Lead users and the adoption and diffusion of new products: Insights from two extreme sports communities

Lead users are proposed as a valuable resource for marketers in terms of the (1) development, (2) adoption, and (3) diffusion of new products. We present the first consumer study to provide evidence that the latter two suggestions are justified. First, we find that lead users demonstrate stronger domain-specific innovativeness than more “ordinary” users. Second, lead users perceive new technologies as less “complex” and might therefore be better prepared to adopt them. Third, we find that lead users demonstrate stronger opinion leadership and weaker opinion seeking tendencies. Finally, we discuss the implications of our findings for the marketing of new products.     

Property taxes and dynamic efficiency: A correction

According to Kim and Lee (1997), property taxes as opposed to capital gain taxes and taxes on rent endanger dynamic efficiency. The present paper shows that the choice of the tax base is immaterial. What counts is whether the taxes eliminate the after-tax rent. Empirical evidence suggests that this is not the case.     

Comparing Regulations to Protect the Commons: An Experimental Investigation

In a laboratory experiment we test three regulations imposed on a common-pool resource game with heterogeneous users: an access fee and subsidy scheme, transferable quotas and non-transferable quotas. We calibrate the game so that all regulations improve users’ profits compared to free-access extraction. We compare the regulations according to five criteria: resource preservation, individual profits, profit difference, Pareto-improvement from free-access and sorting of the most efficient users. One of the main findings is that, even though it performs better in sorting out the most efficient subjects, the fee and subsidy scheme is not more profitable than tradable quotas.     

Gesundheitsfonds — effizientere Steuerung des Gesundheitssystems?

In 2009 the German central health fund was implemented. It was the result of a political compromise. One political party intended to equalise the risk structure among 130 different health care funds, and the other wanted to intensify competition and to improve efficiency among the different health insurances. The fund is flanked by a health-based risk adjustment and is aimed at sustainably ensuring the funding of the statutory health insurance system. It also constitutes the basis for competition among statutory health care funds, securing quality and efficiency in health care provision. To cover additional expenditures, health insurers had to charge flatrate premiums. A new law, which will come into effect in January 2015, will oblige health insurers to charge income related contributions. It is not clear how this will change competition among insurers. The federal government will not need to finance subsidies to low income individuals anymore. Income redistribution will only take place within the public health insurance system, exempting the privately insured and public servants from supporting low income individuals. The authors claim that the health care fund will not succeed in its aim of securing a sustainable financial basis for the statutory health insurance system. Most of the authors argue that there is no evidence of greater efficiency thus far, and they offer proposals on how to achieve improved performance.     

Was ist von der Familienpolitik der Großen Koalition zu erwarten?

A major evaluation of family policies in Germany came to the primary conclusions that family leave and early childhood education and care policies are effective. Specific German tax regulations, however, are less effective, as they decrease the incentives, especially for mothers, to return to the labour market or increase the number of hours they work. The tax regulations for couples, in particular, should be reformed, as this would offer funding possibilities for other worthwhile policies. However, it should not be forgotten that tax regulations are not just aimed at family policies. Indeed, their primary function is to reduce the burden on families and to keep them out of poverty, as demanded by the Germany Federal Constitutional Court. Given the findings of this evaluation, the new German government plans to implement policies which make sense but which do not go far enough. Public child care has been shown to increase maternal employment, household income and fertility in Germany. There are good reasons to invest further in public child care for young children; however, the focus should not only be on the quantity but also the quality of care.     

How to derive consensus among various marketing journal rankings?

Despite the increasing popularity of journal rankings to evaluate the quality of research contributions, the individual rankings for journals that ranked below the top tier of publications usually feature only modest agreement. Attempts to merge rankings into meta-rankings suffer from some methodological issues, such as mixed measurement scales and incomplete data. This paper addresses the issue of how to construct suitable aggregates of individual journal rankings, using an optimization-based consensus ranking approach. The authors apply the proposed method to a subset of marketing-related journals from a list of collected journal rankings. Next, the paper studies the stability of the derived consensus solution, and the degeneration effects that occur when excluding journals and/or rankings. Finally, the authors investigate the similarities/dissimilarities of the consensus with a naive meta-ranking and with individual rankings. The results show that, even though journals are not uniformly ranked, one may derive a consensus ranking with considerably high agreement with the individual rankings.     

From academic research to marketing practice: Exploring the marketing science value chain

We aim to investigate the impact of marketing science articles and tools on the practice of marketing. This impact may be direct (e.g., an academic article may be adapted to solve a practical problem) or indirect (e.g., its contents may be incorporated into practitioners' tools, which then influence marketing decision making). We use the term “marketing science value chain” to describe these diffusion steps, and survey marketing managers, marketing science intermediaries (practicing marketing analysts), and marketing academics to calibrate the value chain.     

Conservatism correction for the market-to-book ratio and Tobin’s q

We decompose the market-to-book ratio into two additive components: a conservatism correction factor and a future-to-book ratio. The conservatism correction factor exceeds the benchmark value of one whenever the accounting for past transactions has been subject to an (unconditional) conservatism bias. The observed history of a firm’s past investments allows us to calculate the magnitude of its conservatism correction factor, resulting in an average value that is about two-thirds of the overall market-to-book ratio. We demonstrate that our measure of Tobin’s q, obtained as the market-to-book ratio divided by the conservatism correction factor, has greater explanatory power in predicting future investments than the market-to-book ratio by itself. Our model analysis derives a number of structural properties of the conservatism correction factor, including its sensitivity to growth in past investments, the percentage of investments in intangibles, and the firm’s cost of capital. We provide empirical support for these hypothesized structural properties.     

How to make Dupire’s local volatility work with jumps

There are several (mathematical) reasons why Dupire’s formula fails in the non-diffusion setting. And yet, in practice, ad-hoc preconditioning of the option data works reasonably well. In this note, we attempt to explain why. In particular, we propose a regularization procedure of the option data so that Dupire’s local vol diffusion process recreates the correct option prices, even in manifest presence of jumps.