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Topic Review

In economics, market power refers to the ability of a firm to influence the price at which it sells a product or service to increase economic profit. In other words, market power occurs if a firm does not face a perfectly elastic demand curve and can set its price (P) above marginal cost (MC) without losing sales. This indicates that the magnitude of market power is associated with the gap between P and MC at a firm's profit maximising level of output. Such propensities contradict perfectly competitive markets, where market participants have no market power, P = MC and firms earn zero economic profit. Market participants in perfectly competitive markets are consequently referred to as 'price takers', whereas market participants that exhibit market power are referred to as 'price makers' or 'price setters'. A firm with market power has the ability to individually affect either the total quantity or price in the market. This said, market power has been seen to exert more upward pressure on prices due to effects relating to Nash equilibria and profitable deviations that can be made by raising prices. Price makers face a downward-sloping demand curve and as a result, price increases lead to a lower quantity demanded. The decrease in supply creates an economic deadweight loss (DWL) and a decline in consumer surplus. This is viewed as socially undesirable and has implications for welfare and resource allocation as larger firms with high markups negatively effect labour markets by providing lower wages. Perfectly competitive markets do not exhibit such issues as firms set prices that reflect costs, which is to the benefit of the customer. As a result, many countries have antitrust or other legislation intended to limit the ability of firms to accrue market power. Such legislation often regulates mergers and sometimes introduces a judicial power to compel divestiture. Market power provides firms with the ability to engage in unilateral anti-competitive behavior. As a result, legislation recognises that firms with market power can, in some circumstances, damage the competitive process. In particular, firms with market power are accused of limit pricing, predatory pricing, holding excess capacity and strategic bundling. A firm usually has market power by having a high market share although this alone is not sufficient to establish the possession of significant market power. This is because highly concentrated markets may be contestable if there are no barriers to entry or exit. Invariably, this limits the incumbent firm's ability to raise its price above competitive levels. If no individual participant in the market has significant market power, anti-competitive conduct can only take place through collusion, or the exercise of a group of participants' collective market power. An example of which was seen in 2007, when British Airways was found to have colluded with Virgin Atlantic between 2004 and 2006, increasing their surcharges per ticket from £5 to £60. Regulators are able to assess the level of market power and dominance a firm has and measure competition through the use of several tools and indicators. Although market power is extremely difficult to measure, through the use of widely used analytical techniques such as concentration ratios, the Herfindahl-Hirschman index and the Lerner index, regulators are able to oversee and attempt to restore market competitiveness.

2.7K
19 Oct 2022

Biography

Richard John Santorum (born May 10, 1958) is an American politician, attorney, and political commentator. A member of the Republican Party, he served as a United States senator from Pennsylvania from 1995 to 2007 and was the Senate's third-ranking Republican from 2001 to 2007. Santorum ran for the 2012 Republican presidential nomination, finishing second to Mitt Romney. In January 2017, he becam

2.7K
24 Nov 2022

Topic Review

Multi-Dimensional Concept of Sustainable Development and Urban Governance

Modern cities bear the entire burden and responsibility of operationalizing the concept of sustainable development, since they are the ones that represent the greatest threat to its implementation. The sustainability of cities largely depends on the form of public governance and decision making; in fact, this interdependence is a prerequisite for all the relevant progress in sustainable development that many European cities strive to achieve. An approach to governance in European cities that has proven to be the most effective in achieving urban sustainability is an integrated one, as it encompasses the coordination, cooperation and integration of sectoral policies and the participation of different actors at all levels of governance.

2.7K
16 Jun 2023

Topic Review

Citizen-Centric Smart Cities

The citizen-centric smart city is conceptualised from the citizenship perspective which stressed on the citizen's responsibilities and participatory governance practices in a smart city (Malek, Lim and Yigitcanlar, 2021). This conception argues that instead of the traditional view on fulfilling the citizen's needs, the citizens should co-produce, participate and contribute to building the smart city together with the government and corporates.

2.6K
14 Sep 2021

Topic Review

Sultana (Title)

Sultana or sultanah (/sʌlˈtɑːnə/; Arabic: سلطانة sulṭāna) is a female royal title, and the feminine form of the word sultan. This term has been officially used for female monarchs in some Islamic states, and historically it was also used for sultan's consorts.

2.5K
17 Nov 2022

Topic Review

Blank and Null Voting Paradox

The Blank and Null Voting Paradox or the Blank and Null Support is a generalized suboptimal support of invalid votes and deliberate abstentions misrepresenting the results in a plurality runoff (two-round) election by choosing a pseudo-Condorcet loser candidate. Nepomuceno and Costa (2019) provided some evidence of this suboptimal support in the 2014 Brazilian national elections by constructing a pairwise comparison with 3,010 voting intension interviews conducted in 204 Brazilian cities. The authors suggested that the 2016 historical impeachment of the Brazilian president Dilma Rousseff can be associated with this weak legitimate representation. This should not be confused with Fishburn and Brams (1983) no-show paradox, which states that the removal of a ballot, or the absence of a voter, might change the outcome of an election to a more preferable choice for that voter than if he or she decided to vote sincerely according to his/her preferences. In the Blank and Null Support, some results end up a worse outcome for the voter, and this outcome hardly could have been made by a strategic decision.

2.5K
02 May 2021

Topic Review

Influencer Marketing

Influencer marketing (also known as influence marketing) is a form of social media marketing involving endorsements and product placement from influencers, people and organizations who have a purported expert level of knowledge or social influence in their field. Influencers are someone (or something) with the power to affect the buying habits or quantifiable actions of others by uploading some form of original—often sponsored—content to social media platforms like Instagram, YouTube, Snapchat or other online channels. Influencer marketing is when a brand enrolls influencers who have an established credibility and audience on social media platforms to discuss or mention the brand in a social media post. Influencer content may be framed as testimonial advertising.

2.5K
14 Oct 2022

Topic Review

Woke (/ˈwoʊk/) as a political term of African American origin refers to a perceived awareness of issues concerning social justice and racial justice. It is derived from the African-American Vernacular English expression "stay woke", whose grammatical aspect refers to a continuing awareness of these issues. By the late 2010s, woke had been adopted as a more generic slang term broadly associated with left-wing politics, socially liberal causes, feminism, LGBT activism, and cultural issues (with the terms woke culture and woke politics also being used). It has been the subject of memes, ironic usage and criticism. Its widespread use since 2014 is a result of the Black Lives Matter movement.

2.4K
23 Nov 2022

Topic Review

Post-truth is a philosophical and political concept for "the disappearance of shared objective standards for truth" and the "circuitous slippage between facts or alt-facts, knowledge, opinion, belief, and truth". Post-truth discourse is often contrasted with the forms taken by scientific methods and inquiry. The term garnered widespread popularity, in the form of "post-truth politics", in the period around the 2016 United States presidential election and the Brexit referendum. It was named Word of the Year in 2016 by the Oxford Dictionary where it is defined as "Relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief". While the term post-truth is relatively recent, the concept can be traced back to earlier moral, epistemic, and political debates about relativism, postmodernity, and mendacity in politics, including nontruthfulness, lies, deception, and deliberate falsehood.

2.4K
19 Oct 2022

Topic Review

Reactance (Psychology)

Reactance is an unpleasant motivational arousal (reaction) to offers, persons, rules, or regulations that threaten or eliminate specific behavioral freedoms. Reactance occurs when a person feels that someone or something is taking away their choices or limiting the range of alternatives. Reactance can occur when someone is heavily pressured to accept a certain view or attitude. Reactance can cause the person to adopt or strengthen a view or attitude that is contrary to what was intended, and also increases resistance to persuasion. People using reverse psychology are playing on reactance, attempting to influence someone to choose the opposite of what they request. Some individuals are naturally high in reactance, a personality characteristic called trait reactance.

2.4K
24 Nov 2022

Topic Review

Collaborationism

Collaborationism is cooperation with the enemy against one's country of citizenship in wartime. The term is most often used to describe the cooperation of civilians with the occupying Axis Powers, especially Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, and Imperial Japan, during World War II. Motivations for collaboration by citizens and organizations included nationalism, ethnic hatred, anti-communism, antisemitism, opportunism, self-defense, or often a combination of these factors. Some collaborators in World War II committed war crimes, crimes against humanity, or atrocities such as the Holocaust. More often collaborators simply "went along to get along," attempting to benefit from the occupation or simply survive. The definition of collaborationism is imprecise and subject to interpretation. Stanley Hoffmann subdivided collaboration into involuntary (reluctant recognition of necessity) and voluntary (an attempt to exploit necessity). According to him, collaborationism can be either servile or ideological. Servile is service to an enemy based on necessity for personal survival or comfort, whereas ideological is advocacy for cooperation with an enemy power. In contrast, Bertram Gordon used the terms "collaborator" and "collaborationist" for non-ideological and ideological collaborations, respectively. James Mace Ward has asserted that, while collaboration is often equated with treason, there was "legitimate collaboration" between civilian internees (mostly Americans) in the Philippines and their Japanese captors for mutual benefit and to enhance the possibilities of the internees to survive. Collaboration with the Axis Powers in Europe and Asia existed in varying degrees in all the occupied countries. Although the United Kingdom and the United States were never occupied, a British dependency, the Channel Islands near France, was under German occupation and thousands of American civilians in Asia were interned by Japan. With the defeat of the Axis, collaborators were often punished by public humiliation, imprisonment, and execution. In France, 10,500 collaborators are estimated to have been executed, some after legal proceedings, others extrajudicially. The opposite of collaborationism in World War II was "resistance", a term which also has a broad range of meaning and interpretations.

2.4K
01 Dec 2022

Topic Review

Citizenship is a relationship between an individual and a state to which the individual owes allegiance and in turn is entitled to its protection.(quoted) Each state determines the conditions under which it will recognize persons as its citizens, and the conditions under which that status will be withdrawn. Recognition by a state as a citizen generally carries with it recognition of civil, political, and social rights which are not afforded to non-citizens. In general, the basic rights normally regarded as arising from citizenship are the right to a passport, the right to leave and return to the country/ies of citizenship, the right to live in that country and to work there. Some countries permit their citizens to have multiple citizenships, while others insist on exclusive allegiance. A person who does not have citizenship of any state is said to be stateless, while one who lives on state borders whose territorial status is uncertain is a border-lander.

2.4K
18 Nov 2022

Topic Review

Resistance Theory in the Early Modern Period

Resistance theory is an aspect of political thought, discussing the basis on which constituted authority may be resisted, by individuals or groups. In the European context it came to prominence as a consequence of the religious divisions in the early modern period that followed the Protestant Reformation. Resistance theories could justify disobedience on religious grounds to monarchs, and were significant in European national politics and international relations in the century leading up to the Peace of Westphalia of 1648. They can also underpin and justify the concept of revolution as now understood. The resistance theory of the early modern period can be considered to predate the formulations of natural and legal rights of citizens, and to co-exist with considerations of natural law. Any "right to resist" is a theory about the limitations on civil obedience. Resistance theory is an aspect of political theory; the right of self-defence is usually taken to be a part of legal theory, and was no novelty in the early modern period. Arguments about the two concepts do overlap, and the distinction is not so clear in debates.

2.3K
26 Oct 2022

Topic Review

Digital rights are fundamental rights in the digital age related to privacy protection in smart cities. In this vein, it has encouraged the United Nations to take an advocacy role regarding the ‘right to have digital rights’ and create the Hub for Human Rights and Digital Technology: ‘Together, as we seek to recover from the pandemic, we must learn to better curtail harmful use of digital technology and better unleash its power as a democratising force and an enabler’.

2.3K
22 Oct 2021

Topic Review

In 1999, international relations scholar Susan Strange introduced the term Westfailure in her posthumously published article entitled The Westfailure System. The term Westfailure is a portmanteau (West + failure) and a pun on the term Westphalian system. Commonly used in international politics, the Westphalian system refers to the system of state sovereignty that emerged from treaties signed during the 1648 Peace of Westphalia. Strange describes the Westphalian system as one that perpetuates non-intervention, the universal recognition of state sovereignty, and the "legitimate use of violence within a given territory." Put simply, the Westphalian system promotes a system where each individual state has the inalienable authority to govern their own internal affairs (laws, market, resources, etc.) without interference from other states or non-governmental actors. The principal aim of Strange's article is to highlight how this system of international governance is failing and does not "satisfy the long-term conditions of sustainability."

2.2K
30 Nov 2022

Topic Review

Hungarian Irredentism

Hungarian irredentism or Greater Hungary are irredentist and revisionist political ideas concerning redemption of territories of the historical Kingdom of Hungary. The idea is associated with Hungarian revisionism, targeting at least to regain control over Hungarian-populated areas in Hungary's neighbouring countries. Hungarian historians did not use the term Greater Hungary, because the "Historic Hungary" is the established term for the Kingdom of Hungary before 1920. The Treaty of Trianon defined the borders of the new independent Hungary and, compared against the claims of the pre-war Kingdom, new Hungary had approximately 72% less land stake and about two-thirds fewer inhabitants, almost 5 million of these being of Hungarian ethnicity. However, only 54% of the inhabitants of the pre-war Kingdom of Hungary were Hungarians before World War I. Following the treaty's instatement, Hungarian leaders became inclined towards revoking some of its terms. This political aim gained greater attention and was a serious national concern up through the second World War. Irredentism in the 1930s led Hungary to form an alliance with Hitler's Germany. Eva S. Balogh states: "Hungary's participation in World War II resulted from a desire to revise the Treaty of Trianon so as to recover territories lost after World War I. This revisionism was the basis for Hungary's interwar foreign policy." Hungary, supported by the Axis Powers, was successful temporarily in gaining some regions of the former Kingdom by the First Vienna Award in 1938 (southern Czechoslovakia with mainly Hungarians) and the Second Vienna Award in 1940 (Northern Transylvania with a significant Romanian population as well), and through military campaign gained regions of Carpathian Ruthenia in 1939 and (ethnically mixed) Bačka, Baranja, Međimurje, and Prekmurje in 1941 (Hungarian occupation of Yugoslav territories). Following the close of World War II, the borders of Hungary as defined by the Treaty of Trianon were restored, except for three Hungarian villages that were transferred to Czechoslovakia. These villages are today administratively a part of Bratislava.

2.2K
01 Dec 2022

Topic Review

Eurabia is a political neologism, a portmanteau of Europe and Arabia, used to describe a far-right anti-Muslim conspiracy theory, involving globalist entities allegedly led by French and Arab powers, to Islamise and Arabise Europe, thereby weakening its existing culture and undermining a previous alignment with the United States and Israel. The term was first used in the 1970s as the title of a newsletter and the concept itself developed by Bat Ye'or (pen name of Gisèle Littman) in the early 2000s and is described in her 2005 book titled Eurabia: The Euro‐Arab Axis. Benjamin Lee of the Centre for Research and Evidence on Security Threats at the University of Lancaster describes her work as arguing that Europe "has surrendered to Islam and is in a state of submission (described as dhimmitude) in which Europe is forced to deny its own culture, stand silently by in the face of Muslim atrocities, accept Muslim immigration, and pay tribute through various types of economic assistance." According to the theory, the blame rests with a range of groups including communists, fascists, the media, universities, mosques and Islamic cultural centres, European bureaucrats, and the Euro-Arab Dialogue. The term has gained some public interest and has been used and discussed across a wide range of the political spectrum, including right-wing activists, self-described "conservatives" and counter-jihad and other anti-Islamism activists. Bat Ye'or's "mother conspiracy theory" has been used for further subtheories. The narrative grew important in expressing anti-Islamist sentiments and was used by movements like Stop Islamisation of Europe. It gained renewed interest after the September 11 attacks and the use of the term by 2011 Norway attacker, Anders Behring Breivik. Ye'or's thesis has come under criticism by scholars, which intensified after Breivik's crime. The conspiracy has been described as having resemblance to the anti-Semitic Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Eurabia is also discussed in classical anti-Europeanism, a strong influence in the culture of the United States and in the notion of American exceptionalism, which sometimes sees Europe on the decline or as a rising rival power, or, as is the case here, both.

2.2K
16 Nov 2022

Topic Review

Digital Public Services Evaluation

Digital public services evaluation consists of monitoring and evaluation of indicators to assess the effectiveness of public services provided by a government in order to allow services with high performance, with a more rational planning and to satisfy the quality expected by the users.

2.2K
27 Oct 2020

Topic Review

China’s Macro Control Policy

Macro control refers to the adjustment and control of the whole social economy in order to promote the development of the market and standardize the operation of the market. Output growth and technological progress show the performance of economic growth in gross and efficiency, respectively, which is the external performance and internal driving force of economic growth. To achieve long-term sustainable economic development, it is necessary to consider both the aggregate problem and technological progress. In this context, we attempts to explore the effectiveness of China’s macroeconomic regulation and control policy on output growth and technological progress under the economic policy uncertainty. Specifically, this paper analyzes the effectiveness of macroeconomic regulation and control policy on China’s output growth and technological progress in an uncertain environment, and then makes an empirical study by constructing a time-varying parameter vector autoregression model (TVP-VAR). Furthermore, the simulation test of the relevant results is carried out using the counter-fact analysis method.

2.1K
01 Jul 2021

Topic Review

Radicalism (Historical)

Radicalism (from Latin radix, "root") was a historical political movement within liberalism during the late 18th and early 19th centuries and a precursor to social liberalism. Its identified radicals were proponents of democratic reform in what subsequently became the parliamentary Radicals in the United Kingdom. During the 19th century in the United Kingdom, continental Europe and Latin America, the term radical came to denote a progressive liberal ideology inspired by the French Revolution . Historically, radicalism emerged in an early form with the French Revolution and the similar movements it inspired in other countries. It grew prominent during the 1830s in the United Kingdom with the Chartists and Belgium with the Revolution of 1830, then across Europe in the 1840s–1850s during the Revolutions of 1848. In contrast to the social conservatism of existing liberal politics, radicalism sought political support for a radical reform of the electoral system to widen suffrage. It was also associated with republicanism, liberalism, left-wing politics, modernism, secular humanism, anti-militarism, civic nationalism, abolition of titles, rationalism and the resistance to a single established state religion, redistribution of property and freedom of the press. In 19th-century France, radicalism had emerged as a minor political force by the 1840s as the extreme left of the day (in contrast to the socially-conservative liberalism of the Moderate Republicans and Orléanist monarchists and the anti-parliamentarianism of the Legitimist monarchists and Bonapartists). By the 1890s, the French radicals were not organised under a single nationwide structure, but rather they had become a significant political force in parliament. In 1901, they consolidated their efforts by forming the country's first major extra-parliamentary political party, the Republican, Radical and Radical-Socialist Party which became the most important party of government during the second half (1899 to 1940) of the French Third Republic. The success of the French Radicals encouraged radicals elsewhere to organise themselves into formal parties in a range of other countries in the late 19th and early 20th century, with radicals holding significant political office in Bulgaria, Denmark, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Netherlands, Portugal, Romania, Russia, Spain, Sweden and Switzerland. During the interwar period, European radical parties organised the Radical Entente, their own political international. As social democracy emerged as a distinct political force in its own right, the differences that once existed between historical left-wing radicalism and conservative liberalism diminished. Between 1940 and 1973, radicalism became defunct in most of its European heartlands, with its role and philosophy taken on by social-democratic and conservative-liberal parties.

2.1K
01 Dec 2022

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