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This introduction lays out some of the theoretical underpinnings of the notion of ‘infrastructural violence’. We begin by considering infrastructure as an ethnographically graspable manifestation, before then moving on to highlight how broader processes of marginalization, abjection and disconnection often become operational and sustainable in contemporary cities through infrastructure. We then show how the concept of ‘infrastructural violence’ can nuance our analyses of the relations between people and things that converge daily in urban life to the detriment of marginalized actors, while also proposing a normative reflexivity that can provide a concrete means through which to talk, imagine and build towards greater regimes of quality and collective benefit. Finally, we conclude with a summary of each of the contributions to this special issue.

W. E. B. Du Bois (1868–1963) is best known as a sociologist, historian, and civil rights leader, but he is also increasingly appreciated as an economist. Du Bois's work in economics was primarily empirical, drawing heavily on the German Historical School of Economics and later on Karl Marx. However, during his early economic studies at Harvard University, Du Bois was interested in marginalism as a theoretical solution to the problem of wage determination. In this paper, I explore the marginalist wage theory developed by Du Bois in his unpublished 158-page 1891 manuscript, A Constructive Critique of Wage Theory. I show that Du Bois developed a wage theory that was at the frontier of marginalist analysis in 1891 and that anticipated important developments in marginal productivity theory and the theory of labor supply. While he did not reengage marginalism after his time in Berlin, Du Bois's work on wage theory reinforces recent recognition of his contributions to economics.

We propose a model of monopolistic competition with additive preferences and variable marginal costs. Using the concept of \"relative love for variety,\" we provide a full characterization of the free-entry equilibrium. When the relative love for variety increases with individual consumption, the market generates pro-competitive effects. When it decreases, the market mimics anti-competitive behavior. The constant elasticity of substitution is the only case in which all competitive effects are washed out. We also show that our results hold true when the economy involves several sectors, firms are heterogeneous, and preferences are given by the quadratic utility and the translog.

We define aggregate productivity growth (APG) as the change in aggregate final demand minus the change in the aggregate expenditures on labor and capital. We show how to aggregate plantlevel data to this quantity and how to decompose APG into technical efficiency and reallocation components. This requires us to confront the \"non-neoclassical\" features that impact plantlevel data, including plant-level heterogeneity, the entry and exit of goods, adjustment costs, fixed and sunk costs, and market power. The APG decomposition includes one term per plant related to technical efficiency and one term for each input at each plant that is a function of the value of marginal product - input price gap and that relates the reallocation of inputs to growth. We compare APG to several competing variants of productivity growth that are based only on plant-level technical efficiency. Two simple theoretical examples illustrate that technical - efficiency reallocation can be negatively correlated with actual APG reallocation because technical efficiency is a production concept and need not have any relation with the APG reallocation gaps. We illustrate this point empirically using panel data from manufacturing industries in Chile, where we show technical-efficiency reallocation differs substantially from measured reallocation based on our definition of APG.

With the rapid development of mobile networks and smart terminals, mobile crowdsourcing has aroused the interest of relevant scholars and industries. In this paper, we propose a new solution to the problem of user selection in mobile crowdsourcing system. The existing user selection schemes mainly include: (1) find a subset of users to maximize crowdsourcing quality under a given budget constraint; (2) find a subset of users to minimize cost while meeting minimum crowdsourcing quality requirement. However, these solutions have deficiencies in selecting users to maximize the quality of service of the task and minimize costs. Inspired by the marginalism principle in economics, we wish to select a new user only when the marginal gain of the newly joined user is higher than the cost of payment and the marginal cost associated with integration. We modeled the scheme as a marginalism problem of mobile crowdsourcing user selection (MCUS-marginalism). We rigorously prove the MCUS-marginalism problem to be NP-hard, and propose a greedy random adaptive procedure with annealing randomness (GRASP-AR) to achieve maximize the gain and minimize the cost of the task. The effectiveness and efficiency of our proposed approaches are clearly verified by a large scale of experimental evaluations on both real-world and synthetic data sets.

This paper examines the relationship between marginal Nubian communities—who are culturally different and who occupy peripheral contexts—and the Kerma “pastoral state” in Upper Nubia during the Classic Kerma period (1750–1550 BCE). It is argued that the funerary assemblages of two such communities—Mirgissa and al-Widay I—document localized identities and active roles in cross-cultural interactions with other cultural groups. These interactions and identities may have been intentionally encouraged and utilized by the Kerma state in order to gain access to exchange systems and maintain power within a more decentralized “pastoral state.” Cooperative processes such as commensality and social reception presented mechanisms for forming friendly relationships with these communities and a variety of Nile valley and desert groups and polities. It is argued that these communities were not marginalized and exploited by the state and but instead used their marginality to achieve degrees of autonomy and form their own localized practices.

This is the introduction to the symposium “Carl Menger: A Reappraisal for the 21st Century”. It provides opening remarks and a brief overview of the articles in the special issue.

We develop a Bayesian nonparametric model for a longitudinal response in the presence of nonignorable missing data. Our general approach is to first specify a working model that flexibly models the missingness and full outcome processes jointly. We specify a Dirichlet process mixture of missing at random (MAR) models as a prior on the joint distribution of the working model. This aspect of the model governs the fit of the observed data by modeling the observed data distribution as the marginalization over the missing data in the working model. We then separately specify the conditional distribution of the missing data given the observed data and dropout. This approach allows us to identify the distribution of the missing data using identifying restrictions as a starting point. We propose a framework for introducing sensitivity parameters, allowing us to vary the untestable assumptions about the missing data mechanism smoothly. Informative priors on the space of missing data assumptions can be specified to combine inferences under many different assumptions into a final inference and accurately characterize uncertainty. These methods are motivated by, and applied to, data from a clinical trial assessing the efficacy of a new treatment for acute schizophrenia. Supplementary materials for this article are available online.

We analyze firms that compete by means of exclusive contracts and market-share discounts (conditional on the seller's share of customers' total purchases). With incomplete information about demand, firms have a unilateral incentive to use these contractual arrangements to better extract buyers' informational rents. However, exclusive contracts intensify competition, thus reducing prices and profits and (in all Pareto undominated equilibria) increasing welfare. Market-share discounts, by contrast, produce a double marginalization effect that leads to higher prices and harms buyers. We discuss the implications of these results for competition policy.

We examine the effect of fiscal positions, both the level of debt and the fiscal balance, on long-term government bond yields in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). To control for the endogenity of fiscal positions to the business cycle we utilize forward projections of fiscal positions from the OECD's Economic Outlook. In a panel regression over the period from 1988 to 2007, we find a robust and significant effect of fiscal positions on long-term bond yields. Our estimates imply that the marginal effect of the projected deterioration of fiscal positions adds about 60 basis points to U.S. bond yields by 2015, with effects on other G-7 bond yields generally being smaller.