Is there a crisis in arts sponsorship?

What is the connection between Heinz Baked Beans, the Notting Hill Carnival and Windows 95? This paper examines present trends in arts sponsorship. Sponsorship by brands is developing rapidly, while traditional arts sponsorship as part of the corporate promotional budget is under threat. Examples of trend setting sponsorships from companies as diverse as Ernst & Young, Lilt and Beck's Bier, show that arts sponsorship is in transition. Arts organisations are having to adjust rapidly to the new environment if they are to fulfil their targets.     

FUND SUBSTITUTION AND THE INCENTIVE EFFECT OF PUBLIC INVESTMENT SUBSIDIES

This paper analyses the observed phenomenon of public for private fund substitution in industrial assistance, by examining the public and private sector funding of investment under different assumptions about the nature of the private capital market. This bears on the effectiveness of industrial subsidies, and has implications for welfare and the design of optimal assistance contracts. It is shown that fund substitution depends crucially on the elasticity of investment with respect to the user cost of capital in the without-subsidy position, and on the nature of any amount and rate constraints on the assistance contract.     

Price Strategies for Idiosyncratic Goods—The Case of Housing

We determine the mechanism that a rational, profit-maximizing seller would use to revise his reservation price for a heterogeneous or infrequently exchanged good. For instance, while one dimension of a home's quality may be easily determined in competitive markets (e.g., the valuation of floor size, location, etc.), other dimensions of quality may be idiosyncratic (unit specific) and unobservable by the seller (e.g., aesthetics of the home). Here, a seller of a new or infrequently exchanged housing unit may use sales success information to revise his expectation of the unit's market-determined value and hence revise his reservation price. The rational seller will, upon arrival of the first buyer inspecting the unit, determine a sequence of reservation prices for this and expected subsequent buyers. This price sequence falls for subsequent buyers and starts from a lower initial price if the first buyer arrives later than expected. Through this mechanism, we offer an explanation for price dispersion and vacancy durations in housing markets. While we explicitly model the real estate market here, this price revision mechanism is also applicable to rental markets, labor markets, used car markets, and other markets characterized by heterogeneity and infrequent sales.     

Job creation initiatives in the UK: the large company role

In recent years many large companies – mainly those making large scale redundancies – have made efforts to stimulate job creation in the localities in which they are based. Although this has succeeded in helping to create jobs, it has been criticised, prompting major sponsors of such initiatives to consider how job creation strategies can be made more effective.     

Reputation and corporate strategy: A review of recent theory and applications

A corporate reputation is a set of attributes ascribed to a firm, inferred from the firm's past actions. While the intuition behind reputation-building is hardly new, recent research has formalized the concept. We review this research and then, using examples, illustrate some of the strategic behavioral implications of these formal models.     

DEVELOPMENT IN THE UNITED KINGDOM

The United Kingdom abolished domestic property taxation, the major autonomous revenue source for local authorities, in 1989 (Scotland) and 1990 (England and Wales). The introduction of a flat rate personal charge (called by the Government 'the community charge' and by its opponents 'the poll tax') aroused huge political controversy. The choice of a substitute tax, to operate from 1993, and based at least partly on property, was one of the major domestic issues in the recent General Parliamentary Election. This paper examines the background to the abolition of domestic property taxation and why it was such a key political issue, explains why the "community charge" failed and describes the immediate prospects.