Supply Disruptions and Regional Price Effects in a Spatial Oligopoly—An Application to the Global Gas Market

Supply shocks in the global gas market may affect countries differently, as the market is regionally interlinked but not perfectly integrated. Additionally, high supply‐side concentration may expose countries to market power in different ways. To evaluate the strategic position of importing countries with regard to gas supplies, we disentangle the import price into different components and characterize each component as price increasing or price decreasing. Because of the complexity of the interrelations in the global gas market, we use an equilibrium model programmed as a mixed complementarity problem (MCP) and simulate the blockage of liquefied natural gas (LNG) flows through the Strait of Hormuz. This enables us to account for the oligopolistic nature and the asymmetry of the gas supply. We find that Japan faces the most severe price increases, as the Japanese gas demand completely relies on LNG supply. In contrast, European countries such as the UK benefit from good interconnection to the continental pipeline system and domestic price taking production, both of which help to mitigate an increase in physical costs of supply as well as in the exercise of market power.     

Communicating a company's positive impact on society—Can plausible explanations secure authenticity?

Organizations could prosper by delivering products and services that make society a better place. However, they face the challenge of successfully communicating what they contribute to society, especially if their contributions are closely related to their core business activities. The thin line between genuine societal engagement and the pursuit of profitability may feed society's increasing skepticism about the genuineness of organizations' care for societal issues. This study addresses the question of how a for-profit organization can successfully communicate what it intends to contribute to society while still coming across as authentic. If customers can explain the organization's envisaged societal contributions in terms of characteristics of the organization, they can see more clearly how its contributions fit the organization and will perceive the organization as more authentic. Perceived authenticity, in turn, increases customer loyalty and perceived fit enhances stakeholders' attitudes toward the organization's societal engagement.     

WICKEDNESS IN SOCIAL CHOICE

In an article from 1973, Rittel and Webber distinguished between ‘tame’ or ‘benign’ problems on the one hand and ‘wicked’ problems on the other. The authors argued that wicked problems occur in nearly all public policy issues. Since different groups adhere to different value-sets, solutions can only be expressed as better or worse. By no means can they be viewed as definitive or objective. In this paper we consider, from this very angle, the theory of social choice which is about the aggregation of individual preferences with the aim to derive a consistent social preference. We show that collective choice offers wicked problems of various types which differ in their degree of severity. We hereby concentrate on welfare functions and voting schemes of different kinds and discuss these in the light of various criteria such as Arrow's independence condition, Condorcet consistency, monotonicity, manipulability, and other properties.     

Chamberlin Meets Ciriacy‐Wantrup: Using Insights from Experimental Economics to Inform Stated Preference Research

Many studies that use stated preference (SP) surveys to estimate the demand for private or public goods can be characterized as experiments, although they are not routinely labeled as such. This paper draws from the broader experimental economics literature to provide insights for SP practitioners and researchers, particularly as it pertains to survey development, mechanism design, external validity, data analysis, and the dissemination of findings.     

Beyond the Urban–Suburban Divide: Urbanization and the Production of the Urban in Zurich North

Starting from current debates on ‘global suburbanism' and ‘postsuburbia', this article explores the changes that the former ‘urban periphery' of Zurich North has experienced in the last three decades. It mobilizes Henri Lefebvre's triadic concept of conceived, perceived and lived space in aid of an analysis of the profound urban transformations that can be observed. The construction of a new tramline serves as a guideline for an analysis of the implementation of new governance arrangements strengthening cross‐border cooperation between individual municipalities and new strategies of cooptation and expertise. This resulted in the production of new urban structures which led to a more densely woven and connected urban fabric primarily providing spaces for the headquarter economy and middle‐class housing. Concomitantly, great efforts have been made to create new public spaces, an urban image and even an urban atmosphere. These have proved at least partially successful, thus promoting a symbolic redefinition of the former urban periphery as a distinctively ‘urban' space. Conventional definitions and concepts no longer suffice to adequately understand such novel urban forms, leading to the conclusion that division into an ‘urban' and a ‘suburban' world is no longer a useful tool for urban analysis.     

Scale effects of R&D as reflected in earnings and returns

Using returns to scale as a conceptual foundation, we explore how R&D-related earnings performance and earnings variability depend upon firm size. We find that the positive association between the level of future earnings and R&D intensity increases with firm size, and that the positive association between the volatility of future earnings and R&D intensity decreases with firm size, consistent with R&D productivity increasing with scale. We also show that R&D scale is associated with lower market returns, consistent with the idea that R&D investment risk declines with scale.     

Discrete time Wishart term structure models

This paper reveals that the class of Affine Term Structure Models (ATSMs) introduced by Duffie and Kan (1996) is larger than previously considered in the literature. In the framework of risk factors following a Wishart autoregressive process, we define the Wishart Term Structure Model (WTSM) as an extension of a subclass of Quadratic Term Structure Models (QTSMs), derive simple parameter restrictions that ensure positive bond yields at all maturities, and observe that the usual constraint on affine processes requiring that the volatility matrix be diagonal up to a path independent linear invertible transformation can be considerably relaxed.     

Individual attitudes towards the impact of multinational corporations on local businesses: how important are individual characteristics and country-level traits?

We study the importance of individual characteristics and national factors influencing individual attitudes towards the impact of multinational corporations on local businesses. Our sample includes more than 40 000 respondents in 29 countries from the 2003 National Identity Survey conducted by the International Social Survey Programme. We find that individual demographic factors and socioeconomic status, such as gender, age, income and education, are strong predictors of their attitudes. For example, income and education are positively associated with favourable attitudes towards the impact of multinational corporations (MNCs) on local businesses while age is negatively associated with individual attitudes towards MNCs. In addition, hierarchical ordered logit model results show that approximately 8% of total variations in individual attitudes around our sample mean are not explained by differences in personal traits. Instead, they are due to country-level heterogeneity such as, but not limited to, different degrees of openness or different aggregate income.