The generality/specificity issue in consumer innovativeness research

The purpose of the present study was to explore the role of personality in shaping consumer innovativeness by testing a model of the hierarchical relationships between a global (broad or abstract) personality trait, its domain-specific manifestation in a consumer context, and overt consumer behavior. A survey of 465 adult consumers measured global innovativeness, domain-specific innovativeness for two product categories (clothing and electronics) and self-reported purchase of new clothing and electronic items. Three hypotheses were tested. First, global innovativeness is more highly correlated with domain-specific innovativeness than it is with the purchase of new items. Second, domain-specific innovativeness is more highly correlated with the purchase of new items than is global innovativeness. Finally, the association between global innovativeness and new product purchase is mediated by domain-specific innovativeness. All three hypotheses were supported for both product categories.     

Effective regulation versus tacit collusion in the long-distance market: an empirical analysis

Regulatory decisions often must be made in an atmosphere of uncertainty, and arguments presented by the affected parties frequently add to, rather than resolve, that uncertainty. Here, we examine several of the deregulatory decisions affecting the long-distance market that were rendered by the FCC over the two-decade period following the divestiture of AT&T. Our purpose is to provide empirical evidence relevant to some of the arguments regarding market conditions that were presented during that period. Findings suggest that some of the more prominent allegations are not supported by the data.      

Modularity and productivity: Assessing the impact of digital technology in the U.S. telecommunication industry

This article investigates the impact of digital technology diffusion on the productivity of firms making up the local operating sector of the U.S. telecommunications industry for the years 1991 to 1993. Diffusion of digital technology is measured as the extent of line digitalization that has taken place, with digitalization expected to enable firms to reap significant operating efficiencies. While the diffusion of this particular technology in the local operating company sector has been relatively low, it is found that, after controlling for the effects of a number of other covariates also likely to affect firm-level performance, the spread of digital technology within the U.S. local telephone network plays a significant and positive role in impacting productive efficiency of the firms making up the network. The investments that have been made in energizing the U.S. information superhighway, via the digitalization of telephone lines, are justified in productive efficiency terms. The article contributes to empirical literature in the technical change area which assesses the firm-level productive efficiency consequences of technology diffusion.     

Diffusion of innovations in globally stable Walrasian equilibrium

When all products in the economy are weak gross substitutes, preferences are homothetic, and firms face menu costs then all prices in an industry move together at the same rate. In the closed-loop Nash noncooperative equilibrium, all firms invest in productivity and reduce real prices. As a result, in the case of quadratic menu costs, the outputs of industries and the economy go up along S-shaped time paths characteristic of diffusion of innovations.     

Social learning with private and common values

Summary. We consider an environment where individuals sequentially choose among several actions. The payoff to an individual depends on her action choice, the state of the world, and an idiosyncratic, privately observed preference shock. Under weak conditions, as the number of individuals increases, the sequence of choices always reveals the state of the world. This contrasts with the familiar result for pure common-value environments where the state is never learned, resulting in herds or informational cascades. The medium run dynamics to convergence can be very complex and non-monotone: posterior beliefs may be concentrated on a wrong state for a long time, shifting suddenly to the correct state.Received: 6 January 2005, Revised: 5 May 2005, JEL Classification Numbers: C72, D82.Jacob K. Goeree: Correspondence toFinancial support from the National Science Foundation NSF (SBR-0098400 and SES-0079301) and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation is gratefully acknowledged. We thank Richard McKelvey posthumously for insights and conjectures about information aggregation that helped shape our thinking about the problem. We also acknowledge helpful comments from Kim Border, Tilman Börgers, Bogachen Celen, Luis Corchon, Matthew Jackson and seminar participants at University College London, the University of Arizona, Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona, the California Institute of Technology, the 2003 annual meeting of ESA in Pittsburgh, the 2003 Malaga Workshop on Social Choice and Welfare Economics, the 2003 SAET meetings in Rhodos, and the 2003 ESSET meetings in Gerzensee.     

A network experiment in continuous time: The influence of link costs

In recent work on non-cooperative network formation star-shaped networks play an important role. In a particular theoretical model of Bala and Goyal (2000) center-sponsored stars are the only strict Nash networks. In testing this theoretical model, Falk and Kosfeld (2003) do not find experimental evidence that players select the center-sponsored star. Based on a slight modification of Bala and Goyal’s model, we design a network formation experiment in which, depending on link costs, periphery-sponsored stars and the empty network are the only strict Nash networks. We observe that almost all groups not only reach a strict Nash network once but also switch the center player in periphery-sponsored stars several times. The main innovation in our experiment is to use a continuous time framework which we believe to be a more realistic setting to study behavior in network formation situations and which makes coordination on stars much easier than simultaneous strategy adaptation in discrete time. Electronic Supplementary Material Supplementary material is available in the online version of this article at http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10683-006-9125-1. JEL Classification C72 · C92 · D81     

Stability and agreement criteria for the termination of Delphi studies

This paper addresses the question of the methodology of testing for stability between successive Delphi rounds and the necessity of doing so prior to the analysis of the level or type of consensus. Following a discussion of a hierarchical set of a criteria for determining the termination of such studies, the paper reviews some of the more common treatments of the subject in the literature. It is finally proposed that a χ² test be used to test the stability of responses between rounds. The method is demonstrated by a numerical example.     

Bank lending rules for managing sovereign risk

A simple domestic lending rule is one that ensures that the loan rate exceeds the bank's cost of capital and the borrower's expected cashflows exceed the terminal value of the loan. Because a sovereign loan is not collateralized and lacks recourse, the domestic lending rule is not adequate for making sovereign lending decisions. Three modifications are suggested. First, the sovereign borrower's time preference for consumption needs to be considered. Second, the domestic borrower's decision to default voluntarily is made after observing the value of the collateral whereas the sovereign borrower's decision is made after observing earnings. In this paper, the sovereign borrower upgrades expectations in a Bayesian manner. Although no lending rule will completely prevent a default, the probability of default can be managed leading to a third modification.     

Mokken scale analysis for polychotomous items: theory,a computer program and an empirical application

This paper contains three subjects. First, an extension of Mokken's nonparametric item response models from dichotomous items to items with two or more ordered answer categories is proposed. Second, a computer program to analyze multicategory item scores is presented. This program is called MSP. The analyses by means of MSP are based on the multicategory extension of Mokken's theory. Finally, an application of MSP to empirical multicategory test data is presented in order to illuminate its possibilities.