Willingness to Pay and the Cost of Commitment: An Empirical Specification and Test

In a static setting, willingness to pay for an environmental improvement is equal to compensating variation. In a dynamic setting, however, willingness to pay may also contain a commitment cost. In this paper we incorporate the dynamic nature of the value formation process into a stated preference study designed to test whether there is an important dynamic component (commitment cost) in stated preference values. The results clearly indicate that stated preference values can contain commitment costs and that these can be quite large: respondents offered the opportunity to delay their purchasing decisions until more information became available were willing to pay significantly less for improved water quality than those facing a now-or-never decision. These results have important consequences for the design and interpretation of stated preference data.     

外部环境影响小企业的成长速度

研究表明．小企业的成长跟它所处的环境和地理位置关系．所以有些地方的小企业成长得很快．而有些地方的许多企业却停滞不前。     

Examining differences in consumer reactions to partitioned prices with a variable number of price components

Partitioned pricing is a tactic in which a seller presents multiple prices for a single product or service instead of one, all-inclusive price. This research investigates effects of partitioned prices containing a variable number of price components, under varying levels of seller trustworthiness, and with or without the presentation of the total price. The results indicate that partitioning into a large number of price components, relative to a small number of price components, negatively affects perceived fairness and purchase intentions for less trustworthy, but not more trustworthy, sellers when the total price is not presented. However, partitioning into a large number of price components positively affects fairness and purchase intentions, regardless of seller trustworthiness, when the total price is presented. The research also examines effects of partitioning on price estimation and recall.     

Valuing high altitude spruce-fir forest improvements: importance of forest condition and recreation activity

High altitude spruce fir forests are typical around the world and are often subjected to multiple forms of recreational use. In this paper, we use household and recreation group data for a spruce fir forest high in the Appalachian Mountains of the U. S. to evaluate the benefits from forest protection (i. e., from improving the forest condition). Our benefits estimation procedures use the referendum-type, contingent valuation (CV) approach of Cameron (1988). We modify the usual practice of obtaining a single willingness-to-pay (WTP) value by using alternative questionnaire scenarios and conducting tests to examine i) household and recreation group value sensitivity to forest condition, and ii) recreation group differences in WTP for forest protection. A first sample of southeastern U. S. households was asked to value a forest protection program for a spruce-fir forest showing no impact from insect disturbance or atmospheric deposition. The second sample was asked to value a protection program for a forest already experiencing impact from insect infestation and air pollution. Logit analysis of the two samples revealed no statistically significant difference in household WTP between the two forest protection programs. Further analysis indicated that consumptive forest users (i. e., hunters and anglers) held forest protection values that were sensitive to a change forest condition, while nonconsumptive forest users (i. e., campers and hikers) held values that were insensitive to the same condition change. Recreation group comparisons revealed that consumptive forest users also held lower values for forest protection than nonconsumptive recreationists. These results demonstrate the importance of estimating public values for forest protection in terms of heterogeneous groups rather than as a homogeneous whole.     

The Effects of Advertising on Mutual Fund Flows: Results from a New Database

We examine 471,000 mutual fund company advertisements from 1997 to 2003 to study advertising's effect on fund inflows. We find advertising is generally ineffective in attracting inflows but was more effective during the bear market despite smaller advertising expenditures during this time. The top 10 advertisers in our sample were most successful in capturing inflows. These companies generated inflows with mutual fund ads; other companies succeeded when advertising their other products and their brand image. Within a fund family, advertising affects the flagship fund differently than the other funds. Sample firms appeared unable to choose correctly between print and TV ads.     

Capabilities, innovation and competitive advantage

This special issue was aimed at advancing the literature examining the role of capabilities in innovation-based competitive strategy. Whilst the innovation literature has over the years moved away from its ‘product innovation’ pre-occupation to capture the role of other forms of innovation in value creation, the capability view has progressed from its ‘rigid’ or ‘static’ view to a ‘dynamic’ view in an effort to capture market dynamism. Despite the recent theoretical advancements the dynamic capability view still lacks a strong empirical base. Contributors to the capability literature over the recent years have adopted multiple research methods to capture capabilities that include cross-sectional designs, case studies and longitudinal studies. Within this backdrop, the articles that were selected for this special issue covers both conceptual and empirical approaches to examine the relationship between capabilities and technical and non-technical innovations and performance outcomes. This essay provides a future research agenda to advance this promising research field. It highlights the need for clearer conceptualizations and development of measures of dynamic capabilities, environmental conditions that underpin the development of dynamic capabilities within the firm and research into the much debated relationship between dynamic capabilities and competitive advantage and organizational performance.     

Rationalizing the International Coffee Agreement virtually

From 1963 to 1989, the International Coffee Agreement controlled world trade in coffee. Like an export cartel, the organization included coffee exporters and importers as members. This paper seeks to understand the behavior of the ICA by treating it as an optimizing entity, which from social choice theory we know to be inherently troublesome. A social choice rule is specified for the ICA that is virtually implementable in Nash equilibrium. The empirical results provide arationalizing argument for the ICA, in the sense that if it sought to maximize the specified criterion function, we would expect it to behave precisely as it did behave.