Corporate environmental strategies as tools to influence regulation

Corporate environmental initiatives have been attributed to a variety of different motives, including cost‐cutting, marketing to ‘green’ consumers willing to pay extra for environmentally friendly products, and shaping future government regulation (including the possible preemption of regulation). Understanding what really motivates corporate environmentalism is important for policymakers, since the effectiveness of government environmental policies depends in large part on how corporations will respond to them. We focus on the welfare implications of two alternative strategies firms may use to shape government regulations: (i) attempting to preempt future legislation altogether or (ii) failing this, to soften the impact of new laws by inducing regulators to set relatively weak standards. We show that while the first sounds threatening to social welfare, it produces political cost savings that outweigh any weakening of environmental performance. The second motivation, however, raises corporate profits, but not by enough to outweigh the resulting loss of environmental quality. Copyright © 1999 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment.     

Supporting others and the evolution of influence

In this paper we study environments in which agents can transfer influence to others by supporting them. When planning whom to support, they should take into account the future effect of this, since the receiving agent might use this influence to support others in the future. We show that in the presence of a finite horizon there is an essentially unique optimal support behavior which can be characterized in terms of associated marginal value functions. The analysis of these marginal value functions allows us to derive qualitative properties of optimal support strategies under different specific environments and to explicitly compute the optimal support behavior in some numerical examples. We also investigate the case of an infinite horizon. Examples show that multiple equilibria may appear in this setting, some of which sustaining a degree of cooperation that would not be possible under a finite horizon.     

Planning horizons for master production scheduling

Production and operations planning in organizations quite often is a multi-level sequential process, involving aggregate planning, master production scheduling, and detailed operations planning and scheduling. To obtain good planning results, it is desirable to have a proper planning horizon for each level of planning. There have been a considerable number of studies dealing with planning horizons for aggregate planning or production smoothing problems. There are also many planning horizon studies for single-item lot sizing problems. No study has addressed the issues associated with the planning horizons for master production schedules (which is a multi-item lot sizing problem in nature), particularly with respect to the relationship to the aggregate plan.This study addresses the issue of planning horizons for companies employing a make-to-stock competitive strategy facing a seasonal demand for their products. We formulate the aggregate planning problem and the master scheduling problem as two separate mathematical programs to approximate the two-stage process that typically takes place in practice. Rolling planning horizons are used to approximate the periodic updates of the plans commonly done in practice. The models also incorporate resource requirements planning concepts to estimate loads on the critical work centers.The planning process is simulated as a single pass procedure where the results of aggregate planning are passed to the master production scheduling model once per month and the results of the master scheduling model (i.e., the portion of the master schedule actually implemented) are passed back to the aggregate planning model for the next planning session.The experimental results show that when the planner faces extreme cost structures such as high smoothing costs/high setup costs or low smoothing costs/low setup costs, the planning horizon effects are reduced to a minimum. Master schedule planning horizons need not be as long as aggregate planning horizons. Alternatively, non-extreme cost structures such as high smoothing costs/low setup costs and low smoothing costs/high setup costs should be handled with equal planning horizons for both aggregate planning and master scheduling.It is also found that the firm's cost structure has an impact on the appropriate planning horizon for both aggregate planning and master scheduling. Some cost conditions allow for smaller master schedule horizons. The best horizon choice seems to be equal planning horizons for both aggregate planning and master scheduling, even though the cost savings is slight in some cases.Finally, the proper length of the planning horizon for master scheduling is affected by the planning horizon of the aggregate plans.     

Savings, Personal Wealth and Risk

In this Briefing Paper we examine the underlying determinants of personal savings behaviour to substantiate our view that the recent fall in savings rates does not imply that it must in future bounce back to some more normal level. On the contrary there are good reasons for believing that savings are more likely to go on falling than to rise.
We argue that consumer behaviour should be related explicitly to personal wealth as well as to disposable income. Personal wealth has risen substantially since 1982: the fall in inflation and long-term interest rates has pushed up gilts' prices; the recovery of profits has sparked off a stock market boom; and the value of the housing stock, which is by far the most important asset held by the personal sector, has started to rise again in real terms. This rise in asset values means that, despite a rise in consumption financed by borrowing, the personal sector balance sheet still in a healthy state, particularly when account is taken of the personal savings now held indirectly via pension funds. These have risen rapidly recently, reducing the need for other long-term savings.
The rise in total wealth has increased savers' tolerance of a fall in net liquid assets (bank and building society deposits etc less borrowing). The willingness to hold a smaller (precautionary) stock of net liquid assets may also reflect a perceived reduction in risk. Financial markets have been much more stable over the period since 1975 than over the preceding eight years, and may now be signalling that the period of adjustment to the shocks and disturbances of the 1970s is drawing to an end. The fall in savings is a worldwide phenomenon. As in the UK it is linked to the fall in inflation and may also be connected with the recovery of the world's major stock markets.     

Resale price maintenance in a model of consumer search

A retail search model of Salop and Stiglitz (1977) is adapted to analyze manufacturer incentives for resale price maintenance. For some retailer cost functions and distributions of consumer search costs, imposition of a minimum price for retailers causes a price distribution to collapse to an intermediate price. Manufacturers may benefit from price floors when sales to high-search-cost consumers that have obtained lower prices increase sufficiently so as to offset decreased sales to other consumers facing higher prices. In contrast to previous work, no free-riding problem with respect to dealer services is necessary for manufacturers to prefer banning discounting of their products.     

Planning horizon results for the dynamic warehouse location problem

In the last decade, a number of models for the dynamic facility location problem have been proposed. The various models contain differing assumptions regarding the revenues and costs realized in the opening, operation, and closure of a facility as well as considering which of the facility sites are candidates for acquisition or disposal at the beginning of a time period. Since the problem becomes extremely large for practical applications, much of the research has been directed toward developing efficient solution techniques. Most of the models and solutions assume that the facilities will be disposed of at the end of the time horizon since distant future conditions usually can't be forecasted with any reasonable degree of accuracy. The problem with this approach is that the “optimal” solution is optimal for only one hypothesized post horizon facility configuration and may become nonoptimal under a different configuration. Post-optimality analysis is needed to assure management that the “optimal” decision to open or close a facility at a given point in time won't prove to be “nonoptimal” when the planning horizon is extended or when design parameters in subsequent time periods change. If management has some guarantee that the decision to open or close a facility in a given time period won't change, it can safely direct attention to the accuracy of the design parameters within that time period.This paper proposes a mixed integer linear programming model to determine which of a finite set of warehouse sites will be operating in each time period of a finite planning horizon. The model is general in the sense that it can reflect a number of acquisition alternatives—purchase, lease or rent. The principal assumptions of the model are: a) Warehouses are assumed to have infinite capacity in meeting customer demand, b) In each time period, any non-operating warehouse is a candidate for becoming operational, and likewise any operating warehouse is a candidate for disposal, c) During a given time period, the fixed costs of becoming operational at a site are greater than the disposal value at that site to reflect the nonrecoverable costs involved in operating a warehouse. These costs are separate from the acquisition and liquidation values of the site. d) During a time period the operation of a warehouse incurs overhead and maintenance costs as well as a depreciation in the disposal value.To solve the model, it is first simplified and a partial optimal solution is obtained by the iterative examination by both lower and upper bounds on the savings realized if a site is opened in a given time period. An attempt is made to fix each warehouse open or closed in each time period. The bounds are based on the delta and omega tests proposed by Efroymson and Ray (1966) and Khumawala (1972) with adjustment for changes in the value of the warehouse between the beginning and end of a time period. A complete optimal solution is obtained by solving the reduced model with Benders' decomposition procedure. The optimal solution is then tested to determine which time periods contain “tentative” decisions that may be affected by post horizon data by analyzing the relationship between the lower (or upper) bounds used in the model simplification time period. If the warehouse decisions made in a time period satisfy these relationships and are thus unaffected by data changes in subsequent time periods, then the decisions made in earlier time periods will also be unaffected by future changes.     

Bargains Followed by Bargains: When Switching Costs Make Markets More Competitive

In markets where consumers have switching costs and firms cannot price‐discriminate, firms have two conflicting strategies. A firm can either offer a low price to attract new consumers and build future market share or a firm can offer a high price to exploit the partial lock‐in of their existing consumers. This paper develops a theory of competition when overlapping generations of consumers have switching costs and firms produce differentiated products. Competition takes place over an infinite horizon with any number of firms. This paper shows that the relationship between the level of switching costs, firms' discount rate, and the number of firms determines whether firms offer low or high prices. Similar to previous duopoly studies, switching costs are likely to facilitate lower (higher) equilibrium prices when switching costs are small (large) or when a firm's discount rate is large (small). Unlike previous studies, this paper demonstrates that the number of firms also determines whether switching costs are pro‐ or anticompetitive, and with a sufficiently large (small) number of firms switching costs are pro‐ (anti‐) competitive.     

应用缓冲储备模型实证检验我国居民的储蓄行为

通过应用缓冲储备模型，实证检验我国居民的教育、医疗、住房等开支的不确定性与储蓄之间的相关性，我们发现，我国居民的预防性储蓄行为不仅显著，而且以目标储蓄率为被解释变量的模型，能够比以储蓄水平为被解释变量的模型更好地解释我国居民的“预防性储蓄”动机。建立完善的医疗保障体系、改革教育体制是降低我国巨额储蓄的必经之路。     

Consumers alone shouldn't trigger the next recession

• ? If consumers in advanced economies were to hike their savings and rein in their discretionary spending in response to fears about the economy, we project global GDP growth in 2020 would slow to a subdued 2.1% (below our 2.5% baseline forecast), but the world economy would avoid a recession.
• ? The risks of rising precautionary savings aren't uniform across the advanced economies. For instance, the UK, Australia, Canada and Japan look particularly vulnerable to slowing retail sales, which could trigger a stronger downturn in those countries.
• ? Economies with the highest rates of consumer debt are also likely to be more at risk to weaker discretionary spending. In this respect, Australia, the Netherlands and Canada stand out the most.

     

Dynamic Competition with Experience Goods

This paper considers dynamic competition in the case in which consumers are only able to learn about their preferences for a certain product after experiencing it. After trying a product a consumer has more information about that product than about untried products. When competing in such a market firms with more sales in the past have an informational advantage because more consumers know their products. If products provide a better-than-expected fit with greater likelihood, taking advantage of that informational advantage may lead to an informational disadvantage in the future. This paper considers this competition with an infinite horizon model in a duopoly market with overlapping generations of consumers. Two effects are identified: On one hand marginal forward-looking consumers realize that by purchasing a product in the current period will be charged a higher expected price in the future. This effect results in reduced price sensitivity and higher equilibrium prices. On the other hand, forward-looking firms realize that they gain in the future from having a greater market share in the current period and compete more aggressively in prices. For similar discount factors for consumers and firms, the former effect is more important, and prices are higher the greater the informational advantages. The paper also characterizes oscillating market share dynamics, and comparative statics of the equilibrium with respect to consumer and firm patience, and the importance of the experience in the ex post valuation of the product.     

Precautionary behavior and consumer information: A Markov process approach

This paper explores the role of consumer confidence in the equilibrium of a dynamic macroeconomic growth model with rational expectations. Consumers face an uncertain future income stream due to a Markov stochastic process that affects production. Changes in the properties of this process change consumer information sets and optimal policies in the rational expectations format. Increases in “persistence” in the shock process are considered; this is identified with the consumer's subjective assessment of future economic conditions. Two cases are considered: where either good or bad states of the process are more likely to persist into the future, and where bad states persist unconditionally at the expense of good. Consistent with earlier treatments of savings under uncertainty (Barsky, Mankiw and Zeldes 1986, and Skinner 1988), the consumer's response to increased income uncertainty is to exhibit precautionary saving behavior. The infinite-horizon growth model format used offers significant improvement over other finite-horizon life cycle models. Specifically, the model is a full general equilibrium model and the solutions are rational expectations solutions. The technique also is easily adapted to other recursive decision problems under uncertainty.     

DETERMINANTS OF STRATEGIC PLANNING SYSTEMS IN LARGE ORGANIZATIONS: A CONTINGENCY APPROACH*

This study investigates the relationship among four design parameters of planning systems and five different firm and environmental characteristics. The impact of this multivariate relationship on organizational effectiveness is then examined using a sample of 115 large manufacturing firms. The findings show general support for the proposition that, in order to be effective, a strategic planning system should be designed in such a way that the specific situational setting of the firm is reflected in the design. The analysis also indicates that firms adopt a more flexible planning system - captured here by two key variables, planning horizon, and frequency of plan reviews - as the level of environmental complexity increases. Implications for future research are discussed.     

Explicit investment rules with time-to-build and uncertainty

We establish explicit socially optimal rules for an irreversible investment decision with time-to-build and uncertainty. Assuming a price sensitive demand function with a random intercept, we provide comparative statics and economic interpretations for three models of demand (arithmetic Brownian, geometric Brownian, and the Cox–Ingersoll–Ross). Committed capacity, that is, the installed capacity plus the investment in the pipeline, must never drop below the best predictor of future demand, minus two biases. The discounting bias takes into account the fact that investment is paid upfront for future use; the precautionary bias multiplies a type of risk aversion index by the local volatility. Relying on the analytical forms, we discuss in detail the economic effects. For example, the impact of volatility on the optimal investment is negligible in some cases. It vanishes in the CIR model for long delays, and in the GBM model for high discount rates.     

Residential spatial growth with perfect foresight and multiple income groups

This paper presents explicit solutions for expanding monocentric cities with two or more income groups. Housing is durable but deteriorates over time, and redevelopment cannot take place. Landlords have perfect foresight. The utility function and housing technology are Cobb-Douglas. Population, per capita income, and transportation costs per mile change at constant percentage rates. The model is solved analytically, using an infinite time horizon. As development proceeds outward, a constant fraction of land is developed with high-income housing, and the remaining land is reserved for future low-income development. At any time, housing is constructed at one distance for high-income consumers, and at a lesser distance for low-income consumers. High-income housing is first occupied by high-income consumers, then filters to low-income consumers, and is ultimately abandoned. Low-income housing is first occupied by low-income households, and ultimately abandoned.     

THE DEMAND FOR BEER,WINE AND SPIRITS: A SURVEY OF THE LITERATURE

Abstract The demand for alcohol literature is vast and much conflicting information about the nature of the demand for alcoholic beverages has been published. This paper presents a survey of the literature, and then uses the technique of meta‐regression analysis to establish insights into the nature of the demand for beer, wine and spirits. Unlike previous meta‐studies of the demand for alcoholic beverages this study adjusts for the precision of each elasticity estimate. The analysis presented suggests reported elasticity estimates will be influenced by such factors as estimation technique, data frequency and time period under consideration. With respect to time, the findings suggest that the demand for alcoholic beverages has become less inelastic since the mid‐1950s and that the income elasticity has been falling since the mid‐1960s. The analysis also found support for the idea that alcohol as a commodity group is a necessity, and that consumers respond to price discounting with inventory behaviour rather than true substitution behaviour. Little support is found for the idea that the demand for alcoholic beverages varies fundamentally across most countries, although wine may be an exception.     

Briefing Paper: Public expenditure control in the 1980s

The past few months have seen well-leaked ministerial bids for additional resources as the government prepares to consider allocations for the 1987-8 financial year. There has also been an increasing number of calls from within the Conservative party for more public expenditure as a response to poor performance in the polls. The first part of this Briefing Paper provides a new dimension to the discussion of future spending plans by analysing the record of controlling public expenditure in the past. It outlines the reasons for uncertainty and the various ways by which the government has sought to keep expenditure under control and the limitations of the available information. On the basis of this analysis we look at the future and conclude that the government is unlikely to be able to keep expenditure within the plan for the coming year, or indeed for the rest of the decade. There has been a regular pattern of overspending in the past and this cannot be entirely explained by such factors as the miners' strike and the Falklands. Another conclusion is that the government has so far chosen to be seen to be keeping plans for expenditure growth down rather than providing realistic plans which allow for overspending, and is likely to continue to do so in the future. At a disaggregated level, analysis of the pressures on three major spending departments – Defence, the DHSS and Education and Science – suggests that these are unlikely to be completely offset by efficiency savings. Indeed it may be more difficult to make savings in the future because of past success in eliminating inefficiencies and slack in the system. The freedom of manoeuvre available to the government, including the use of the reserve, adjusting proceeds from the privatisation programme and the possibility of adjusting the figures themselves, is less than in the recent past. And the greatest potential scope for manoeuvre – policy changes to cut spending in areas that have a significant impact on the totals – is effectively denied a government wishing to present a caring image in the run-up to a general election.     

Price promotions as a threat to brands

Manufacturers frequently resist heavy discounting of their products by retailers. Since low prices should increase demand and manufacturers could simply refuse to fund deep price promotions, such resistance is puzzling at first sight. We develop a model in which price promotions cause shoppers to evaluate the relative importance of quality and price against a market-wide reference point. With deep discounting, consumers perceive quality differences as less pronounced, eroding brand value and the bargaining position of brand manufacturers. This reduces their profits and may even lead to a delisting of their products. By linking price promotions to increased one-stop shopping and more intense retail competition, our theory also offers an explanation for the rise of store brands.     

Health insurance and savings over the life cycle—a semiparametric smooth coefficient estimation

Individuals save for future uncertain health care expenses. This is less efficient than pooling health risk through insurance. The provision of comprehensive health insurance may raise welfare by providing the missing market to smooth out consumption through the life cycle. We employ a semiparametric smooth coefficient model to examine the effects of the introduction of the National Health Insurance in Taiwan in 1995 on savings and consumption over the life cycle. The idea is to estimate the coefficients of health insurance which vary with age. Our results suggest that younger households are more sensitive to the risk reductions, and that they demonstrate a greater response in the reduction of their precautionary saving. Copyright © 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Write-offs and Profitability in Private Firms: Disentangling the Impact of Tax-Minimisation Incentives

Private firms are likely to use the financial reporting process more for other objectives, such as tax savings, than for communicating performance. However, observing firms choosing accounting policies for tax-minimisation purposes is not straightforward due to (i) tax and non-tax costs of reporting lower income (ii) accounting policies that result in lower reported income and no tax savings but generate non-tax benefits (iii) preparers' multiple incentives and (iv) econometric issues. We observe a large sample of 20,505 private firms writing off assets in two separate regimes, one that generates tax savings and one that does not. Firms significantly decrease, but continue to use, write-offs after the adverse change in tax treatment of write-offs. The exogenous tax change should not affect other reporting incentives. This allows us to disentangle the tax-minimisation incentive from other (un-observable) incentives, including debt contracting, dividends and employee relations that contribute to the observed anomalous positive relationship between write-offs and profitability. We show that for private firms (i) obtaining tax savings is important overall (ii) non-tax costs and benefits are probably also important and (iii) earnings informativeness for future cash flows increases after the adverse tax legislation change.     

CAN A NEW NUCLEAR PROGRAMME BE JUSTIFIED?

The moratorium on the building of new nuclear power stations in the UK that has existed since the 1980s may be ended as a result of government concerns about the security of energy provision and the environmental impact of fossil-fuel-based energy supply. This viewpoint argues that the case for nuclear power on both counts is unproven. Moreover, renewed government support for a civil nuclear power programme may be a case of government attempting to pick winners, when the evidence suggests that such decisions are best taken by energy suppliers, producers and consumers.