This article analyzes negative externalities that policymakers in one region or group may impose upon the citizens of neighboring regions or groups. These externalities may be material, but they may also be psychological (in the form of envy). The latter form of externality may arise from the production of `conspicuous public goods. As a result, decentralized provision of conspicuous public goods may be too high. Potentially, a centralized legislature may internalize negative externalities. However, in a model with strategic delegation, we argue that the median voter in each jurisdiction may anticipate a reduction in local public goods supply and delegate to a policymaker who cares more for public goods than she does herself. This last effect mitigates the expected benefits of policy centralization. The authors theory is then applied to the setting of civil conflict, where they discuss electoral outcomes in Northern Ireland and Yugoslavia before and after significant institutional changes that affected the degree of centralization. These case studies provide support for the authors theoretical predictions.
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Urban freight transport is frequently censured for its unsustainable impacts. Although our current urbanized civilization requires an efficient freight transport system in order to sustain it, the common perception is that urban freight transport has negative impacts on all sustainability issues: social, economic and environmental (also known as the triple P: people, profi t and planet). Urban freight transport, or urban goods movement, is identifi ed as having the following unsustainable eff ects on: people, such as the consequences of traffi c accidents, noise nuisance, visual intrusion, smell, vibration and the consequences of (local) emissions, such as NOx and PM10, on public health; profit, such as inefficiencies (especially for carriers) due to regulations and restrictions, congestion and reduced city accessibility; the planet, such as the contribution of transport to global pollutant emissions (CO2) and the consequences for global warming.
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Game Mechanics is aimed at game design students and industry professionals who want to improve their understanding of how to design, build, and test the mechanics of a game. Game Mechanics will show you how to design, test, and tune the core mechanics of a game—any game, from a huge role-playing game to a casual mobile phone game to a board game. Along the way, we’ll use many examples from real games that you may know: Pac-Man, Monopoly, Civilization, StarCraft II, and others. The authors provide two features. One is a tool called Machinations that can be used to visualize and simulate game mechanics on your own computer, without writing any code or using a spreadsheet. The other is a design pattern library, including the deep structures of game economies that generate challenge and many kinds of feedback loops.
