4 History on Trial before the Social Welfare Courts: Holocaust Survivors, German Judges, and the Struggle for “Ghetto Pensions”

In this article, we scrutinise epistemic competitions in interviews about World War II. In particular, we analyse how the interlocutors draw on their epistemic authority concerning WWII to construct their interactional telling rights. On the one hand, the analyses illustrate how the interviewers rely on their historical expert status – as evidenced through their specialist knowledge and ventriloquisation of vicarious WWII narratives – in order to topicalise certain master narratives and thereby attempt to project particular identities upon the interviewees. On the other hand, the interviewees derive their epistemic authority from their first-hand experience as Jewish Holocaust survivors, on which they draw in order to counter these story projections, whilst constructing a more distinct self-positioning to protect their nuanced personal identity work. Overall, these epistemic competitions not only shaped the interviewees’ identity work, but they also made the link between storytelling and the social context more tangible as they brought – typically rather elusive – master narratives to the surface.

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Demand Subsidy versus Production Regulation: Development of New Energy Vehicles in a Competitive Environment

Mathematics ◽

10.3390/math9111280 ◽

2021 ◽

Vol 9 (11) ◽

pp. 1280

Author(s):

Zixuan Wang ◽

Xiuzhang Li

Keyword(s):

Social Welfare ◽

Stackelberg Game ◽

Positive Impact ◽

Consumer Preference ◽

Social Planner ◽

Environmental Preferences ◽

The Social ◽

New Energy ◽

Vehicle Market ◽

New Energy Vehicles

In the competitive market environment, the growth of new energy vehicles (NEVs) faces many obstacles. Demand subsidy or production regulation-related policies are widely used to promote the development of NEVs. A comparative analysis of the effects of the two types of policies on the competitive vehicle market requires further study. To fill this gap, we investigate which type of policy is more preferable from the perspective of the social planner. In this paper, we construct a Stackelberg game with a welfare-maximizing social planner and two profit-maximizing manufacturers producing NEVs and fuel vehicles (FVs), respectively. Interestingly, although both types of policies can increase the quantity of NEVs, demand subsidy also promotes the growth of total vehicles at the same time; in contrast, production regulation reduces the total vehicles. Moreover, compared with the benchmark that no policy intervention, demand subsidy generally improves social welfare, while production regulation improves social welfare only with high consumer preference for NEVs. Nevertheless, production regulation always has a positive impact on the environment, whereas demand subsidy may have a positive impact only when the NEV is very environment friendly. The numerical results show that consumer environmental preferences and the regulation of environmental impact determine which type of policy dominates the other.

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