United Shoe Machineryand the Antitrust Significance of “Free” Service

In United States v. United Shoe MachineryCorp., United Shoe Machinery was found guilty ofillegal monopolization due to its leasing practices. Existing scholarship on this case largely focuses onthe issue of leasing versus selling. In contrast,we examine a particular practice of United's thatwas condemned: its policy of providing service forits leased machines without a separate servicecharge. Our analysis demonstrates that thispractice served an important insurance function byshifting risk from the shoe manufacturers to United,a more efficient bearer of risk, and concludes thatthis practice was efficiency enhancing.     

A Survivor Test of the American Agency System of Distributing Property Liability Insurance

In earlier work byjoskow and by Cummins and VanDerhei, the American Agency system of distribution has been deemed inefficient, i.e. excessively costly. We test this in a natural way by examining whether the system survives in competition with more efficient systems. We find that it survives, but is in steady decline.     

A new context for ethics education objectives in a college of business: Ethical decision-making models

Objectives for ethics education in business school courses generally appear to be based on custom, intuition, and judgment rather than on a more unified theoretical/empirical base. These objectives may be more clearly implemented and their effects studied more rigorously if they could be rooted in the components of ethical decision-making models shown to be influential in ethical decision making. This paper shows how several widely used ethics education objectives can be placed in the context of current models of ethical decision making. Neil Herndon is University Lecturer in the Department of Business and Management at the City University of Hong Kong. His major research interest involves the influences of the ethical content of corporate cultures on the people within an organization. His work in this area has been published in the Journal of International Consumer Marketing and the Proceedings of the Academy of Marketing Science.     

零售店规模经济实证分析方法比较与修正

在对零售店的规模经济进行实证研究与分析时，有两种基本方法：生产函数方法与统计成本方法。生产函数方法倾向于否定零售店存在规模经济，而统计成本方法则倾向于支持零售店的规模经济。本文同时应用两种方法对中国百货商店的规模经济进行分析，结果证实了研究方法的不同会导致研究结果的不一致。本文还对原有的模型进行了修正，加入了一个新的规模指标。分析结果显示：新模型优于老模型；老模型中研究方法所导致的研究结果不一致的问题基本得到了解决。     

Scale economies of department stores in the People's Republic of China

This paper statistically tested three hypotheses about relationships between the size and efficiency of department stores in the People's Republic of China. The results show that the enlargement of the size of stores in China had a positive impact on the efficiency of large and medium-sized department stores, and that these department stores derived their economies of scale from cost savings rather than from an increase of the average transaction size.