Consumer sorting and hedonic valuation of wine attributes: exploiting data from a field experiment

This article uses a novel experimental approach to measure consumer willingness to pay (WTP) for wine attributes. We invited customers of a local supermarket who had selected a bottle of wine to purchase to participate in a valuation experiment. Integrating their original wine choice into the experiment, each participant evaluated six alternative wines, generating a rich set of data on willingness to pay and consumer characteristics. The data from the experiment allow us to compare standard shelf price‐based wine attribute valuation estimates with estimates using WTP data and an increasing amount of information about individual consumers. The full model employs individual fixed effects to estimate WTP parameters without bias from consumer sorting or supply side influences. Our WTP estimates for wine attributes differ markedly from previous attribute value estimates. Consumers in our sample display clear and stable preferences for wine varieties, but less clear preferences for appellations. Our results suggest caution is needed in using market prices to estimate parameters of the consumer valuation function for product attributes.     

Product price and performance level in one market or two separated markets under various cost structures and functions

Market characteristics, including intrinsic demand and customer sensitivity on price and product performance level, are distinct at different markets. Comparisons of various product development strategies in one market or two geographically separated markets are conducted for three classes of products: development intensive products (DIPs) with constant unit cost, marginal cost-intensive products (MIPs) with constant fixed cost, and marginal and development intensive products (MDIPs) with non-constant unit cost and fixed cost. Results show that larger demand size, less customer sensitivity on price and/or more sensitivity on performance level lead to more profit, a higher sale price and a not-lower product performance. The customer reservation or the saturation performance level should be generally adopted though the optimal performance level does exist occasionally. Unit cost and/or fixed cost must increase in performance at an increasing rate for the existence of one optimal performance level. Due to the impact of demand size, one high-end (low-end) MDIP or DIP could be introduced into one low-end (high-end) market at a different price if the demand size is significantly large in the low-end market. For DIPs, offering one niche high-end product is not worse than offering the low-end product into two markets. For MIPs with negligible fixed cost, the product line strategy is not worse than the standard product development strategy. Additionally, the product cost reduction approach adopted in one product line has significant effects on the best product development strategy and sequence.     

论电子银行个人结售汇业务的发展及监管

电子银行个人结售汇业务的出现满足了银行外汇业务自主化的需要,为银行外汇业务的创新和发展提供了拓展空间。本文通过深入分析当前我国电子银行个人结售汇业务对银行业及涉外经济的影响,深入剖析外汇监管方面存在的问题,并对此提出建议。     

Monetary policy in open economies: Practical perspectives for pragmatic central bankers

This paper reviews and interprets some of the key policy implications that flow from a class of DSGE models for optimal monetary policy in the open economy. The framework suggests that good macroeconomic outcomes in open economies are possible by focusing inflation targeting that is implemented by a Taylor type rule, a rule that in equilibrium is reflected in the exchange rate as an asset price. Optimal monetary policy will not be able deliver a stationary (‘stable’) nominal exchange rate – let alone a fixed exchange rate or one that remains inside a target zone – because, absent a commitment device, optimal monetary can’t deliver a stationary domestic price level. Another feature in the data for inflation targeting countries that is consistent with monetary policy via Taylor type rule is that it will tend push the nominal exchange rate in the opposite direction from PPP in response to an ‘inflation’ shock—the ‘bad news god news’ result of Clarida and Waldman (2008. Is Bad News about Inflation Good News for the Exchange Rate. In: John Campbell, (Ed.), Asset Prices and Monetary Policy, Chicago: University of Chicago Press), Clarida and Waldman (2014. Bad News About Inflation is Good News for the Nominal Exchange Rate Under Optimal Monetary Policy: DSGE Theory and a Decade of Empirical Evidence). This is so even though in the long run of these models the nominal exchange rate must in expectation obey PPP.     

Optimal inventory and pricing policies for remanufacturable leased products

In this paper we consider a company which leases new products and also sells remanufactured versions of the new product that become available at the end of their lease periods. When the amount of end-of-lease items in stock is not sufficient to meet the demand for remanufactured products, the firm may purchase additional cores from a third-party supplier. We develop a dynamic programming formulation for determining the optimal price of remanufactured products, and optimal payment structure for the leased products. Our objective is to maximize the discounted system-wide profit over a finite horizon. The profit function consists of revenues that are obtained from remanufactured product sales and leasing, remanufacturing and manufacturing costs, inventory holding and shortage costs. We consider a consumer choice based demand model for mapping a potential customer into one of the product segments (a remanufactured product customer or a customer for a leased product with a particular lease period) for a given price/lease payment vector. We explore several properties of the discounted profit function and provide insight on the behavior of pricing and inventory policies. We also investigate the effect of key product characteristics such as deterioration in age, cost of shortage in remanufacturable product inventory, and key market characteristics such as relative willingness-to-pay for buying a remanufactured product and relative willingness-to-pay for leasing a new product on optimal pricing policies through a computational study.     

预售模式下酒店客房定价及最优超售量确定的研究

创新驱动战略下国内服务业的发展取得了长足进步．为服务业提供了完善的预订制度且高效的预订系统，酒店业是一个采用预订系统销售自身产品的典型服务业，其预订流程非常完善。分析了在预售期内带有预订取消现象且预订未取消的旅客随机到达的情况下．构建数学模型就预售期内服务产品的定价及产品最优超售量问题进行了研究。     

Asymmetric exchange rate pass-through in an emerging market economy: The case of Mexico

This paper applies a nonlinear Autoregressive Distribute Lag to examine the exchange rate pass-through into consumer price inflation in Mexico. Overall, the evidence confirmed that ignoring the asymmetric (sign) effect of exchange rate movements on inflation may lead to incorrect inferences and policy conclusions. Exchange rate fluctuation is transferred to prices level more during currency depreciation than appreciation. We compare the macroeconomic performances between pre- and post-inflation targeting, and our findings reaffirmed that the pass-through has weakened significantly after launching inflation targeting in 2001. This result implies that low inflation in the sample period examined is good for Mexico because exchange rate pass-through declines after 2001. Consumer prices have become less responsive to exchange rate movements. We further observe a revival (strengthening) of oil price pass-through to domestic inflation in the post- inflation targeting period.     

Recurrence plots analysis of the CNY exchange markets based on phase space reconstruction

The employment of autocorrelation-based transformation to study the dynamics of the exchange rate system is meaningful because it benefits for chaotic prediction on the basis that the transformation from an exchange rate sequence to its associated autocorrelation sequence is reversible. This paper examines the influence of autocorrelation-based transformation on the systemic dynamics using exchange rates of CNY against different currencies among USD, EUR, JPY, GBP, MYR and RUB. First, we construct recurrence plots of exchange rate return sequences and autocorrelation sequences with a fixed sliding window length of 20. The recurrence quantification analysis (RQA) shows that the exchange rate return sequences exhibit lower degrees of determinism than the autocorrelation sequences. Further, by analyzing the RQA measures with bootstrap techniques and box plots, we reveal that the RQA measures of the exchange rate return systems and the autocorrelation sequence systems are mostly significant, and the vertical structures of recurrence plots of autocorrelation sequences are more sensitive to the shuffles of bootstrap techniques. Finally, we investigate the evolution of RQA measures with the changes of sliding window lengths. The analysis shows that appropriately adjusting the sliding window length can increase the systemic determinism.     

基于可持续增长率的杜邦分析体系的研究

在经济全球化大环境下，企业具有更加多样化的会计信息，也就更需要能全面反映企业业绩的财务分析体系。多年来传统杜邦分析法虽因能系统、全面、直观地反映企业财务状况，提高对财务报表的分析效率，提升经营管理能力而得到企业的广泛应用，但它本身存在着诸多缺陷。针对其局限性，本文引入可持续增长率来改进传统的杜邦分析体系以更加符合现代企业的要求。     

Financial markets with volatility uncertainty

We investigate financial markets under model risk caused by uncertain volatilities. To this end, we consider a financial market that features volatility uncertainty. We use the notion of G-expectation and its corresponding G-Brownian motion recently introduced by Peng (2007) to ensure a mathematically consistent framework. Our financial market consists of a riskless asset and a risky stock with price process modeled by geometric G-Brownian motion. We adapt the notion of arbitrage to this more complex situation, and consider stock price dynamics which exclude arbitrage opportunities. Volatility uncertainty results in an incomplete market. We establish the interval of no-arbitrage prices for general European contingent claims, and deduce explicit results in the Markovian case.