Buying In or Selling Out or Uncertainty Production Choice and Agency

Buying In or Selling Out?: The Commercialization of the American Research Industry

Author: Donald G Stein

Universities were once ivory towers where scholarship and teaching were unbiased and free from commercial pressure and special interests -- or so we tell ourselves. Whether they were ever as pure as we think, it is certain that they are pure no longer. Administrators benefit from patents by commercializing faculty discoveries; they pour money into sports with the expectation that these spectacles will somehow bring in revenue; they sign contracts with soda and fast-food companies, legitimizing the dominance of a single brand on campus; and they charge for distance learning courses that they market widely. In this volume, edited by Donald G. Stein, university presidents and other leaders in higher education comment on the many connections between business and scholarship when intellectual property and learning are treated as marketable commodities. Some contributrs write about the benefits of these connections in providing much needed resources. Others emphasize that the thirst for profits may bias the type and quality of research. They fear for the future of basic research when faculty are in search of immediate payoffs. The majority of the contributors acknowledge that commercialization is the current reality and has progressed too far to turn back. They propose guidelines for students and professors to govern commercial activities. Such guidelines can increase the likelihood that quality, openness, and collegiality will remain core academic values.

Table of Contents:

	Acknowledgments
Ch. 1	A Personal Perspective on the Selling of Academia	1
Ch. 2	College Sports, Inc.: How Big-Time Athletic Departments Run Interference for College, Inc.	17
Ch. 3	The Benefits and Cost of Commercialization of the Academy	32
Ch. 4	Increased Commercialization of the Academy Following the Bayh-Dole Act of 1980	48
Ch. 5	Delicate Balance: Market Forces versus the Public Interest	56
Ch. 6	Pushing the Envelope in University Involvement with Commercialization	75
Ch. 7	Conflicting Goals and Values: When Commercialization Enters into Tenure and Promotion Decisions	89
Ch. 8	Buyer and Seller Views of University-Industry Licensing	103
Ch. 9	The Increasingly Proprietary Nature of Publicly Funded Biomedical Research: Benefits and Threats	117
Ch. 10	The Clinical Trials Business: Who Gains?	127
Ch. 11	Reforming Research Ethics in an Age of Multivested Science	133
Ch. 12	The Academy and Industry: A View across the Divide	153
Ch. 13	Responsible Innovation in the Commercialized University	161
	Contributors	175
	Index	179

Interesting textbook: Turismo:o Negócio de Viagem

Uncertainty, Production, Choice, and Agency: The State-Contingent Approach

Author: Robert G Chambers

This book demonstrates that the state-contingent approach provides the best way to think about all problems in the economics of uncertainty, including problems of consumer choice, the theory of the firm, and principal agent relationships. The authors demonstrate that dual methods apply under uncertainty and that the dual representations can be developed for stochastic technologies. Moreover, proper exploitation of the properties of alternative primal and dual representations of preferences allows analysts to generalize and extend the results of the existing literature on preferences under uncertainty, thus making expected utility theory largely superfluous for many decisions.