Planning the production of electrical energy

In the paper, an effort is made to answer many of the perplexing questions concerning pricing and investment decisions that must be faced if the development of the electrical energy industry in the United States is to be carried on within a fully integrated or at least partially integrated framework.By using an intertemporal-spatial equilibrium model, solutions are suggested to such problems as the efficient pricing, allocation, and additions to generating capacity facing the electrical energy industry when peak demands occur at different times in different regions, when regions have different kinds and sizes of generating plants and are endowed with resources of different costs and availabilities, when prices do not reflect marginal costs, and when there are restrictions on transmission capacity.     

A note on defining geographic markets

This paper offers an approach to delineating geographic markets and/or product markets based on the notion of instantaneous causality. After providing a brief review of the issue of concern and a discussion of the relevant statistical methodology the flour market in the United States is examined. It is concluded that the flour market in fact is national in scope.     

Voluntary adoption of clawback provisions,corporate governance,and interlock effects

We examine the relationship between a company’s governance structure and the early adoption of management compensation clawbacks. We construct an index of whether governance tends toward relative management entrenchment versus monitoring and find that ostensible management entrenchment makes a clawback provision less likely. Furthermore, we examine whether social networks by the compensation committee with other adopters (interlocks) affects the likelihood of adoption, potentially by providing information from other decision-makers evaluating adoption. We find that interlocks by directors on the compensation committee with other companies with clawbacks increase the probability of a clawback. In addition, not all clawbacks are the same. We find that companies with clawbacks that are patterned after SOX are most common and are associated with monitoring-oriented governance and interlocks. Dodd Frank did not yet exist, but we find that clawback policies that would be compliant with Dodd Frank or are otherwise innovative are not associated with our measure of governance.     

Distortions in Tourism Development in the Dali Autonomous Region,China

This paper presents a tourism destination development sequence for Dali, Yunnan Province, China. The development of Dali highlights limits in the power of the local government as the lead stakeholder, which took a top-down approach to economic development. The government sought to address increasing control of the tourism sector by external tour operators through increasing its own control of local tourism attractions. This approach has been only partially successful in reducing distortions in the tourism channel. The origins of these distortions are described and analysed. A number of additional responses are suggested to improve the local benefits obtained from the inflow of tourists to this new destination area including development of a more market oriented competitive strategy that seeks to co-opt stakeholders into collaborative activities.     

The Search for a Critical Concentration Revisited

This paper examines the issue of whether there is a four-firm critical concentration ratio above which industries earn supranormal profits. A statistical test is employed to investigate the functional stability of the estimated relationship. Although the initial results indicate a range in the concentration ratio of between 0.48 and 0.55 over which the functional relationship destabilizes, additional analysis fails to identify a clear break in the concentration-profitability relationship. It can only be concluded that a critical concentration does not appear to exist.     

Ownership and Governance in the Insurance Industry: A Review of the Theory and Evidence

The objective of this paper is to review the coexistence of mutual and proprietary insurance companies from a corporate governance perspective.The paper begins by reviewing the theoretical justification for the existence of mutual and proprietary companies in the insurance industry. The paper then examines the empirical evidence on insurance company performance and seeks to identify whether organisational structure influences managerial behaviour. Finally, the paper analyses the impactof insurance conversions (i.e. mutualisation and demutualisation) on the welfare of po1icyholders,shareholders and managers in order to identify whether the conversion process is motivated by efficiency or expropriation objectives.     

Who Pays More for Food?

Building on research with unit values, we demonstrate how a household's per serving and total vegetable expenditures depend on both the characteristics of the household and on its location. The lower a household's income, for example, the lower is vegetable spending, all else constant. However, households living in communities with high real estate prices, or with a high incidence of poverty, among other things, tend to pay more. Simulations further illustrate the effect that a community's characteristics can have on a household's vegetable spending, if the household lives in each of 10 cities in the United States.     

Applying experiential marketing in selling tourism dreams

Experiential marketing is effective in influencing tourist behaviour because pleasure tourists travel in pursuit of fantasies and positive emotions. The influences of experiential marketing on tourist behaviour depends on tourist imagery processing (i.e. the mental system involved in processing experiential stimuli). This theme has recently attracted the attention of tourism academics, but it lacks guidance for researchers to navigate the dense, complex literature. Hence, this paper aims to provide a theoretically based review of imagery processing research in tourism. The systematic quantitative literature review method is applied to select and analyse 70 relevant papers published in the period from 1997 to 2017. In doing so, this review reconciles imagery-related concepts such as mental simulation, consumption vision, narrative transportation, telepresence, imagination, fantasy and memory recall. Moreover, a general framework of tourist behaviour is developed to explain how experiential marketing influences tourist behaviour by means of mental processes. This paper suggests different ways to apply experiential marketing in managing tourist experiences. Also, it highlights the necessity of customising experiential marketing initiatives to target different tourist segments.     

Legal centralization and the birth of the secular state

This paper investigates the relationship between the historical process of legal central- ization and increased religious toleration by the state. We develop a model based on the mathematics of mixture distributions which delineates the conditions under which legal centralization raises the costs faced by states of setting a narrow standard of orthodox belief. We compare the results of the model with historical evidence drawn from two important cases in which religious diversity and state centralization collided in France: the Albigensian crusades of the thirteenth century and the rise of Protestant belief in the sixteenth century.