Market-oriented sustainability: a conceptual framework and propositions

Utilizing Resource-Advantage Theory as the underlying theoretical foundation and drawing on literature from a variety of disciplines, we develop a market-oriented sustainability framework. By incorporating sustainability into market orientation, the goal of strategic alignment of sustainability with marketing strategies is achieved to create a competitive advantage. Three constructs identified in the model are DNA, stakeholder involvement, and performance management. These three constructs are the drivers of sustainability. DNA is used as an extended metaphor to clarify and illustrate the workings of an organization and how sustainability may be implemented. This construct includes core ideology, dynamic capabilities, and societal engagement. The firm’s DNA is communicated to both internal and external stakeholders, and stakeholders’ concerns should be an influence on strategic marketing planning. Performance management is the third major construct in the model and includes corporate social performance and corporate financial performance metrics. Within the model explication, we offer propositions to support market-oriented sustainability research and provide directions for sustainability theory, research, and practice.     

The effectiveness of publicity versus advertising: a meta-analytic investigation of its moderators

This study provides an answer to the question whether and under which conditions publicity is more or less effective than advertising. Advertising refers to paid communication that identifies the message sponsor, whereas publicity is communication that secures editorial space in media for promotion purposes and does not have an identifiable sponsor. The primary advantage of advertising over publicity is the sponsor’s control over message content; its disadvantages are audience skepticism and lack of credibility. We investigate this trade-off between credibility effects and effects of recipients’ processing and evaluation of message content. Results of a meta-analytic structural equation model show that the positive credibility effect of publicity is on average about three times as strong as the information evaluation effect, supporting the overall superiority of publicity over advertising. This effect, however, is moderated by prior knowledge and only holds for products about which recipients lack prior knowledge. The effects change for known products when advertising becomes superior. The effectiveness of publicity depends on further moderating variables. In particular, academic studies tend to underestimate the true effects of publicity over advertising due to experimental manipulations. Campaigns that combine publicity and advertising weaken the effects of publicity, whereas advertorials (i.e., advertisements disguised as editorial material) are more effective, since they combine the advantages of both publicity and advertising. The results have theoretical and practical implications.     

Long-term forecasting of the development of Russia’s pension system: Factors and conditions

The problems associated with the reformation of the pension system have gained extreme urgency in the process of forming the long-term strategy for Russia??s socioeconomic development (until 2030), which is determined by the growth in its influence on the macroeconomic strategy. This paper gives an actuarial substantiation of the actual factors and conditions, on which the development of the pension system in the Russian Federation depends, and prospects for the stability of the pension budget based on insurance principles.     

Container storage and transshipment marine terminals

This study addresses the storage arrangement of transshipment containers on a container yard, in order to carry out efficiently the ship handling operations at a terminal where mega-containerships call. An optimization model is specified to investigate the flow of containers from the mega-containership to feeder ships using intermediate storage at the yard. A heuristic based on the lagrangian relaxation is formulated. The quality of the heuristic approach is tested in a number of experiments. In the experiments, various situations are analyzed with respect to mega-containership arrival rates, some strategies for stack arrangements and terminal layouts.     

Economic contribution of French serradella (Ornithopus sativus Brot.) pasture to integrated weed management in Western Australian mixed‐farming systems: an application of compressed annealing*

Sowing phases of French serradella (Ornithopus sativus Brot.) pasture between extended cropping sequences in the Western Australian wheatbelt can sustain grain production through restoring soil fertility and reducing selective herbicide use. The objective of this article is to investigate the profitability of rotations involving this pasture under a variety of weed management scenarios to obtain greater insight into its value for mixed farming systems in this region. A stochastic search procedure, compressed annealing, is used to identify profitable sets of weed management strategies in a simulation model representing a large number of potential combinations of chemical and non‐chemical forms of weed control. In contrast to a continuous‐cropping sequence, the inclusion of a serradella phase in a rotation is profitable at high weed densities and with increasing levels of herbicide resistance. A single year of pasture in the rotation is optimal if resistance to Group A selective herbicides is present at the beginning of the planning horizon, but a three‐year phase is required if resistance to multiple herbicide groups is observed. Sowing a serradella pasture twice over a two‐year phase is also shown to be economically attractive given benefits of successive high weed kills.     

Credit,reputation, and masculinity in British urban commerce: Edinburgh,c. 1710–70 1

This article draws on cases of public insult from the Edinburgh consistory court to explore constructions of credit and reputation during the eighteenth century. Scotland's unique legal context offers new insights into the honour of men and women, replacing the received view that female honour was almost entirely about sexual honour and complicating our understanding of male honour among the middling sort. In contrast to studies that view the credit of men and women as principally contradictory, this study instead identifies significant points of both overlap and divergence in male and female reputation and discusses honour as a family matter. Unlike in England, levels of defamation litigation in Scotland remained high through the eighteenth century, and both the social composition of defamation litigants and the types of insult they brought to court remained consistent. However, the forms and settings of disputes over honour changed, reflecting the interiorization of conflict as the eighteenth century progressed.     

Technological complementarities, demand, and market power

Recent technological changes in many industries have generated numerous complementary technologies. A key implication of complementary technologies is that the demand for related services has tended to change both qualitatively and quantitatively. While the economics literature has examined various aspects, the effects of technological complementarity have not been fully flushed out. Using a simple model, this paper examines the implications of technological complementarity. How have firms’ pricing abilities changed with complementary technologies? What implications do complementary technologies have for regulation? Results show that technological complementarity has the potential to increase the market power of firms, possibly increasing prices to unprecedented levels. This holds whether demand elasticity is constant or variable. Policy implications are discussed.     

Performance of Core Inflation Measures

This paper assesses the performance of core inflation measures based on the structural VAR approach. Since core or monetary inflation is not directly observable, we develop a monetary general equilibrium model that fits real aggregated European data and we use this model to generate time series for headline as well as core inflation. For five different schemes which attempt to identify core inflation within a VAR framework it is investigated whether the estimated core inflation series recover the true series sufficiently precise in order to be useful for monetary policy.     

THE EVOLUTION OF COMPETITIVENESS IN HUNGARIAN AGRICULTURE: FROM TRANSITION TO ACCESSION

MOCT-MOST: Economic Policy in Transitional Economies -     

Career concerns incentives: An experimental test

Holmström’s [Holmström, B., 1982/1999. Managerial incentive problems: a dynamic perspective. Review of Economic Studies 66, 169–182. Originally published in: Essays in Economics and Management in Honour of Lars Wahlbeck, Helsinki] career concerns model has become a workhorse for analyzing agency issues in many fields. The underlying signal jamming argument requires players to use information in a Bayesian way, which is difficult to directly test with field data: typically little is known about the information that individuals base their decisions on. Our laboratory experiment provides prima facie evidence: (i) the signal jamming mechanism successfully creates incentives on the labor supply side; (ii) decision errors take time to decrease; (iii) while subjects’ average beliefs are remarkably consistent with play, a mild winner’s curse arises on the labor demand side.