National pricing with local quality competition

We study the incentives of national retail chains to adopt national (uniform) prices across local markets that differ in size and competition intensity. In addition to price, the chains may also compete along a quality dimension, and quality is always set locally. We show that absent quality competition, the chains will never use national pricing. However, if quality competition is sufficiently strong there exist equilibria where at least one of the chains adopts national pricing. We also identify cases in which national pricing benefits (harms) all consumers, even in markets where such a pricing strategy leads to higher (lower) prices.     

Crowding,satiation, and saturation: The days of television series' lives

The performance of firms depends not just on the structure of the industries in which they compete but also on their relative positioning within those industries, in terms of operating within particular niches. We propose that demand for these niches depends endogenously on the historical ecology of the products offered: Niches become saturated—reduced in their ability to support products—as a large number of previous offerings allows the audience to satisfy its desire for products of a particular type. Analyzing the survival rates of television series aired in the United States from 1946 to 2003, we found that the survival rates of future entrants fell with the extensiveness of recent offerings in the niche, and that the negative association between crowding and survival also weakened with this saturation. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Cost-effectiveness of beef slaughterhouse decontamination measures in the Netherlands

The cost-effectiveness of seven decontamination measures to reduce Escherichia coli O157:H7 (VTEC)-contaminated carcass quarters in a typical Dutch dairy-beef industrial slaughterhouse were explored. To estimate the effectiveness a stochastic epidemiological-simulation model was used and to estimate the net cost a deterministic-economic model. The estimated baseline prevalence of daily-contaminated quarters was 9.16% (with a 90% confidence interval 4.40-13.10%). A reduction in the prevalence of VTEC-contaminated quarters to 2% using decontamination measures is achieved at costs of €0.20 to €0.50 per quarter, which is 16-40% of the net profit per carcass. A reduction to a prevalence of 1% will cost €0.50-€1.00 per quarter. Additional carcass trim and carcass steam-pasteurization are considered as the most cost-effective decontamination measures with costs of €16,340 and €20,243 per year to achieve a 1% prevalence reduction. Nevertheless, the lowest level of VTEC prevalence, less than 1%, is achieved using a set of measures that costs between €1.00 and €2.00 per quarter or, by implementing irradiation, which costs €4.65 per quarter.     

以价值为基础的维修管理——用OEE作为关键性能指标

介绍挪威工业界使用OEE作为考核设备效率的关键性能指标,以及实际使用OEE指标的4个层次生产损失的模式和15个生产损失要素。     

The Economics of Retailing Formats: Competition Versus Bargaining

We set up a merger game between retailing stores to study the incentives of independent stores to form a big store when some consumers have preferences for one‐stop shopping. Such one‐stop shopping creates complementarity between products, leading in turn to lower prices after a big store is formed but may also lead to an improvement in the bargaining position vis‐à‐vis producers through the creation of an inside option that small stores do not have. We find that big stores will not be formed when the stores' ex ante bargaining power vis‐à‐vis producers is high. Otherwise, an asymmetric situation occurs with only one big store created when one‐stop shoppers are abundant.     

How Economists Form Their Views: Reaction to Professor Pryor's Millennium Survey

This comment is in response to Frederic L. Pryor (2000). "The Millennium Survey: How Economists View the U.S. Economy in the 21^st Century." The American Journal of Economics and Sociology. 59 (January), pp. 3-33.     

The challenge of constructing regional advantages in peripheral areas: The case of marine biotechnology in Tromsø, Norway

The idea of constructing regional advantage (CRA) has recently been emphasized by scholars as a new way for firms to gain competitiveness in a globalizing learning economy. The rationale behind the idea is that advantages in a regional industry can be constructed by proactive public–private partnership. This article uses, and examines the relevance of, the CRA framework in analysing the development and functioning of the marine biotechnology industry in Tromsø, which is a fairly peripheral region in Norway. Despite the fact that much effort has been put into education and R&D at the University of Tromsø and related research institutes, and the fact that many public policy tools have intended to create a blooming marine biotechnology industry in the area, the results have so far been meagre. This article explains the rather weak results in terms of the number of firms and jobs in the marine biotechnology industry in Tromsø as being due to a lack of synthetic knowledge on how to industrialize research results and little spillover of market knowledge. With regard to more general theoretical lessons linked to the CRA framework, this article argues for seeing the concept of related variety in a broader industrial and geographical sense in peripheral regions.