the vision of a society committed to the collective values espoused by feminism and other areas in social justice.     

Stochastic amortization and manufacturing profitability

The quantitative analysis of manufacturing operations usually considers the amortization of physical assets, and allows for the cost of such assets in product prices. Typically, this involves the use of an asset's P/A ratio, where P is its initial cost and A is the net cash-flow or profit it generates in unit time. The simplest case, regarding asset life as fixed, is seldom credible, and a more realistic approach is to model the stochastic nature of asset lifetimes. In this paper, we demonstrate the efficacy of the strategy of calculating an average P/A, and show that the earning power of assets should increase with variability in lifetimes. We then argue that pricings based around this average are most useful with large numbers of assets, and that analysis of a small number requires a more considered approach. Finally, we consider the impact of estimating lifetime parameters on the approaches outlined.     

Duverger's Law, Penrose's Power Index and the Unity of the UK

As predicted by Duverger's Law, the UK has had two-party competition for long periods in most electoral districts. However, there are different patterns of two-party competition in different districts and more than two effective parties in the Commons. Since 1874, parliament has always contained parties wishing to modify the Union and contesting seats only outside England. By calculating the Penrose power index for all parties in the House of Commons for all general elections since 1874, we identify when such parties were pivotal. We explain various legislative changes (for example the Crofters Act 1886, the first three Irish Home Rule Bills, the Parliament Act 1911) and non-changes (for example the failure to enact female suffrage before 1914) by reference to the Penrose index scores. The scores also explain how and why policy towards Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland changed and did not change in the 1970s.     

Voting power and voting blocs

We investigate the method of power indices to study voting power of members of a legislature that has voting blocs. Our analysis is theoretical, intended to contribute to a theory of positive political science in which social actors are motivated by the pursuit of power as measured by objective power indices. Our starting points are the papers by Riker (Behavioural Science, 1959, “A test of the adequacy of the power index”) and Coleman (American Sociological Review, 1973, “Loss of Power”). We argue against the Shapley–Shubik index and show that anyway the Shapley–Shubik index per head is inappropriate for voting blocs. We apply the Penrose index (the absolute Banzhaf index) to a hypothetical voting body with 100 members. We show how the power indices of individual bloc members can be used to study the implications of the formation of blocs and how voting power varies as bloc size varies. We briefly consider incentives to migrate between blocs. This technique of analysis has many real world applications to legislatures and international bodies. It can be generalised in many ways: our analysis is a priori (assuming formal voting and ignoring actual voting behaviour) but can be made empirical with voting data reflecting behaviour; it examines the consequences of two blocs but can easily be extended to more.     

Designing the Voting System for the Council of the European Union

This paper examines thesystem of Qualified Majority Voting, usedby the Council of the European Union, fromthe perspective of enlargement of theUnion. It uses an approach based on powerindices due to Penrose (1946), Banzhaf (1965) and Coleman(1971) to make two analyses: (1) the question ofthe voting power of member countries fromthe point of view of fairness, and (2) thequestion of how the threshold number ofvotes required for QMV should bedetermined. It studies two scenarios forchange from 2005 onwards envisaged by theNice Treaty: (1) no enlargement, the EUcomprising 15 member countries, and (2)full enlargement to 27 members by theaccession of all the present twelvecandidates. The proposal is made that fairweights be determined algorithmically as atechnical or routine matter as themembership changes. The analysis of how thethreshold affects power shows thetrade-offs that countries face betweentheir blocking power and the power of theCouncil to act. The main findings are: (1)that the weights laid down in the NiceTreaty are close to being fair, the onlysignificant discrepancies being theunder-representation of Germany andRomania, and the over-representation ofSpain and Poland; (2) the thresholdrequired for a decision is set too high forthe Council to be an effective decisionmaking body.     

An Empirical Comparison of the Performance of Classical Power Indices

Power indices are general measures of the relative a priori voting power of individual members of a voting body. They are useful for both positive and normative analysis of voting bodies particularly those using weighted voting. This paper applies new algorithms for computing the rival Shapley-Shubik and Banzhaf indices for large voting bodies to shareholder voting power in a cross section of British companies. Each company is a separate voting body and there is much variation in ownership between them resulting in different power structures. Because the data are incomplete, both finite and 'oceanic' games of shareholder voting are analysed. The indices are appraised, using reasonable criteria, from the literature on corporate control. The results are unfavourable to the Shapley-Shubik index and suggest that the Banzhaf index much better reflects the variations in the power of shareholders between companies as the weights of shareholder blocs vary.     

A behavioral power index

We propose an empirically informed measure of the voting power that relaxes the assumptions of equally probable and independent votes. The behavioral power index measures the voter’s ability to swing a decision based on the probability distributions of the others’ behavior. We apply it to the Supreme Court of the United States using roll-call data to estimate voting probability distributions, which lead us to refute the assumption of equally probable and independent votes, and estimate the equivalent number of independent Justices for the Warren, Burger and Rehnquist benches, which turns out to be very low.     

Foreign patents for the technology transfer from laboratories of U.S. federal agencies

The Journal of Technology Transfer - This paper documents the importance of foreign patents for the technology transfer of inventions created in the laboratories of the U.S. federal agencies....