LEADERSHIP IN CLIMATE CHANGE MITIGATION: CONSEQUENCES AND INCENTIVES

Initiatives in favor of unilateral action on climate change are frequently challenged by concerns over free riding. Nevertheless, we observe an increasing number of unilateral efforts at different administrative levels and in different parts of the world. Previous academic literature described various individual mechanisms where emissions abroad may increase or decrease as a reaction to unilateral emission reductions. In this paper, we collect a comprehensive set of both positive and negative reactions and analyze them in stylized models. This allows us to identify the most important characteristics that determine the potential of a leader to boost mitigation efforts abroad. We find that this potential depends on (i) a strong ability to generate knowledge through leadership, (ii) a high degree of credibility in the international community, and (iii) a similar economic structure to the most important emitters. While most effects are difficult to quantify, this comprehensive assessment suggests that leakage effects resulting from unilateral mitigation may well be outweighed by positive reactions.     

新时代中国区域高质量发展的动力转变方向及形成路径研究

高质量发展已经成为中国经济发展的根本导向。作为经济体系的重要组成部分之一,区域经济的高质量发展要求增强发展动力的均衡性、精准性、融合性、复制性和专业性。其中,由外需动力为主转向内外需动力并重、由所有区域的齐头并进到不同区域的各展所长、由地方竞争的发展速度到区域协调的规模经济、由个体区域的率先发展到个体区域的综合示范、由综合性区域战略到专业性区域政策是动力转型的主要方向,培育具有世界级竞争力的产业集群、细化主体功能区规划、构建共享型的区域利益关系、构建可复制的区域发展路径、完善区域管理制度是实现上述转型的支撑路径。     

粤港澳大湾区创新生态系统内部耦合时空演化及空间收敛分析

在构建以国内大循环为主体、国内国际双循环相互促进的新发展格局下，高效协同的区域创新体系有助于将粤港澳大湾区三地建设成为具有全球影响力的科技创新中心。通过构建创新生态系统综合评价指标体系，采用耦合协调模型和空间计量模型，实证检验大湾区10个城市2007-2019年创新生态系统内部耦合协调水平、时空跃迁特征以及收敛性。研究发现，大湾区整体及各城市耦合协调度呈上升趋势，基本实现从失调衰退区到协调过渡区的转化，具体可划分为4个等级层次；大湾区创新生态系统协调耦合度存在显著的绝对β与条件β收敛趋势，即最终收敛于同一稳态水平，且城市间差距逐渐缩小。其中，经济发展水平、对外交流水平、人力资本水平对创新生态系统协调耦合度起显著正向作用。     

The promise and peril of dynamic targeted pricing

Dynamic pricing is widely adopted in many industries, such as travel and insurance. These industries are also gaining extensive capabilities in identifying and segmenting customers, partly fueled by the increasing availability of data. It is natural to ask whether firms should take advantage of such developments by charging different prices to different customer segments. If so, under what conditions? We seek answers to these highly managerially relevant questions.We consider a market with two customer segments served by a monopolist. The monopolist can choose among a set of pricing strategies to exploit consumers’ inter-temporal preferences and/or inter-segment variations. At one end of the spectrum, the firm can charge a constant price to all customers, which is called static pricing. At the other end of the spectrum, the firm can charge different prices to different customer segments and vary these prices over time, which is referred to as dynamic targeted pricing. We systematically compare these alternative pricing strategies. We show that dynamic pricing without targeting can be more effective than static targeted pricing when customers are not very forward looking, which corroborates the findings in the empirical literature. Interestingly, we find that the monopolist can be worse off when she adopts targeting in addition to dynamic pricing. We conduct laboratory experiments to test several key model predictions. The studies show that individuals behave in a manner consistent with the predictions of our model.     

Relief aid stocking decisions under bilateral agency cooperation

We aim to quantify the benefits of cooperation between humanitarian relief agencies in terms of stocking decisions. We consider two agencies that stock the same type of relief item at different locations prone to individual disaster risks and agree to transship the shortage amount from available stocks in case of a disaster. We incorporate the disaster risk to the Newsvendor model by conditioning the stock quantity decisions on the event that a major disaster occurs within the lifetime of the stocked relief item. We optimize the stock quantity for each agency in response to the other's quantity and compute a Nash Equilibrium solution numerically. We apply this game theoretic approach to the case of earthquake preparedness in Istanbul to optimize the stocking decisions of an agency for shelter units in cooperation with another agency. We investigate the characteristics of the solutions under various parameter settings and identify cases in which cooperation may be beneficial to one or both of the agencies.     

A game theoretic approach for analyzing the competition between national and store brands by considering store loyalty

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Factors influencing consumers' purchase decision-making in O2O business model: Evidence from consumers' overall evaluation

Online-to-offline (O2O) has become a rapidly growing e-commerce model worldwide, but the factors influencing consumers' purchase decision-making have not been examined well. After exploring the working mechanism of the O2O model, we extract eleven indexes of consumers' overall evaluation in the O2O model with Crawlzilla and R techniques. Social network analysis (SNA) is adopted to build social networks reflecting consumers' overall evaluation in the O2O model. Based on the modified social network and the extracted subgraph, this study (N = 768) reveals consumers' overall evaluation behavior patterns in the O2O model by calculating network density, central potential, edge betweenness. The results show that shoppers overall evaluate the eleven indexes, especially perceived product quality, online product price, promotion intensity, business reputation, and product brand, which reflects the significant associations between the indexes. Among all the eleven evaluation indexes, perceived product quality, online product price, and business reputation dominate consumers’ decision-making behavior. When making purchase decisions, consumers not only overall consider online product price, perceived product quality, and business reputation but also balance perceived product quality, business reputation, and promotion intensity. Finally, we make some suggestions on marketing strategy for e-commerce companies.     

Price and quality decisions in a vertically-differentiated supply chain with an “Online-to-Store” channel

Because of the prevalence of “Online-to-Store (OS)” channel, customers can purchase differentiated products online and pick up in-store. We develop a Stackelberg game-theoretic model to study the impact of an OS channel on quality levels, demands, prices, and profits of a manufacturer and a retailer in a supply chain. We assume that the retailer acts as a Stackelberg leader, and the manufacturer acts as a Stackelberg follower. The manufacturer produces and sells two products with vertically-differentiated quality levels to the retailer who in turn sells the products to customers through a Store channel, an Online channel, or an OS channel. The retailer incurs a handing cost if the OS channel is available, and consumers bear a shipping cost and a transaction cost when the products are purchased from the Online and Store channels, respectively. We find that the manufacturer should reduce both products’ quality levels and wholesale prices, whereas the retailer can increase the selling prices for a relatively small shipping cost and a not too small handling cost. When the products are available both online and in-store, however, the quality levels, wholesale prices and selling prices might increase for a small shipping cost and a not too small handling cost. Compared to the case in which both products are available online only with the OS channel, adding the Store channel is always beneficial for both parties. The intuition behind these results hinges on the trade-off between the handling cost and the increased market demand for the retailer. Moreover, the quality levels, the wholesale prices of both products, and the selling price of the low-quality product would decrease, while the selling price of the high-quality product increases for a sufficiently low transaction cost and a not too small shipping cost.     

A game theoretic approach to optimize multi-stakeholder utilities for land acquisition negotiations with informality

To combat the critical stresses of rising urbanization, the government acquires land from private owners using the power of eminent domain. This land assembly causes negative externalities such as increasing social tension and injustice that may impose a long-term threat to stability and sustainable development. Therefore, there is a need to make the land acquisition process more transparent and just. Considering the unique Indian context where informality has a strong presence, we propose an approach based on game theory that models the bargain through a three-stage Nash equilibrium game. Four agents – the government, the private developer, the landowner, and the free rider – are considered. We provide conditional solutions for the generalizable Case and proceed to model different stakeholder behavior patterns through two utility functional forms – linear and exponential. In the linear case, we find that the free rider obtains half of the revenue of the project, whereas the landowner gains between one-fourth and one-half of the revenue. Thus, we highlight the undeniably crucial role free riders play in land acquisition negotiations. However, closed form solutions cannot be obtained for the exponential form, due to which we use simulations to demonstrate a solution procedure. We conclude by stating that the proposed model can be useful in formulating future land policies in a sustainable and inclusive manner, with optimal utility derivations for all concerned stakeholders. Our model can also be extended to other spatial contexts where informality features heavily in the land market, especially in the Global South.     

Pricing,greening, and transparency decisions considering the impact of government subsidies and CSR behavior in supply chain decisions

In this paper, we analytically model different government subsidy strategies in a supply chain manufacturing and selling a green product. We model the interaction between greening degree and transparency level set by a manufacturer and its impact on not only the supply chain, but also consumers and the government. The supply chain is composed of a manufacturer and a retailer. The manufacturer can choose two different strategies. First, he only cares about his production profit; and second, he concerns with CSR in addition to his production profit. We develop a new transparency-based index of consumer satisfaction to model how the market reacts to manufacturer CSR decisions. The government decide three different subsidy strategies. A three-stage Stackelberg game model is developed and solved to analytically derive managerial insights. As a result, if the transparency cost coefficient is sufficiently high, the greening degree and transparency level in CSR concerns strategy are higher than when the manufacturer is not concerned with corporate social responsibility. In addition, when the transparency cost coefficient is sufficiently high, the profit of supply chain members and government are equal in both strategies. We give a real-world example of Iranian brick industry.