Pricing Decisions in Dual-Channel Supply Chain Including Monopolistic Manufacturer and Duopolistic Retailers: A Game-Theoretic Approach

Emergence of the Internet as a new distribution channel has led to increasing attention by researchers to dual-channel supply chain in recent years. In this paper, pricing and ordering decisions are investigated on a dual-channel supply chain which consists of monopolistic manufacturer and duopolistic retailers. The market is assumed to be controlled by the manufacturer. Thus, the manufacturer becomes leader and the two retailers act as followers. Due to establishing this new structure, different game-theoretic models including Bertrand, Collusion, and Stackelberg are developed to analyze pricing strategies under the various interactions between the two retailers. Then, the equilibrium decisions are compared under the considered scenarios and valuable managerial insights are presented. We found that the various games do not have any effects on the manufacturer’s responses. The retail prices given by the Collusion game are higher than by the other games. In the Collusion model, demands in the retail channel are lower than in the other games. Moreover, the manufacturer and retailers receive respectively the lowest and the highest profits under the Collusion game.     

Emotional stability: A new construct and its implications for individual behavior in organizations

Despite being generally well studied, emotional stability (ES) has not yet been widely accepted as a satisfactory and solidly valid theoretical construct. Without a clearly defined and validated construct, it is difficult to infer what ES means for the behavior and decisions of individuals as well as the performance of groups and organizations. Based on self-organization theory, this study infers a two dimensional construct for ES (threshold and recovery) under the framework of dynamic change and complexity. Two studies were conducted in China to develop and examine the construct of ES in an organizational context. The psychometric examination indicated that the newly developed construct of ES has discriminant and convergent validity with respect to different though related constructs such as the Big Five personality model and emotional intelligence (EI). It also demonstrates incremental validity in predicting group leadership, job satisfaction, job self-efficacy, and commitment. The findings also demonstrate that ES moderates the relationship between individual commitment and group relationship conflict. The results indicate that self-ratings effectively reflect the theoretical construct, whereas peer ratings and supervisor ratings create different biases. Additional theory, empirical, and methodological contributions are also discussed.     

Socioeconomic Status,Religion and Health in India: an Examination of Chronic and Communicable Diseases

The literature on socioeconomic status and health suggests that those in higher positions have better health, and those in lower positions have worse health. There is little evidence of an SES gradient in non-industrialized countries, however, and it is uncertain whether the health gradient established in many Western countries would apply in developing countries. In this study, the authors examine patterns in health outcomes by caste and religion in India, a developing country. Results from a nationally representative sample, the Indian Human Development Survey, suggest that while high SES social groups report less communicable disease, they report a higher prevalence of chronic diseases than low SES groups. This study demonstrates the need to examine diseases of affluence among high SES groups in developing countries while also identifying the particular health concerns that are prevalent among low SES groups.     

Macroeconomic adjustment programmes in the euro area: an overall assessment

Since the start of EMU (Economic and Monetary Union), the euro area, and more broadly the global economy, experienced an unprecedented credit boom. The expansion of credit was particularly strong in Greece, Ireland, Portugal and Cyprus and all of them subsequently needed official financial support. In each of the four programmes, financial assistance has been provided and promised against the commitment of each country to fulfil certain economic policy conditions contained in the macroeconomic adjustment programme. In general, a macroeconomic adjustment is a process driven by policies but also by changes in private spending behaviour (consumption, imports, investment) and improvement in competitiveness that countries are required to undertake after a large shock. In the case of the four countries, the shock emerged as a consequence of an excessive accumulation of imbalances in different parts of the economy: in the public sector in Greece, in the housing and banking sectors in Ireland, external imbalances in Portugal and in the banking sector in Cyprus. The paper looks at the feasibility of the fiscal adjustment comparing the macroeconomic conditions in the four countries and emphasising the role of the fiscal multipliers in the process. It also assesses the fall in the output in a comparative framework, stressing the role played by the different components of demand either in amplifying the effect of the fiscal consolidation or in offsetting it. In addition, it considers formulation of the programmes as well as their implementation with most attention devoted to reforms aiming at improving competitiveness, growth and employment in the framework of a cross-country approach.     

Management earnings forecasts and the quality of analysts’ forecasts: The moderating effect of audit committees

This study investigates whether effective audit committees influence the association between management earnings forecasts and the properties of analysts’ forecasts. We posit that this influence on the part of an audit committee would likely result from increased responsibility for monitoring voluntary disclosure. Using the four attributes that the Blue Ribbon Committee (1999) and prior research suggest as being indicative of audit committee effectiveness, we find that analysts’ forecasts exhibit higher accuracy and lower dispersion with the issuance of management forecasts for those firms employing audit committees that are composed exclusively of independent directors, include an accounting expert, and act with due diligence. We also find that effective audit committees strengthen the association between management and analyst forecast accuracy. Our evidence, therefore, supports the notion that effective corporate governance influences the reliability of voluntary disclosure, and thereby benefits the users of financial information.     

Restricted Hodrick–Prescott filtering in a state-space framework

The current paper extends previous results on Hodrick–Prescott (HP) filtering and shows that it is possible to implement the judgement-augmented, or restricted, HP filter within the state-space framework. The implementation entails augmenting the vector of measurements and altering one of the system matrices of the state-space model for the HP filter. Restrictions can thereby be incorporated in the HP filter, making, e.g., estimation more accessible. An application to US GDP gap estimation illustrates how the restricted filter could be usefully applied in an empirical macroeconomic setting.     

Transatlantic wage gaps and the migration decision: Europe–Canada in the 1920s

As has been seen in other contexts, workers in similar occupations earned much higher wages in Canada than Europe during the 1920s. This observation and related aspects of immigration are addressed with a life-cycle model of the migration decision. The characteristics of immigrants from five European countries: Ireland, Italy, the Netherlands, Poland, and Sweden, are explored in a way that sheds light not just on those population flows but on the process of immigration generally. We draw on passenger manifests from immigrant ships for information on the individual migrants. Simulations, based partly on the these manifests, reveal that the costs of migration, borrowing constraints, concern for status, and country-specific taste preferences account for key immigrant characteristics, and help explain the large wage differentials that persisted despite Canada’s relatively open immigration policy.     

Augmenting the eye of the beholder: exploring the strategic potential of augmented reality to enhance online service experiences

Driven by the proliferation of augmented reality (AR) technologies, many firms are pursuing a strategy of service augmentation to enhance customers’ online service experiences. Drawing on situated cognition theory, the authors show that AR-based service augmentation enhances customer value perceptions by simultaneously providing simulated physical control and environmental embedding. The resulting authentic situated experience, manifested in a feeling of spatial presence, functions as a mediator and also predicts customer decision comfort. Furthermore, the effect of spatial presence on utilitarian value perceptions is greater for customers who are disposed toward verbal rather than visual information processing, and the positive effect on decision comfort is attenuated by customers’ privacy concerns.