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Passage1:It pays to giveAllowing consumers to set their own prices can be good for business; even better if the firms give some of it to charityIN OCTOBER 2007 Radiohead, a British rock group, released its first album in four years, ―In Rainbows‖, as a direct digital download. The move drew a fair bit of attention (including from this newspaper) not only because it represented a technological thumb in the eye to the traditional music industry, but also because the band allowed listeners to pay whatever they wished for it. Some 60% of those who seized the opportunity paid nothing at all, but the band seemed pleased with the result; one estimate had it earning nearly $3m from the experiment.One group outside the music industry taking an interest was a trio of professors then at the Rady School of Management at the University of California, San Diego: Ayelet Gneezy, Uri Gneezy and Leif Nelson (who is now at the Haas School of Business at the University of California, Berkeley). Inspired, they designed a series of experiments to gauge whether pay-what-you-want pricing would work for other businesses. Their most recent experiment, co-authored with Amber Brown of Disney Research and published in Science, also stirred in a new element: would it make any difference if firms donated some of the pay-what-you-want fee to charity?The authors set up their pricing experiment at the exit of a roller-coaster ride at a large amusement park. Riders were offered a photograph of themselves, snapped mid-coast. The usual price was $12.95, but on one day, riders were told they could pay what they wished, including taking the photo for free. A second group was charged the full price but told that half the money would go to a well-regarded health charity. Yet a third group could set the price and see half of their chosen amount donated. Allowing customers to set the price dramatically increased the percentage of buyers—from less than 1% to 8%. Even accounting for those who took a free photo, the amusement park collected more revenue on the pay-what-you-want day than when selling for the usual fixed price.The authors also found that of the customers who were allowed to pay what they want, those who were told that half the money would go to a good cause paid substantially more than those who were not told about the charitable donation—to the point that revenue more than tripled. (The charity did, indeed, get its promised cut.) The smallest number of purchases, meanwhile, came the day that customers had to pay the full $12.95 but half was donated.Therefore more than simple altruism was motivating the customers who gave money for a photo they could have had for free. ―One of the quirks about paying what you want,‖ suggests Mr Nelson, ―is that it starts tosignal something about who you are. Every dollar you spend is a direct reflection of how much you care about this charity and what kind of person you are. No one wants to go cheap with a charity.‖ He calls this phenomenon ―shared social responsibility‖: instead of passively accepting a firm’s assertion of its charitable donations, the customer must actively agree to give money to charity, and determine how much.But how widespread could shared social responsibility be? Ms Gneezy is the first to point out that customer-determined pricing works best for products with low marginal costs. Since publishing their findings, the researchers have spoken to several companies interested in pursuing similar experiments with their products, including software developers and video-game designers. But offering flexible pricing on a virtual product online, instead of in person at an amusement park, may make it easier for people to ―go cheap‖ even if a charity is involved. Combining customer-determined pricing, corporate social responsibility, and increased profits will be tricky to pull off, and not every company will be able to do it—just like not every band can put their album online for free and still profit.Passage 2:Why do firms exist?Ronald Coase, the author of “The Nature of the Firm” (1937), turns 100 on December 29thFOR philosophers the great existential question is: ―Why is there something rather than nothing?‖ For management theorists the more mundane equivalent is: ―Why do firms exist? Why isn’t everything done by the market?‖Today most people live in a market economy, and central planning is remembered as the greatest economic disaster of the 20th century. Yet most people also spend their working lives in centrally planned bureaucracies called firms. They stick with the same employer for years, rather than regularly returning to the jobs market. They labour to fulfil the ―strategic plans‖ of their corporate commissars. John Jacob Astor’s American Fur Company made him the richest man in America in the 1840s. But it never consisted of more than a handful of people. Today Astor’s company would not register as a blip on the corporate horizon. Firms routinely employ thousands of workers and move billions of dollars-worth of goods and services within their borders.Why have these ―islands of conscious power‖ survived in the surrounding ―ocean of unconscious co-operation‖, to borrow a phrase from D.H.Robertson, an economist? Classical economics had little to say about this question. Adam Smith opened ―The Wealth of Nations‖ with a wonderful description of the division of labour in a pin factory, but he said nothing about the bosses who hired the pin-makers or the managers who organised them. Smith’s successors said even less, either ignoring the pin factory entirely or treating it as a tedious black box. They preferred to focus on the sea rather than the islands.Who knows the secret of the black box?The man who restored the pin factory to its rightful place at the heart of economic theory celebrates his 100th birthday on December 29th. The ec onomics profession was slow to recognise Ronald Coase’s genius. He first expounded his thinking about the firm in a lecture in Dundee in 1932, when he was just 21 years old. Nobody much listened. He published ―The Nature of the Firm‖ five years later. It w ent largely unread.But Mr Coase laboured on regardless: a second seminal article on ―The Problem of Social Cost‖ laid the intellectual foundations of the deregulation revolution of the 1980s. Eventually, Mr Coase acquired an army of followers, such as Oliver Williamson, who fleshed out his ideas. In 1991, aged 80, he was awarded a Nobel prize. Far from resting on his laurels, Mr Coase will publish a new book in 2011, with Ning Wang of Arizona State University, on ―How China Became Capitalist‖.His central insight was that firms exist because going to the market all the time can impose heavy transaction costs. You need to hire workers, negotiate prices and enforce contracts, to name but three time-consuming activities. A firm is essentially a device for creating long-term contracts when short-term contracts are too bothersome. But if markets are so inefficient, why don’t firms go on getting bigger for ever? Mr Coase also pointed out that these little planned societies impose transaction costs of their own, which tend to rise as they grow bigger. The proper balance between hierarchies and markets is constantly recalibrated by the forces of competition: entrepreneurs may choose to lower transaction costs by forming firms but giant firms eventually become sluggish and uncompetitive.How much light does ―The Nature of the Firm‖ throw on today’s corporate landscape? The young Mr Coase first grew interested in the workings of firms when he travelled around America’s industrial heartland on a scholarship in 1931-32. He abandoned his textbooks and asked businessmen why they did what they did. He has long chided his fellow economists for scrawling hieroglyphics on blackboards rather than looking at what it actually takes to run a business. So it seems reasonable to test his ideas by the same empirical standards.Mr Coase’s theory continues to explain some of the most puzzling problems in modern business. Take the rise of vast and highly diversified business groups in the emerging world, such as India’s Tata group and T urkey’s Koc Holding. Many Western observers dismiss these as relics of a primitive form of capitalism. But they make perfect sense when you consider the transaction costs of going to the market. Where trust in established institutions is scarce, it makes sense for companies to stretch their brands over many industries. And where capital and labour markets are inefficient, it makes equal sense for companies to allocate their own capital and train their own loyalists.But Mr Coase’s narrow focus on transacti on costs nevertheless provides only a partial explanation of the power of firms. The rise of the neo-Coasian school of economists has led to a fierce backlash among management theorists who champion the ―resource-based theory‖ of the firm. They argue that activities are conducted within firms not only because markets fail, but also because firms succeed: they can marshal a wide range of resources—particularly nebulous ones such as ―corporate culture‖ and ―collective knowledge‖—that markets cannot access. Companies can organise production and create knowledge in unique ways. They can also make long-term bets on innovations that will redefine markets rather than merely satisfy demand. Mr Coase’s theory of ―marketfailure‖ needs to be complemented by a theory of ―organisational advantages‖.All this undoubtedly complicates ―The Nature of the Firm‖. But it also vindicates the twin decisions that Mr Coase made all those years ago as a young student at the London School of Economics: to look inside the black box rather than simply ignoring it, and to examine businesses, not just fiddle with theories. Is it too much to hope that other practitioners of the dismal science will follow his example and study the real world?Passage 3:Academic view: Virtuous circlesDa niel C Smith, dean of Indiana University’s Kelley School of Business, says that universities need to find new ways to combat rising tuition costs THE current economics of higher education, at least in America, are not sustainable. As high-paying manufacturing jobs disappear, college education becomes a necessity. Yet, for more than a decade, tuition fees have risen at many times the rate of inflation. What’s more, the forces driving these increases will not abate. America’s public universities face steep cuts in state support, rising healthcare and energy costs. And when cash is tight, the philanthropists who are so important to universities disappear. This means that not only will the price of tuition continue to increase, but universities’ ability to offer financial aid to students is also hit.If the cost of attending an American university becomes prohibitive it will threaten the country’s long-term global competitiveness. It is, therefore, not only a problem for students but also for businesses and society. To remain competitive, America needs a new model of student financial support; higher education and the private sector have a joint responsibility to innovate in creating such models.Enter the business school. Business schools are perfectly positioned to develop new ways of paying for higher education. At the Kelley School, we are exploring an ―education circle of life‖ model of financial support for students.It begins with the immediate needs of businesses—particularly small- to mid-size companies that are the growth engines of the economy. In order to grow and hire more talent, these companies must explore opportunities beyond US borders. But many lack the skills or global contacts to do so. Most top business schools, on the other hand, have a global network of alumni, corporate friends and government contacts. They also have superb students and faculty. Our idea is to create a consulting consortium in which teams of students help client companies identify, assess and capitalise on global growth opportunities. Using distance-learning technologies, student teams collaborate with international alumni, students at partner universities and global corporate partners to pair mid-size American firms with global opportunities.So where does tuition support come in? The firms pay a fee for the student consulting services. A portion of the fee goes towards the students’ tuition costs; the remainder is paid into an endowment account that provides financial aid for deserving students. Contracts are also structured so that a portion of new revenue generated from the globalventures will, for a set period of time, add to the scholarship endowment account.The education circle of life creates growth for mid-size firms, which can in turn spur employment. The initiative provides students with hands-on experience and in the process creates a sustainable revenue stream for the school to offset rising tuition costs.Passage 4: A fistful of dustThe true effect of windblown material is only now coming to be appreciatedClimate scienceON MAY 26th 2008 Germany turned red. The winds of change, though, were meteorological, not political. Unusual weather brought iron-rich dust from Africa to Europe, not only altering the colour of roofs and cars on the continent but also, according to recent calculations by Max Bangert, a graduate student at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, making the place about a quarter of a degree colder for as long as the dust stayed in the air.Unusual for Germany; commonplace for the planet as a whole. The Sahara and other bone-dry places continually send dust up into the atmosphere, where it may travel thousands of kilometres and influence regional weather, the global climate and even the growth of forests halfway around the planet.Earlier in 2008, for instance, Ilan Koren and his colleagues at the Weizmann Institute of Science, in Israel, detected a particularly voluminous burst of dust from the Bodélé Depression. This low-lying bed of silt in Chad, across which powerful jets of wind are wont to blow,constitutes less than 1% of the Sahara’s area but is reckoned the world’s dustiest place. It is thought to be responsible for a quarter or more of the Sahara’s output of airborne dust.Dr Koren observed the dust rise with a camera on a satellite called Aqua; watched it obscure the sun using an automated photometer in Ilorin, Nigeria; followed it across the Atlantic with another satellite, CALIPSO; and finally saw a spike in levels of silicon, aluminium and iron as it landed on detectors in Manaus, Brazil. His results, presented at a meeting of the American Geophysical Union held in San Francisco in December, provide a remarkable account of the intercontinental transfer of dust. Blowin’ in the windThe importance of this long-distance logistical chain has become apparent only in the past few years, and researchers are still working out its many repercussions—for the more you look at dust, the more effects it seems to have. African dust is thought, for example, to stimulate plant growth in the Amazon by bringing in phosphorus (which is in short supply there). This may put a check on global warming by removing what would otherwise be a long-term constraint on the forest’s ability to suck up carbon dioxide as it grows.Dust which does not reach land may do something similar to the sea. Some parts of the ocean are short of iron, which red desert dust has in abundance. Dust from the Gobi desert seems to stimulate plankton blooms in the nutrient-poor waters of the North Pacific, though it is not clear whether this results in a net reduction of atmospheric carbon dioxide, since that would require some of the plankton to sink to the seabed, never to return.Dust aloft cools the land below, as Europe’s meteorologists found out in May 2008. It does this directly, by reflecting sunlight back into space, and indirectly, by helping clouds to form. The effect is significant. The carbon dioxide which has been added to the atmosphere since the industrial revolution began has a greenhouse effect equivalent to the arrival of about 1.6 watts of extra solar power per square metre of the Earth’s surface. The direct effects of dust are estimated to provide a countervailing cooling of about 0.14 watts per square metre. Add the indirect effect on clouds and this could increase markedly, though there are great uncertainties.This dust-driven cooling, though, is patchy—and in some places it may not even be helpful. Dust that cools a desert can change local airflow patterns and lessen the amount of rain that falls in surrounding areas. Thiscauses plants to die, and provides more opportunities for wildfires, increasing the atmospheric carbon-dioxide level.To get a better sense of the net effects brought about by the ups and downs of dust, it would help to have a detailed historical record of the dustiness of the planet. And this is what Natalie Mahowald of Cornell University and 19 colleagues have achieved. They analysed cores from glaciers, lake bottoms and coral reefs and measured how the levels of some telltale chemicals changed with depth, and thus with time. They then used models of global wind circulation to deduce which dust sources have become stronger and which weaker. Their conclusion, published recently in Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics, is that in fits and starts over the past century the air became twice as dusty.Part of the increase stems from human activities—directly, in the case of construction, or indirectly, when it results from clearing vegetation from marginal land in order to farm it. Another part of the explanation may be global warming itself, shifting the boundaries of deserts and intensifying dust production in some areas.How many times must a man look up?The amount of dust actually injected into the atmosphere, though, may have been significantly underestimated. In a recent paper in theProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Jasper Kok of the National Centre for Atmospheric Research, in Boulder, Colorado, writes that the amount of coarse dust driven into the atmosphere by wind is at least double and may be eight times as much as previously thought.He arrived at this conclusion not by measuring dust directly from planes or satellites, which see only a bit of the atmosphere at a time and are not necessarily good at picking up all signs of dust, but by reasoning his way to a model of how loose soil, some fine and some coarse, is affected by the wind and lifted into the air.Fine particles of dust do not simply lie around until they are blown away by the wind. Rather, they stick together in clumps. Only when these clumps are broken up is the dust liberated. That happens when heavier particles are lifted by the wind and then fall back to the ground, hammering and shattering the dust-clumps as they do so. Dr Kok shows that this shattering, like the shattering of all sorts of other things, produces a distinctive mix of particle sizes. This mix does not match those currently used in climate models. It has more bigger particles and fewer smaller ones. The discrepancy seems not to have been noticed before because existing ways of measuring dust are biased towards the finest material—that which most influences air temperature and cloud formation.The consequences of this reassessment are unclear, since the effects of coarse dust are not well understood. Also, the larger particles fall out of the atmosphere more quickly. What is clear is that it is yet another example of how fiendishly complicated the atmosphere is, and what a broad set of approaches is required to understand it.Passage 5: Making cancer glow awayHow to track down tiny tumoursONE problem with cancers is detecting them when they are small and easy to deal with. Once they have grown large enough to be noticed, they have often also spread to other tissues, with lethal consequences. However, Norman Maitland of the Yorkshire Cancer Research Laboratory, in Harrogate, England, thinks that he may have a solution to this difficulty.Dr Maitland speculated that if he could attach glowing proteins to viruses programmed to find and infect cancer cells, he could make tumours easier to see. The proteins in question come from the crystal jelly, a marine organism. Their original extraction was rewarded with the Nobel prize for chemistry in 2008.To use crystal-jelly proteins to illuminate tumours, Dr Maitland and his colleagues developed a series of viruses, ranging from a stripped-down version of HIV to an insect virus reprogrammed to infect human cells, that have been modified to attach specifically to proteins on the surface of the cancer cells in question. They have also been programmed to cause the production of crystal-jelly protein, by splicing a prostate-specificcontrol sequence into their genetic material, next to a version of the fluorescent-protein gene.Once exposed to tissue samples containing prostate-cancer cells, the viruses infected them. The infection did not harm the cells, but as the virus replicated and infected new cancer cells, the glowing protein multiplied too. This caused the tumours to grow brighter and brighter. Unfortunately, they glowed green, the colour of the light from natural crystal-jelly protein. Green light’s frequency is too high for it to be able to travel through human tissues. For the glowing proteins to be seen from outside the body, they needed to produce light that can pass through readily. Red looked to be the perfect choice. Fortunately, the team that won the Nobel prize was able to provide Dr Maitland with a version of the protein that emits red light.Even when they are infected with viruses that make them glow red, though, small tumours are hard to see. To be able to detect them, Dr Maitland will have to use a specially developed camera that scans the body slice by slice. Such cameras are expensive, and the £500,000 ($750,000) they cost may be the greatest hurdle to deploying the technique.That technique will not, in any case, be ready for clinical trials for another five years, and the price of cameras may have come down by then.If it all works, picking tumours up at a stage when they can be dealt with should become a lot easier.Passage 6: The old man of the mountain returnsMore evidence for a previously unknown species of human SVANTE PAABO, the DNA palaeontologist whose work provided the inspiration for ―Jurassic Park‖, has produced a nice Christmas present for students of human evolution. He and his colleagues have confirmed, using the creature’s whole genome, that a fossil finger bone which is at least 30,000 years old, and which was found in a cave in the Altai mountains of Siberia, comes from a previously unknown human species. Tha t was all but certain from their previous study of the creature’s mitochondrial DNA (an abundant form of the molecule found in cells’ powerpacks), released in March. The latest analysis, published in Nature on December 23rd, removes any doubt—and adds a tooth to the meagre stock of evidence from the new species that modern science is able to examine.This discovery is extraordinary on many levels. Perhaps the most important is that one small group of modern humans who live far away from Siberia—the Melanesian islanders of the Pacific Ocean—have picked up a block of genes from the newly discovered species on their (or, rather, their ancestors’) travels. Genetic evidence of the Melanesians’ journey from the African cradle of Homo sapiens, which started (like that of all non-African people) about 60,000 years ago when a band ofadventurers crossed the straits of Bab el Mandeb, from modern Djibouti to modern Yemen, suggests they then continued along the south coast of Asia, never going far inland. For the necessary interbreeding to have happened, Dr Paabo’s new species would thus have to have been spread over a vast area of Asia. Yet it has left no previously identified traces.To be fair, Asia has not, so far, been a rich source of human fossils—unlike Africa, where many sites in the east and the south have yielded ancestral humans, and Europe, where Neanderthals have been found by the hundred. Good Asian fossils come only from China (Peking Man, a type of Homo erectus) and Indonesia (Java Man, another erectus, and Homo floresiensis, the much-maligned ―hobbit‖ of the island of Flores). Stone tools abound, but human bones from other Asian sites are almost as rare as hens’ teeth. The few that do exist are now, of course, the subject of intense scrutiny and much debate about whether they, too, belong to the new species.What this discovery ought to provide, then, is the impetus to start looking much harder for human fossils in Asia. The new species, which has yet to be named, clearly lived all over the place. If, despite that, it remained hidden until now, who knows what other species of human might also be out there?Passage 7: Canada beckonsTHIS month has seen qualified good news for polar bears. On December 16th researchers from the United States and Canada predicted that even though the extent of the summer ice in the Arctic Ocean is expected to decline precipitously over the next few decades, a refuge of sorts will remain for them. Meanwhile, in a paper in Nature, a group American climatologists argued that a sudden and irreversible decline of the sea ice may, after all, not be the most likely outcome of global warming.The refuge will be along the northern shores of Canada and Greenland, Stephanie Pfirman, of Barnard College in New York, and her colleagues told the autumn meeting of the American Geophysical Union in San Francisco. Even in summer, ice will persist there because increased melting will be compensated for by the arrival of ice from the centre of the Arctic Ocean, and even from as far away as Europe and Asia. Then, as now, prevailing winds and resultant ocean currents carry ice to North America. That is why the ice on the Eurasian side is typically young and about one metre thick, whereas that near Canada can be eight metres thick and as many years old.Dr Pfirman arrived at this conclusion after running a computer model called the Community Climate System Model version 3, or CCSM3, which was developed by the University Corporation for AtmosphericResearch in Boulder, Colorado. According to this model, the Arctic Ocean will be more or less ice-free by 2050 if no special effort is made to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions – the "business as usual" scenario. The reason is that when large stretches of ocean, for lack of reflective ice cover, absorb more heat from the sun than is usually the case they will be unlikely ever to freeze over again. Even after this destructive feedback cycle has taken its course, however, the model’s calculations of ice growth and transport show that the refuge at the American side of the Arctic, all 500,000 square kilometres of it, will be there for the last polar bears.For survival, the bears do not just need sea ice to walk about on. There have to be prey for them to eat as well. It so happens, says Brendan Kelly of the National Marine Mammal Laboratory in Alaska, that the ringed seals and bearded seals which polar bears specialise in catching will be all too happy to live in the refuge. An important requirement for seals is thick snow cover in the spring, to dig lairs in. These lairs protect them and their young from the cold and make it harder for polar bears to spot them. Climate models generally predict more snow as the temperature rises, but much of it, says Dr Kelly, will fall in the autumn on a sea that has not yet frozen over. The refuge will be the only place in the Arctic where a lack of snow will not be an issue.The sea mammals and their hunters would have even fewer problems if fears of climatic feedback in the Arctic proved unfounded. The paper in Nature claims that they are. A group led by Steven Amstrup of the US Geological Survey’s Alaska Science Centre ran CCSM3 with several assumptions about reducing greenhouse gases. Dr Amstrup concluded that although the sea ice does shrink, it does so gradually and in proportion to the temperature rises that result. Sudden disappearances of ice do occur, but the Arctic seems able to recover from them. This is important, as it will give humanity more time to reduce its emissions and it improves, among many other things, the chance that polar bears will survive as a species.The paper’s authors mention a number of factors that may counteract a runaway melting cycle. One is that the extra absorption of sunlight may be less than feared because the maximum area of open water occurs at the end of summer, when the days are already shortening and there is usually ample cloud cover to reflect light anyway. Another, they think, is that once the summer is over, new ice grows fastest where the ice cover is thin or non-existent to start with.Meanwhile, in San Francisco, Dr Pfirman and her colleagues warned against complacency. They noted that CCSM3 does not do a good job of describing the rapid decline of the ice in the last decade. And since the。