Rio+20: Looking Back at 20 Years of Environmental and Resource Economics

Twenty years on from the Rio ’92 conference, we must face the fact that there have been a few successes but more failures. Scientific complexity, uncertainty, short-termism inherent in politics, the free-rider problem, and issues of fairness are part of the explanation for the lack of progress, but we point to more fundamental motivational problems. It is time to assess our responsibility as economists in the field of environment and resources. Our scientific contribution has been misleading because our models are structurally incapable of addressing major concerns. The cost-benefit test is not fit to assess large-scale resource conservation projects, including climate abatement. This understanding was already present during the Rio ‘92 summit, but the problems, while identified, have not been resolved twenty years later. The contribution from theory, through the sustainability paradigm of non-decreasing welfare, has turned out ineffective. It does not provide us with tools for designing a better future for our children. Instead, it risks choosing a constant welfare path, with knowledge increasing but natural resources deteriorating, while not properly analyzing the richer possibilities for a better future that nature and creativity imply. It is time for our profession to search for a more constructive contribution in theory and practice.     

Cooperative Strategy,Technology Innovation and Competition Policy in the United States and the European Union

The widespread adoption of joint ventures in the 1980s and strategic alliances in the 1990s by a spectrum of businesses across industries has resulted in cooperative strategy emerging as the corporate and business strategy of the global economy. Of further significance, however, is the relaxation by antitrust authorities in the USA and the EU of policies forbidding or restricting horizontal or competitor collaborations. Beginning in the 1980s, legislation, regulations and guidelines have established a business environment conducive to competitor collaborations. This evolution in competition policy is justified by the need for accelerating technology-based innovations at the firm level, thus improving competitiveness at the national level. The US government and the European Commission have provided firms with "safe harbors' to develop strategic technology alliances with competitors, albeit with notable differences in specific market share thresholds and emphases on qualitative versus quantitative perspectives in their respective competition policy frameworks.     

Kynecting the Dots: How Kentucky’s Willingness to Loosen the Reins Sparked a Health Insurance Enrollment Race in the Bluegrass State

The development of health insurance exchanges within the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA) legislation is one of the hottest health policy issues of this decade. With the surprise enrollment success of Kentucky’s exchange called “Kynect,” the influence of how marketing and branding have contributed to the embrace of the policy has garnered interest from scholars and practitioners alike. Driven by the utilization of in-depth interviews, this study found that Kynect’s success was aided by three emergent themes: frequent communication between the outsourced marketing firm, Doe-Anderson, and relevant stakeholders; the willingness to delegate all marketing and branding control to Doe-Anderson; and a multiparty commitment to developing and executing a campaign that would simultaneously adhere to public values and accentuate a feeling of localness to constituents across the state. The paper contributes to existing literature by providing an inside look at how a government can find marketing success against historical odds.     

Socio-Institutional Environment and Innovation in Russia

This article investigates the impact of social capital and institutions on innovation outcome in Russian regions in 1997–2011. The novelty of the article also lies in the use of two metrics of innovation: the number of new technologies developed and patents filed. The findings provide strong support for the argument that social capital (proxied by social tension) and institutions (proxied by institutional potential) influence innovation activity. Furthermore, different types of innovation outcome are affected differently: the effect of social tension on technology development is significantly negative but insignificant with patenting, while institutional potential affects patenting negatively but its effect on technology development is insignificant.     

Communication costs in the performance of unrelated tasks: Continuum models and finite models

We consider two two‐person organizations, called A and B. Each organization faces a changing environment; an environment has two components and each of them is privately observed by one of the organization's two members. Each organization's task is to respond to the current environment by taking a correct action; the correct action is a known function of the environment. However, the task of A is totally unrelated to the task of B: if A knew B's current environment and B's current correct action, that would tell A nothing at all about its own current correct action (and vice versa). Now suppose that each organization performs its task by a sequence of message announcements that stop when an “action‐taker”; has just enough information about the two members’ private observations so that he can take the correct action. Suppose we measure the effort this requires by the size of the set of possible message announcements. Then a compelling conjecture says that there can be no saving in total effort if we merge the two organizations into a single four‐person organization in which a single action‐taker takes both actions.

The conjecture turns out to be true when the possible messages form a continuum whose size is measured by its dimension, provided the message‐announcing procedure obeys suitable regularity conditions. When we turn to a model in which the number of possible messages is finite, the situation is different. While a certain general proposition about coverings and projections is the main tool in proving the “continuum”; conjecture, the finite analog of that proposition is (surprisingly) false. The finite version of the conjecture holds, on the other hand, when one adds a certain regularity requirement ("contiguity") to the message‐announcement procedure. The truth of the finite conjecture without such a requirement remains open.     

Non‐Recognition of Print Advertising: Emotion Arousal and Gender Effects

Research in the behavioral sciences has found that memory tends to be enhanced by exposure to emotion‐arousing stimuli. While this relationship is not fully understood, the linkage appears to be more pronounced for females than for males. While the majority of prior studies dealing with memory have relied on the use of visual stimuli in a clinical experimental setting, this research examined the impact on memory resulting from exposure to actual print advertisements of varying degrees of arousal‐producing content. Differences in the relationship between arousal and memory were explored for male and female participants. In general, females were found to exhibit higher memory levels than males. As a single combined group, subjects exposed to emotion arousing versus emotion neutral ad. stimuli exhibited no significant difference in memory. For the set of emotion neutral ad. stimuli, no difference in memory was found between sexes. However, retention was significantly higher for females than males for the set of emotion‐arousing stimuli. The study identifies opportunities for further applied memory research.     

A content analysis of male roles in television advertising: Do traditional roles still hold?

Analysis of male roles in television advertising is limited. In order to remedy this, our research serves as a catalyst by providing a review of the current literature, conducting a preliminary examination of male roles in television advertising, and discussing ways for this area of research to move forward in the future. Specifically, the study conducted in this paper examines television advertising to provide insight on the depiction of males, the portrayed relations between males and other individuals, and how these depictions may have changed from 2003 to 2008. Male depictions in lead roles are contrasted using 907 primetime commercials from 2003 and 961 commercials from 2008 from the four major US broadcasting networks (ABC, NBC, CBS, and FOX). Results suggest that some aspects of male depictions in advertising are counter to, while other aspects are reflective of, the changing gender roles occurring in society.     

Techno-economic modeling of value network configurations for public wireless local area access

The growing amount of mobile data traffic increases the demand for local area network deployments, and therefore is likely to have an effect on the mobile communications ecosystem. Several alternative value network configurations exist giving new business opportunities to different actors, but the attractiveness and success of local area access provisioning remains uncertain. This article analyzes the business of public local area access from the point of view of two potential providers: service application providers, i.e. companies whose core business is to provide information and content services in the Internet, and mobile operators. A quantitative techno-economic model is constructed to quantify the costs and required revenues of operating viable public local area access networks. The results show that the revenue requirements vary between public venue types and value network configurations.     

Investment Flows,Economic Growth,and Corruption in African Countries: An Analysis

ABSTRACT

The analysis of corruption in international business is a relatively new phenomenon, and for the past two decades, many studies have attempted to capture the economic impact of the corruption in a country. However, most of these studies have concentrated their analysis to the experiences of the developed countries. None or very few of the current works have addressed the corruption issue in the context of foreign direct investment and economic growth in the developing countries. This work examines theoretically, as well as empirically, the incidence of corruption in the context of foreign direct investment in the developing countries, especially several African countries that signed a treaty to reduce the incidence of corruption in their respective countries.     

Managing the Dilemma of Discretion: The European Commission and the Development of EU State Aid Policy

This article examines the role played by the European Commission in the development of the European Union’s (EU) state aid policy. It does so through the prism of a “dilemma” that exists at the nexus of the Commission’s delegated authority to administer EU treaty state aid provisions, the discretion conferred on Commission authorities by the imprecise language in which those provisions are written, and the political and institutional control mechanisms EU member governments use to influence the exercise of that discretion. Examining Commission efforts to manage this dilemma over the history of the EU, we provide evidence to illustrate how the Commission’s approach adapted to shifting economic and political conditions.