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This research focuses on managing disruption risk in supply chains using inventory and reserve capacity under stochastic demand. While inventory can be considered as a speculative risk mitigation lever, reserve capacity can be used in a reactive fashion when a disruption occurs. We determine optimal inventory levels and reserve capacity production rates for a firm that is exposed to supply chain disruption risk. We fully characterise four main risk mitigation strategies: inventory strategy, reserve capacity strategy, mixed strategy and passive acceptance. We illustrate how the optimal risk mitigation strategy depends on product characteristics (functional versus innovative) and supply chain characteristics (agile versus efficient). This work is inspired from a risk management problem of a leading pharmaceutical company. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 2013, Gail Davies and Helen Scalway launched Micespace.org, an interactive web-based art and research project that uses the platform of a mock mouse model repository to visualize the complex spatial and digital networks of the postgenomic sciences. The website creates an immersive experience of the process of researching and purchasing a mouse model from a genetics repository – one can tour laboratory plans, browse stock and purchase mice, or review genetic security protocol. Functioning as a mock-mutant mouse repository, Micespace.org disrupts narratives of transgenic mice as uncontested scientific objects that bear and bear witness to human disease. Micespace.org uses speculative visualization to allow us to witness the institutional spaces of the postgenomics laboratory where the bodies of mice are transformed from biological beings into scientific data, from animals to scientific objects. In this paper, I suggest that Micespace.org satirizes contemporary forms of bioscientific witnessing and testimony that are built into the apparati of postgenomic consortiums – where massive amounts of data are collected to construct and disseminate animal bodies that can more completely model the human biological system. However, mice have their own genetic make-up that is just as complicated as humans. This means that the genetic similarity that scientists cultivate within transgenic mice through gene splicing, knocking, and immune manipulation, is never complete and what we are left with are genetically fragmented creatures that bear witness to the contradictory relationship between humans, animals, and the genetic science. This paper has two central arguments. First, the website exposes the epistemological processes involved in making mice into models of human bodies that support narratives of bodily similarity between humans and mice to sell them as model organisms. Second, to better understand how the mutant mouse repository functions, I conceptualize it as an archive of forced bodily similarity, to grasp the immensity of the project to make mice as close as possible to us. The enduring questions that guide this paper are how do we bear witness to mutant mice in repositories and how can we comprehend mice themselves as witnesses to this endeavor? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Hanna Wheatley is a Senior Researcher in NEF (New Economics Foundation), mainly working on housing and land, currently leading NEF’s work on the public land sale in the UK. A London-based think-tank and consultancy, NEF aims to transform the economy so it works for people and the planet. We spoke to her about the role of land in the context of the housing crisis and alternative ways through which people can shape development and access housing.

The United Nations Commission on International Trade Law (UNCITRAL) is considering changes to its rules governing international arbitration proceedings. UNCITRAL Working Group III is analyzing possible reforms of the arbitral rules to address the risks associated with the increased prevalence of third-party funded investment arbitration claims. Funders claim that existing regulation is sufficient, arguing in part that funding provides access to justice for impecunious claimants who otherwise would be unable to bring claims. This Essay argues that funders' access to justice reasoning is flawed at best and dangerously misleading at worst. UNCITRAL must take immediate action to address the potential for exploitative practices by funders in the investment context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What does a political conceptualisation of the relationship between urban development and heritage involve? Against the widespread idea that there is a conflict between densification and the protection of historic buildings and sites in the City of London, I show that a conservative heritage discourse promotes the construction of speculative towers. Arguing against a City that is privately owned, self-competing and socially homogeneous, I develop a democratic understanding of history that contests an essentialist reading of the city and challenges the idea that speculative developments direct attention to and visually enhance historic landmarks. Aligning historical analysis with political critique, I draw on the work of Walter Benjamin and Michel Foucault and discuss notions of "historical events" and "cultural treasures" in order to think against the prevailing speculative logic in the city. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents both the history of and state‐of‐the‐art in empirical modeling approaches to the world commodity price volatility. The analysis builds on the storage model and key milestones in its development. Specifically, it is intended to offer a reader unfamiliar with the relevant literature an insight into the modeling issues at stake from both a historical and speculative viewpoint. The review considers primarily the empirical techniques designed to assess the merits of the storage theory; it does not address purely statistical approaches that do not rely on storage theory and that have been studied in depth in other streams of the commodity price literature. The paper concludes with some suggestions for future research to try to resolve some of the existing empirical flaws, and hopefully to increase the explanatory power of the storage model. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Highlights • We consider the arguments against space colonization recently proposed by Phil Torres. • Beside oversimplifications and imprecisions, Torres's account fails to properly address postbiological evolution and conflates different speculative future scenarios. • Arguments against cosmic diversity based on suffering risk are dangerously close to becoming arguments against diversity as such, hence open to totalitarian tendencies. • No naturalistic utilitarian calculus of various scenarios for the future of humanity could be complete if it does not take extraterrestrial life and intelligence into account. • Space colonization remains the only option for long-term survival of humanity and all human values. Abstract Recent discussion of the alleged adverse consequences of space colonization by Phil Torres in this journal is critically assessed. While the concern for suffering risks (s-risks) should be part of any strategic discussion of the cosmic future of humanity, the Hobbesian picture painted by Torres is largely flawed and unpersuasive. Instead, there is a very real risk that the skeptical arguments will be taken too seriously and future human flourishing in space delayed or prevented. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article reports on speculative price movements through the use of the random walks process of analysis. The hypothesis that speculative price movements are random is examined to determine if there is any predictable pattern. This is done through the analysis of the relation of information of present stock price movements and future price movement patterns. The work done by Sidney S. Alexander is discussed as it confirms stock price movements have a discernable pattern by taking away random variability through ignoring any changes which are less than 5%.

Non-domestic buildings have great potential for energy-related emission reductions in response to climate change. However, high-specification office buildings in the UK demonstrate that regulation, assessment and certification (‘standards’) have not incentivized the development of lower-energy office buildings as expected. Making use of the concepts of ‘qualculation’ and ‘calculative agency’, qualitative case studies of 10 speculatively developed office buildings in London, UK, provide new insight into why this is the case. Interview data (n = 57) are used to illustrate how ‘market standards’ substitute for user needs, and ratchet up the provision of building services to maximize marketability competitively. The examples of energy modelling and the market’s (mis)use of British Council for Offices guidelines are used to explain how such standards perversely bolster energy-demanding levels of specification and building services, and militate against lower-energy design, in the sector researched. The potentials for alternative, performance-based standards and new industry norms of quality are discussed. It is concluded that at least the London speculative office market by its very constitution and operation, including the reliance on standards, continues to create increasingly energy-demanding buildings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the technical turn to new ways of quantifying and standardizing measurements of age as these intersect with discourses of anti-aging and speculative futures of ‘smart’ quantified aging bodies. Often couched in a metaphorical language of ‘smart’, ‘fit’, ‘boosting’ and ‘optimizing’, the aging body is emerging as a node for data collection, monitoring, and surveillance. The research is located in the current literature that links aging, bodies and technologies, with specific extended examples of wearable devices such as fitness trackers and digital exercises such as brain games designed for memory performance. Conclusions suggest that new technologies around aging and quantifiable fitness create an ambiguous image of the aging body and brain as both improvable and ‘plastic’ but also inevitably in decline. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Along with CMOS technology scaling, ADC-based serial link receivers have drawn growing interest in backplane communications but power dissipation of the ADC and complex digital equalizer in such digital receivers can be a limiting factor in high-speed applications. Implementing analog embedded equalization within the front-end ADC structure can potentially relax the ADC resolution requirement and reduces the complexity of the DSP which results in a more energy-efficient receiver. In this paper, the equivalence between the speculative comparisons of a loop-unrolling DFE and an ADC with non-uniform quantization levels is utilized to propose a novel ADC-based DFE receiver structure. The equivalency partially compensates for the power overhead imposed by loop-unrolling DFE. The 5-bit prototype receiver with two-tap embedded DFE is designed, laid out and simulated in a 130-nm CMOS process with 1.8 Gbps data rate. With embedded DFE disabled, the receiver achieves 4.57-bits ENOB and 1.77 pJ/conv.-step FOM. With 1.8-Gbps signaling across a 48-in FR4 channel, the two-tap DFE enabled receiver opens the completely closed eye and allows for a 0.26 UI timing margin at a BER of 10 −9 . The total active area is 0.21 mm 2 and the ADC consumes 76 mW from a 1.2-V supply. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Data decompression is one of the most important techniques in data processing and has been widely used in multimedia information transmission and processing. However, the existing decompression algorithms on multicore platforms are time-consuming and do not support large data well. In order to expand parallelism and enhance decompression efficiency on large-scale datasets, based on the software thread-level speculation technique, this paper raises a speculative parallel decompression algorithm on Apache Spark. By analyzing the data structure of the compressed data, the algorithm firstly hires a function to divide compressed data into blocks which can be decompressed independently and then spawns a number of threads to speculatively decompress data blocks in parallel. At last, the speculative results are merged to form the final outcome. Comparing with the conventional parallel approach on multicore platform, the proposed algorithm is very efficiency and obtains a high parallelism degree by making the best of the resources of the cluster. Experiments show that the proposed approach could achieve 2.6 $$\times $$ speedup when comparing with the traditional approach in average. In addition, with the growing number of working nodes, the execution time cost decreases gradually, and the speedup scales linearly. The results indicate that the decompression efficiency can be significantly enhanced by adopting this speculative parallel algorithm. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article asks that we take seriously (and suggests that we have not yet taken seriously enough) Steven B. Katz's point that nonhuman rhetoric is "supplanting and replacing the physical human body" as the main site for rhetorical agency. Discussing Ian Bogost's carpentry and James J. Brown Jr. and Nathaniel Rivers's adaptation of it as rhetorical carpentry as an example of nonhuman rhetoric that does not go far enough, I suggest that Joanna Zylinska's concept of "scalar derangement"-- the pathological need to put all things on a human scale--is a major impasse for a nonhuman rhetoric founded on representational methods. Instead, I offer a model of rhetorical invocation and suggest that skotison, Richard Lanham's term for deliberately obfuscatory style, provides a rhetorical practice for addressing the nonhuman at nonhuman scales. Instead of a nonhuman rhetoric of things, I maintain that in the age of climate change we should begin to consider an inhuman rhetoric. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We present a robust model of speculative bubbles by introducing loss-averse reference-dependent preferences by Koszegi and Rabin (2006) into the framework of Allen et al. (1993) , where in equilibrium, asymmetrically-informed rational investors buy overvalued assets, hoping to sell them to less informed agents before the crash occurs. With reference-dependent preferences, the asset price may not necessarily be observable to agents when there is no trade. However, this is never the case with classical preferences, as shown in the paper. Incorporating the classical model as a special case, we generalize the notion of bubbles to allow for the analysis in the case of a silent market with unobservable prices, and our model is able to generate strong bubbles robust to moderate perturbations in parameters without the need for stronger conditions as suggested in previous literature. Assuming for simplicity that dividends can only take on two values, we construct an example of a robust reference-dependent bubble which is not robust in the classical setting, and we also show that the positive results regarding the limit of the bubble size and bubble frequency in the classical setting are preserved in our framework. Our main results and economic implications remain valid in more general settings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper unpacks Sterling's concept of spimes and outlines how it can be developed as a lens through which to speculate and reflect upon the future of more preferable and sustainable technological products. The term spimes denotes a class of near future, sustainable, manufactured objects, and unlike the disposable products, which permeate our society today, a spime would be designed so that it can be managed sustainably throughout its entire lifecycle. This would have the goal of making the implicit consequences of product obsolescence and unsustainable disposal explicit to potential users. With the current rhetoric associated with the so-called Internet of Things promoting existing production and consumption models, the time is right to explore Sterling's concept in greater depth. In doing so, this paper examines the meaning of the term spimes, distinguishes the concept from today's Internet-connected products and posits design criteria for potential near future spime objects. The paper concludes with an initial evaluation of a speculative design fiction created by the author - the Toaster for Life - which seeks to embody several of the spime design criteria in order to facilitate audiences in considering the unsustainable people-product relationships which define present day behaviour, and also aid the author in reflecting upon the design fiction process itself. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using data from Chinese stock markets, we examine the effect of speculative trading on stock returns. We develop a volume-related variable, abnormal turnover ratio (ATR), by isolating speculative trading from liquidity and other components in trading volume. After a group of tests verifying that ATR indeed represents speculative trading, we show that ATR negatively predicts future stock returns. The average monthly return spread between the top and bottom ATR deciles is 1.87%, suggesting a highly significant negative ATR premium. The return predictability of ATR survives after controlling for common risk factors and event-driven information shocks. These findings indicate that speculative trading affects asset prices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

However it may be defined, urban ‘development’ typically implies the production of durable legacies. Yet these legacies are often planned through contingent, temporary projects. The role of temporary projects in implementing urban development is often interpreted in linear fashion: projects are viewed as isolated events which incrementally work toward already-existing development agendas. I argue instead that temporary projects play a recursive role in development planning: interpreted as a series of interlinked projects, they not only support but also redefine agendas for durable development. I focus on one type of temporary project: (failed) bids to host the Olympics, which I assess through a comparative 20-year sample of bids and through case studies of failed bids in Doha (Qatar) and New York (USA). I show that event-led development planning leverages project contingency and policy failure to construct long-term development agendas, as cities bid multiple times and recycle plans across projects. The paper contributes to debates over the long-term impacts of speculation and experimentation in urban governance, by assessing the role of contingency in urban politics. Temporariness is an asset in urban politics which can be used to mitigate risk in speculative development planning: since Olympic bids often fail to secure hosting rights, references to the possibility of failure can insulate project planners from critique. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this paper is threefold. First, we examine the Sellarsian concept of the (myth of the) catégorial Given, focus on its wide application and suggest that it can be applied to those post-Kantian philosophical views, currently fashionable in Continental philosophical circles, for which Quentin Meillassoux coins the term "corrclationism": the view that mind and world are "always already" given to us as essentially related to one another, and only subsequently can they be thought of as being independently existing and meaningful "entities." Second, it is pointed out that Sellars uses an argument against the explanatory adequacy of the manifest image (an image with essential "Givenist" elements in its descriptive and explanatory dimension) that is exactly of the same form as Meillassoux's argument against correlalionism, but, which, when combined with other crucial Sellarsian views concerning the transcendental/empirical distinction, can avoid a problematic feature of Meillassoux's argument, and, in this way, constitute a better philosophical weapon against correlationism. Finally, it is suggested that by not drawing the transcendental/empirical distinction in the right (i.e., Sellarsian) way, Meillassoux himself is exposed and, in the constructive ("speculative realist") part of his work, indeed succumbs to a version of the myth of the catégorial Given. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Patterson Colony, an agricultural town built out at the height of the City Beautiful era, exhibits that movement’s distinctive monumental geometries writ small, imitative of Washington, D.C., and jarringly unlike its grid-bound neighbors in California’s Central Valley. The story of Patterson’s street plan sheds light on an unfamiliar site and scale of comprehensive planning, and shows how the beautifiers’ rhetorics could be recoded and harnessed to a speculative real-estate venture. In Patterson we see these tropes—“order” in particular—taking on complex valences that are at once aesthetic and technical, revising any hard-and-fast distinction between City Beautiful and City Practical imaginaries. This history, finally, allows us to rethink how replicable urban forms travel, and to specify the meanings, uses, and predicates of self-appointed “model” towns—a designation that has been attached, sometimes incautiously, to countless episodes in the evolution of the American city and suburb. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In the last decade, over one hundred university towns have been constructed in China, housing and employing millions of students and teachers. However, very little is known about the reasons behind this phenomenon, or the impact of this massive wave of construction. Based on an ethnographic survey in Guangzhou University Town (GUT), one of the most representative cases, we find that the construction of a university town is driven by ‘chameleon’-like land-centered speculative urbanism in post-reform China. Against the backdrop of China's recentralized land use regime, local governments utilize a variety of projects such as the ‘new city,’ ‘eco-city’ or ‘university town’ to generate land-related profits. Building a GUT requires the cooperation and collaboration of a variety of stakeholders, from local states and local banks to universities and the local communities, to create an efficient coalition. The construction of the GUT is a de facto state-led project. In sum, the rapid construction of university towns in China is indicative of the land-centered speculative urbanism at the heart of post-reform China. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Highlights: [•] The new housing market segment for foreign retirees is still small. [•] Developers usually sell houses to them well above the government set floor price. [•] Houses designed for locals are usually sold to foreign retirees uncustomised. [•] Customisation in terms of product, price, place and promotions is best refrained. [•] The 5Ps notion is apt to reflect dissimilar nationality-specific buying patterns. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: The Estonian economy in the past two decades has been highly leveraged and was characterised by increases in real estate prices. These increases in prices developed the pattern of a possible speculative bubble. In Estonia during this period, a land value tax was enforced; however, the tax implemented in 1993, was estimated only in 2001, thus diminishing its role as a buffer against speculative behaviour in the real estate market. The aim of this research is to assess whether the peak-to-trough phases in the Estonian real estate market characterised the pattern of a speculative bubble and to verify if a more rigorous implementation of the land tax would have lessened the speculative behaviour. We first give a perspective of the Estonian financial and economic environment; secondly, we empirically assess through econometric tests whether a bubble affected the Estonian real estate market; thirdly, we analyse through a panel model if a correct implementation of land tax would have buffered the speculative cycle in the real estate market. The results of our study demonstrate the presence of speculative bubble in the Tallinn house price and show that a more rigorous implementation of the Estonian land tax would have reduced the effects of the boom and bust dynamics in the real estate market. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Despite the significant role that speculative housebuilders have in new housing provision, little attention has been paid to understanding the behavioural practices of speculative housebuilders and, in particular, evaluating their response to state-led policy initiatives seeking to influence their business practices. In addressing this gap, this paper uses the policy switch favouring brownfield development as a mechanism for examining how housebuilders respond to increasing state intervention in their business practices and, in doing so, explores the increasingly contested relationship between the state and the market in housing supply. It then reflects on what impacts this may have on housing delivery within the changing financial and policy context beyond 2010 and warns that public policy seeking to influence the location, type, quantity and quality of new housing needs to be supported by policies that encourage widespread behavioural change in the speculative housebuilding industry. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper proposes a framework for studying the optimal exchange rate regime in an open economy vulnerable to self-fulfilling currency crises. Model results show that the optimal regime a country's government should adopt critically depends on the country's level of transparency. Furthermore, stabilisation properties are conditional on conjectural and time-varying factors such as market sentiments, which swing according to international investors’ feelings. Thus, and paradoxically, in a weakly transparent economy, greater flexibility gives rise to a wide range of exchange-rate stability compared with hard-anchoring regimes. Key to this is the role of expectations coordination during stressful scenarios. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this case study design processes are used to explore potential new land-use patterns in redundant spaces in an intensive horticultural region, in peri-urban Melbourne, Victoria. Currently, a mismatch between title boundaries and commercial scale horticultural production methods has led to pockets of under-utilised land. The projects parameters were to increase efficiency, introduce cross programming and develop a strategy for recreation as a new activity in this region. The underlying purpose of this speculative design project was to develop design methods to work with aberrant and unusual sites without losing the very qualities that characterise these places. On this site the overriding imperative was to ensure that the outcome preserves the existing haunting beauty of this region. The case study offers a design framework that can be utilised in other circumstances where it is important to reorient land use without destroying the not-quite-right qualities of places that are so easily overlooked but so important to the genius loci [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the conference "Spekulation und Spekulanten in wissenschaftlicher Perspektive. Dimensionen eines umstrittenen Phänomens" ("Speculation and Speculators in a Scientific Perspective. Dimensions of a controversial Phenomenon") held in Hannover, Germany in November of 2010. Topics discussed include the development and origin of the meaning of the word "speculation," a historical view of the speculator as an entrepreneur, and the state regulation of speculative transactions.

The article discusses an early 20th century speculative housing project in the "Quartiere Coppedè" of Rome, Italy, designed by the Florentine architect Gino Coppedè. The project was sponsored by the Genovese financial empire of Cerruti and was described variously as a cocktail of artful artlessness and medievalized Liberty style, both praised by the press and derided by architects as unRoman and monstrous. Particularly emphasized is Coppedè's use of decoration harkening back to archaic legend and myth.

Abstract: The market maker plays an important role in price formation, but his/her behavior and stabilizing impact on the market are relatively unclear, in particular in speculative markets. This paper develops a financial market model that examines the impact on market stability of the market maker, who acts as both a liquidity provider and an active investor in a market consisting of two types of boundedly rational speculative investors—the fundamentalists and trend followers. We show that the market maker does not necessarily stabilize the market when he/she actively manages the inventory to maximize profits, and that rather the market maker’s impact depends on the behavior of the speculators. Numerical simulations show that the model is able to generate outcomes for asset returns and market inventories that are consistent with empirical findings. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

This note considers the hedging effectiveness of a dynamic hedge strategy as compared to the conventional OLS strategy. The conditions for the superiority of the OLS strategy are identified. It is argued that these conditions are frequently satisfied and therefore one expects to find the dominance of the OLS strategy over any dynamic strategy in the empirical work. © 2008 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Jrl Fut Mark 28:308–311, 2008 [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article explores speculative building and the building industry's organization by combining several literatures. Literature from ancient history and the16th and 17th centuries showed the longevity of the speculative housing processes. A substantial literature focused on England's urban and related housing history of the 19th century. A literature from American business schools, architecture and urban planning programs in the mid-20th century is also presented.

This study tests for the presence of rational speculative bubbles in the Equity REIT industry. We analyze REIT prices using a vector of macroeconomic fundamentals. Using the unit root test and cointegration procedures, we find no evidence of rational bubbles in the REIT market. Tests for duration dependence in the returns series show no evidence of negative duration dependence, suggesting that REIT markets are not affected by rational bubbles. Applying the same tests, we find no evidence of rational speculative bubbles in the Russell 2000 index, a proxy for small-cap stocks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Speculative housebuilding in the United Kingdom faces an ever tighter regulatory environment owing to the increasing impact of the sustainable development agenda. For example, 60% of all new homes in England are now expected to be constructed on previously developed land or provided through the conversion of existing buildings. As speculative housebuilders are responsible for about 80% of all new dwellings built in the United Kingdom, the achievement of this important government target is critically dependent on the ability and willingness of the private sector to respond to public policy. By exploring the main components of the residential development process, the author investigates how far speculative housebuilding will need to change to ensure the successful implementation of the government's brownfield housing target. He suggests that those speculative housebuilders that are enthusiastically building up core competencies in brownfield housing are likely to emerge as the market leaders of the future whereas those companies that continue to rely on past practices and technologies will face an uncertain future as greenfield development opportunities begin to reduce. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Speculative development is significant as a way of providing new owner occupied housing in Europe. Yet because this sector of supply is developed under very different policy conditions, the relationships between new build output, housing markets and the wider economy can vary considerably. Previous research, which has sought to understand the determinants of speculative housing development, has largely failed to recognize the contribution that can result from a comparative European study. In this paper, the UK is compared with the Netherlands, where speculative housing sectors operate under different land and planning systems. Supply or 'cost' based theoretical frameworks are contrasted with quantity 'signal' approaches in an investigation of the relationship between macroeconomy, existing housing, and new build market. It is shown, via an analysis of the period 1975–1997, that both UK and Dutch speculative housing sectors respond to a significant extent to changes in housing market indicators such as the level of turnover and house prices; however, Dutch speculative housing output has been more responsive to changes in the wider economy. This is explained not only in terms of the system of municipal land supply, but also in terms of a tenure neutral new build housing policy. It is argued that although there will be some convergence with respect to the long run land-house price relationship, development industries will continue to operate very differently, particularly in dealing with public sector bodies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The design of new residential development in the UK is castigated routinely in both the technical and broadsheet press, and has in the past few years become the focus of governmental policy initiatives intended to improve the overall standard of design in new housebuilding. Remarkably, however, there has been very little empirical research into the process of housing design in the private sector, and hence even academic commentaries have had to extrapolate from a hitherto very limited number of research studies. Moreover, the private sector housebuilding industry has undergone significant change in the last two decades, with considerable concentration and hence domination of production by large firms. With the private housebuilding sector responsible for over 80% of new production in the 1990s, it is timely to revisit the design practices of large speculative housebuilding firms, in order to better understand current practices and the system of constraints and opportunities in which these practices are situated. Furthermore, it is necessary to place design practice in the context of construction technology, for design criticism all too often abstracts from the technology of building practice and innovation. Therefore, this study examines, by means of a nationally representative questionnaire survey of housebuilding firms, the dominant design practices currently utilized in the industry. The focus is the extent to which volume housebuilding firms (defined as those producing in excess of 1000 units per annum) utilize standard designs, and the interrelationship between such designs and the construction technology employed. In-depth interviews with a representative sample of senior personnel from leading housebuilding companies complement the national survey, and provide insights into the system of constraints and opportunities which the housebuilding industry faces. At the heart of current debates is the conflict between the alleged prominence of the criterion of buildability in private sector housebuilding, at the expense of individuality in design, regard for the overall design context and the requirements of the housing consumer. Each of these issues is investigated in the context of the prevailing practice in the private sector housebuidling industry in the UK in the 1990s. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Most models of trade in speculative markets assume that agents interpret public information identically. We provide empirical evidence on the relation between the volume of trade and stock returns around public announcements, and we argue that the evidence is inconsistent with this assumption. We then develop a model of trade around public announcements that incorporates differential interpretations and is consistent with the observed volume-return relation. Then we test the standard model of belief revision underlying most models of trade using stock brokerage research analysts' earnings forecasts. The hypothesis of identical interpretations seems inconsistent with the forecast revisions in these data. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]