Hey DJ,don’t stop the music: Institutional work and record pooling practices in the United States’ music industry

Abstract

Heeding calls to generate a creative synthesis between business history and organisation studies, this article analyses the emergence, institutionalisation and digitalisation of record pooling practices through the lens of institutional work. By developing an ‘analytically structured history’, this article contributes to the field of business history by demonstrating the value of practice and boundary work as organising categories. Practice and boundary work capture the continuous, recursive relations between structure and agency when constructing narrative explanations. It also contributes to neo-institutionalist history by demonstrating the embeddedness of institutional work – the everyday motivations and actions to revise practices and boundaries are shown to be intimately shaped by the conditions and affordances of historically-situated technologies.     

Managing Service Expectations in Online Markets: A Signaling Theory of E-tailer Pricing and Empirical Tests

Expectations play a significant role in determining customer perceptions and satisfaction. Accordingly, retailers seek to manage customers’ service expectations. However, the tangible signals of service quality that are available to brick-and-mortar retailers (such as location, store appearance, and salespersons’ behavior) may not be available in online markets. Using a signaling model, we obtain conditions when Internet retailers (e-tailers) use price to manage their customers’ service expectations. In contrast to extant theory, we find that it is possible for both low and high service e-tailers to use price in signaling their service levels. Further, we develop an appropriate deductive test of our theory based on price-ending patterns as an artifact of the signaling process. Based on this test, we find evidence that e-tailers indeed manage service expectations using price. Interestingly, we also find preliminary evidence that suggests customers implicitly associate price-ending patterns with a retailer's expected service level. We discuss several other implications of our findings for researchers and managers.     

Pooling forecasts in linear rational expectations models

Estimating linear rational expectations models in a limited-information setting requires replacing the expectations of future, endogenous variables either with instrumented, actual values or with forecast survey data. Applying the method of Gottfries and Persson [Empirical examinations of the information sets of economic agents. Quarterly Journal of Economics 103, 251–259], I show how to augment these methods with actual, future values of the endogenous variables to improve statistical efficiency. The method is illustrated with an application to the US hybrid new Keynesian Phillips curve, where traditional, lagged instruments and the median forecast from the Survey of Professional Forecasters both appear to miss significant information used by price-setters, so that forecast pooling with actual values improves the statistical fit to inflation.     

改革前后我国基本养老保险社会统筹的公平性研究

本文考察了我国九大行业有代表性的个人参加基本养老保险社会统筹所获得的内含报酬率以及基础养老金的替代率,发现:无论是改革前还是改革后,低收入行业的内含报酬率和绝对替代率都要高于高收入行业;与改革前相比,改革后九大行业基础养老金的替代率,以及社会统筹部分的内含报酬率都有了显著提高;从九大行业的整体来看,改革后绝对替代率的离散系数小于改革前。我国基本养老保险社会统筹部分发挥了一定程度的收入调节作用,缩小了各行业之间的基础养老金差距。     

Cost-effective pallet management strategies

The existing industry strategies for managing pallets, (single-use expendable pallets, buy/sell programs, and leased pallet pooling programs), are analyzed and compared using push and pull inventory control policies. A two-stage integrated framework is developed that combines cost relationship models with data gathered in industry with multi-echelon inventory performance measures. For the base case, the single-use expendable pallet approach presents the least cost of all strategies, but the leased pallet pooling programs outperform the buy/sell programs in terms of total cost. The intervals where each strategy is most attractive are shown with respect to pallet cost, salvage cost, dwell fees, effective issue fees, retention rates, and transportation costs.     

Combining Probability Distributions by Multiplication in Metrology: A Viable Method?

In measurement science quite often the value of a so‐called ‘output quantity’ is inferred from information about ‘input quantities’ with the help of the ‘mathematical model of measurement’. The latter represents the functional relation through which outputs and inputs depend on one another. However, subsets of functionally independent quantities can always be so defined that they suffice to express the entire information available. Reporting information in terms of such a subset may in certain circumstances require aggregating probability distributions whose arguments are interrelated quantities. The option of aggregating by multiplication of distributions is shown to be susceptible of yielding inconsistent results when the roles of inputs and outputs are assigned differently to the quantities. Two alternatives to this practice that do not give rise to such discrepancies are discussed, namely (i) logarithmic pooling with weights summing to one and (ii) linear pooling, of which the former appears to be slightly more favourable for applications in metrology. An example illustrates the inconsistency of results obtained by distinct ways of multiplying distributions and the manner in which these results differ from a logarithmically pooled distribution.     

The role of income pooling and decision-making responsibilities in material deprivation

This paper analyzes to what extent family arrangements are linked to the level of household material deprivation. This key dimension of individual well-being is defined as the enforced inability to afford financial expenses, durable goods, and adequate housing conditions. We define family arrangements in terms of the degree to which resources are pooled and the main decision maker. Using the EU-SILC dataset, we find that households where decision-making responsibilities fall chiefly on females have lower deprivation levels regardless of the degree of income pooling. In contrast, greater levels of deprivation are more likely in households where decisions are shared and resources are not fully pooled. These findings highlight the importance of integrating family arrangements in the design of actions and initiatives aimed at reducing inequalities and improving the general welfare of the economy.     

社会养老保障制度城乡一体化路径探析——以嘉兴市新农保试点为例

新型农村社会养老保障试点的推行,是统筹城乡社会保障的重要路径。文章以嘉兴试点为例分析浙江新农保推行状况,基于宏观角度,从提高城乡养老保障统筹层次,扩大政府筹资来源,完善基础养老金补贴制度安排,调节养老保障缴费基数实现新农保和职工养老保障对接等方面思考,提出建议加快新农保覆盖速度,以推进新农保的试点和推广。     

连锁企业大规模订单采购中的延迟策略研究

本文由大规模定制订单运作引出延迟策略，就其基本理论和分类模式进行了阐述，重点剖析了这一策略在连锁企业上的适用条件和应用时的关键所在，并基于跨产品风险共担理论，通过案例，定性分析了连锁企业如何运用延迟策略解决供应链成本问题。     

Cream Skimming, Dregs Skimming, and Pooling: On the Dynamics of Competitive Screening

We discuss the existence of a pooling equilibrium in a two-period model of an insurance market with asymmetric information. We solve the model numerically. We pay particular attention to the reasons for non-existence in cases where no pooling equilibrium exists. In addition to the phenomenon of cream skimming emphasized in earlier literature, we here point to the importance of the opposite: dregs skimming, whereby high-risk consumers are profitably detracted from the candidate pooling contract.