An economy with personal currency: theory and experimental evidence

Is personal currency issued by participants sufficient to operate an economy efficiently, with no outside or government money? Sahi and Yao (in J Math Econ, 1989) and Sorin (in J Econ Theory, 1996) constructed a strategic market game to prove that this is possible. We conduct an experimental game in which each agent issues his/her personal IOUs, and a costless efficient clearinghouse adjusts the exchange rates among them so the markets always clear. The results suggest that if the information system and clearing are so good as to preclude moral hazard, any form of information asymmetry, and need for trust, the economy operates efficiently at any price level without government money. These conditions cannot reasonably be expected to hold in natural settings. In a second set of treatments when agents have the option of not delivering on their promises, a high enough penalty for non-delivery is necessary to ensure an efficient market; a lower penalty leads to inefficient, even collapsing, markets due to moral hazard.     

The dark side of the sharing economy: Balancing value co-creation and value co-destruction

The sharing economy disrupts the marketplace and brings both benefits and disadvantages into service ecosystems. We discuss principles of the S-D logic and transformative service research and explore the processes of value co-creation and co-destruction of well-being within the ecosystem of the accommodation sharing economy. Following a brief period of euphoria, the dark side of the sharing economy emerges, defined as the socially, environmentally, or economically undesirable effects introduced by the sharing economy. Airbnb introduced new realities for visitors, neighborhoods, the accommodation industry, and city councils, whereby some stakeholders are frequently found to maximize their own value at the expense of others. Value co-destruction prevails often due to uncontrolled and rapid expansion. We seek to promote a more balanced process, and the optimization of value co-creation, while seeking to prevent value co-destruction. Using a literature review, netnography, and a case study, we investigate co-creation and co-destruction, as expressed by different stakeholders, and focus on the socio-psychological implications in the use of sharing platforms that affect the well-being of individuals and community. A conceptual framework is proposed to manage future research addressing well-being, value co-creation and co-destruction in complex ecosystem service networks.     

Business Strategy at the Base of the Pyramid

The design and implementation of base of the pyramid (BoP) solutions or products require multinational companies to make adjustments to their business strategies and processes. While this strategic opportunity has been argued for in BoP related publications, a 'traditional' strategic management perspective has not been applied. This paper aims towards using the strategic management process as an analytic framework for case studies at the BoP, allowing analysis of which aspects are particularly critical for achieving respective solutions. This includes reaching sustainability related objectives. A total of seven cases covering both products and services have been researched, allowing a contribution towards the applicability of strategic management in respective situations. Further, the importance of specific strategy process elements is assessed. While it seems obvious that strategic management thought can be applied, the analytic criteria put forward (i.e. company, initial need, motivation, external analysis, stakeholder, product/service, strategic choice, organizational implementation, supply chain, economic outcome, effects on sustainable development) are particularly geared towards the BoP solutions. While previous literature centres on analysing needs, the case based research provides the insight that aspects of internal organization, supply chain management and sustainability outcomes are of equal importance. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment.     

Domestic Sources of Twenty-first-century Geopolitics: Domestic Politics and Sovereign Wealth Funds in GCC Economies

The present article brings domestic politics into an analysis on sovereign wealth funds (SWFs) that are relevant for the study of contemporary geopolitics. What are the domestic drivers behind SWF creation, and how does a country’s domestic political environment affect the creation of these funds? Using a comparative historical case study on sovereign funds in Gulf Cooperation Countries, this article investigates the effects of domestic state–society structures on decisions about SWF creation and their evolving structure. Thereby, this article adds to an emerging stream of literature that looks at the drivers and implications of SWFs. One of the key findings of this analysis is that there are systematic links between the sovereign fund types and domestic structures; these structures include and exclude socio-economic actors that influence policy-making decisions.     

Gap in relative importance of service activities closed

Conclusion Overall it is evident that the relative importance of services and service activity trends in the USA and west Germany is very similar. In other words the activity structure in Germany is indeed “modern”. Also in highly productive areas of production, value adding largely takes the form of service activities. Thus the employment problem in Germany results not from outdated activity structures; the causes are rather those macroeconomic reasons to which the DIW has repeatedly drawn attention⁷. German economic policy must ensure that the framework of macroeconomic conditions is changed to allow jobs to be created. Whether these jobs are created in certain branches or activities is of secondary importance. Having said this, in Germany, too, it is to be expected that more than two out of every three new jobs created will be service jobs. Even so, a quarter of new jobs will be created in industry.     

Surrogate modelling of a detailed farm-level model using deep learning

Technological change co-determines agri-environmental performance and farm structural transformation. Meaningful impact assessment of related policies can be derived from farm-level models that are rich in technology details and environmental indicators, integrated with agent-based models capturing dynamic farm interaction. However, such integration faces considerable challenges affecting model development, debugging and computational demands in application. Surrogate modelling using deep learning techniques can facilitate such integration for simulations with broad regional coverage. We develop surrogates of the farm model FarmDyn using different architectures of neural networks. Our specifically designed evaluation metrics allow practitioners to assess trade-offs among model fit, inference time and data requirements. All tested neural networks achieve a high fit but differ substantially in inference time. The Multilayer Perceptron shows almost top performance in all criteria but saves strongly on inference time compared to a Bi-directional Long Short Term Memory.     

Medical consumption over the life-cycle

We investigate the association between age and medical spending in the U.S. using data from the Medical Expenditure Panel Survey. We estimate a partially linear seminonparametric model and construct “pure” life-cycle profiles of health spending simultaneously controlling for time effects (i.e., institutional changes and business cycles effects) and cohort effects (i.e., generation specific conditions). We find that time and cohort effects together introduce a significant estimation bias into predictions of health expenditures per age group, especially for individuals older than 60 years. The estimation bias introduced by cohort effects increases monotonically with age while the bias due to time effects is not significant. The overall effect of Medicare on the cohort and time effects biases is negligible.     

The division of labour in innovation management

Abstract
The literature shows a plethora of roles in innovation management. These roles have not provided a systematic and unique pattern of relationship which can serve as an instrument of organization. An analysis of the empirical findings shows the existence of division of labour in innovation management in a multiple role concept. The concepts like 'product champion', 'gatekeeper', 'sponsor', 'business innovator', 'technical innovator', 'promoter' etc. have some elements of commonality and complementarity. Two underlying principles can be delineated: division of labour according to phases of the innovation process and according to sources of power of the incumbents. An interaction model and a process linkage model for innovation management are developed to explain the different findings. These models help to integrate these empirical concepts and serve as guidelines for possible organization of the innovation process.