MIDDLEMEN IN SEARCH EQUILIBRIUM*

This article shows how allowing for goods to be divisible at the point of consumption and incorporating productive heterogeneity lead to the emergence of middlemen in an equilibrium search environment. In the baseline model, middlemen are welfare reducing and their number increases as market frictions are reduced. When the model is extended to allow for time taken in production and increasing returns to scale in the market meeting technology, middlemen can be beneficial to society by speeding up the meeting process.     

服务经济的微观分析-基于生产与交易的分工均衡

与目前有关服务经济的研究不同,本文用一个新兴古典的佣金中间商1模型来分析交易服务的经济性质.主要结果表明:在市场分工中,交易服务是一种能够对产品的交易产生正网络效应的特殊商品;由中间商数量所决定的服务网络规模会影响市场一体化程度;制度效率和服务交易效率的改进将提高人均真实收入,当制度效率比服务交易效率的改进程度更大,或当服务业的劳动生产率提高,从生产部门向交易部门的劳动力迁移将增加;而改进的制度效率也将扩大产品和服务的市场容量;因而,经济增长呈现为以服务业发展为导向的增长.本文对于服务业缘何已成为发达国家的主导产业给出了一个微观解释,也为中国通过服务业来推动经济增长提供了一个理论视角.     

THE SPATIAL ORIGIN OF COMMERCE*

Although dispersion raises productivity by relieving crowding, concentration promotes trade. The participation of specialist middlemen, who tend to cluster around the regional center, in the trading process would mitigate such tensions, for it becomes less urgent for others to scramble for central locations then from the increase in the density of economic activities around such locations. A city, populated by a cluster of middlemen, that serves as a platform for intermediate trade among producers in surrounding areas can exist without any increasing returns in production, transportation, and exchange. Indirect trade and pure commerce may, thus, have a spatial origin.     

弱势制造商营销渠道联盟构建——基于外贸型中小企业转型内销渠道建设的思考

外贸企业转型内销市场面临品牌弱势、营销人才缺乏、渠道模式建立困难等问题。处于弱势的外贸企业需选择合适的中间商,充分运用利益让渡提高中间商经济上的满意水平,为渠道伙伴提供优质的服务,与联盟伙伴建立良好的沟通机制实现信息共享,从而构建渠道战略联盟;通过实施区域市场深耕策略,提升在渠道联盟中的话语权,巩固渠道联盟的相互信任,提高联盟绩效,以建立稳定的区域营销网络。     

Ranking Australian Economics Departments by Research Productivity

This study ranks Australian economics departments according to their average research productivity during 1998–2002. The highest ranked departments are those at ANU, JCU, Melbourne, Tasmania and UWA. We also rank departments according to the variability of research productivity among their members, the assumption being that, other things being equal, the less variable is productivity within a department, the better. Research productivity is found to be highly skewed within all departments. However, in general, research productivity is more (less) evenly distributed within those departments that have relatively high (low) average research productivity.     

为什么交易服务中间商存在? 内生分工的一般均衡分析

本文考虑个人既是生产者(包括中间商)又是消费者的情况,同时基于分工获益与交易费用之间的冲突,运用超边际及一般均衡方法,探索了交易服务中间商出现和存在的理由。本文证明,交易服务中间商是专业化和分工水平提高的产物,而这种专业化和分工水平的提高则来自于制度效率和交易服务的交易效率所共同决定的产品总贸易效率的充分改进;交易服务中间商的出现还受到生产和交易的学习成本的影响,也会随着交易服务的生产技术的提高而加速;总贸易效率的提高同时也导致了交易服务中间商协调的委托贸易模式取代自给自足和非专业化生产者-消费者之间的直接贸易模式,并使得市场种类数增加、经济依存度提高、交易迂回度提高和人均真实收入增加。本文对于理解运输和物流服务的外包与内部化、生产与交易的交互作用以及营销渠道的形成具有意义。     

Middle Men: The Visible Market‐Makers

This paper presents a framework in which middlemen emerge to intermediate between ex‐ante homogeneous buyers and sellers in the presence of search frictions. Middlemen announce prices, and hold an inventory to provide more sure services. Middlemen can mitigate trade imbalances with price competition. Using this framework I illustrate how the frictionless limit can emerge and how middlemen can implement the short‐side principle for the market price to be Walrasian. The recent progress in the literature on intermediation will also be discussed.     

The effects of human resource management on small firms’ productivity and employees’ wages

This paper analyses whether employees and firms differently benefit from particular human resource (HR) practices. The focus is on small firms that may be badly informed on the impact of HR practices on firm performance. In this study on Dutch pharmacies, it is found that firms do not reward employees’ skills according to their contribution to firms’ productivity, as (1) employees are over-rewarded for their sector-specific skills and under-rewarded for the productivity enhancing effect of their computer skills and (2) employees’ work experience positively affects their wages but does not have real productivity effects. Moreover, it is found that training employees in case of vacancy problems seems to be an adequate HR practice, since it increases productivity without affecting the average wage level. The opposite holds for offering higher wages to newly recruited employees. Furthermore, we find that only the employees benefit from performance evaluation interviews, whereas employing many employees by temporary contracts appears to have a negative effect on productivity, without affecting the wage level.     

农业生产力因素及其质态论

农业生产力因素按其转化为生产力的方式可以被划分为物质生产因素和非物质生产因素，其具体构成可概括为十个方面。同时，农业生产力因素的构成并非杂乱堆砌，而是由特定的农业生产力因素在特定的关联方式下所形成的有机整体，是类型、层次和指标的统一。     

Demonstrating group selection: A comment on Janet Landa’s ‘The bioeconomics of homogenous middleman groups as adaptive units’

Janet Landa provides an impressive historical tour of the development of her theory of homogeneous middlemen groups (HMGs), and how she arrived at the group selection approach. Despite her claim that the case studies she presents provide evidence for group selection in human societies, we argue that such a conclusion is premature. We suggest that an evolutionary explanation of HGMs will be strengthened by greater attention to the details of the selective process.     

Productivity in the tourism industry

This paper analyzes the efficiency of a Portuguese public-owned hotel chain, Enatur. It applies data envelopment analysis (DEA) to estimate total factor productivity (TFP) change, while breaking it down into technical efficiency and technological change. The benchmarking procedure used is an internal one, which compares hotels with each other. For the period 1999–2001, the hotels are ranked according to their total productivity change. It is concluded that some hotels experienced productivity growth, while others faced a decline. Some implications beneficial for managerial policies were drawn from this study.     

TECHNICAL EFFICIENCY,REGULATION AND HETEROGENEITY IN JAPANESE AIRPORTS

In this paper, the random stochastic frontier model is used to estimate the technical efficiency of Japanese airports, with regulation and heterogeneity included in the variables. The airports are ranked according to their productivity for the period 1987–2005 and homogeneous and heterogeneous variables in the cost function are disentangled. Policy implications are derived.     

Erratum to “Competition,incentives, and public school productivity”

When competition increases, it is often presumed that public schools will be forced to become more efficient. This paper challenges that presumption, showing that in well-defined circumstances, rent-seeking public schools find it optimal to reduce productivity when a voucher is introduced. This occurs for incentive reasons alone. More generally, the productivity effects of vouchers are shown to be non-uniform, varying systematically according to household and community characteristics and the form the voucher takes; when the voucher is targeted, perverse productivity outcomes do not arise. The analysis has relevance to the policy issue of voucher design.     

Do education quality and spillovers matter? Evidence on human capital and productivity in Greece

This paper estimates production functions for Greek regions over 1971–2011, using census data on educational human capital. We construct rich human capital series, where data for employees are decomposed according to their education level. In addition, we take into account possible effects due to education quality and spillovers. Our evidence shows that human capital has a strong positive association with labor productivity through upper secondary and tertiary education, while primary education exhibits a negative relationship and lower secondary education does not exhibit any association with productivity. Tertiary education spillovers along with a number of education quality indicators present a significant positive relationship with productivity. Overall, findings suggest that policy makers should account for education quality as well as spillovers and direct their efforts toward a more efficient and enhanced education system with emphasis on high education levels to improve labor productivity overall and reduce spatial productivity disparities.     

A new perspective on the exporter productivity premium: online trade

We use a unique firm-level data set including 9000 companies from 26 European Union countries covering four different sectors to take a close look at the relationship between online exports and productivity. The online exporter productivity premium is estimated using different techniques (ordinary least squares, quantile regressions and robust estimation). Results consistently indicate that the estimated online exporter productivity premium is statistically different from zero, positive and significant from an economic point of view. European online exporters, according to these results, are approximately 2% more productive than non-online exporters. Productivity differences between firms could be related to variables that are not included in the empirical model. More research would be needed to address this issue in the future.     

Conflicts of supply chains in multi-channel marketing: a case from northern Finland

Multi-channel marketing is a popular research theme of marketing management. Studying multi-channel marketing is a popular research theme of marketing management. The studies emphasise the necessity and advantages of multi-channel marketing. Despite these advantages, multi-channel marketing is also a source of conflicts in supply chains because the coordination of supply chain ecosystem is challenging. This study is based on a questionnaire and interviews of entrepreneurs. The large significance of dealer, large turnover and the intention to bypass middlemen in the supply chain are sources of conflicts. Variables, which seem to have decreasing effects on conflicts are ‘large number of employees’, ‘intentions to sell different products via different channels’ and slightly in the case ‘to achieve competitive advantage via online shop’. Successful exploitation of e-commerce and multi-channel marketing needs intensive adaptation of entrepreneurs in each step. Each marketing channels need their own planning and sub-strategies. The strategic decisions of e-commerce are part of the whole strategy of the entrepreneurs and the firm.     

UK wage underpayment: implications for the minimum wage

Dynamic monopsony suggests that, due to labour market frictions, workers will be paid below their productivity. This paper uses the stochastic frontier technique to estimate the degree of this underpayment for UK employees. It finds evidence of significant underpayment. The estimates are used to examine whether the predictions of dynamic monopsony are empirically accurate. No conclusive evidence against this theoretical framework is found. The paper also investigates whether payment according to productivity is a sufficient condition for the elimination of the ‘working poor’ problem. Due to the existence of an unemployment barrier, it finds that the minimum wage is not an effective anti-poverty policy.     

Export,FDI and firm productivity

Many empirical papers tested the theoretical predictions of Helpman, Melitz and Yeaple (HMY, 2004) which sorts firms at different internationalization states according to their productivity levels. While these papers ignore the fact, that the theoretical predictions of HMY only apply to firms that become engaged in market-driven Foreign Direct Investment (FDI), we apply a more precise methodology using a French firm sample with more than 110?000 observations. Our results show that firms with a broader investment strategy, reflecting a great importance of market-driven motives, show higher productivity levels than firms with less encompassing foreign investment strategies. We conclude that the methodology is well-suited to sort firms according to the importance of market-driven FDI.     

Voting under ignorance of job skills of unemployed: the overtaxation bias

Usual models on voting over basic income–flat tax schedules rest on the assumption that voters know the whole distribution of skills even if at equilibrium some individuals do not work. If individuals’ productivity remains unknown until they work, it may be more convincing to assume that voters have only beliefs about the distribution of skills and that a learning process takes place. In this paper, at each period, individuals vote according to their beliefs which are updated when getting new information from the job market. The voting process converges towards some steady-state equilibrium that depends on both the true distribution of skills and the initial beliefs. The equilibrium tax rate is higher than (or equal to) the tax rate achieved in the perfect information framework. An illustration is provided on French data: if voters are over-pessimistic as to the potential productivity of unemployed people, majority voting may lock the economy in an “informational trap” with a high tax rate and a high level of inactivity.     

Aggregate Productivity in the Post-war British Coal Industry

An econometric model, using OLS regression, of aggregate productivity in the post-war British coal industry is given. Some of the methods used by Weisskopf et al. (1983), in their ‘social model’ of aggregate productivity in the US economy are drawn upon; however all ‘social’ variables included in this coal productivity model are found not to be significant. The results suggest that pit closures have been an important source of aggregate productivity growth throughout the period; this does not imply, however, that ‘unproductive’, or ‘uneconomic’, pits are intrinsically so, rather their status as such may be the result of a ‘political’ process. Average colliery size and the industry's capital stock were also found to be important explanatory variables. Attention was paid to the effects of the national miners' strikes during the period; these effects were found to be structurally insignificant.