Theoretical and empirical work on individual decision-making in the context of organized commodity markets has mostly assumed that individual economic agents behave as if they pursue the aim of maximum expected utility (e.g. Stein 1961, 1964; Johnson 1960; Ward and Fletcher 1971; Rutledge 1972). For the reader who believes that individuals do not maximize expected utility because of inadequate information, inability to distinguish local from global maxima, utility functions which do not permit maximization, or for some other reason, and for the reader who finds the aim of maximum expected utility introspectively unsatisfactory, this paper presents an alternative non-maximizing approach.

The main determinants of the individual economic agent’s market position are his expectations of the relevant variable relating to the commodity in which he is trading, his attitude toward risk and his decision rule. The paper considers first the case of an individual speculator, who is assumed risk averse in a sense to be defined, and secondly the case of a discretionary hedger who combines both hedging and speculative elements, and who may be either a carrying-charge or selective hedger in the sense of Working (1953). It will be seen that conventional results, as regards the nature of the trader’s supply and demand functions and with respect to certain parameter changes, are obtained by a route alternative to that of utility maximization, although a formal comparison between the two approaches is the subject of a separate paper. For the benefit of the non-specialist reader we begin with a brief review of the literature on speculation in commodity futures markets.

This paper examines the role of differences in language skills in explaining differences in the level of labour earnings of males residing in Quebec. Canada in 1970. The paper puts forward an analytical framework that could be of use for others interested in explaining earnings in bi-, tri- or multi-lingual labour markets and shows that a knowledge of English was more highly rewarded than a knowledge of French, ceteris paribus, in Quebec in 1970.

The paper is divided in four parts. The first part outlines the theoretical framework and the empirical evidence that leads to the hypothesis that English is a more highly rewarded skill in the labour market of Quebec than French in 1970. The second part describes the database, discusses the choice of the functional form and presents the independent variables and their expected signs and, when appropriate, relative magnitudes. The third part examines the results for the whole of Quebec males in 1970 with particular attention paid to returns to language skills. The fourth part examines the results for specific industries and occupations.

Optimal advertising expenditures in static models of the firm generally satisfy the well-known Dorfman-Steiner conditions (Dorfman and Steiner) under a variety of objective functions (see Peel), including that of the « Illyrian » labour-managed firm as perceived by Meade and Vanek, (see Ireland and Law). If advertising has dynamic effects then the generalisation of such results as that of Nerlove and Arrow to firms with objectives other than pure profit maximisation is considered doubtful by at least one writer (Peel). The purpose of the present note is to argue that there is unlikely to be any fundamental difference in advertising policy between a « generalised » firm such as a labour-managed firm and a traditional profit-maximising firrn after provision has been made to adjust for scale differences (factor input levels).

Peel contrasts Nerlove and Arrow’s result for the profit-maximising firm with the result for the same model but with an objective function of maximising the discounted stream of profits per worker or income per worker.

It is conceivable that the reaction of a government excluded from the cartelization of a strategic exhaustible resource (and suffering from a subsequent restriction in its supply) takes the form of a depletion allowance directed at home-country extractive firms in the industry. According to federal law, a depletion allowance is a tax reduction on income proportional to the amount of reserves extracted. Presumably the aim of such a manœuver would be to speed up the rate of extraction at home (i.e. tilting the extraction profile of home-country firms towards the present) thereby relieving short-run excess demand and simultaneously reducing dependence on foreign owned and controlled reserves. (Clearly, allusion can be made to the 1973-74 OPEC oil embargo and to the subsequent policy decisions made by governments of non-OPEC oil producing countries).