Consuming in one's mind: An exploration

Consumer research generally focuses on the consumption of tangible objects and experiences, which are concrete. However, consumers often consume in their minds by fantasizing, dreaming, or imagining that they possess some desired object or that they are living some experience. In this article, the term consumption dreams is used to refer to mental representations of consumption objects that consumers desire and experiences that they want to realize. These are distinguished from uncontrolled mental activities that occur when asleep. The results of two exploratory studies that examined consumption dreams are presented. In the first study, five adult consumers were asked about their most important consumption dream, as well as the factors that influenced this dream and the behaviors that ensued. The second study consisted of a survey of 195 adult consumers where the determinants and consequences of consumption dreaming were probed. It was found that indulging in consumption dreaming is a common activity among most consumers and that consumption dreams and their characteristics depend on general as well as dream‐based variables. In addition, those dreams were found to impact on several consumer behaviors. A causal model involving a subset of the variables examined in this exploratory research was put forward and tested with the survey data. The results showed the value of a proposed conceptual framework to generate theoretical propositions about consumption dreaming. © 2005 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.     

Public Service Leaders as ‘Change Agents’ – for Whom?

Abstract

This article examines how far senior staff in English educational and health service organizations view themselves as leaders who are ‘change agents’ for government-driven reform and independent change agendas. The contribution of external leadership development provision to shaping these self-perceptions is explored. Special attention is paid to national leadership development bodies with different degrees of formal association with government. Whatever this relationship, such provision and other development support apparently reinforced a strong sense of personal agency (choice of action) associated with being a leader, empowering senior staff to adopt a modestly mediatory stance towards both reform and leadership development provision.     

Identifying and characterising price leadership in British supermarkets

Price leadership is a concept that lacks precision. We propose a deliberately narrow, falsifiable, definition then develop it, illustrate its feasibility and test it using the two leading British supermarket chains. We find both firms engaging in leading prices upward over a range of products, with the larger being initially more dominant but the smaller increasing leadership activity to take overall leadership over time. However, more price leadership events are price reductions than price increases, consistently led by the smaller firm. Nevertheless, the increases are of larger monetary amounts than the falls, so average basket price increases over time.     

Beyond survival: the implementation of new forms of work organization in the UK and German steel industries

This paper outlines and analyses the major changes in work-force organization that have been introduced by British and German steel producers in the past decade, against a backcloth of retrenchment in the industry, new product development and technological change. Including multiskilling, a reduction in demarcation and team–working, these changes have had a major effect upon the composition of the work–force and the nature of work undertaken at the shopfloor level.

While these changes have had a common broad trajectory, they have been introduced at a different pace and in different forms. The contrasts are provided not only at the international level, but between plants in the same countries. The paper further outlines the response of trade unions to these changes and the implications for industrial relations at the shopfloor level.     

Taxation of Foreign Profits with Heterogeneous Multinational Firms

This paper analyses optimal taxation of foreign profits using a model with heterogeneous multinational firms that serve a foreign market through exports or foreign direct investment (FDI). If a firm switches from exporting to FDI, domestic activity and tax payments may decrease, stay constant or even rise because of intra‐firm trade. It turns out that, in contrast to recent claims, in all three cases, the optimal tax system implies full taxation after deduction of foreign tax payments. If the country accounts for the effects of its policy on the foreign price level, the case for taxing foreign income becomes even stronger. However, the globally optimal tax system may require exemption of foreign income from tax.     

Post-Soviet Pension Systems,Retirement, and Elderly Poverty: Findings from the Kyrgyz Republic

MOCT-MOST: Economic Policy in Transitional Economies -     

Using Market Structure to Regulate a Vertically Integrated Monopolist

A natural monopolist whose cost is private information produces a good which is combined with another good that can be produced by the monopolist or by other firms. The agency that regulates the monopolist can impose any of several different market structures in the industry: integrated monopoly, vertical separation with free entry downstream, or liberalization downstream (both integrated and independent production). When several firms produce downstream, a Cournot quantity-setting game with free entry determines the market price. We derive the optimal contracts to offer the monopolist under all three market structures and examine the influence of downstream cost differences on access prices.We then study the optimal regulatory policy where the regulator can condition the downstream market structure on the monopolist's cost report to the regulator. The optimal regulatory policy awards a monopoly to a low-cost upstream firm, but requires free entry downstream if the monopolist reports high upstream costs. Thus, the choice of market structure is an additional tool to limit rent extraction by the monopolist. Simulation analysis reveals the possibility of significant welfare gains from this additional regulatory tool.     

The geography of output volatility

This paper examines the structural determinants of output volatility in developing countries, and especially the roles of geography and institutions. We investigate the volatility effects of market access, climate variability, the geographic predisposition to trade, and various measures of institutional quality. We find an especially important role for market access: remote countries are more likely to have undiversified exports and to experience greater volatility in output growth. Our results are based on Bayesian methods that allow us to address formally the problem of model uncertainty and to examine robustness across a wide range of specifications.     

Do optimal diversification strategies outperform the 1/N strategy in U.K. stock returns?

This paper examines whether optimal diversification strategies outperform the 1/N strategy in U.K. stock returns. The study focuses on the performance of recent strategies developed by Tu and Zhou (2011) and Kirby and Ostdiek (2010). I find that a number of optimal asset allocation strategies can significantly outperform the 1/N strategy even after adjusting for trading costs. The strategies developed by Kirby and Ostdiek outperform the 1/N strategy, even at higher trading costs, due to the low turnover of these strategies. The strategies of Tu and Zhou have mixed performance after adjusting for trading costs due to the high turnover of these strategies. The results of the paper provide support for the use of optimal diversification strategies.     

Regulatory arbitrage and the FERC rate settlement process

We demonstrate that the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission’s (FERC) regulatory procedures for natural gas pipelines, specifically its rate-refund policy, induces regulatory arbitrage that leads to economic distortions. Specifically, we demonstrate that the rate refund policy causes pipelines effectively to “extort” ratepayers through the addition of economically inefficient capital investment, akin to “gold-plating” investments. We estimate the potential magnitude of this arbitrage impact on ratepayers to be between $400 and $700 million annually. Counterintuitively, however, we demonstrate that the presence of this arbitrage opportunity leads to underinvestment in pipeline capacity, thus negating one of the principal purposes of rate regulation. We further demonstrate that FERC could easily eliminate this regulatory arbitrage by setting the refund interest rate to the pipeline’s as-filed weighted average cost of capital.