Population aging,consumption budget allocation and sectoral growth

This paper assesses the heterogeneous effects of population aging on personal budget allocation across sectors. Using China's household survey data, we break down each household expenditure component into its constituent members. We find consistent and robust age profiles of the composition of personal consumption expenditures. Young people spend larger proportions of their budget on food and education, culture, and recreation services. The middle-aged spend significantly more on clothing and transportation and communication. Lastly, the elderly spend substantially more on food and health care and medical services. After controlling for period and cohort effects as well as other socio-economic factors, we still find age to be a fundamental driver of consumption budget allocation. We also incorporate the estimated results into the population forecast data and predict the evolution of China's consumption budget allocation patterns driven by demographic change.     

Creating shared views of customers: Individuals as sense-makers in multinational companies

Global suppliers' relationships with their global customers tend to be complex, as each consists of multiple geographical, technological and functional units. For a supplier to manage these customer relationships, some shared views of each relationship are likely to be needed for consistency of activities. This creates a need within supplier MNCs to make sense of customers. This research focuses on sense-making by individuals in supplier MNCs. It considers individuals acting in the sense-making process a means of creating shared views. A qualitative process research strategy is utilized to uncover this process. As a result, this research recognizes four mechanisms, defined as individual-level behavioral patterns, for creating shared supplier views of the customer: defining, linking, triggering and creating. Furthermore, the study defines the triggers that cause individuals increasingly to share similar or dissimilar views of the customer. These triggers are recognized at different levels of management: within the MNC (i.e., internal cooperation, shared projects, limited customer contacts), at the customer-relationship level (i.e., previous cooperation with the customer) and at the network level (i.e., involvement of third parties).     

Sharing ambiguous risks

We analyse risk-sharing when individuals perceive ambiguity about future events. The main departure from previous work is that different individuals perceive ambiguity differently. We show that individuals fail to share risks for extreme events. This may provide an explanation why we do not observe individuals buying insurance for certain events like hurricanes or earthquakes and why many contracts contain an “act of God” clause, which allows non-performance if an unforeseen event occurs.     

Analyzing travel mobility patterns in city destinations: Implications for destination design

Understanding the features of travel activities is important in elaborating travel behaviors and segmenting travelers based on the similarity of activity patterns. This research applying mobile big data analytics suggests a novel method to classify travelers by considering the sequences of travel activity with individuals' trajectories. The result revealed five distinct travel types visiting city destinations and demonstrated dynamic travel flow among different mobility types. Recognizing that different types of travel patterns present important information in understanding destinations’ roles (or functions), this study attempts to characterize the functionality dynamics of city destinations based on travel activity types. As a result, the findings of this research provide insights into the demand-driven construct (or flow-based) of destination planning, which is the foundation of smart destination design. In addition, important methodological and practical implications that could be useful for city destination planners/designers are suggested.     

Bank ownership of multilateral trading facilities and implications for historical exchanges: An industrial economics approach

The aim of this paper is to address bank ownership in Multilateral Trading Facilities (MTFs) and its implications for historical exchanges. We propose an oligopoly model with network effects to account for an exchange industry that consists of two MTFs and an historical exchange. Based on the observation that banks are both owners and clients of MTFs, we examine banks' incentive to influence the pricing policy of MTFs. We show that when brokerage and trading activities are particularly important for banks' revenue relative to their profit as MTF operators, certain market outcomes may emerge whereby both MTFs include banks' interest as clients in their objective function. We also demonstrate that accounting for banks' interest in MTFs' objective function acts as a competitive device that reduces the price and the profitability of the historical exchange.     

TFP growth slowdown and the Japanese labor market in the 1990s

Unemployment in Japan nearly tripled during the 1990s. Underlying this upsurge lie an increase in the probability of workers to lose their jobs and a decrease in the probability that the unemployed find jobs. This paper analyzes the sources responsible for these labor market changes in Japan in the decade of the 1990s. We build, calibrate, and simulate a neo-classical growth model with search frictions in the labor market. Using actual TFP data, the model is able to reproduce the path of unemployment and the job flows, as well as that of output. We find it to be the decrease in productivity, coupled with the reduction in hours worked, which curtails the profits of firms, inducing a drop in employment and an increase in unemployment.     

Understanding the older shopper: A behavioural typology

With regard to the contemporary retail environment, to date, the older shopper has been afforded limited academic attention, which is somewhat surprising given the growth of this population in the UK. Consequently, this study presents an empirically derived typology of older grocery shoppers through the application of salient retail attributes and store image dimensions developed through extensive qualitative research techniques. The findings provide an important contribution towards better understanding differences in shopping behaviour amongst older consumers. The identification of six distinct shopper types, including three new distinct groups, contributes to theory, whilst a number of potential implications for retail managers are explored in light of the findings.     

Out-of-town shopping and its induced CO2-emissions

Planning policies in several European countries have aimed at hindering the expansion of out-of-town shopping centers. One argument for this is concern for the increase in transport and a resulting increase in environmental externalities such as CO₂-emissions. This concern is weakly founded in science as few studies have attempted to measure CO₂-emissions of shopping trips as a function of the location of the shopping centers. In this paper we conduct a counter-factual analysis comparing downtown, edge-of-town and out-of-town shopping. In this comparison we use GPS to track 250 consumers over a time-span of two months in a Swedish region. The GPS-data enters the Oguchi's formula to obtain shopping trip-specific CO₂-emissions. We find that consumers’ out-of-town shopping would generate an excess of 60 per cent CO₂-emissions whereas downtown and edge-of-town shopping centers are comparable.