Liberty and the Post‐utilitarian Society

Utilitarian foundations for limited government are shaky insofar as they assume rational and consistent individuals. Recently economists’ assumption of rational actors has come under sustained attack. Behavioural economics has suggested that people are plagued by irrational biases and inconsistencies. These developments have led to a post‐utilitarianism which is held to justify paternalistic interventions by the state via ‘sin taxes’, direct bans or new obligations. Individual responsibility is seriously undermined, as is faith in markets. Supporters of individual freedom need to move away from utilitarian reasoning, reassert core values of autonomy and responsibility, and define strict limits on the scope of government intervention.     

A good deal online: The Impacts of acquisition and transaction value on E-satisfaction and E-loyalty

Relying on Thaler's exchange theory, this research examines the unique effects of perceived transaction and acquisition values on consumer e-satisfaction and e-loyalty in an e-commerce setting, along with the moderating role of product/ service category. Overall, consumers' perceptions of transaction value lead to their e-dissatisfaction. Hence, obtaining a good deal does not have the same meaning and influence depending on the type of buying trip (exploratory or goal-directed). These results confirm Thaler's exchange theory's usefulness to analyzing the impact of perceived value on e-satisfaction and e-loyalty. Additionally, in a managerial perspective, this research underlines the importance of adapting promotional strategies to online contexts, since online purchase experience improves when there is an alignment between the customer's goals and the e-tailer’s online offering.     

Technological dualism,incomplete financial markets and economic development

A model is built in which, the more incomplete financial markets are, the more technological dualism is prevalent in the economy. The model is extended to show that, through dualism and technological choice, incomplete financial markets can have a negative impact on long-run growth.     

Around and Around: The Expectations Hypothesis

We show how to construct models of the term structure of interest rates in which the expectations hypothesis holds. McCulloch (1993) presents such a model, thereby contradicting an assertion by Cox, Ingersoll, and Ross (1981), but his example is Gaussian and falls outside the class of finite-dimensional Markovian models. We generalize McCulloch's model in three ways: (i) We provide an arbitrage-free characterization of the unbiased expectations hypothesis in terms of forward rates; (ii) we extend this characterization to a whole class of expectations hypotheses; and (iii) we show how to construct finite-dimensional Markovian and non-Gaussian examples.     

The impact of the current economic crisis on the geography of air traffic volumes: an empirical analysis

This paper presents a comprehensive analysis of air services dynamics during the recent economic crisis. Through a regression analysis, we show that at the country scale, the change in the supply of seats is highly dependent on economic growth, confirming the cyclical nature of the air sector. Hence the crisis of air services has much more affected the USA, Europe and Japan than the rest of the world. However, many countries deviate from this general trend. In a second step, using the existing literature, we explain some of these deviating figures. National specificities and airline strategies seem to influence the intensity of the crisis. We argue that the intensity of the crisis in the US is due to the structural oversupply of the air sector. Through other cases, especially the Middle East, we show that hubbing strategies might reduce the impact of the crisis, or at least make it less dependent upon local economic dynamics. In contrast with other authors, we found no positive impact of the share of low-cost carriers on the supply during the crisis, despite their success in some specific contexts like between Europe and Morocco.     

Agricultural productivity, trade, and industrialisation

Traditional development economics states that industrialisationmust be positively correlated with agricultural developmentas in the American and many European cases. However, some recentindustrialisation experiences suggests a negative link whichcan be supported by a simple Ricardian argument Yet this argumentis not consistent with the agricultural ‘leap forward’that often occurred before industrialisation took place. Here,we develop a model in which, for a closed economy, industrialisationfollows rising agricultural productivity. For a small open economy,multiple equilibria are possible and industrialisation tendsto be associated with low agricultural productivity, but istriggered by sudden changes in it.     

What drives agrifood firms to register for an Environmental Management System?

This paper examines empirically which factors determine voluntaryadoption of Environmental Management System (EMS) certification(ISO 14001 or EMAS) by agrifood industries. A discrete-choicemodel of EMS certification is applied to a sample of 1,000 Frenchagrifood firms. The findings suggest that management-relatedfactors drive certification more strongly than economic incentivesand provides a new perspective on Porter's theory of the doublebenefit of certification.     

Engineering Hedonic Attributes to Generate Perceptions of Luxury: Consumer Perception of an Everyday Sound

For the last twenty years, the perception of hedonic attributes has been a problematic matter in consumer research. We argue that the perception of a hedonic product attribute should not be considered as an irreducible holistic experience, but rather as a complex set of sensory experiences, the components of which are identifiable and quantifiable. We provide evidence for this position by proposing a reliable method linking the features of product-related sound stimuli to consumer perception of hedonic attributes. To our knowledge, this study is the first of its kind offering a detailed investigation of consumer perception of everyday sounds (as opposed to music). We discuss managerial and consumer-level implications of the findings and provide an agenda for future research.