This paper examines behavior in a tournament in which we vary the tournament prize structure and the information available about participants' skill at the task of solving mazes. The number of solved mazes is lowest when payments are independent of performance; higher when a single, large prize is given; and highest when multiple, differentiated prizes are given. This result is strongest when we inform participants about the number of mazes they and others solved in a pre-tournament round. Some participants reported that they solved more mazes than they actually solved, and this misreporting also peaked with multiple differentiated prizes.

California  should include vehicle fuels as part  of a greenhouse gas reduction cap-and-trade   program.  Numerous  political,  administrative  and  economic  reasons  that  suggest otherwise are considered. They include compliance and enforcement concerns, other regulatory programs  for  transportation, belief that  gains  from  inclusion would be  small,  jurisdictional linkage  issues,  and  both  political  skepticism  and  agency  inexperience  with  market-based regulation.  However, consideration  of most of these strongly  favors inclusion. Inclusion also creates an important competition between the electricity sector and other vehicle fuels to shrink
emissions over time as they vie to see which can most successfully replace ordinary gasoline and diesel.

The world of agriculture is in a state of crisis. And nowhere is this more important than for Africa where economies depend heavily on agriculture and hunger is on the rise. Agriculture is in the headlines, but for the wrong reasons: failures instead of successes. It is receiving rare political attention and financial commitments by governments and donors. This creates unique opportunities in using agriculture for development. But will opportunities be seized? Governments and donors have increasingly turned their backs on agriculture over the last 20 years, contributing to the current food crisis. Will African governments and donors respond by successfully using agriculture for development, or, after a brief concern with agriculture motivated by food riots and human distress, are we to witness a return to business as usual? This paper attempts to answer that question, identifying causes that have led to the crisis, opportunities for new departures, and forces that could be mobilized in order to avoid the business-as-usual scenario and promote instead the agriculture-for-development outcome.

Are politicians accountable to the demands of their citizens? What facilitates political behavior that meets citizen needs and desires? Under what circumstances will citizens reject politicians who fail in this task? The two books considered in this review essay attempt to answer these questions largely through empirical analyses of politician and citizen behavior. These works touch on two distinct but related topics in comparative politics—the ability of governments to govern and the reaction of citizens to government performance. While Grindle assesses the capacity of governments to deal with changing patterns of authority and responsibility, the contributors to the Maravall and Sánchez-Cuenca volume focus primarily on understanding, first, how and why citizens reward and punish politicians in particular ways and, second, how politicians respond to this expected behavior. In both cases, while many potential state and societal characteristics are taken into account, the nature of formal institutions plays a predominant role
in explaining the behavior of both politicians and their constituents. Jennifer Bussell is a Visiting Fellow at the Center for Asian Democracy, University of Louisville.86 India Review Given the differing theoretical agendas of these two books, I will, for the most part, discuss them separately. In both cases, I will focus on the relevance of these analyses, grounded in general theories but evaluated largely in the context of Western Europe and Mexico, for
understanding the dynamics of political behavior in India. It is true that the specific empirical realities examined here may have only limited similarities with micro-level Indian politics. What these works provide, rather the prospect of direct empirical comparisons, is instead an opportunity for broadening the range of theoretical and empirical analyses in India. In other words, I argue that these works are most relevant for shedding light on new or under analyzed questions which, if posed to the Indian case, could provide important new insights into the behavior of both citizens and their representatives.

In 1960, California developed a "master plan" for its already famed public higher education system. It was and continues to be arguably the single most influential effort to plan the future of a system of higher education in the annals of American higher education. Despite popular belief, however, the California Master Plan for Higher Education is more important for what it preserved than what it created. There is much confusion regarding exactly how the Master Plan came about, what it said and did not say, and what portions of it are still relevant today. This essay provides a brief historical tour on how California developed its pioneering higher education system, what the 1960 Master Plan accomplished, and a discussion on the current problems facing this system in the midst of the Great Recession. The immense success of California's network of public colleges and universities has been its historic accomplishment of what I have called in a previous book, The California Idea: the goal of broad access combined with the development of high quality, mission differentiated, and affordable higher education institutions first articulated by California Progressives. Historically, this system has been a great success, with an ability to grow with the state's population and effectively meet rising demand for access to higher education. However, the fiscal health and productivity of California's higher education system has eroded over the past three or so decades. The Great Recession has greatly accelerated this trajectory. Over the past two years, public funding for higher education has been reduced by some $1 billion. Tuition and fees have climbed, but have not produced sufficient revenue to mitigate large budget cuts. The University of California and the California State University have limited enrollment for the first time, and in the midst of growing enrollment demand. California's community colleges have not been able to meet enrollment demand. There is the prospect of continued cuts in the 2010-11 fiscal year as federal stimulus funds for state governments disappear. California is projected to grow from its current 37 million people to some 60 million in 2050. In addition, President Obama has set a national goal for the US to once again have among the highest educational attainment rates in the world. This would require the nation to produce over 8 million additional degrees; California's "fair share" would be approximately 1 million additional degrees - a number made larger, because of the state's current rank among the bottom ten states in degree production relative to the size of its population. This raises a number of big questions: Can California sustain the system as outlined by the 1960 Master Plan? Even if it can, is it, as the British say, "fit for purpose?" Or is it outdated for producing robust levels of socioeconomic mobility and the trained labor needed for tomorrow's economy? How can California retain the California Idea of broad access and quality academic programs? While adequate funding is a major variable, this essay identifies a number of serious problems with the structure of California's higher education system that make meeting Obama's goal extremely difficult, if not impossible to achieve. These include macro effects of too many part-time students, an imbalance in 2-year and 4-year college enrollment, inadequate financial aid, and the need for a new public college and university funding model. A failure to pursue "smart growth" in the public higher education system will lead to a "Brazilian Effect," in which for-profits expand dramatically to help partially fill growing demand for higher education probably at possibly even greater cost to students and government, and with often low-quality academic degree programs.

Food prices rose sharply on the international market between January 2005 and mid-2008, precipitating what has become known asthe “global food crisis”. Yet, how much of a crisis was it at the household level, and for whom was it a crisis? This paper analyzes the welfare effects of changes in prices over categories of households in Guatemala. We find three surprising results. The first is that there was no statistically significant transmission of international into domestic prices over the three and a half years that the crisis lasted. Most real staple food prices rose, but changes were modest and certainly far removed from full transmission as frequently assumed. Welfare effects were as a consequence small. The second surprising result
is that, given high food dependency for farmer households, including large farmers, most of these households lost from the rise in prices, especially of course the marginal, small, and medium farmers. Only if international prices had fully transmitted would half of the large farmers have gained, with the vast majority in the other categories still losing. Allowing for price responses in both production and consumption mitigates negative effects, but still leaves a vast majority of the farmer population losing. Finally, the third surprising result is that farmer households represent as many astwo-thirds of all poor householdslosing from rising food prices. Increasing the productivity of production for home consumption in smallholder farming can thus be an important instrument in combating the short run welfare losses of rising food prices among poor households.