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Some Recent Experiments in Creative Pricing Strategies
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With internet commerce, a buyer cannot directly examine the product and so must rely upon the accuracy and reliability of the seller in deciding whether and how much to bid. In this setting, the seller's reputation can become an important factor in the bid. This paper examines the impact of the seller's reputation on the willingness of buyers to bid on items sold via internet auctions, using a 1999 mint condition U.S. 32.73. The empirical results show that the seller's reputation has a positive, statistically significant, but small impact on the price.
In this paper, we examine critically the notion of "Triple Bottom Line" accounting. We begin by asking just what it is that supporters of the Triple Bottom Line idea advocate, and attempt to distil specific, assessable claims from the vague, diverse, and sometimes contradictory uses of the Triple Bottom Line rhetoric. We then use these claims as a basis upon which to argue (a) that what is sound about the idea of a Triple Bottom Line is not novel, and (b) that what is novel about the idea is not sound. We argue on both conceptual and practical grounds that the Triple Bottom Line is an unhelpful addition to current discussions of corporate social responsibility. Finally, we argue that the Triple Bottom Line paradigm cannot be rescued simply by attenuating its claims: the rhetoric is badly misleading, and may in fact provide a smokescreen behind which firms can avoid truly effective social and environmental reporting and performance.
During the past decade, spurred by claims that the country is experiencing a hate crime epidemic, Congress and the majority of states have enacted laws increasing the punishment for crimes motivated by officially disfavored prejudices. Congress has also mandated a reporting system that aims to provide data on the incidence of hate crime. Some police departments have formed bias crime units. The upshot is the emergence of a new crime category and a new way to think about crime. The definition of hate crime, however, is fraught with problems, the federal data gathering effort has been completely unsuccessful, and enforcement of the hate crime laws has been minimal. Creation of a hate crime category fills political and symbolic functions but is unlikely to provide a useful indication of the state of various prejudices or to reduce crime generated by prejudice. Indeed, deconstructing criminal law according to the dictates of "identity politics" might exacerbate social divisions and conflict.
Rural communities in Australia are confronting a period of unprecedented change. They face declining commodity prices, the withdrawal of both public and private sector services, such as banks and hospitals, and the closure of small businesses. Their populations are in decline, with young people leaving for the larger regional centres. Many also face a declining resource base as soils become saline and water resources are sold to areas with higher unit returns. This paper presents a framework for sustainable community development based on emerging ideas of performance auditing and the development of progress indicators. The triple bottom line community audit approach is recast for the community level, measuring performance on improved community wellbeing, reduced environmental impact and increased economic vitality. Rural communities need to redefine their future. A sustainability focus offers a way forward. Las comunidades rurales en Australia estan afrontando un periodo de cambio sin precedente. Enfrentan disminución en los precios de los productos, retiro de servicios de ambos sectores, publico y privado, como bancos y hospitales y el cierre de pequeños negocios. Su población está disminuyendo, la gente joven emigra hacia centros regionales mas grandes. Muchos tambien enfrentan un deterioro en los recursos base ya que los suelos se tornan salinos, y los recursos de agua son vendidos a áreas con retorno de unidad mas alto. Este documento presenta una estructura para el desarrollo comunitario sostenible basado en el surgimiento de ideas de la revisión del desempeño y del desarrollo de indicadores de progreso. El enfoque de auditoria del triple resultado final esta rehecho para el nivel de la comunidad, midiendo el desempeño en el bienestar de la comunidad mejorada, el impacto ambiental reducido, y la vitalidad económica incrementada. Las comunidades rurales necesitan redefinir su futuro. Un enfoque sostenible ofrece una vía hacia adelante.
Purpose
This article seeks to examine the use of radio frequency identification (RFID) technology in commercial applications and to discuss whether regulation is needed to balance commercial economic interests versus consumer privacy and libertarian concerns.
Design/methodology/approach
This paper covers discussions and comparative studies of others' work and thinking.
Findings
RFID technology provides enormous economic benefits for both business and consumers, while simultaneously potentially constituting one of the most invasive surveillance technologies threatening consumer privacy.
Practical implications
The use of RFID technology has profound consumer privacy, civil liberty and security implications.
Originality/value
RFID technology is at an embryonic stage. Like many new technologies, it poses both potential benefit and harm to society. The article recommends that legislation is needed to tip the balance enough to provide adequate privacy protection without unduly harming economic efficiency.
The privacy issues and the technical challenges faced by the RFID tags in becoming a fundamental technology are discussed. Two notable privacy issues include leaking information pertaining to personal property, and tracking the consumer's spending history and patterns and physical whereabouts. Both technological and social countermeasures must be implemented in a mutually beneficial manner, helping retailers control their inventory and ensuring consumers about their data. Comprehensive countermeasures must combine a variety of viewpoints-legal, social, and technological-to address any potential security threats to the personal data of the consumers worldwide.
To what extent will an industry in which mergers are feasible tend toward monopoly? We analyze this question using a dynamic dominant-firm model with rational agents, endogenous mergers, and constant returns to scale production. We find that long-run industry concentration depends upon the initial concentration. A monopolistic industry will remain monopolized and a perfectly competitive industry will remain perfectly competitive. For intermediate concentration levels, the dominant firm may acquire or sell capital, depending on its ability to commit to future behavior. Industry evolution also depends on the elasticities of demand and supply and the discount factor.
Purpose
To clarify the relationship between corporate social responsibility (CSR) and profits.
Design/methodology/approach
Explicates CSR against the background of a larger thesis (Coase) about the role of firms in a market economy.
Findings
There are three different senses of CSR: negative – what not to do (illegal); positive – innovative products and services; and supplementary. There is a clear hierarchy or prioritization here: negative > positive > supplementary.
Practical implications
There are four areas in which supplementary obligations contribute directly to the bottom line: the environment, marketing, recruitment, and international.
Originality/value
This paper overcomes false dualisms between CSR and profits, avoids hidden political agendas, and offers persuasive arguments for firms to engage in relevant CSR activity.
This paper surveys recent studies of internet auctions. Four main areas of research are summarized. First, we survey several studies that document and attempt to explain the frequently observed sniping, or last-second bidding behavior, in these auctions. Second, we summarize several methods proposed to quantify the distortions caused by asymmetric information in these markets, most notably due to the winner's curse. Third, we explore research about the role of reputation mechanisms installed to help combat these distortions. Finally, we discuss what internet auctions have to teach us about auction design.
Cheap, tiny, plentiful radio-frequency identification tags can make it possible to tag almost everything, spurring a revolution in how physical objects interact with information services. It uses radio waves to read an object's markings in the form of a unique identifying number stored on an attached or embedded silicon chip. Unlike active tags, passive tags provide only an identifying number, when the tags themselves are 'illuminated' by the radio waves emitted by a specialized reader. The sampling of RFID technologies and their applications will help show its possibility in consumer uses of passive RFID tags.
A US-based company, VeriChip Corporation, has developed a human version of the implantable RFID tag that is similar in size to a grain of rice, containing a microchip and a copper coil that works as an antenna. The chip is injected with a needle just under the skin in the tricep area of the right arm. The idea to do this is to help the doctors determine the identity of the patient much faster than they would under normal circumstances by simply scanning their right upper arm while taking their vital signs. It will also restrict doctors from taking unnecessary tests, as the implanted chip will provide fast access to the patient's medical record, including present condition, previous operations, ongoing medication and even family contact details. The data residing in the chip would be a 16 digit number, which after being decoded by a VeriChip handheld reader, is used by a doctor to access a web-based database hosted by the company, called Verimed.
Since the early 1980s, economic experts have recommended "downsizing" as the best way for U.S. corporations to remain competitive. Reducing unnecessary staff would lower costs, increase profits, and transform these companies into lean, mean production machines. As many American businesses pursued this strategy often in the wake of mergers and acquisitions that left them with an unwieldy layer of middle management and raised their bottom line, it seemed the experts were right. Yet as David M. Gordon shows in this iconoclastic book, most of them have really only gone halfway. They are "mean, " but far from lean. Tracing the overall employment patterns of the past decade, Gordon shows that most American companies actually employ more managers and supervisors than ever before. These ever-increasing functionaries control company payrolls and pay themselves generous salaries at the expense of average workers. For despite a steadily growing economy the real wages of the American worker have been falling for the past 20 years. To explain this decline and the much-debated "wage gap" that resulted, pundits and professors invoke various causes ranging from the flow of production jobs overseas to the average worker's lack of the technological skills needed in today's "knowledge economy." But Gordon exposes the single greatest factor in this decline, a corporate strategy that penalizes line workers and hinders businesses from competing effectively in world markets: the simultaneous overstaffing of management hierarchies and the inadequate compensation of workers. Instead of sharing profits with their employees, thus encouraging them to work harder, management has moreoften opted to prod workers by instilling fear of layoffs. Gordon unerringly plots the shortsighted and disastrous course of U.S. corporations, and documents the tremendous social and personal costs to their employees. Yet in addition to telling the harsh truth about downsizing, he suggests policies to ensure fairer business practices. Wages can increase indeed, they must as the economy begins to perform more efficiency. U.S. corporations have become fat and mean. They need to become lean and decent not just for the sake of their workers, but for the sake of their competitive advantage. This provocative and original book shows how they can.
Governments pay far more to participate in the development of major league sports facilities than is commonly understood due to the routine omission of public subsidies for land and infrastructure, and the ongoing costs of operations, capital improvements, municipal services, and foregone property taxes. Adjusting for these omissions increases the average public subsidy by 177 million, representing a 40% increase over the industry-reported average of 5 billion.
The relationship of coping resources and cognitive appraisals to emotions produced by the end of a romantic relationships at 2 separate times was investigated. Participants were 231 graduate students who completed inventories measuring their coping resources, cognitive appraisals, and emotional reactions. The results of the structural model suggested that preventive coping resources affected the appraised desirability of the event as well as initial emotional reactions and that combative coping resources affected subsequent emotional response. The implications of these findings for stress models of emotions and clinical interventions are discussed.
In recent years, many U.S. direct marketers have expanded their efforts into Asia. A few studies of consumers' attitudes towards direct marketing were conducted outside of the United States in order to ascertain their attitudes towards direct marketing, privacy, environmental concerns, and trust issues. International direct marketers must take care to respect these issues before entering new countries, such as Taiwan and other emerging markets. The following article reports the results of a survey done in both the U.S. and Taiwan.
A novel plan to develop a 54 million to buy one of the laptops for every student in middle school and high school in his state. Although no contracts with governments have been signed, Mr. Negroponte says current plans call for producing five to ten million units beginning in late 2006 or early 2007, with tens of millions more a year later. Five companies --Google Inc., Advanced Micro Devices Inc., Red Hat Inc., News Corp. and Brightstar Corp. --have each provided $2 million to fund a nonprofit organization called One Laptop Per Child that was set up to oversee the project. Mr. Negroponte says five companies are bidding to make the laptop, although he declined to name them.
No abstract available.
In this article we examine the fundamental premises of our cognitive-relational theory of emotion and coping and assess our progress in examining them through 10 years of programmatic empirical research. Our discussion involves the metatheoretical topics of transaction and relationship, process, and emotion as a system. The person-environment relationship is mediated by two key processess: cognitive appraisal and coping. We evaluate the findings of our research on these processes, their dynamic interplay, their antecedents, and their short-term and long-term outcomes. In the final section we highlight major substantive and methodological issues that need to be addressed. These include issues surrounding the theory and measurement of appraisal, functional and dysfunctional coping, causal inference, microanalytic vs macroanalytic research strategies, objective vs subjective approaches and confounding, and the problem of method variance.
Mergers in the UK brewing industry have reduced the number of national brewers from six to four. The number of brands, in contrast, has remained relatively constant. We analyze the effects of mergers on brand competition and pricing. Brand-level demand equations are estimated from a panel of draft beers. To model brand-substitution possibilities, we estimate the matrix of cross-price elasticities semiparametrically. Our structural model is used to assess the strength of brand competition along various dimensions and to evaluate the mergers. In particular, we compute equilibria of pricing games with different numbers of players.
A PC-based transparent gateway for interconnecting Bluetooth Piconets and IP local area networks (LAN) was designed in our research. The essential function of this designed Bluetooth-IP gateway is to achieve a seamless integration among home appliances, networking elements and multi-systems using the address resolution protocol (ARP) and connection management scheme. The key techniques developed, as well as the performance analysis in terms of queue length, loss rate, throughput and transmission delay are explored in this research. The results allow us to determine the value of the optimal command and infer the maximum queue length requirements such that the service quality is kept at an acceptance level.
The benefits offered by RFID technology to the consumers are discussed. Consumers need to calculate their own delivered value and risk exposure before they willingly use the system. RFID developers are trying to limit the perceived risk by educating consumers as to the positive benefits of RFID and providing privacy to explain what data is being collected and how it is being used. They have developed technologies such as kill switches that disable tag functionality and destructible tags removable by consumers. RFID solution providers must increase their focus on increasing the value of the products and services they provide and the overall customer experience they deliver.
Translating content from one media platform to another, a process here dubbed content streaming, is the leitmotif of contemporary globalized media. Yet widely divergent interpretations of the phenomenon have emerged. Academic political economy interprets content streaming as powerfully inimical to cultural diversity, media competition and freedom of speech. Mainstream business reporting, working from an opposing media economics schema, pillories ‘synergy’-based content strategies as oversold in theory and unworkable in practice. Challenging this established trend for the disciplines to develop in parallel, the article harnesses mainstream critique of content streaming to political economy’s traditionally circumspect view of corporate media. Examining first the commercial rationales for pursuing content streaming, before turning to the financial and managerial constraints on realizing these goals, the article positions content streaming as less all-pervasive than political economists have feared, but more commercially entrenched than the financial press currently allows.
Background and Objective: A growing body of literature on the economics of depression concludes that this illness has an enormous impact on workplace performance. In addition to work cutback and sporadic absenteeism, the symptoms of depression also result in elevated rates of chronic absenteeism that manifest in the form of workplace disability.
Design and Setting: Using a unique data source that contains the medical, pharmaceutical and disability claims of a national US manufacturer, we measured the extent of disability before and after initial treatment for major depression.
Participants: 1260 employees with at least one medical or disability claim for major depression based on International Classification of Diseases, 9th edition (ICD-9) codes in 1996 or 1997.
Results: We estimate that the decreased disability payments in the first 30 days following initial treatment for major depression results in employer savings totalling $US93 per patient, which can exceed the cost of treatment for a similar period of time. These disability savings do not incorporate several additional sources of likely cost savings to the employer, and thereby underestimate the workplace offsets associated with depression treatment. Additional benefits to the employer from the treatment of depression include reduced work cutback and decreased sporadic absenteeism of treated employees, reductions in some types of medical and prescription drug expenditures following appropriate depression treatment, and productivity improvements by employees serving as caregivers for treated spouses and children. Furthermore, to the extent that new pharmaceutical products offer advantages in the workplace over existing treatments for depression, the first month of such treatment will be associated with workplace savings that exceed per-patient estimates reported here for current treatment modalities.
Conclusions: The findings from this analysis imply that the workplace benefits from improved functioning are substantial and may in fact exceed the usual costs of depression treatment. Thus, purely on economic rather than clinical or quality-of-life grounds, this argues in favour of more aggressive outreach to employees with symptomatic disease that results in initiation of treatment before their symptoms are allowed to persist and result in a disability claim. In this light, detection and treatment of depression in the workplace can be seen as important components of community-based disease management programmes.
By stimulating commerce and development at the bottom of the economic pyramid, multi-nationals could radically improve the lives of billions of people and help create a more stable, less dangerous world. Achieving this goal does not require MNCs to spearhead global social-development initiatives for charitable purposes. They need only act in their own self-interest. How? The authors lay out the business case for entering the world's poorest markets. Fully 65% of the world's population earns less than $2,000 per year--that's 4 billion people. But despite the vastness of this market, it remains largely untapped. The reluctance to invest is easy to understand, but it is, by and large, based on outdated assumptions of the developing world. While individual incomes may be low, the aggregate buying power of poor communities is actually quite large, representing a substantial market in many countries for what some might consider luxury goods like satellite television and phone services. Prices, and margins, are often much higher in poor neighborhoods than in their middle-class counterparts. And new technologies are already steadily reducing the effects of corruption, illiteracy, inadequate infrastructure, and other such barriers. Because these markets are in the earliest stages of economic development, revenue growth for multi-nationals entering them can be extremely rapid. MNCs can also lower costs, not only through low-cost labor but by transferring operating efficiencies and innovations developed to serve their existing operations. Certainly, succeeding in such markets requires MNCs to think creatively. The biggest change, though, has to come from executives: Unless business leaders confront their own preconceptions--particularly about the value of high-volume, low-margin businesses--companies are unlikely to master the challenges or reap the rewards of these developing markets.
Cost-of-illness research has shown that depression is associated with an enormous economic burden, in the order of tens of billions of dollars each year in the US alone. The largest component of this economic burden derives from lost work productivity due to depression. A large body of literature indicates that the causes of the economic burden of depression, including impaired work performance, would respond both to improvement in depressive symptomatology and to standard treatments for depression. Despite this, the economic burden of depression persists, partly because of the widespread underuse and poor quality use of otherwise efficacious and tolerable depression treatments. Recent effectiveness studies conducted in primary care have shown that a variety of models, which enhance care of depression through aggressive outreach and improved quality of treatments, are highly effective in clinical terms and in some cases on work performance outcomes as well. Economic analyses accompanying these effectiveness studies have also shown that these quality improvement interventions are cost efficient. Unfortunately, widespread uptake of these enhanced treatment programmes for depression has not occurred in primary care due to barriers at the level of primary care physicians, healthcare systems, and purchasers of healthcare. Further research is needed to overcome these barriers to providing high-quality care for depression and to ultimately reduce the enormous adverse economic impact of depression disorders.
There is both a popular and academic literature suggesting that owners of sports teams do not profit maximize. The alternative formulation entails either win or utility maximization, usually subject to a breakeven constraint. Another line of economic analysis holds that team owners do fundamentally profit maximize or that profit maximization provides a useful benchmark against which to assess actual performance. There has been some empirical work attempting to decipher the true objective function of team owners. These results are inconclusive. Objective functions, however, remain important because they affect both owner behaviour and league performance. In practice, owners' objectives vary by team, league, and country and are strongly affected by how the team relates to an owner's other assets. The next task for modelling the behaviour and performance of sports leagues is to take fuller account of the diversity of ownership objectives within a given league. Copyright 2003, Oxford University Press.
There is no widely accepted definition of price discrimination with differentiated products. Either absolute price-cost differences or percentage price-cost markups are used as benchmarks for comparison. I show that the two criteria are qualitatively different: One may indicate price discrimination when the other does not. Moreover, anything other than marginal cost pricing will be identified as price discrimination by at least one of the two. I propose choosing a criterion based on the cost of arbitrage in the market under examination. Because this is often difficult to determine, it is advisable to always report results with both measures. (JEL L1, D4) Copyright 2004, Oxford University Press.
Diversification is certainly the simplest and perhaps the oldest approach to managing the trade-off between portfolio risk and return. Because diversification tends to reduce risk without a proportional reduction in returns, an overwhelming majority of commercial banks have diversified portfolios. Larger banks usually are organized into multiple specialized lines of business; smaller banks generally hold a higher proportion of marketable securities whose returns are not tied to a particular geographic market. A much smaller number of banks have chosen to ignore the benefits of diversification and focus on a particular asset such as credit cards, residential or commercial real estate, corporate trust services, or small business lending.> This article investigates specialization in banking and its effects on risk and return. The author compares a group of banks specializing in small business micro-loans (loans under $100,000) with a matched set of diversified peers. The number of specialized banks is still small, but they are expected to become more prevalent, and the number of specialized nonbanks is large, including commercial and consumer finance companies, mortgage banks, leasing companies, many thrift institutions, and some investment banks and insurance companies. The author discusses the issues that specialization creates for regulators, especially in the field of capital requirements, and the need to revise the current approach to regulatory risk-based capital to better distinguish between specialized and diversified banks.
This paper explores possible ways in which growth in Internet retailing (e-retailing) may affect the spatial distribution of economic activities. After a brief overview of e-retailing, a categorization of possible spatial impacts is introduced. These include impacts on the retail industry, such as substitution of e-retail for brick-and-mortar retail, impacts on transportation, such as substitution of freight transportation for personal transportation in goods delivery, and pervasive impacts that affect the whole economy. The latter category includes uniform delivered pricing, spatial leveling of accessibility, and marketing strategies that target individuals rather than regions. The question of whether e-retailing and brick-and-mortar retailing are truly substitutes is taken up in the next section, along with potential implications of multi-channel retailing. The final section of the paper defines some critical research directions. Copyright 2003 Gatton College of Business and Economics, University of Kentucky..
Studies of the performance effects of public vs private ownership have found mixed evidence. This paper draws on theory suggesting that public enterprise may have an advantage in producing goods and services whose quality attributes are difficult to specify a priori. Using a comprehensive data set of U.S. electric utilities to estimate cost functions, we find that while privately owned systems achieve lower costs in generation, public systems generally have an advantage in the end-user-oriented distribution function with its more non-contractible quality attributes. Other evidence on quality differences by ownership type and by enterprise size supports this distinction. JEL classification: L33, L94
L’avantage comparatif de la propriété publique : résultats pour la production d’électricité auxEtats-Unis. Les études de la performance des entreprises publiques et privées ont produit des résultats qui ne sont pas déterminants. Ce mémoire se fonde sur la théorie qui suggère que l’entreprise publique peut avoir un avantage dans la production de biens et services dont la qualité est difficile à définir a priori. A partir de données extensives sur les producteurs d’électricité aux Etats-Unis, on définit des fonctions de coûts. Il appert que, quand ils sont entre des mains privées, les systèmes de production réussissent à obtenir des coûts de génération plus bas; d’autre part, les systèmes publics ont un avantage pour ce qui est de la fonction de distribution orientée vers les besoins de l’usager à cause des attributs de qualité plus difficiles à contractualiser. D’autres résultats quant aux différences de qualité par types de propriété et par tailles d’entreprises viennent confirmer l’importance de cette distinction.
The radio network performance of a large number of Bluetooth
piconets is investigated in this contribution. Asynchronous packet data
connections are considered exclusively. Continuously transmitting
piconets as well as partially loaded piconets with constant average user
bit rate (according to a WWW traffic model) are treated. All piconets
are located in a single room. It turns out that Bluetooth provides a
large capacity for data connections. Under normal load conditions, the
link throughput is degraded only marginally by interference. Several
hundred simultaneous WWW sessions are feasible in the considered
scenario. A maximum aggregate system throughput of about 18 Mbit/s can
be obtained. In general, long and uncoded Bluetooth packet types should
be preferred for data transmission, since they provide for the largest
throughput in most interference conditions
U.S. wage gap between CEOs and laborers widens
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NGOS-A tainted history
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Aid is not the answer
- C Prahalad
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$100 laptop gets working prototype
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You need not be paranoid to fear RFID
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An executive guide to workplace depression [Electronic version
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Why can't discrimination be discrimination? Johnson v. K Mart Corp. and the meaning of "discrimination" under the Americans with Disabilities Act
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Bluetooth networks architecture and protocols
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http://cwc.ucsd.edu/~cruz/ece.158/btoothslides.pdf