Decision Strategy and Structure in Households: A “Groups” Perspective

From a practical perspective, (arguably) most consumer decisions are not made in isolation of the households in which consumers are inserted, yet we commonly treat them econometrically as if they were. The purpose of this workshop was to take some initial steps in defining needed research in household decision making that structurally accounts for goal sharing, utility interdependence, taste heterogeneity, choice set formation, power structures, group size and composition, and so forth. We also considered conditions under which aggregation of tastes, utility and choices might occur and make sense from both behavioral and modeling perspectives.     

Digital distribution and the prohibition of resale markets for information goods

An existing theoretical literature finds that frictionless resale markets cannot reduce profits of monopolist producers of perfectly durable goods. This paper starts by presenting logical arguments suggesting this finding does not hold for goods consumers tire of with use, implying the impact of resale is an empirical question. The empirical impact is then estimated in the market for video games, one of many markets in which producers may soon legally prevent resale by distributing their products digitally as downloads or streamed rentals. Estimation proceeds in two steps. First, demand parameters are estimated using a dynamic discrete choice model in a market with allowed resale, using data on new sales and used trade-ins. Then, using these parameter estimates, prices, profits, and consumer welfare are simulated under counterfactual environments. When resale is allowed, firms are unable to prevent their goods from selling for low prices in later periods. The ability to do so by restricting resale outright yields significant profit increases. Renting, however, does not raise profits as much due to a revenue extraction problem.     

英格兰银行的内幕

蜚声国际的英国中央银行为英国带来了空前的繁荣,但其中却包含着泡沫一个房产泡沫。英格兰银行会使这种繁荣持续下去吗?     

CEO Experience and Diversification Strategy Fit

Recent years have seen major progress on research into the concept of fit. Also emerging in the literature is an apparent interest in the importance of executive know-how and experience. This article combines the two areas by considering the impact of Chief Executive Officer (CEO) experience upon strategy adoption and corporate performance in the post-implementation strategy phase. Using a sample of 52 US companies from the top 1000, we have examined the relationship between CEO experience and the separate strategies of internal and acquisitive diversification. The results suggest that CEO experience is not a major factor in strategy selection but where a fit exists between the selected strategy and observed experience, post-implementation performance is affected.     

Reflections on the 'Realist Turn' in Organization and Management Studies

abstract    This paper has three objectives. First, to provide an exposition of the 'realist turn' in contemporary organization and management studies. Second, to assess the detailed implications of this incipient 'realist turn' for the underlying explanatory principles and practices that should inform organization and management studies as a social scientific field. Third, to evaluate the potential, longer-term, impact of these explanatory principles and practices in an intellectual context where anti-realist ontologies and epistemologies have been dominant. This will entail a critique of contemporary approaches that draw on a social constructionist ontology and a postmodernist epistemology. Overall, the paper concludes that the 'realist turn' creates a significant intellectual opportunity and space in which the historical sociology of dynamic organizational forms and managerial control regimes can be rediscovered and renewed.     

Managerial discretion and internal alignment under regulatory constraints and change

This paper investigates the effects of regulatory constraints and their relaxation on managerial discretion and internal fit in the context of the U.S. airline industry. Our results suggest that when managers' discretion is limited in one realm of choice, they compensate by using their greater level of discretion in some other arena to achieve internal fit. We show that the pursuit of fit matters, in the sense of having measurable efficiency consequences, and that fit trumps ‘best practice,’ at least in this context. In this respect, our findings provide a validation of the contingency perspective on internal fit. The ability to achieve fit under changing conditions may express a dynamic managerial capability necessary for adaptive organizational change. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Monetary Impacts and Overshooting of Agricultural Prices in an Open Economy

This article's focus is on the time adjustment paths of the exchange rate and prices in response to unanticipated monetary shocks. First, we expand the theoretical specification of the overshooting hypothesis by generalizing Dornbusch's model to include a third sector (i.e., agricultural prices). Second, we employ Johansen's cointegration test along with a vector error correction model to investigate whether agricultural prices overshoot in an open economy. The empirical results indicate that agricultural prices adjust faster than industrial prices to innovations in the money supply, affecting relative prices in the short run, but strict long-run money neutrality does not hold.