Oleksii Birulin joined the Discipline of Economics in late 2004. Oleksii obtained his PhD from Pennsylvania State University and is regarded as one of the upcoming theorists in the field of game theory and applied microeconomics. His research interests in auction theory, mechanism design, contract theory and organisation of the firm enchances the activities of the strong game theory and applied micro-economic group in economics.

Oleksii conducts theoretical work on auctions and mechanism design with a particular emphasis on efficiency. His current work focuses on the provision of public goods when there is a risk of congestion. The problem of achieving a Pareto efficient allocation in economies with public goods is an old one.

A public good is called pure if it is both non-rival (can be used by all the agents simultaneously) and non-excludable (access is guaranteed to everybody). The concept of a pure public good is, of course, an idealisation. Many public goods are, at least to an extent, rival and/or excludable.

Oleksii's paper in the Journal of Economic Theory (2006) studies goods which differ from pure public goods in both "dimensions", noting that they are excludable and, to some extent, rival or congested. Examples of such goods are abundant. A swimming pool that charges membership fees is an excludable public good, and when it becomes crowded, customers, obviously, adversely affect each other's welfare. A public good in the paper has two characteristics: its cost and its capacity. The good that is used by more consumers than its capacity delivers the welfare of zero.

Oleksii shows that, somewhat surprisingly, the goods of larger capacity (those that imply less exclusion) may be easier to finance than the goods of smaller capacity. There are situations where the good of intermediate capacity (half of the population uses the good) can be produced in an efficient, budget balanced mechanism with voluntary participation, while the good of smaller capacity cannot. Oleksii presents a (rather permissive) sufficient condition for the existence of an incentive compatible mechanism that always produces the public good of fixed capacity ex-post efficiently, balances the budget ex-post and satisfies voluntary participation constraints.

"How to sell a good efficiently - to the buyer who values it the most - is one of the main questions of the theory of auctions. The task becomes harder as the informational environment gets more complex. When the valuations of the buyers are asymmetric and depend on the private information of the others the set of efficient mechanisms is quite limited. Among these is the open ascending price, or English, auction."

Oleksii Birulin and Sergei Izmalkov "On Efficiency of the English Auctions," mimeo, MIT and Sydney University

Daniel Oron joined the Discipline of Econometrics and Business Statistics late in 2004. Daniel obtained his MBA in Finance and Operations Research and his PhD in Operations Research from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Daniel's main interests lie in the deterministic mathematical modelling of business decision problems, linear and integer programming, dynamic programming, simulation and inventory models. He is also one of the upcoming scholars in the area of management decision science.

Daniel is currently involved in a research project which studies the co-ordination of classical scheduling models with transportation constraints; this research involves due date assignment, time-dependent processing times and scheduling with setup times. Daniel is collaborating with leading international scholars from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and Ben Gurion University on this particular project.

In addition, Daniel lists supply-chain management and lot-sizing among his research interests. He has also investigated manufacturing problems where products have to be delivered to a deadline. In these problems, known as due-date assignment problems, a production schedule minimizing the producers' expenses has to be determined.

First, one can prove (by a standard pairwise interchange argument), that an optimal schedule exists in which jobs are sequenced in a non-increasing order of job-weights. The remaining part of the solution, i.e., the allocation to batches (for a given sequence) has been solved in O(n) time by Albers and Brucker. Other possible extensions are, e.g., to allow sequence-dependent setup times (while keeping identical jobs), or to consider bounds on the batch sizes.

Alan Woodland is regarded as a leading international scholar in applied econometrics and international trade theory. Alan's position within the Faculty has been predominantly research-based; he is currently an ARC Professional Fellow and is pioneering research in a number of areas. His principal fields of interest are international trade, econometric modelling, household behaviour, taxation and subsidies, and time allocation. His most recent research has centred on obtaining pareto-improvements in welfare through a range of policy changes, such as international income transfers, tariffs, taxes and trade quotas under the two redistribution mechanisms, income transfers and commodity taxes.

Alan's current research activity includes an ARC-funded study which focuses on the role of risk and uncertainty in relation to the volatility of world prices and their effect on Australian production sector. Additionally, Alan is engaged in a research project which examines the welfare implications of multi-level tariff reforms. This ARC-funded study relates to the theoretical basis for APEC (Asia-Pacific Economics Corporation) and scrutinises the process by which countries endeavour to change tariffs. Furthermore, Alan is also currently supervising a number of PhD students; among these is the work of George Kudrna, which is directed at evaluating the current Australian government's plans to change superannuation and tax laws. It is expected that the anticipated changes in superannuation and tax laws will affect people's decisions regarding retirement, and this will in turn have an effect on Australian economy.

Alan is a Fellow of the Econometric Society, Chair of the Australasian Standing Committee of the Econometric Society, has served two terms on the Executive of the International Economics Association, and is a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences of Australia. He was Joint Editor of Economic Record, is Associate Editor of International Tax and Public Finance, and a member of the editorial boards of Economic Analysis and Policy, Journal of Applied Econometrics and
Empirical Economics.

"... open regionalism, in the form of our non-preferential trading clubs, can be Pareto-improving for the world. Pareto optimality is achieved by choosing trade policy reforms that maintain the initial world prices, thus ensuring that non-member countries are unaffected, and that reduces the effects of trade distortions for club members, thus improving the efficiency of resource allocation within the club and raising welfare of club members."

Research Grants

• International Trade Policy and the Dynamics of Open Economies - ARC Discovery Project 2002-2007
• ARC Fellowship - ARC Fellowship 2002-2006
• Labour Supply and Saving of Older Australians: Behavioural Response and Economic Impacts - ARC Linkage Project Grant (UNSW Grant) 2002-2005

Associate Professor Sue Newberry from the Discipline of Accounting was awarded the prestigious John Perrin Prize for 2005 and the inscribed quaich in the photo above for her paper in the journal Financial Accountability and Management (with June Pallot, the late professor from the College of Business and Economics of the University of Canterbury, Christchurch) 'A wolf in sheep's clothing? Wider consequences of the financial management system of the New Zealand central government'.

In sharp contrast to the new orthodoxy of accrual based appropriations and business-style financial reporting in the public sector (in which Australia and New Zealand have been at the forefront), Associate Professor Newberry questions the appropriateness of applying business accounting practices and standards to the public sector. She takes particular issue with the assertions that these are changes of technical rather than political significance, citing evidence from New Zealand that some techniques undermine democratic controls.

"While there are many reporting practices that the public sector can usefully adopt from the private sector, it should be remembered that the fundamental rationale of accounting in the two sectors remains different. ... In the public sector, the purpose of accounting is taxpayer control over the use of funds rather than the measurement of capital growth for distribution purposes."

Associate Professor Sue Williams specialises in strategic information management. Her work is directed towards assisting organisations make the most effective use of their information assets and to minimise information risks.

Sue's research focuses on information in use and draws on theories of sociotechnical change and situated action to make sense of complex, changing business information landscapes. She co-founded and leads the Information Policy and Practice Research Group (IPPRG) within the Faculty and is the Asia-Pacific Regional Editor of the International Journal of Information Management. She has extensive experience in research, teaching and consultancy in the areas of information design and information policy in both the private and public sectors. Sue Williams has received funding for her research from a wide range or funding bodies including the ARC, British Telecom, European Union and the British Library. Her most recent project, conducted in collaboration with colleagues from the IPPRG, is entitled "Constructing the meaning of document retention: a policy research agenda". The project seeks to provide an interdisciplinary view of the phenomenon of document retention and to understand and explain how retention policies are constructed, enacted and evaluated.

Giuseppe Carabetta's research expertise is in employment law, particularly public sector employment law. He has extensive research experience in the area of police employment and is recognised as the leading scholar in Australian police labour relations law.

Giuseppe's research has prompted the Australian police unions, and in particular the Police Federation of Australia (PFA), to review the legal status of their 50,000 police members and has led to an ongoing collaborative relationship with the PFA, with a current focus on reviewing the critical issue of police dismissal laws. Arguing from a technical legal viewpoint, in 2005 he was involved in discussions between the PFA and the Federal Government over the proposed workplace relations reforms and was instrumental in the preparation of the PFA's successful submission to the Senate Employment, Workplace Relations and Education Committee Inquiry into the Workplace Relations Amendment (Work Choices) Bill 2005.

Giuseppe was awarded the Vice-Chancellor's Award for Outstanding Teaching for 2005.

Richard Gerlach's research interests lie mainly in financial econometrics and time series. His methodological work has centred on developing computationally intensive Bayesian methods for inference, diagnosis and model comparison for time series models, with a recent focus on nonlinear threshold heteroskedastic models and volatility forecasting. He also has an interest in estimating logit models incorporating misclassification.

Richard's applied work has involved assessing asymmetry in major international stock markets, in response to local and exogenous factors; cointegration analysis assessing the effect of the Asian financial crisis on long term relationships between international real estate investment markets; stock selection for financial investment using logit models; option pricing and hedging involving barriers; and factors influencing the 2004 Federal election.

His research papers have been published in Journal of the American Statistical Association, Journal of Time Series Analysis and the International Journal of Forecasting and he has been an invited speaker and regular presenter at major international conferences such as the International Association for Statistical Computing world conference, the International Symposium on Forecasting and the International Statistical Institute sessions.

Professor Alex Frino is Professor of Finance and Director of the Securities Industry Research Centre of Asia Pacific.

In 1991 he received a Masters Degree in Finance from the University of Cambridge, England and in 1995 a PhD in Finance from the University of Sydney, Australia. He has published over 50 papers in leading scholarly journals including the Journal of Finance, Journal of Banking & Finance, Journal of Portfolio Management and Journal of Futures Markets.

Alex Frino has held Visiting Economist positions with CS First Boston Australia, the Sydney Futures Exchange and Commodity Futures Trading Commission in Washington DC. He is the recipient of the 2005 Fulbright Senior Scholar Award and spent twelve months in the US examining the impact of off-market trading and electronic trading on the US futures market. (US markets are among the last in the world to still use open out-cry trading, and he analysed data coming out of out-cry and electronic trading at the Chicago Board of Trade and the Chicago Mercantile Exchange.)

Professor Sid Gray's research interests are wide ranging and cover many aspects of international business and management. In particular, he is recognised as one of the world's leading scholars in the field of international accounting.

Sid Gray's most significant contributions address, firstly, European and global accounting harmonisation where his research examines the convergence of standards and practices internationally with special reference to the comparative impact of nationally based accounting policies and performance measurement. Secondly, his research explores transparency and corporate governance issues with a focus on examining the importance of the cultural and social environment relative to capital market and other pressures on the information disclosure strategies of multinationals based in the major countries of the world. His research achievements have been recognised most recently by his election as a Fellow of the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia.

Sid Gray is currently working on an ARC funded project to examine the benefits and costs of implementing International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) in Australia, the European Union and some Asian countries. In particular, he is exploring the local impacts of IFRS and the significance of cultural and institutional factors that may limit the implementation and effectiveness of accounting standards that are globally determined. Another major area of research that he is working on investigates the extent to which large companies around the world are in fact globalised and the factors that limit successful internationalisation in practice.

Professor Alan Dupont is a graduate of the Royal Military College Duntroon and the US Foreign Service Institute, and holds a PhD in international relations from the Australian National University. He has spent more than thirty years working on international security issues, with a particular focus on Asia, in government, the military, academe and the think tank world. He served in the Australian embassies in Seoul and Jakarta and has also worked as a free-lance journalist in South America. He has written extensively on defence and security issues, including a path breaking book on the emerging non-military threats to East Asia.

Professor Dupont is the inaugural Director of the Centre for International Security Studies (CISS). He was previously Senior Fellow for International Security at the Lowy Institute for International Policy and was Director of the Asia-Pacific Security Program at the Australian National University's Strategic and Defence Studies Centre.

Professor Dupont is one of five Australian representatives to the Asean Regional Forum's Register of Experts and Eminent Persons and is a special advisor on foreign policy to East Timor's Prime Minister, Jose Ramos Horta. He is member of the Council of the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, the Australian Committee to the Council for Security Cooperation in the Asia Pacific and the International Institute for Strategic Studies. He is also a member of the Foreign Affairs Council, an advisory body to the Australian Minister for Foreign Affairs, a member of the Board of Management of the Land Warfare Studies Centre, the Australian Army's think tank, and a member of the International Advisory Board of CQS, a European hedge fund.

Marylouise Caldwell and Paul Henry are at the forefront of a developing expertise within the Faculty in educational videos and documentary films that focus on significant business or socioeconomic issues, using the techniques of cinema verite and video ethnography in particular.

Their distinctive expertise is in social research which draws on the power of recorded visual observation as the primary data source for analysis. In 2004 Paul and Marylouise won first prize with their first film Living dolls: How affinity groups sustain celebrity worship at the Association for Consumer Research (ACR) Film Festival in Portland USA, and first prize at the 2006 Latin American ACR Film Festival in Monterrey, Mexico with their film Heavy Metal: Headbanging as resistance or refuge. Recently they won first prize again at ACR USA, with their film: Empowering the citizen consumer: Striving to reduce maternal deaths and morbidity in Pakistan. They are the only academics worldwide, to have won more than two of these prestigious prizes.

Paul and Marylouise have a commitment to understanding consumer (dis)empowerment - to using the techniques of audio-visual story-telling to inform others of what facilitates or inhibits consumers physical, psychological and material well-being. They have studied and filmed a beauty contest for AIDS/HIV victims in Botswana addressing issues that reduce stigma/denial; studied impoverished consumers in the United States and how they survive by making trade-offs; and looked at how PriceWaterhouseCoopers teams up with Mission Australia to help Australian teenagers develop strong leadership skills.

In the context of the new media - whether podcasting or interactive webbased visual tools - which is reshaping the whole modus operandi of education, they are very well positioned. At the present time, they are working on 26 educational videos commissioned by the US and Australian offices of Pearson Education, with ambitions to establish within the Faculty a significant centre of research and professional engagement in educational and social research filmmaking.

Professor David Hensher is the Director of the Institute of Transport and Logistics Studies: An Australian Key Centre.

David is a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences in Australia, Past President of the International Association of Travel Behaviour Research and a Vice-Chair of the International Scientific Committee of the World Conference of Transport Research. He is the Executive Chair and Co-Founder of The International Conference in Competition and Ownership in Land Passenger Transport (the Thredbo Series), now in its 16th year.

David is on the editorial boards of ten of the leading transport journals and is Area Editor of Transport Reviews. In 1999 he was appointed by one of the world's most prestigious academic publishing houses - Elsevier Science Press - as series and volume editor of a new handbook series "Handbooks in Transport". He has published extensively (over 350 papers) in the leading international transport journals and key journals in economics as well as ten books; he is Australia's most cited transport academic and number three transport economist. His particular interests are transport economics, transport strategy, sustainable transport, productivity measurement, traveller behaviour analysis, stated choice experiments, dynamic discretecontinuous choice modelling, privatisation and deregulation.

David has advised numerous government and private sector organisations on matters related to transportation especially on forecasting demand for existing and new transportation services. He is regarded as Australia's most eminent expert on matters relating to travel demand and valuation and transport reform.

Stephen Greaves' work is focused on the environmental, health and safety consequences of our dayto- day travel and activity choices. Through the linkage of satellite-based technology and portable pollution monitors - in collaboration with the University's School of Public Health - Stephen has been able to translate broadly based macro phenomenon, such as air pollution, to the level of the individual, with the capacity to give individuals a more tangible understanding of the environmental dimensions of transport choices (whether bicycles, cars, public transport) and the personal health implications.

Together with colleagues at ITLS, Stephen has recently been awarded an ARC Linkage Grant in partnership with a major insurance company, entitled Exploring Behavioural Responses of Motorists to Exposure- Based Charging Mechanisms. The purpose of the grant is to explore the behavioural responses of motorists to a novel charging regime in which charges are levied on drivers based on their accident history, kilometres driven and the circumstances under which these kilometres are driven. The project has enormous potential for infrastructure maintenance and development funding models and for more equitable insurance premiums based on actual use.

Nick Wailes works in two of the most crucial areas of organisational change in contemporary business - the implementation of ERP and the impact of globalisation on the management of organisations.

Central to his work is an interest in how the context of business decision making - whether social, cultural, organisational, regional or national - influences decision making and its successful implementation. In doing so he brings a background in history, economics and strategic management to the equation, enabling a richer understanding of the dynamics underpinning strategic management and organisational change compared to a narrower purely economic analysis.

Nick Wailes' work is fundamentally comparative, analysing business scenarios with common parameters but quite different outcomes. Together with other researchers from Work and Organisational Studies he is co-ordinating two ARC Discovery Grant projects 'Globalisation and Employment Relations in Autos and Banking' project, in collaboration with researchers in China, Germany, Hong Kong, Japan, South Korea, Singapore, Sweden and the USA; and 'The Impact of Enterprise Resource Planning Systems on Australian Oganisations'.

Nick Wailes' research has been published in leading international journals including Journal of Applied Behavioral Science, Journal of Organisational Change Management, International Human Resource Management Journal and the British Journal of Industrial Relations and in 2006 he was invited to act as a Rapporteur at one of the key plenary sessions of the International Industrial Relations 15th World Congress.

For John Buchanan, one of the great pleasures of his work is to use scholarly techniques, combined with professional insights and experience, to provide innovative solutions to real issues in the workplace (and the broader community).

In his view, the real issues of the workplace are far more interesting than scholarly debates per se. Not only are they of immediate consequence, but they require a capacity to draw on a whole range of disciplines in order to deal with the multiplicity of dimensions of any issue. In addition, they require a capacity to harness the professional insights and contributions of all those involved in the reality of the workplace.

John brings to his leadership of the Workplace Research Centre a background in history, law, economics, and work and organisational studies; a diverse network of scholarly and client/ practitioner contacts; experience in policy development in microeconomic reform and labour market restructuring with the Australian government; together with extensive experience as a union delegate in which he learnt about the realities of workplace management.

What adds to the whole equation is a love of public speaking and community engagement. Through 40-50 public presentations each year he translates to the broader community the insights which flow from the linkage of scholarship and practical engagement on matters of crucial social, political and economic significance.