The Information Revolution in the Asian-Pacific Region

In this paper, an attempt is made to survey literature dealing with these developments in the Asian-Pacific region. Section I explores the information sector. Section II focuses on telecommunications, the leading edge of the information infrastructure. Section III reviews writing about 'IT-led development', the view of information technology as a powerful tool for the promotion of socioeconomic development. Section IV looks at the role of the World Bank, the largest single hard-currency source of finance for telecommunications in developing countries. Section V reports on some aspects of IT trade and internationalisation. Section VI provides summary country case studies. Section VII raises some questions about the link between telecommunications and economic development.     

Accounting for Animal Welfare: Addressing Epistemic Vices During Live Sheep Export Voyages

Journal of Business Ethics - In this research, we develop a reporting framework based on an ethical account of the Australian live sheep export (LSE) industry’s current operations. We...     

Sustainability accounting—a brief history and conceptual framework

Research linking accounting to the emerging concept of sustainability surfaced in the early 1990s and has received continuing attention in academic and professional accounting literature. This paper tracks this brief history through to the release of the Sustainability Reporting Guidelines at the World Summit on Sustainable Development in August 2002, consolidating the various approaches into a sustainability accounting framework. The result is a comprehensive reporting model that presents an enormous challenge to business organisations, requiring a significant commitment of resources to achieve widespread implementation. Failure to meet this challenge enables business organisations to continue to avoid accountability for their continuing unsustainability. The paper concludes with a personal view as to how implementation of the sustainability accounting framework could proceed.     

Telecommunications in the Pacific region: Impact of a new regime

In many developed countries there has recently been serious erosion of the monopoly position of national telecommunications authorities. Such authorities have long found difficulty in adjusting to the furious pace of electronics technology. The private sector may find less difficulty and should benefit as both user and provider of new information services. However, there are likely to be costs involved, and those who have traditionally made least use of telecommunications seem destined to bear the bulk of these costs. In developed countries, this may be unfortunate: in developing countries, the consequences could be much more serious.     

Exercise boundary of the American put near maturity in an exponential Lévy model

We study the behavior of the critical price of an American put option near maturity in an exponential Lévy model. In particular, we prove that in situations where the limit of the critical price is equal to the strike price, the rate of convergence to the limit is linear if and only if the underlying Lévy process has finite variation. In the case of infinite variation, a variety of rates of convergence can be observed: we prove that when the negative part of the Lévy measure exhibits an α-stable density near the origin, with 1<α<2, the convergence rate is ruled by $\theta^{1/\alpha}|\ln \theta|^{1-\frac{1}{\alpha}}$ , where θ is the time until maturity.     

How Economic Tropes Affect Attitudes Toward Social Welfare Policies

We offer a framework for understanding public responses to social programs designed to alleviate disadvantages experienced by some sectors of the U.S. population. The framework is built on 2 key tropes of generalized exchange theory: mutuality and possessive individualism. Using the Affordable Care Act (ACA) as a public sector context, we show how marketing messages can be manipulated to affect consumer likelihood to participate in and support the public policy. Consistent with cognitive attitude models, we find that beliefs regarding individual and mutual benefits are significant, positive predictors of ACA attitudes. In contrast, when messages are framed with ideological economic tropes—possessive individualism or mutuality—ACA attitudes diverge. Priming possessive individualism negatively affects program attitudes relative to a mutuality prime or a no-prime control condition. We conclude with policy advice for those tasked with effective implementation of public sector programs.     

The critical price for the American put in an exponential Lévy model

This paper considers the behavior of the critical price for the American put in the exponential Lévy model when the underlying stock pays dividends at a continuous rate. We prove the continuity of the free boundary and give a characterization of the critical price at maturity, generalizing a recent result of S.Z. Levendorskiǐ (Int. J. Theor. Appl. Finance 7:303–336, 2004).      

Consumers' response to promotional gifts: The role of gender,transactional value,and reciprocity

Gifts received with the purchase of a focal product are widely used as a tool aimed at incentivizing sales. Yet, marketers still face many questions related to the effectiveness of this promotional technique. In this paper, we examine whether customer's gender—a variable that is managerially relevant and often collected for targeting and positioning purposes—influences the success of gift promotions. Using novel data from a car rental company, we show that promotional gifts have a stronger positive impact on subsequent purchase behaviors for women (vs. men). Two follow‐up experiments demonstrate that this gender effect is driven by the fact that women obtain greater transactional value from the promotional purchase than men do, leading to enhanced reciprocity motivation among women. Taken together, these findings first argue for a more targeted use of promotions involving gifts and second, raise questions about whether we should carefully consider potential gender differences in predicting the effects of many common marketing tactics that are presently discussed as if universal.