董事会的战略角色

正如果董事会能够清晰地定义自己在公司内的战略功能,董事会内部、董事会与高管之间的争议将大大减少光怪陆离的世界,商业模式快速遭遇颠覆,新的竞争者层出不穷,为了生存发展,公司高层比任何时候都更加需要战略思维。不幸的是,董事会似乎仍然不知道应该如何在公司里发挥战略性作用。一种极端情况是,董事会就是CEO决策程序里一个橡皮图章;     

Conflicting attitudes and scepticism towards online shopping: the role of experience

Researchers typically study how levels of risk perception about online shopping affect whether and how consumers use the channel to buy products. In this paper, we propose to study how different types of attitudes towards online shopping are formed when consumers consider both the benefit and the risk of using the Internet to do their shopping. We consider the possibility that general types of attitudes are formed when consumers' perception of the risk and the benefit of using online shopping conflict. We pay particular attention to the concept of online shopping scepticism where consumers may fully realize the benefit of using the Internet to do their shopping, but also express a certain level of concern about the risk of using that channel. In the risk literature, researchers have shown that experience and increased exposure to a particular technology usually involves the accumulation of more and better knowledge that in turn may lead to a reduction in the perception of the risks involved. In this research, we also explore the role of experience in the context of consumers' intention to use online shopping. More specifically, we postulate that online shopping experience has a direct effect as well as an indirect effect on the intention to use online shopping. Experience with online shopping directly increases the consumer's intention to use the Internet to buy products but it also reduces the degree of scepticism and risk aversion, and that in turn, also increases the intention to use online shopping.     

How Sensitive are Individual Retirement Expectations to Raising the Retirement Age?

This paper investigates the causal effects of the announcement of an increase in the statutory pension age on employee retirement expectations. In June 2010, the Dutch government signed a new pension agreement with the employer and employee organizations that entailed an increase in the statutory pension age from 65 currently to 66 in 2020 for all inhabitants born after 1954. Given the expected increase in average life expectancy, it was also decided that in 2025 the pension age would be further increased to 67 for those born after 1959. This new pension agreement received huge media coverage. Using representative matched administrative and survey data of public sector employees, we find that the proposed policy reform increased the expected retirement age by 3.6 months for employees born between 1954 and 1959 and by 10.8 months for those born after 1959. This increase is reflected in a clear shift in the retirement peak from age 65 to ages 66 and 67 for the respective treated cohorts. Men respond less strongly to the policy reform than women, but within couples we find no evidence that the retirement expectations of one spouse are affected by an increase in the statutory pension age of the other. Furthermore, we show that treatment effects are largely driven by highly educated individuals but are lower for employees whose job involves physically demanding tasks or managerial and supervisory tasks.     

Iterative Adjustment of Survival Functions by Composed Probability Distortions

We introduce a parametric class of composite probability distortions that can be combined to converge to a target survival function. These distortions respect analytic invertibility and stability, which are shown to be relevant in many actuarial fields. We study the asymptotic impact of such distortions on hazard rates. The paper provides an estimation methodology, including hints for initialisation. Some applications to survival data bring results for catastrophic event impact modelling. We also obtain accurate parametric representations of the mortality trend over years. Finally, we suggest a prospective mortality simulation model that comes naturally from the above analysis.     

Efficient Equilibria in the Voluntary Contributions Mechanism with Private Information

We characterize generally the Bayesian Nash equilibria of a voluntary contributions public goods game for two consumers with private information.The two consumers simultaneously make voluntary contributions to the public good, and the contributions are refunded if the total falls short of the cost of the public good. Several families of equilibria (step‐function, regular and semi‐regular) are studied. Necessary and sufficient conditions for regular and semi‐regular equilibrium allocations to be interim incentive efficient are derived. In the uniform distribution case we prove (i) the existence of an open set of incentive efficient regular equilibria when the cost of production is large enough and (ii) the existence of an open set of incentive efficient semi‐regular equilibria when the cost of production is low enough. Step‐function equilibra are proved to be interim incentive inefficient.     

Buying Back Subcontractors: The Strategic Limits of Backward Integration

In a model where a monopolistic downstream firm (assembler) negotiates simultaneously with each of its n subcontractors the prices of the complementary components which enter its product, we show that backward integration is limited by a strategic negative effect: the prices and profits of independent suppliers increase when a merger reduces their number. Mergers are profitable only if the downstream firm buys at least two thirds of its suppliers. In an endogenous acquisition game à la Kamien and Zang (1990) the only merged equilibrium occurs when there is only one subcontractor. In a sequential acquisition game full integration is not an equilibrium when the number of suppliers is at least five.     

Trade and the location of industries: Some new results

We study a two-country two-sector model with free entry and monopolistic competition where both industries use labour to produce differentiated goods. The two countries are identical except for size. Labour is freely mobile across industries but it cannot move internationally. Transport costs affect both industries. The location of industries and the pattern of trade are the results of the interaction of two effects: the home market effect and the wage differential effect. The main results are: (i) if the two countries are sufficiently close in size and demand elasticities differ across industries (transport costs being equal), a continuous fall in transport costs from a prohibitive level to zero is associated with a reversal in the pattern of trade at some intermediate level. For large transport costs, the large country is a net exporter of the more differentiated good. For lower transport costs, the large country becomes a net exporter of the less differentiated good; (ii) if the two countries are very different in size and demand elasticities differ across industries (transport costs being equal), the larger country is always a net exporter of the less differentiated good.     

Intermarket network externalities and competition: An application to the media industry

Intermarket network externalities occur when the utility of a good produced in a given industry varies with the size of the demand for a good produced in another. A particularly significant example of this phenomenon is provided by the interaction between the media and advertising industries. Media consumers vary according to their willingness to pay for a media good, which depends on the advertising volume. In the advertising market, advertisers vary according to their willingness to pay for an advertisement, which also depends positively on the audience reached. We model a situation of competition between two content providers who are rivals in both the media and advertising industries, choosing simultaneously the newspaper prices and the advertising rates. We characterize the equilibria of the game and explore how they depend on audience attitudes towards advertising. Our main finding is that two-sided interactions may induce exit by one of the media companies from either only the advertising market or both markets.     

Measuring consumer's willingness to pay for organic and Fair Trade products

Previous research has extensively studied consumer's environmental and social concerns. However, measuring the value of the environmental or social dimension of a product remains a challenge. This paper proposes to partially fill this gap by measuring the double ‘Fair Trade and organic’ labels' value using an experimental method – the Becker‐DeGroot‐Marschak's mechanism. Two ‘organic and Fair Trade’ and two conventional chocolate products were tested on a sample of 102 consumers. Results show that organic and Fair Trade labels increase consumers' willingness to pay, and allow the identification of three consumers clusters. The first cluster represents people insensitive to the label. For the second cluster, the ‘organic and Fair Trade’ labels' influence on the improving image of the products is positive and important. And finally, for the third cluster, the valuation of the ‘organic and Fair Trade’ label is determined by the product's taste. Our research contributes to a better understanding of consumers' valuation of Fair Trade and organic labels, leading to our conclusions, which offer managerial implications with respect to this market (importance of taste and usefulness of double labels).