Philip Gunby

Sprayed to Death: Path Dependence, Lock-In and Pest Control Strategies

Theoretical literature on the economics of technology has emphasized the effects on technological trajectories of positive feedbacks. In a competition among technologies that all perform a similar function, the presence of increasing returns to adoptions can force all but one technology from the market. Furthermore, the victor need not be the superior technology. This paper provides an empirical study of one technological competition which illuminates this theoretical work. It uses theoretical results to explain why chemical control of agricultural pests remains the dominant technology in spite of many claims that it is inferior to its main competitor, integrated pest management. Copyright 1996 by Royal Economic Society.

Ambiguity, the certainty illusion, and the natural frequency approach to reasoning with inverse probabilities

People have difficulty reasoning with diagnostic information in uncertain situations, especially when an understanding and calculation of inverse conditional probabilities (Bayes theorem) is required. While natural frequency representations of inference tasks improve matters, they suffer from three problems: (1) calculation errors persist with a majority of subjects; (2) the representation suffers from an illusion of certainty that ignores ambiguity; and (3) the costs of repeatedly applying the representation to deal with imprecision and ambiguity in inference are prohibitive. We describe a user friendly, interactive, graphical software tool for calculating, visualizing, and communicating accurate inferences about uncertain states when relevant diagnostic test information (sensitivity, specificity, and base rate) is both imperfect and ambiguous in its application to a specific patient. The software is free, open-source, and runs on all popular PC operating systems (Windows, Mac, Linux).

Learning from disaster

This book focuses on knowledge-based economies and attempts to analyze dynamic innovation driven processes within those economies. It shows that evolutionary economics, and in particular the strand of applied industry and innovation studies often called Neo-Schumpeterian economics, has left the nursery of new academic approaches and is able to offer important insights for the understanding of socio-economic processes of change and development having a strong impact on economic reality all over the world. The contributions are summarized under four major sections – knowledge and cognition, studies of knowledge-based industries, the geographical dimension of knowledge-based economies and measuring and modelling for knowledge-based economies – and give a broad overview of the prolific research being undertaken in applied evolutionary economics.