Publication Type: Short Oral Report
Abstract: Researchers investigating students’ understanding of functions have found that many students have a limited understanding of functions. While much research has been conducted on students’ understanding of functions, little attention has been paid to students’ understanding of function transformations, function inverse, function composition and how these three concepts are related. In this study, we investigated eight calculus students’ flexibility among these three concepts through task-based interviews. We used an object/process view of a function and a flexibility model to analyze the data. The data showed that the participants used varied yet limited approaches to respond to tasks involving function transformations, function inverse, function transformation and the relationship among the three concepts.

Publication Type: Poster
Abstract: Studies on students’ understanding of functions have reported that many students have a limited understanding of functions. Students’ understanding of function transformation, function inverse, function composition, and the relationship among these three concepts is thus far understudied. This study investigates calculus students’ understandings of the three concepts. Data obtained from two phases, a questionnaire and task-based interviews, will be presented.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: This paper reviews theoretical works in three approaches in organizational research: (1) rationalized individual model (Transaction Cost Economics and Principal Agent Theory), (2) structuralism/functionalism model (Resource Dependence Theory and Institutional Theory), and (3) structurational model (Granovetter’s Social Embeddedness Model and Giddens’ Structuration Theory). Reviewing the last approach in depth, this paper points out that it has been recognized as an important guideline for studying organizational phenomena even in two other approaches, which resulted in an emphasis on individual actions over structural forces. However, the concepts found in Giddens’ Theory of Structuration – regularity, ontological security, deep lying mode of tension management, etc. – suggest that the first two approaches are not incompatible with the structurational approach. This paper argues that (1) once sui-generis characteristics of functionalism and structuralism are discarded, and (2) the fact that regularities (structural forces and functional characteristics) found in organizational studies are based upon organizations’ actions in a specific organizational and economic institution is acknowledged, functionalism and structuralism might enhance the structurational approach.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: This paper is about the forms and functions of city-regions, and the common mismatch of the variable geometries of economic spaces, and, political and institutional spaces. The purpose of this research is to assess the various institutional mechanisms that exist in 6 cross-border urban regions on the Canadian-American border: Detroit-Windsor, Niagara, and Vancouver-Seattle; on the American-Mexican border: San Diego-Tijuana; and on the Franco-Belgian and Dutch-German borders in Lille-Courtrai and Enshede-Gronau.
The twenty first century new global economy seems to give metropolitan regions a new central role. City regions result from the multitude of points of convergence and confluence of large economic and social networks. In Jane Jacobs's words, cities and their economic regions make the wealth of nations, and yet, often, their governmental structures and functions do not mirror those important urban social, political, and economic and spatial facts. Most cities' institutional and functional boundaries do not overlap with the needs of their economic regions. Moreover, there are very few examples of clear institutional and functional frameworks presiding over large cross-border urban regions. This paper addresses the following question: does free trade, and particularly continental economic integration in North American and Europe, lead to a progressive transformation of the regional economies of the six cross-border regions presented in this study? Does economic integration, in turn, affects the forms and functions of the local and regional governance of these regions. Thus for instance, is the European Union free trade regime enhancing territorially based multifunctional institutions, while on the contrary, the NAFTA fosters local informal, uni-functional, and non-territorially based institutions?

Publication Type: Proceeding
Abstract: That people are self-interested is one of the fundamental assumptions of economics and, increasingly, political science. Results from economics experiments, however, along with everyday experience, call this assumption into question. In divide-the-dollar ultimatum games, participants regularly turn down offers that they deem insufficient, even though they would objectively be better off if they accepted. Drivers stuck in a traffic jam get angry at the car that cruises illegally by on the shoulder, even though the moving driver’s actions cost those who are stopped nothing. And restaurant patrons will glare at a person talking on a cellphone at a distant table even though they cannot hear the conversation. If the stuck drivers or the irritated diners could inflict some punishment for the transgressions they observe, many would, even at some cost to themselves. Such punishment strategies appear irrational because they make the punisher worse off than doing nothing (or, in the case of the ultimatum game, than accepting the offered split). Nonetheless, we see unrewarded and costly (or potentially costly) punishment strategies at work in economics laboratories and in the real world. Why? We examine existing explanations for costly punishment, from altruistic defense of social mores to “wary cooperation” (Hibbing and Alford 2004) and then use new methods of evolutionary game theory to explain why costly punishment behavior can be rational and when we should expect it to occur.