The Effect of Concept Formulation on Concept Test Scores

While concept testing is a mainstay of the new product development process, there is little empirical evidence on the variation in consumer responses due to alternative concept formulations, particularly for those tests undertaken early in the product development process. The present study addressed this gap in the literature by using a split sample mail survey to compare stripped, embellished, and visual concept formulations for five heterogeneous product concepts. It was found that respondents' answers to attitude and purchase intention questions showed only minor variation with different formulations of the concept test statement. It also was found that the ranking of the concepts showed no substantial changes across the different formulations. Therefore, the type of concept statement formulation may not be that important, at least for early ranking tasks performed before experiential prototypes are available. Early concept tests therefore may be carried out using stripped concept statements. This may reduce costs, allowing organizations to undertake early concept testing more frequently across a wider range of products.     

Consistency of UK Pension Fund Investment Performance

Transition matrix techniques are used to relate the past and present performance of pension fund portfolios. In particular, funds are ranked to study the tendency of portfolios to remain in the same quartile of the ranking as they were in the previous period. For raw returns, funds in both of the top quartiles are found to be more likely to remain in the same quartile than would be expected by chance. This result can be taken as limited evidence for the consistency of performance. Similar systemic effects are observed on a risk-adjusted basis. There appears to be clear evidence that some fund managers can offer a degree of consistent good performance.     

Socioeconomic predictors of forest use values in the Peruvian Amazon: A potential tool for biodiversity conservation

Conservation is a crisis discipline requiring rapid action with limited funds. This study examines the potential of socioeconomic variables to predict forest use values. If natural resource use can be predicted from socioeconomic data, conservation planners could rapidly identify and focus conservation programs on the sectors of local populations that most intensively utilize local flora and fauna. Families in three communities in the northern Peruvian Amazon were surveyed over a 6-month period. Data were collected on use of flora and fauna from six locally determined use categories (food, medicine and poisons, wood, weavings, adornments, and “other”) in forest types of three age classes (fallow fields—very young forests, young secondary forests, and old secondary forests). Forest use values were the dependant variables calculated in $/ha/year. Socioeconomic variables included: age, education, family size, residence time, land worked, land owned, number of fishing nets, chickens, pigs, cows, and/or mules owned (all proxies for productive assets), and level of ecological knowledge (ability of informants to correctly identify forest species and answer basic questions about their biology). Ordinary least square multiple regressions were run independently for each forest type. Regressions were also run separately for the two most valuable use categories, food and wood. Low R² adjusted values (all < 0.3) reflect the difficulty in predicting human behavior due to confounding variables and complex interactions. Residence time and a household's community of residence were the most significant predictors of forest use values. Households in Vista Alegre, the community with the highest density of people and smallest landholdings per household, extracted the highest value of forest products per hectare. The longer a family stayed in any community the higher the value of forest goods they extracted. If families that lived in an area longest are the most intensive extractors of forest products, they should be a major focus for conservation programming. In addition, the higher value of products extracted from forests by some families may make them more open to strategies seeking to protect long-term viability of the resources they utilize. The importance of residence time also indicates that planners need to account for changes in the resource use patterns of stakeholders over time.     

Technological convergence, R&D, trade and productivity growth

This paper analyses productivity growth in a panel of 14 United Kingdom manufacturing industries since 1970. Innovation and technology transfer provide two potential sources of productivity growth for a country behind the technological frontier. We examine the roles played by research and development (R&D), international trade, and human capital in stimulating each source of productivity growth. Technology transfer is statistically significant and quantitatively important. While R&D raises rates of innovation, international trade enhances the speed of technology transfer. Human capital primarily affects output through private rates of return (captured in our index of labour quality) rather than measured TFP.     

ADAM SMITH AND THE ROLE OF THE METAPHOR OF AN INVISIBLE HAND

Daniel Klein and Brandon Lucas's ‘In a Word or Two, Placed in the Middle: The Invisible Hand in Smith's Tomes’, following a vague hint by Peter Minowitz (2004) , offers original physical evidence that Smith ‘deliberately placed the phrase “led by an invisible hand”– at the physical centre of both his masterworks’. Further, it suggests that the invisible‐hand paragraphs are a response to Rousseau (1755 ); and that in ‘numerous and rich ways’, centrality holds ‘special and positive significance in Smith's thought’. This paper acknowledges the physical centrality of the invisible‐hand metaphor, but questions whether centrality alone gives weight to wider claims that the ‘invisible hand’ was Smith's ‘central idea’. It draws upon Smith's Rhetoric Lectures (1763), and argues that the invisible‐hand paragraphs in The Theory of Moral Sentiments and Wealth of Nations identify the actual objects of the invisible‐hand metaphor. This paper insists that Adam Smith is the most reliable source for revealing what he meant. In contrast, most modern attributions of special meaning to Adam Smith's use of the metaphor ignore Smith's teaching on the use of metaphors and, instead, make numerous, and often mutually exclusive, claims that Smith had a ‘doctrine’ of ‘an invisible‐hand’.     

An Exploratory Study of Regulatory Failure in the Australian Home Mortgage Market

Regulators have long been interested in protecting consumers borrowing for a home as it is likely the single greatest financial obligation they will undertake. In this paper we examine the approach taken in Australia to mandating the disclosure of simple comparison data to reduce the complexity involved in the home loan decision. This article highlights that while the form of the legislated disclosure significantly improves decision accuracy, the failure of the regulator to account for the consumer's purchase behavior and lenders' motivations has undermined its effectiveness. We provide a number of recommendations for how to rectify these failings, principally that regulators need to consider the role of borrower information search and lender motivation as part of any regulatory reform.     

Futures of Crisis,Futures of Urban Political Theory: Flooding in Asian Coastal Megacities

Coastal megacities across Asia have experienced devastating floods in recent years. Studies project dramatic increases in populations prone to chronic flooding and potential permanent inundation of densely populated urban areas in future decades. The uncertainties presented by future flood risks disrupt prevalent state visions of globalization‐driven prosperity. The emerging reality of a shift in relationship between water and urban settlements has begun driving recalibration of power relations around a range of issues, including longstanding contestations over infrastructure delivery, housing, land rights and political representation. Flood mitigation efforts have played out in debates over displacement and eviction, and distributional concerns about the costs and benefits of these initiatives. This article develops a conceptual framework for assessing the implications of projections of flood risk for urban political theory. The article begins by identifying political contestations that emerge around the varied ways water intersects with urban processes—through dynamics of permeability, flow and drainage, aquifers and pipes, and coastal defense. It then explores how projections of the crisis of flooding have reshaped three contemporary debates in urban politics: those around property rights and the question of ‘informality’; around neoliberalization and financialization; and around the rescaling of the state. Finally, it briefly deploys this framework to examine the case of Jakarta.     

Benevolence,nationalism and hegemony: fifty years of the National Parks and Access to the Countryside Act 1949

This paper reviews the National Parks and Access to the Countryside Act 1949 fifty years since its enactment. The Act is assessed in the light of fifty years of access policy and within the present context of political debates and manoeuvres over the ‘right to roam’. It is concluded that benevolence is still the prevailing attitude towards access provision, maintaining as it does the scope for alternative freedoms and opportunities to exploit land for consumptive practices such as leisure and recreation. As such, it is argued that the notion of the gift (Mauss, 1990) continues to dominate the provision of countryside access in England and Wales.     

Money Demand in Singapore Revisited: A Comment with Implications

This comment reviews the meaning and significance of the econometric results relating to money demand in Singapore in a paper by Daquila and Phua (1993). I argue that there are a number of confusions and faults in their analysis that could account for their results being incompatible with earlier studies and with monetary events in Singapore. An explanation of their perplexing findings is offered, simple re-estimates are made to justify this point and then some implications for economic methodology and research are offered.