Sexy, hedonistic, hilarious - Ann Summers parties are the ultimate girls' night in. Promising the perfect antidote to the toils of everyday life - sexual pleasure - they are the 'naughty but nice' version of the classic Tupperware(R) party.Ann Summers parties are incredibly popular, with around 4000 parties held in Britain every week. The basis is simple: to provide an all-female environment where women can buy sexy lingerie, erotic fashion, sex toys and other sex-related products. In many respects these parties enable women to transgress social taboos in the comfort of their own homes. But they are also a subtle means of constructing and enforcing heterosexual femininity.This book investigates what really goes on at these 'special' homosocial gatherings, where heterosexual women drink, laugh, shop, play party games and talk about sex. Storr develops a new analysis of the ways heterosexual women identify with and against each other - and of what this tells us about gender, sexuality and consumption in contemporary society. Drawing on both participant observation and in-depth interviews with party organizers, this fascinating and fun book is an indispensable guide to the politics of 'post-feminist' culture.

This book is the collection of my own studies in logistics, targeted to a broad readership. The book consists of 4 parts and 5 chapters. The first part deals with the logistics services in developed and developing countries, while the second part covers global competitiveness and logistics performance. The third part is about the relationship between the logistics performance and education and, finally, the fourth part examines the relationship between the choices of transport mode and fuel type. All the chapters in this book are independent of each other, with each one reflecting my own experience, analyses and results. I hope you will find this book useful, informative and appropriate for your needs.

"Handbook of Computational Economics" summarizes recent advances in economic thought, revealing some of the potential offered by modern computational methods. With computational power increasing in hardware and algorithms, many economists are closing the gap between economic practice and the frontiers of computational mathematics. In their efforts to accelerate the incorporation of computational power into mainstream research, contributors to this volume update the improvements in algorithms that have sharpened econometric tools, solution methods for dynamic optimization and equilibrium models, and applications to public finance, macroeconomics, and auctions. They also cover the switch to massive parallelism in the creation of more powerful computers, with advances in the development of high-power and high-throughput computing.

Much more can be done to expand the value of computational modeling in economics. In conjunction with volume one (1996) and volume two (2006), this volume offers a remarkable picture of the recent development of economics as a science as well as an exciting preview of its future potential.
Samples different styles and approaches, reflecting the breadth of computational economics as practiced todayFocuses on problems with few well-developed solutions in the literature of other disciplinesEmphasizes the potential for increasing the value of computational modeling in economics

It is fashionable to criticize economic theory for focusing too much on rationality and ignoring the imperfect and emotional way in which real economic decisions are reached. All of us facing the global economic crisis wonder just how rational economic men and women can be. Behavioral economics - an effort to incorporate psychological ideas into economics - has become all the rage. In this book, David K. Levine questions the idea that behavioral economics is the answer to economic problems. He explores the successes and failures of contemporary economics both inside and outside the laboratory, and asks whether popular behavioral theories of psychological biases are solutions to the failures. The book not only provides an overview of popular behavioral theories and their history, but also gives the reader the tools for scrutinizing them. Is Behavioral Economics Doomed? is essential reading for students and teachers of economic theory and anyone interested in the psychology of economics.

This lively book takes Oklahoma history into the world of Wild West capitalism. It begins with a useful survey of banking from the early days of the American republic until commercial patterns coalesced in the East. It then follows the course of American expansion westward, tracing the evolution of commerce and banking in Oklahoma from their genesis to the eve of statehood in 1907.
"Banking in Oklahoma before Statehood "is not just a story of men sitting behind desks. Author Michael J. Hightower describes the riverboat trade in the Arkansas and Red River valleys and freighting on the Santa Fe Trail. Shortages of both currency and credit posed major impediments to regional commerce until storekeepers solved these problems by moving beyond barter to open ad hoc establishments known as merchant banks.
Banking went through a wild adolescence during the territorial period. The era saw robberies and insider shenanigans, rivalries between banks with territorial and national charters, speculation in land and natural resources, and land fraud in the Indian Territory. But as banking matured, the better-capitalized institutions became the nucleus of commercial culture in the Oklahoma and Indian Territories.
To tell this story, the author blends documentary historical research in both public and corporate archives with his own interviews and those that WPA field-workers conducted with old-timers during the New Deal. Bankers were never far from the action during the territorial period, and the institutions they built were both cause and effect of Oklahoma's inclusion in national networks of banking and commerce. The no-holds-barred brand of capitalism that breathed life into the Oklahoma frontier has remained alive and well since the days of the fur traders. As one knowledgable observer said in the 1980s, "You've always had the gambling spirit in Oklahoma."

Economic Growth and the Environment explores the debate on how to reconcile economic growth with protection of the natural environment, and the closely related discussion on whether an increasing scarcity of natural resources will eventually force economic growth to cease. The debate focusses on whether environmental policies will benefit the economy or not, and is divided into growth optimists and growth pessimists. In general, economists have been optimistic and have pointed to the possibilities of technological progress and substitution, yet they also acknowledge that natural resources and environmental concern do restrict economic growth. The difficulty lies in quantifying the constraint to economic growth. Modern growth economists have constructed models to examine to what extent 'growth pessimism' is theoretically warranted. This book provides an introduction to some of these models, brings together the discussion between growth optimists and pessimists, and presents the theory behind their arguments. It aims to present models where both sides can meet and where both are able to derive expected results with the parameter values that they deem appropriate. From there, the discussions can turn to the empirical observations about these parameters. This book will be of interest to advanced undergraduates in economics, microeconomics, economic growth, sustainable development, and environmental economics. Each chapter concludes with a set of Exercises designed to help the reader master the models.

Efficiency is the most important objective in economics and this book shows how it can be analyzed using input and output data at all levels of the economy. After his 'Input-Output Economics: Theory and Applications', Thijs ten Raa has extended his research to efficiency analysis. He has contributed to the microeconomic theory of performance measurement, made applications to industries, national economies and international trade, and written on the history of economic thought. Twenty-five new papers, published in the last decade are now collected and interrelated by an introduction, amounting to a unification of theory and applications in efficiency and input-output analyses.Efficiency analysts measure firm performance relative to the best practice, which is determined by a firm (or collection of firms) operating on the frontier of the production possibilities. More precisely, efficiency is relative productivity, where the latter is essentially output per 'unit' of input. On the other hand, input-output analysts study input per 'unit' of output. The concept of the one is the inverse of the other and this insight will help resolve open issues in either branch of economic science. Environmental objectives are shown to be achievable by reallocations of production. Benchmarking theory is developed and used to measure how well (or poor) industries and economies are organized. Papers on the history of economic thought round out the volume.

The rich, multi-faceted and multi-disciplinary field of matching-based market design is an active and important one due to its highly successful applications with economic and sociological impact. Its home is economics, but with intimate connections to algorithm design and operations research. With chapters contributed by over fifty top researchers from all three disciplines, this volume is unique in its breadth and depth, while still being a cohesive and unified picture of the field, suitable for the uninitiated as well as the expert. It explains the dominant ideas from computer science and economics underlying the most important results on market design and introduces the main algorithmic questions and combinatorial structures. Methodologies and applications from both the pre-Internet and post-Internet eras are covered in detail. Key chapters discuss the basic notions of efficiency, fairness and incentives, and the way market design seeks solutions guided by normative criteria borrowed from social choice theory.