Profit rates and structural variables in French manufacturing industries

In this paper, the authors apply the theory of industrial organization to the French manufacturing sector. Profit rates of industries and firms are related to concentration on the product market, differentiation, economies of scale, absolute capital cost requirements and to firm sizes. The analysis suggest that concentration on the seller's side may lead to misallocation of resources in industries in which barriers to entry are high. They also suggest that large firms may be less efficient than smaller firms. These results call into question the industrial policy of the French government over the last ten years.     

The multinational corporation vis-à-vis societies in transformation: The case for intermediate technology in the developing countries

There are preciously few problems, no matter how intricate, which—when perceived form more different angles and over more time—do not grow in complexity. Perhaps the most complicated problem that crossed this author's path is the development of Asia, Latin America and Africa.Development to what? As a Dutch economist who sees himself preferably as a socioeconomist, I perceive development as a level of human dignity that requires, a priori, employment. For to be unemployed is to be outside society and to lose face, self-respect and income.As a regional planner for a large multinational corporation—CPC International, Inc.—I have studied in some depth what comes first: education or employment; resources or employment; consumption or production; food or productivity; agriculture or industry; growth or distribution. Having been exposed to these problems in various continents, I have reached the conclusion that employment is, on balance, the number one priority.That priority calls for a highly labor-intensive technology, which in this article is termed “intermediate technology”. It constitutes one phase of development that can create rock-bottom employment, a meager but sure and growing income, and human dignity for one billion marginated people in three continents. That objective requires ingenuous technological forecasting for vital social change.     

Competition for attention in the Information (overload) Age

The Information Age has a surfeit of information received relative to what is processed. We model multiple sectors competing for consumer attention, with competition in price within each sector. Sector advertising levels follow a constant elasticity of substitution (CES) form, and within‐sector prices are dispersed with a truncated Pareto distribution. The “information hump” shows highest ad levels for intermediate attention levels. Overall, advertising is excessive, although the allocation across sectors is optimal. The blame for information overload falls most on product categories with low information transmission costs and low profits.     

Financialization as a strategy of workplace control in professional service firms

Recently, there has been an increased focus on finance as a form of control in corporations. In this paper, we explore financialization as an employee control strategy in a Big Four accountancy firm, and more specifically how it affects the everyday lives of the professionals within the firm. We found financialization involved attempts to transform employees working lives into an investment activity where work was experienced as ‘billable hours’ that are ‘invested’ in the hope of a high future pay-off. Employees sought to increase the value of their investment by skilful manipulation. If wisely managed, this investment could yield significant benefits in the future. We argue that financialization involves active employee participation and is a way of binding other forms of control together.     

The Stochastic Seasonal Behaviour of Natural Gas Prices

Previous studies have explored the seasonal behaviour of commodity prices as a deterministic factor. This paper goes further by proposing a general (n+2m)‐factor model for the stochastic behaviour of commodity prices, which nests the deterministic seasonal model by Sorensen (2002) . We consider seasonality as a stochastic factor, with n non‐seasonal and m seasonal factors. The non‐seasonal factors are as defined in Schwartz (1997) , Schwartz and Smith (2000) and Cortazar and Schwartz (2003) . The seasonal factors are trigonometric components generated by stochastic processes. The model has been applied to the Henry Hub natural gas futures contracts listed by NYMEX. We find that models allowing for stochastic seasonality outperform standard models with deterministic seasonality. We obtain similar results with other energy commodities. Moreover, we find that stochastic seasonality implies that the volatility of futures returns follows a seasonal pattern. This result has important implications in terms of option pricing.     

Hook vs. hope: How to enhance customer engagement through gamification

Many digital service providers have adopted gamification to promote customer engagement. Critical questions, however, remain about the most effective way to enhance customer engagement and increase sales by applying gamification. With a research design that combines qualitative and quantitative methods, including the use of objective sales data from a large field study and replication of the findings across different contexts, this study explores how gamification fosters customer engagement. Both field study results and a simulation study reveal gamification principles (i.e., social interaction, sense of control, goals, progress tracking, rewards, and prompts) that promote hope and consequently increase customer engagement and digital sales. Furthermore, we find that hope is more strongly associated with customer engagement than the psychological condition of compulsion, which even exerts a negative impact. This research thus explores how gamification creates value for customers and provides actionable insights for managers to foster hope through gamification as opposed to get customers hooked.