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This paper aims to investigate the impact of monopoly power on the world of work within the logistics segment, particularly in the context of automation processes. We conduct a fieldwork analysis of three workplaces situated in Italy, each owned by distinct types of monopolies: a corporate monopoly, Philip Morris, the global leader in tobacco and cigarette production; a state-owned monopoly, Poste Italiane, the exclusive public provider of mail services within the national borders; and a novel form of digital monopoly that holds control over intangibles and exhibits monopsonistic control over labour — Amazon. Through a comparative examination of these three diverse forms of monopolies, utilising corporate-level metrics and patent data, we scrutinise the restructuring of labour processes following the introduction of Automated Guided Vehicles. Employing a qualitative analysis that includes semi-structured interviews with HR professionals, IT specialists, and workers, we underscore that powerful monopolies play a crucial role in shaping the trajectory of technological development, adoption, and utilisation. Despite notable distinctions observed among the three cases, we document a common trend of standardisation and codification of human activities when interfacing with automated machines. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Remembering the devastating defeat of the Russian Empire in the Russo–Japanese War (1904–1905), in particular, at the Battle of Tsushima (May 1905), does not easily fit into patriotic and 'great power' narratives of the past promoted in Putin's Russia. In contrast to monolithic, state-dominated accounts of the Great Patriotic War (1941–1945), which have come to prevail over the last two decades, alternative accounts of memory emerge through remembering the Russo–Japanese War. This article highlights how the polyphonic memory of this conflict poses a challenge to monopolistic state-authored accounts, with their rigid, nationalist framings of memory, borders and identity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The political, economic transition of post-socialist states in Central Eastern Europe and the Balkans took different directions in the 90s. More recently, countries like Hungary, have experienced democratic backsliding, while Western-Balkans states, such as Montenegro, have been stuck in a never-ending transition. Sport is often utilized as a tool by hybrid regimes that systematically degrade democratic principles, dismantle independent institutions and merge political monopoly with economic power. The present comparative study aims to introduce the sport diplomacy approaches of Hungary and Montenegro, focusing on the state-led utilization of sport in foreign affairs. We argue that hybrid regimes governed by strong political elites tend to influence or overtake control of the autonomous sport movements in order to shape their external image in a more conducive way and to support nationalistic political agendas through the popularity of sports. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Why are some countries able to go ahead with comprehensive top-down local government amalgamation reforms, despite the many challenges such a reform entails? So far, we have limited theoretical and empirical understanding of how central governments manage to adopt such reforms. Drawing on different theoretical frameworks around public policy as well as research into territorial reforms, this article presents key political and institutional factors that are likely to facilitate top-down municipal mergers and examines whether these theoretical propositions help to explain the adoption of comprehensive top-down municipal amalgamation in four cases: Denmark, Estonia, Ireland, and Portugal. Key political and institutional factors identified in existing frameworks provide a useful starting point for understanding and explaining top-down comprehensive municipal amalgamation reforms, such as the role played by the breaking up of existing policy monopolies and emergence of new venues for discussing the reform. At the same time, the cases also reveal some important nuances that at times run counter to theoretical expectations. Our cases also reveal further factors, including the "bundling" of amalgamation reforms with other wider initiatives, and the potential effect of "distracting events" that should be taken into account in the further development of theoretical frameworks concerning top-down amalgamations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite Turkey's changing political regimes, sports have remained under state governance since 1938. This article analyzes the ideologies, influences, and politics that have shaped this state monopoly over the sports system across three phases from the 1920s to the 1990s: establishment, stabilization, and instrumentalization. The establishment phase aimed to align sports with nation-building ideals, incorporating nationalist ideology and paramilitarism. The stabilization phase embraced a statist approach influenced by socio-economic conditions and Soviet influence. The instrumentalization phase, beginning with the Özal years, utilized sports for political discourse and socio-economic purposes, retaining the state-run system even during the era of neoliberalization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

AbstractThis study investigates how nationalist sentiments enable the gambling industry to capitalize on national markets. With the help of qualitative content analytical tools, we analyzed 500 curated social media posts targeting Finnish and Swedish audiences. The study compared narrative templates, identifying speaker positions (inside/outside sociocultural context) and types of nationalist connotations (surface-level/in-depth). The results are displayed in a four-field matrix that reveals that Finland’s state gambling monopoly, Veikkaus, leverages ‘cultural nationalism’ to highlight its social role, portraying itself as a supporter of Finnish values, sports, and civil society. In contrast, international gambling companies and former domestic monopolies in Sweden’s license-based regulatory system use more mechanical, ‘sports-nationalist’ symbols, though the former monopoly companies occasionally refer to traditional Swedish cultural identity symbols. Compared to Veikkaus, the Swedish operators approach the national market as commercial outsiders, seeking public trust through sports associations. The study sheds light on how regulatory systems shape digital capitalist strategies for targeting national consumers on the social media. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyses the mechanisms governing the extraction, circulation, and distribution of rent in the biotech industry. Building on recent scholarship, it contributes to debates surrounding the importance of rent in technoscientific capitalism. We analyse genome editing as a global labour process. Part One examines the ongoing patent battle over CRISPR-Cas9 as a struggle for control over a foundational biotechnology increasingly central to several industrial sectors: a process of enclosure that facilitates a shift towards monopoly, rent extraction, and financial speculation. Part Two then details how patented CRISPR technologies are valorised through the construction of global, multi-layered infrastructures of rent extraction based on complex webs of financial and licensing deals. Part Three maps the uneven global geographies of CRISPR patenting. It considers how monopoly power emerges through the continuous conversion of public research into private assets, and how this enclosure reinforces profoundly unequal systems of distribution of royalties and rents in the global biopolitical economy. We interrogate how CRISPR technologies cement and expand neocolonial geographies of rent extraction, privatising the economic benefits and socialising the ecological risks. Finally, we argue that an increasingly monopolistic corporate biopower mediates how genome editing technologies are developed, and which mutant ecologies are socially produced. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This work analyses the mutual dependence linking digital platforms, i.e., ‘Big Tech’, and the US military apparatus. Three main elements at the roots of such dependence are detected: an ‘originary linkage’ binding the development of digital platforms with governments’ military R&D efforts; the critical nature of infrastructures and technologies controlled by platforms; and their role as their government’s ‘eyes and ears’ (both at home and abroad). Focusing on the US, we first document the growing relevance of these corporations as US Department of Defense contractors. Second, we explore a selection of multi-year contracts entrusting platforms to develop and manage critical technologies and infrastructures for military purposes. Finally, we document the direct involvement of major US-based platforms in war scenarios. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Great Central Gas Consumers’ Company (GCGCC) was established by the metropolitan middle class to address the detrimental effects of gas industry monopoly through the promotion of market competition. It revealed that the middle class staunchly advocated for the use of liberalism to safeguard their own rights and interests, coinciding with Britain’s wider acceptance of liberalism and echoing the clarion call of the era of liberalism. Government engagement and interference in the formation of the GCGCC, as well as the ensuing disputation around it, could be seen as a manifestation of the principle of liberalism rather than a violation thereof. It reflected that liberalism was neither the absence of government nor total laissez-faire. The fact that the old gas companies adjusted their positions and compromised in favour of liberal principles demonstrated the more flexible response mechanisms of the modern industrial system to industrial and social problems, as well as the significant influence of liberalism on the development of the British industrial sector and society as a whole. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many ceasefire and peace agreements stipulate the disarmament and demobilization of pro-state armed groups involved in the conflict, yet few of these groups ever completely demobilize. This study seeks to explain the process of incomplete demobilization by advancing a theoretical argument that pro-state armed groups are least likely to disarm and demobilize when the monopoly on violence is fragmented, and when there is relative balance of capabilities and interests between the government and pro-state armed groups. Under these circumstances, both governments and pro-state armed groups may favor incomplete demobilization enabling them to pursue their strategic objectives. We draw on unique interview data with pro-state paramilitaries from Ukraine to empirically illustrate our theoretical expectations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Monopolies constituted one of the main institutions to control the economy from the Ottoman Empire to the Republic of Turkey. Over time, monopolies' roles changed from revenue sources for the sultans' treasuries to assigning foreign debts to debtors, creating a Muslim-Turkish bourgeoisie, structuring property relations by commercializing the economy and finally generating revenues for modernization projects. The new Turkish state also used monopolies to raise funds for its radical modernization and state-building projects. This article examines how low-income consumers, producers and traders coped with monopolies via smuggling during the first two decades of the Republic. It argues that most of what was called smuggling were economic survival methods and the continuation of the practices that had a very long pedigree among low-income people to cope with the high prices of monopoly products due to high taxes and high monopoly profit margins. This article lays out a different interpretation of smuggling as 'social smuggling', which lessened the burden of the monopolies over low-income cultivators, traders and consumers. It argues that this informal economy limited the state's extractive capacity and economic interventionism required for modernization projects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Employing insights provided by the theory of monopolistic markets in economics and Great Power behaviour in the discipline of international relations, this paper aims to provide an alternative understanding of India's refusal to join the BRI beyond the immediate bilateral security, domestic politics, and economic considerations in Sino-Indian relations. We argue that BRI is an effort by China to position itself as the leading firm in the market for international development – a space for long dominated by Western development providers. The paper argues that India's efforts to contest the BRI can be seen as a natural outcome of other rising powers resisting China's efforts to monopolize the development market. In doing so, it provides a template of why rising powers compete with each other in providing developmental aid even when cooperation may create mutual benefits. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Religion still has a great potential and perhaps even a monopoly on explaining life in terms of meaning and significance. In this paper, we argue that neither the development of science nor scientism poses a threat to religion. We suggest, however, that the political entanglement of religion may be a threat. In this paper, we discuss the paradoxical situation in which the political harm of religion is inextricably linked to its beneficial potential to give meaning and significance to life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this study, we discuss the Confucian tradition in today's multicultural China from two perspectives: that of the mandatory school curriculum, which represents 'official knowledge', and that of students from ethnic minority and/or religious backgrounds who are located on the cultural margins in China. The analysis draws on curricular narratives of the Confucian tradition for six major school subjects and semi-structured interviews with a group of university students from non-Han ethnic minority and/or religious backgrounds, whose lived experiences are rarely included in the national curriculum narrative. The analysis suggests that the interpretation of the Confucian tradition is a monopolising and dominant discourse that reinforces the cultural hierarchy between different cultural groups. However, the students appear to regard the Confucian tradition as only one culture and worldview in China, which can benefit from the critical reflexivity of other cultures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This research investigates the impact of anti-monopoly law on green innovation by analyzing data on 2539 manufacturing listed firms in China from 2003–2020. The empirical findings first show that implementation of the anti-monopoly law has a significant inhibitory effect on green technology innovation. Second, the inhibitory effect of the anti-monopoly law on green innovation mainly exists in state-owned monopolies and regions with a higher degree of marketization. Finally, the anti-monopoly law affects the green technological innovation of monopolies mainly by reducing monopoly power, strengthening financing constraints, and increasing business risks. The findings herein provide a valuable empirical basis for policymaking bureaus to improve anti-monopoly laws. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years, there have been many voices in Korea arguing that a few commercially successful films take up the opportunities for the exhibition of other films and thus limit the selection of titles available for moviegoers, a trend dubbed the "screen monopoly". In seeking a solution, a number of scholars have looked to the anti-screen monopoly "regulations" in France, but without providing rigorous or persuasive evidence. By comparing the appropriate variables of Korea and France, this paper argues that the Korean film market is less monopolised than France despite the non-existence of these regulations. Furthermore, it demonstrates that Korea has more diversity than France. As a result, this paper concludes that introducing the French anti-screen monopoly regulations in Korea does not seem a beneficial option. The findings in this paper suggest a strong need to re-examine the effectiveness of government policies in the cultural industry. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyses how China has overcome the limit of coercion through the use of Private Security Companies since the end of the Cold War until 2021. For this purpose, the Security Governance approach was applied to understand how the decentralisation and fragmentation of the security monopoly by the state could result in convenient coercive acts against societies. We point two paths of observation: an international path – the protection of the Chinese diaspora and the Belt and Road Initiative facilities; and a national path – the governmental interests that pave the monitoring and controlling mechanisms of Chinese society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We consider a monopoly grocery retailer that procures from a far away supplier a batch of a perishable product. A random part of this batch has quality deterioration before entering the market during a long-distance transportation. With the stochastic freshness-keeping ratio, i.e. the ratio of products preserved in high quality after transportation, the grocery retailer has to determine its ordering batch size and selling prices to alleviate cannibalisation caused by quality segmentation. We find that when the realised size of the high-quality product exceeds half of the maximum market potential after the transportation, it is optimal to sell high-quality products only to avoid cannibalisation. Otherwise, it is optimal to sell the high-quality and low-quality products simultaneously to extend sales. We also find that, when more customers arrive or the difference of two quality levels becomes larger, it is optimal to order more to gain more profit. Finally, we investigate the role of freshness-keeping effort on the optimal pricing and ordering policy and further characterise the optimal freshness-keeping effort under various structures of the freshness-keeping cost. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article argues that the historic tasks of removing foreign domination and landlord-capitalist rule in the colonies are one task and have to be carried out by the proletariat, in alliance with the peasant masses. For its part, dependent on imperialism, the landlord-bourgeoisie are fearful of a shake-up of property relations in any form. The article first explains the intensification of uneven and combined development in the final, monopoly stage of capitalism before turning to China's struggles for national independence. It is contended that the People's Republic of China is a transitional economy where the law of primitive socialist accumulation and the law of value are in competition. This is the driver of its social formation, a "unity of opposites" between capitalist and non-capitalist elements. Capitalism in China remains under the control of the Communist Party of China and its social-economic base. The flourishing of private enterprises leads to inequality and capitalist accumulation but has been restrained by state policies and the law of primitive socialist accumulation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We examine how local news monopolies affect misperceptions about the size of the immigrant population in Germany. We propose a theoretical framework in which het- erogeneous information from different local news outlets diffuses through social interactions. We posit that indirect exposure to information from multiple sources leads to more accurate beliefs in competitive markets. To causally identify the effect of local news monopolies on misperceptions, we exploit overlapping newspaper coverage areas as a source of exogenous variation in the number of available outlets. We estimate that local news monopolies increase misperceptions about the size of the local immigrant population by about four percentage points. We demonstrate that the effect of media monopolies hinges on social interactions. For individuals with fewer close social contacts, misperceptions remain unaffected by local news monopolies. Our results suggest that consolidation in the market for news decreases constituents' knowledge about critical policy issues. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Covid-19 pandemic heightened already intense and increased scrutiny of public education in recent years. The administrative impulse to stage community engagement efforts to deliberate upon these questions, however well-intentioned, rarely realises full community engagement and reflection. Based on an examination of public engagement events held at Florida schools related to the Covid-19 health crisis, the proposed essay identifies a more concerning transformation of "public comment" into a weaponisable prop for lawmakers seeking the public legitimacy necessary for their agenda, marrying the worlds of critical studies with those of public administration and its orientations. More than merely failing to genuinely engage the public, we argue that such events forestall a more productive arrangement of the democratic form that does not rely on publicness and the leader that secures that space. Ultimately, we suggest a path that affords the possibility of public engagement, but that does not seal off the possibility of that more radical democratic future to come. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper relies on hitherto unexplored archival sources to understand the origin of differentiated systems for collecting salt revenue in different regions of colonial India. It finds that the government's salt policies, both reactive and proactive, established its control over salt sources and supply, which resulted in higher revenue, replaced indigenous salt with British salt in Bengal and stifled the salt industry in many regions. In the process, salt, an everyday condiment, was transformed into a source of revenue, then into a commodity and, finally, into a political tool in the hands of the government and Indians. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Monopolies of different kinds have remained a constant factor in the history of the salt industry in India. The available literature focuses on the economic aspects of the industry and not on labour. In this essay, we study the labour process to understand the influence of monopoly, caste hegemony, land tenure and the idea of production inefficiency. We show how colonial and post-colonial state policies have remained indifferent to the lives of salt workers. This article reconstructs salt history in India from the perspective of salt workers, restoring dignity to their labour and lives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reviews reasons for the domination of the Indonesian salt business, from the colonial to the New Order era, by the Chinese who are ethnic Indonesian citizens. The authors argue that this domination and subordination by middlemen induces a negative impact on market segmentation. Consequently, local farmers have limited market access and it appears that these salt farmers are pressurised by middlemen and the Chinese. This study used a historical method with an economic-political approach. Due to the New Order's policy that placed the economy as a 'commander', business opportunities were widely open to the Chinese and even to foreign investment. During this era, there were middle-scale and large-scale salt companies, all of which belonged to the Chinese. Meanwhile, small-scale companies were non-Chinese or native Indonesian. The Chinese dominance in the salt business was not something new, and ironically, it has left almost no place for locals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although much of the U.S. electricity system moved to deregulated markets in the late 1990s, states in the southeastern United States—home to the nation's largest, most valuable, and most polluting utilities—chose to retain regulated monopolies. In this article, we draw on interviews with regulators, environmental organizations, lobbyists, and utility executives to examine how utilities in the southeastern United States have maintained their position as monopolies in the face of calls for competition in the 1990s and again in the 2020s. We ground our inquiry in geographical political economy, with attention to the role that law plays in balancing monopoly and competition in electricity provision and capitalism more broadly. Our research suggests that the cultural political economy of energy regulation in the Southeast has played a central role in enabling electric utilities to maintain their monopoly position, with utilities using their relationships with regulators to parlay their monopoly preference into narratives of monopoly-as-consumer-protection. We therefore offer insights regarding long-debated mechanisms of regulatory capture, highlighting how the structure of public utility law creates opportunities for political and personal relationships to overpower general ideological commitments to competition. These findings demonstrate how law is deployed as a mediating tool of capitalist relations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite widespread focus on the communicative function of terrorism, terrorists frequently forgo claiming responsibility for their attacks. So why don't terrorists claim their attacks? The scholars who have attempted to answer this question have primarily focused on group- and target-based differences. I propose an alternative theory, emphasizing the importance of temporality. Intuitively, the passing of time following group entry should change the utility of verbal claims of responsibility as an emerging group cannot rely on a previously established reputation. Levels of terrorist competition over time further influence verbal credit-taking-especially when competitors share attack styles-leading to decreased credit-taking over time in terrorist monopolies relative to competitive settings. I explore these dynamics through case-studies of Canada and Ireland during the 1960–1970s. Canada poses a monopoly case, whereas the Irish case experienced extensive intra- and inter-group competition. Coding newspaper articles, I appended the Canadian Incident Database with a measure of verbal credit-taking and juxtaposed it with Domestic Terrorist Victims data. Results show the expected newcomer dynamic, backing a temporal theory, yet neither intra- nor inter-group competition showed any effect despite the most-likely nature of the cases. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The emergence, longevity and resilience of contested states have redefined the relationship between sovereignty and territoriality. While fully-fledged states uphold the monopoly of authority, contested states seek to rewrite the sovereignty playbook and gain a seat among sovereign equals. This atypical antagonism, propped up by post-Westphalian statehood aspirations, has changed the way sovereignty is perceived and understood nowadays. Approaching sovereignty as multi-faceted, this article discusses contested statehood in the context of the EU's engagement overseas. Drawing on the literature of Europeanisation and complex sovereignty, it accounts for the influence of contested statehood on the EU's role and policies in contested states. Specifically, by delving into Kosovo's complex sovereignty (internal/external), the analysis measures the fluctuating impact of contestedness on the EU's employed policy frameworks and deployed crisis management tools unfolding a paradox that has defined the EU's foreign policy in Kosovo for years. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using public goods theory as a guidepost, scholars have correctly observed that subsidies for sport venues are a product of the monopolistic structure of major sport leagues. Without challenging the observation that economic rent is being extracted from cities, we utilize the municipal capitalism framework to explore the ongoing appeal of teams to cities. We note that rising levels of economic segregation required local officials to aggressively pursue partnerships to offer competitive club goods that deflect regional economic activity into their taxing jurisdictions. After reviewing 116 published academic papers to establish the two frameworks (public goods and municipal capitalism), we use three previously studied case studies to assess outcomes in light of a municipal capitalism perspective. This permits us to provide insights into the use of various sources of public capital to deflect economic activity with the potential to enhance economic development and tax revenues. The work also identifies the need for additional research to compare and contrast classical public goods theory, municipal capitalism, and local government initiatives in an era of "fend for yourself federalism." [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article applies an anarchist lens to the food sovereignty movement. It analyzes food regimes as capitalist agriculture regimes which rely on the State's monopoly on hunger, wherein the State relies on the dispossession of people from their land and food systems, the protection of property, and the primacy of capital. The interdependence of this State-capital-property trinity is violently enforced, and manufactures compliance through counterinsurgent strategies of social war. The State monopoly on hunger justifies a new offshoot of the larger food sovereignty movement, a prefigurative praxis which dismantles all food regimes to build new counter-worlds: food anarchy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper is focused on Slovene and Serbian state socialist experts and their role in the scientific field of researching the Yugoslav national question in the first half of the 1960s, with emphasis on their research and debates regarding the concept of national Yugoslavism. The institutes being examined are the Institute for Ethnic Studies (Inštitut za narodnostna vprašanja, INV) in Ljubljana and the Institute of Social Sciences (Institut društvenih nauka, IDN) in Belgrade. In the early 1960s, Yugoslav soft nation-building reached its peak with the famous Ćosić–Pirjevec debate. The latter coincided with the end of the 'transitional period' at INV and its new leadership under Drago Druškovič. Some Serbian lawyers shifted the fight for the establishment of a socialist Yugoslav nation from political debates to the Yugoslav Association for International Law, where the dispute reached a climax in late 1964. With the abandonment of the Yugoslav national idea, IDN prepared an ambitious programme of researching Yugoslav interethnic relations, which would include several institutions from all Yugoslav republics. The League of Communists of Yugoslavia financed research on interethnic relations in Yugoslavia to create 'correct' policies with regard to the national question. Huge amounts of data were collected (public opinion polls, newspaper clippings) and analysed by the research institutions mentioned earlier, which often gave expert opinions to leading Communists. In the late 1960s, amateur research and opinion polling conducted by Yugoslav newspapers challenged the monopoly of the Party on the scientific research field of interethnic relations. Thus, in the early 1970s, the Party struggled to retake control. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We analyse the cooperative choice of corporate social responsibility when a manufacturer and a retailer in a bilateral monopoly may hold different bargaining powers. We find that an increase in the bargaining power of one of the firms leads to an increase in the degree of social concern of the other firm in the bilateral monopoly and a reduction in its own degree of social concern. It also leads to an increase in the firm´s own profits and a reduction in the other firm's profits, but it has no effect on the quantity sold, its price, total profits, consumer surplus or social surplus. Just as in the symmetric case, both the manufacturer and the retailer cooperatively choose higher degrees of social concern than under a non-cooperative framework and these choices completely solve the double-marginalization problem. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using petitioning campaigns to express their discontent to both civic and central authorities, London's livery companies emerged as powerful opponents of monopolies in the late Elizabethan and early Stuart periods. This article focuses on one campaign launched by the Grocers' Company in response to the monopolisation of the production of starch from 1588, analysing a petition by the company and a counter-response offered by the newly incorporated Starchmakers' Company in 1608. It highlights not only the politics surrounding starch, but also the careful utilisation of specific rhetorical devices by both groups in their attempts to persuade the state to favour their cause. It thus contributes to understandings of the sophistication of Jacobean manuscript petitioning culture. The article concludes by suggesting the potential power of such petitioning campaigns, utilised by subjects to respond to the growing presence of powerful projectors and 'odious' patents of monopoly in the realm. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As big tech companies are entering new industrial sectors, an open question concerns the drivers of their expansionary strategies. This paper proposes that these companies are currently entering sectors based on their data-driven intellectual monopoly power, thereby complementing the preliminary answer provided by political economy research which has argued that expansion is driven by their infrastructural power. This approach is developed through a historical analysis of tech giants as companies that systematically turn knowledge and data into intangible assets, showing their expansionary strategies in the healthcare sector to be mainly driven by insights obtained from those intangible assets (a monopolized intangibles driver) and by a quest for conquering new knowledge and data to perpetuate their intellectual monopolies (an intangibles prospecting driver). The paper further illustrates its arguments through a case study of Google's expansionary strategy and its prioritized incursion into healthcare. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Monopolization in the US economy is empirically evaluated, along with the concentration and centralization of capital. Factors which contribute to monopolization and counteracting factors are briefly outlined. In addition to income and wealth Gini indices, a Gini index measuring business inequality across firms is presented to assess the degree of monopolization. The business Gini index has steadily risen a few percentage points during the neoliberal era, reaching approximately 91% in recent years. To relate developments in the concentration and centralization of capital to the tendency towards monopolization, industry concentration ratio data are assessed. Tracking the progress of industries over time, concentration ratios tend to increase- particularly for industries which start out with low concentration ratios. The growth of top firms relative to the overall market is conditioned by technological innovation, which plays an instrumental role in cost and price competition. Average firm size within an industry is directly related to the organic composition of capital and concentration ratio, and inversely related to the relative standard deviation of the concentration ratio over time. By comparing the performance (including the growth of output and number of firms) of industries grouped in different ranges of concentration ratios, contrasting theories of competition are evaluated. The empirical findings support the theory of real competition over the theory of monopoly capitalism insofar as monopolization does not demonstrably undermine the law of value. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The completion of the natural gas pipeline 'Power of Siberia' in 2019 creates new dynamics in Eurasian trade. Russia's deepening ties with China present it with the opportunity to change its relationship with the European Union from monopsony to monopoly, thus gaining bargaining leverage. However, this argument goes both ways, being also applicable to Russo–Chinese affairs, with the European Union as the alternative option. The article concludes that Russia, while seriously strengthened by its developing energy relationship with China, will not endanger its status as a reliable supplier across Eurasia, since its nascent monopoly position depends on the existence of an alternative option. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When an innovative product is introduced into the market, innovators always face competition from entrant imitators. Strategic customers may also anticipate this and can design their purchase plans accordingly. In this study, we develop a dynamic game model to formulate the problem associated with competitive product pricing between an innovator and an imitator for obtaining a pricing equilibrium. The influence of various factors on pricing policies, market sales and profits are analysed. We argue that when anticipating forthcoming competitors, innovators should not price too highly in the monopoly stage. The optimal monopoly price decreases with the quality ratio and forms a U shape along with the dimension of customers' strategic level; however, the right tail of the U is mitigated when the quality ratio increases. In the duopoly phase, the markdown for the innovator and the difference in product cost performance between the innovator and imitator are investigated. We then analyse the value of demand information. The numerical analysis indicates that the value decreases with customers' strategic level and increases with the quality ratio. The revealing behaviour of the innovator influences the imitator marginally in pricing and considerably in profit. Finally, a medium level is always preferred when the imitator chooses the product quality level. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents an analytical model for sellers with finite capacity to optimise their price and maximum deal size limit on group-buying websites. For the general demand functions that satisfy some mild regularity conditions, the optimal strategies and the corresponding deal parameters are characterised. The optimal strategies demonstrate that deep online discounts (selling products below the cost or even selling products for free) can be optimal if the maximum deal size is used strategically. Moreover, deep discounts can be beneficial even if the capacity is tight, which explains the use of deep discounts commonly observed in practice. Our results also provide the operators of group-buying websites with useful suggestions on how to induce sellers to offer deep discounts. Sensitivity analysis with regard to the minimum deal size and capacity is provided. Our analysis shows that counter-intuitively selling out capacity may not always be optimal, even if the amount of capacity cannot satisfy the unconstrained optimal sales quantity online. Finally, we extend the model to consider offline prices being sellers' decisions and discuss the robustness of the optimal strategies when the demand is stochastic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the answers that Samir Amin, a well-known theorist of the Third World, gave to three questions: why, how and by whom the global capitalist system must be changed. Among other topics, the article outlines Amin's theory of unequal development, the generalized monopolies, the five privileges of the global centre, Eurocentrism, "delinking," "long transition," progressive nationalism, and the global class structure. Amin's participation in the fight for the emancipation of developing countries and of all of the world's oppressed social classes will also be addressed, as will his last call for a global alliance of workers and the people. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we consider a mixed oligopoly market in which a public firm and private firms compete, in particular, in which private entrants are allowed to enter a monopoly market by a public incumbent who maximizes social welfare. It has been widely believed that the public firm has advantage over private firms because the former who maximizes social welfare can charge a lower price than the latter who maximizes its own profit. However, in a Hotelling model of product differentiation, we obtain the results that both the public firm and private firms charge the same price in equilibrium, and more importantly, that the equilibrium prices may rise as a result of competition, thereby lowering the consumer surplus, if the transportation cost is high enough. We also show that if a private firm enters the market by choosing its own degree of differentiation, it will prefer neither maximum differentiation nor minimum differentiation in the case that the public incumbent is myopic in the sense that it cannot anticipate entry as well as in the case that it is far-sighted enough to anticipate entry. This draws an important policy implication in the market of Korean housing guarantee services. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper focuses on tech giants as active drivers of a phase of globalization characterized by growth in digital services trade combined with a general shift to intangible assets. By analysing how Google, Amazon and Microsoft organize their innovation activities, we show that they continuously monopolize knowledge while outsourcing innovation steps to other firms and research institutions. The paper compares science and technology collaborations with patent co-ownership suggesting knowledge predation from those other organizations. We also highlight that selected tech giants combine the collection of innovation rents with rents from exclusive access to data. We, therefore, refer to tech giants as data-driven intellectual monopolies, each organizing and controlling a global corporate innovation system (CIS). Intellectual monopolies predate knowledge (including data when they are data-driven) from their CIS that they turn into intangible assets. The paper ends with reflections on the implications for innovation and development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Explanations for slow global growth (secular stagnation) correctly focus on income inequality and wage formation but are incomplete. They ignore the source of wages and fail to ask why a rising profit share has not produced more investment. Older but essential insights on stagnation from Keynes, Schumpeter and Veblen complement orthodox and post-Keynesian analyses to generate a more robust explanation based on the distributional conflict over profit among firms. These thinkers highlight the importance of corporate profit strategy and organizational structure for investment behavior. A politically mediated process of strategic interaction has transformed the old Fordist dual industrial structure into a tripartite structure composed of high profit volume firms with monopolies based on intellectual property rights (IPRs), physical capital-intensive firms protected by an investment barrier to entry, and low profit volume labor-intensive firms. Profit data from Compustat and Orbis show that IPR-based firms have a lower marginal propensity to invest. Other firms with smaller profit volumes forego investment from fear of creating excess capacity in a slow growth environment. High profit firms also tend to pay higher wages, creating income inequality. Changes in antitrust, employment and intellectual property law can remedy this situation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Nevertheless, since both entropies are used outside of pure mathematics to talk about things in the world I as entropic i , I propose that a conceptual differentiation is needed between thermodynamic entropy and informational entropy.[2] I take it to be, therefore, the task of philosophy to I conceptually i differentiate between thermodynamic entropy and informational entropy. Furthermore, as above, information entropy (and therefore intropy) measurably increases in relation to the amount of information and the rate of change of that information since both quantity and speed affect complexity. 2 Bernard Stiegler's attempt at such a task, that informational entropy equates to the becoming-obsolescent of information in its distinction to "knowledge" is inadequate in so far as there is little to no engagement with the actual differences between thermodynamics and information theory. The task of this article is to transduce - transduction being a mutually constitutive analogical deduction and justification of concepts I across i disciplines - Claude Shannon's concept of informational entropy, as used in data science and information theory to quantify statistical certainty, into a working philosophical concept: I intropy i . [Extracted from the article]

The present paper discusses the attitude of Bohemian ecclesiastical circles towards the papal monopoly of the canonisation and translation of saints. Three cases known from sources dated to the first half of the twelfth century are analysed, all pointing to widespread adoption in the Bohemian Church at a relatively early date of the view that both the canonisation of new saints and the translation of those already recognised required papal approval. The issue is discussed against the wider background of contacts between Bohemian ecclesiastical elites and Rome, as well as Germany. It was the influence of the German Church, where the notion of papal monopoly of the canonisation and translation of saints was widely accepted early on, that provides the key to understanding the phenomenon in Bohemia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article analyses the competition between commercial banks in colonial Kenya for the control of government accounts and their attempts to end the monopoly of the National Bank of India acting as the government bank. Banking institutions in colonial Kenya have been categorised by the current investigations on economic and business history as immobile, conservative institutions involved in collusion. However, using unexplored archival material, this article challenges the existing literature showing the limits of collusive practices, the dynamic competition between commercial banks in a time of economic and financial expansion and the important role of the colonial government in shaping the rivalry. The study's objective is to reconsider the performance of financial institutions during the colonial era and their influence over the government. In doing so, this investigation concludes that the absence of consistent legislation over the banks and the British government's limited influence in the colony allowed local interests to prevail over the objectives of Barclays DCO, altering the expansion process of the banks during the final years of colonial rule. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article introduces desecuritization as the missing supplement of the conception of securitization as a dispersed social process. It calls for the creative development of approaches that destabilise the credibility of security professionals' claimed expert knowledge. To illustrate the potential of this approach, the article combines insights from the sociology of ignorance (agnotology) and the autonomy of migration literature to deconstruct the framing of migrants as cunning tricksters, a narrative that features prominently in processes of securitization. Within the Schengen visa regime discussed in this article, the trickster narrative emerges in the portrayal of visa applicants as deploying various modes of deception like 'document fraud' or 'visa shopping'. Based on ethnographic fieldwork at consulates in North Africa, this article demonstrates, in contrast, that practices like applying at a consulate known for a more liberal decision-making practice constitute coping strategies by which migrants try to mitigate the uncertainty that a culture of suspicion, the discretionary power of consular staff and the heterogeneity of opaque decision-making criteria create for them. Ultimately, the analysis shows that security practices produce not only knowledge, but also various forms of nonknowledge which provoke the instances of 'trickery' that ever more pervasive security practices are supposed to forestall. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the 2005–2015 decade, news publishers, governments, and digital news aggregators re-negotiated the parameters of control over the circulation of digital content. Using governance and regime theory, we analyze five emblematic cases—Brazil, France, Germany, Spain, and the United Kingdom—of early governance reactions to news aggregators' practices and identify different types of strategies: (1) discursive resistance; (2) controlled drop-out; (3) one-time payments; (4) opt-in ancillary copyright law; and (5) strict ancillary copyright law. Through contextualizing and triangulating, we explain the nuanced ways in which legacy actors struggled to find adequate strategies to maintain their definitional power when technology companies first manifested their interest in the news sector. The findings indicate a link between the strength of policy regimes that sustained copyright as a normative monopoly and shifts in normative interpretations. With that, we highlight the importance of considering policy regimes' constituencies as an explanatory dimension when studying change and maintenance in media governance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, we investigate a monopolist's efforts for product innovation (or quality improvement) and process innovation (or reducing marginal production cost) with reference price effects in a dynamic setting. The significant features of our work are: (i) a monopolist deals with customer behavior according to economic principles and determines the price of the product, besides, the monopolist carries out the activities of product and process innovation; (ii) the consumers' demand structure depends on product price, product quality and reference price, and takes a separable multiplicative way between the state variables (product quality and reference price) and the control variables (product price). Our main results suggest that (i) there exists unique saddle-point steady-state equilibrium under monopoly and social planning; (ii) as the memory parameter increases, it is very likely that the monopolist's steady-state effort for process innovation is greater than that for product innovation; (iii) the efforts for product and process innovation under social planning are greater than that under monopoly; (iv) although the price is still determined by the monopolist under the social planning, the price under the social planning is higher than that under monopoly and (v) there is a negative price-quality relationship. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This review engages with Pem Davidson Buck's The Punishment Monopoly: Tales of My Ancestors, Dispossession, and the Building of the United States. We position the book in relation to the political-cultural context of the United States, and outline and describe the general arguments and contours of the text. We then think with and in relation to Buck's arguments in order to suggest the need for a politics of possibility—of exposing, defending, and advancing a pluriverse of worlds—to join with a politics of oppositional, power-building solidarity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The fragile monopoly results from the fact that most Big Tech firms were funded by venture capital (VC), a financial instrument that markedly differs from traditional investment banking. Additionally, Big Tech companies have subsequently acquired many other digital technology companies themselves backed by venture capital (Amor and Kooli, [1]). Assetization and the Logic of Venture Capital, or Why Facebook Does not "Feel" Like a Monopoly to Zuckerberg Keywords: BigTech; monopoly; venture capital; assetization; Political Economy EN BigTech monopoly venture capital assetization Political Economy 107 120 14 03/10/22 20220301 NES 220301 Introduction The most valuable companies in 2021 are tech firms known as "Big Tech". [Extracted from the article]