Expected and Actual Effects of Housing Allowances on Housing Prices

Most analysts and policy makers expected fullscale housing allowance programs to substantially disturb local housing markets, causing housing prices tb increase sharply. This paper reviews conjectures about expected price effects, summarizes evidence from the Housing Assistance Supply Experiment, and explains why the program did not engender the expected price inflation.     

South-north trade and southern growth: Bleak prospects from the structuralist point of view

A three-country, three-commodity model is developed to illustrate the dynamics of growth among the ‘North’, the ‘South’ and ‘OPEC’. One conclusion is that the Southern growth rate will be increased by faster growth of Northern capital, with a steady state response coefficient of unity. However, if the steady state is perturbed by increases in Northern productivity or the oil price, then the coefficient becomes less than one. In the short run, higher capital flows from North to South increase the former's growth rate but may have only marginal impact on growth in the South. Higher productivity in the South will slow its growth rate and reduce its terms of trade when the Engel elasticity of Northern demand for its exports is less than one. These and other results follow from surplus labor in the South and its dependent position in international trade, from which it will be difficult to escape.     

Cereal stocks,food aid and food security for the poor

This paper reviews recent events in world cereals markets, and argues that a significant proportion of the 1972–74 price increases resulted essentially from panic buying by a number of governments which controlled their countries' grain trade. Under these circumstances, a price stabilizing buffer stock would be beneficial, especially for poor countries in conjunction with food aid and emergency relief provisions. However, major producer countries might well lose from price stabilization, and may stand in the way of international agreement on buffer stocks.     

Systemic absorptive capacity: creating early-to-market returns through R&D alliances

For most complex emergent technologies, product-market success depends on efficient linkages between changing lead innovators within the R&D process. In this paper, our unit of analysis is a complex high technology product and the system of alliance linkages formed to progress a product through R&D milestones. We present a model and evidence for advancing our understanding of how achieving early-to-market returns depends on systemic absorptive capacity. This systemic absorptive capacity is the cumulative efficiency in the use of absorptive capacity to link changing lead innovators across successive milestones in R&D product development. We advance propositions of how systemic absorptive capacity can explain performance differences between rival product development systems competing for early-to-market returns with similar products through accelerating speed to market, cost and quality advantages. These explanations are contrasted with the conclusions of previous studies that have focused on absorptive capacity of single firms or single alliances in R&D.     

Competitive Irrationality in Transitional Economies: Are Communist Managers Less Irrational?

Why do marketing managers in the transitional economies of Eastern Europe and China often engage in competitively irrational behavior, choosing pricing strategies that damage competitors’ profits, rather than choosing pricing strategies that improve their firm’s profits? We propose one possible reason, the moral vacuum created by the collapse of communist ideology. We hypothesize and find that managers who experienced formal communist moral ideological indoctrination are less likely to be competitively irrational than the post-communist managers who did not. Implications are discussed.     

The implications of recency and gender effects in consumer response to ambush marketing

So-called ambush marketers, are companies that use clever advertising imagery (and/or ad placement) to link their brand(s) with a major event, in the minds of its audience, without having to purchase the expensive rights fees that event properties often charge for official sponsorship status. This study uses an experimental design to explore certain effects of the ambush marketing strategy. Its focus is on the potential impact of recency (of ad exposure), as well as gender differences, on measures of memory, brand attitude, and behavioral intentions for brands perceived to be official sponsors. Respondents (n-215) were randomly assigned to groups viewing Olympics programming intercut with advertising for either official sponsors or ambush marketers. No statistically significant differences are observed between males and females in their pretest sponsor recall or recognition levels, whereas recency of ad exposure is found to be a significant influence on posttest sponsor awareness in the aggregate. Significant gender differences are detected, however, in attitude toward the brand and purchase intentions for two of three product categories investigated, as females have higher mean scores for those two measures. The implications of these results are discussed and followed by recommendations for event promoters seeking to preserve the value of event sponsorships, along with defensive advertising-strategies to protect the investments of their official sponsors. © 1998 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.