Are You a Chocolate Lover? An Investigation of the Repurchase Behavior of Chocolate Consumers

This study aimed to understand the factors affecting repurchase behavior of chocolate brands and, consequently, customer retention and acquisition. The study adopted a qualitative, inductive approach using in-depth interviews with 31 Australian consumers. The factors identified in the extant literature as antecedents of customers’ repurchase intention in the chocolate industry, including brand recognition, sales promotion, product price value, variety, taste, texture, size, packaging, and customer satisfaction, were confirmed. The results also indicated that functional value, product selection value, self-gratification value, socialization value, and transactional value were also considered during the consumer decision-making process. Implications for practitioners are provided.     

Determinants of women's financial inclusion: Evidence from India

A number of studies have analyzed the determinants of financial inclusion in India, but few if any have focused specifically on the factors that shape women's access to finance. This paper draws on the trove of women-specific data collected in the fourth round of the National Family Health Survey (NFHS-4), conducted in 2015–16 in India, to examine the factors that influence women's access to finance. The results indicate that while the forces that shape women's access to finance function at multiple levels, micro-level factors appear to be powerful drivers of inclusion. The analysis reveals that household-level economic indicators like wealth, gender of household head and their rural-urban location are crucial, but so are individual-level characteristics which explain approximately 83% of the variation in the multilevel regressions. Informal gender norms that govern women's mobility and economic activity crucially influence the ability of women to access loans and open bank accounts.     

Value creation in innovation ecosystems: how the structure of technological interdependence affects firm performance in new technology generations

The success of an innovating firm often depends on the efforts of other innovators in its environment. How do the challenges faced by external innovators affect the focal firm's outcomes? To address this question we first characterize the external environment according to the structure of interdependence. We follow the flow of inputs and outputs in the ecosystem to distinguish between upstream components that are bundled by the focal firm, and downstream complements that are bundled by the firm's customers. We hypothesize that the effects of external innovation challenges depend not only on their magnitude, but also on their location in the ecosystem relative to the focal firm. We identify a key asymmetry that results from the location of challenges relative to a focal firm—greater upstream innovation challenges in components enhance the benefits that accrue to technology leaders, while greater downstream innovation challenges in complements erode these benefits. We further propose that the effectiveness of vertical integration as a strategy to manage ecosystem interdependence increases over the course of the technology life cycle. We explore these arguments in the context of the global semiconductor lithography equipment industry from its emergence in 1962 to 2005 across nine distinct technology generations. We find strong empirical support for our framework. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

A testable model of consumption with externalities

This paper presents a nonparametric model of interdependent preferences, where an individual's consumption may act as an externality on the preferences of other consumers. We assume that individual price consumption data is observed for all consumers. It is known that the general consumption model with externalities imposes few restrictions on the observed data, where the consistency requirement is Nash rationalizability. We motivate potential games as an important sub class of games where the family of concave potential games is refutable and imposes stronger restrictions on observed data. We use this framework to extend the analysis of Brown and Matzkin [D. Brown, R. Matzkin, Testable restrictions on the equilibrium manifold, Econometrica 64 (1996) 1249-1262] on refutable pure exchange economies to pure exchange economies with externalities. Finally, we discuss an application of this model to inter-household consumption data.     

Enumeration of Nash equilibria for two-player games

This paper describes algorithms for finding all Nash equilibria of a two-player game in strategic form. We present two algorithms that extend earlier work. Our presentation is self-contained, and explains the two methods in a unified framework using faces of best-response polyhedra. The first method lrsnash is based on the known vertex enumeration program lrs, for “lexicographic reverse search”. It enumerates the vertices of only one best-response polytope, and the vertices of the complementary faces that correspond to these vertices (if they are not empty) in the other polytope. The second method is a modification of the known EEE algorithm, for “enumeration of extreme equilibria”. We also describe a second, as yet not implemented, variant that is space efficient. We discuss details of implementations of lrsnash and EEE, and report on computational experiments that compare the two algorithms, which show that both have their strengths and weaknesses.     

Optimality of balanced designs for minimum norm quadratic unbiased estimation of variance components

This paper develops an approximate theory for the optimality of balanced designs under minimum norm quadratic unbiased estimation of variance components in one-way classified data.     

Exploiting International Stock Market Correlations with Open-end International Mutual Funds

Investors can exploit the correlations between international stock markets by trading no-load, open-end, international mutual funds. These investors in effect cheat passive investors because they buy the mutual funds at their net asset values, which do not reflect information released during the US trading day. The strategy we examine yields an annual rate of return 800 basis points above the S&P500, over a period of almost eight years.     

Optimal employment contracts and the returns to monitoring in a principal-agent context

Abstract. In this paper we study a two-person firm consisting of a principal and an agent. The principal hires the agent to provide some input into the production process. The output of the production process is determined by the agent's input and an exogenous state realization. Subsequent to joining the firm, but prior to choosing his input, the agent privately observes the state realization. The principal employs an imperfect monitoring system that publicly reports on the state realization. Our purpose in studying this model is to better understand the effects of monitoring on the design of the optimal employment contract and the determinants of the value of monitoring in a model with asymmetric information. Résumé. Les auteurs étudient une entreprise constituée de deux personnes, un mandant et un mandataire. Le mandant embauche le mandataire pour sa contribution au processus de fabrication. Le résultat du processus de fabrication est déterminé par la contribution du mandataire et par la réalisation d'un état exogène. Après s'être joint à l'entreprise, mais avant de déterminer quelle sera sa contribution, le mandataire observe, en privé, la réalisation de cet état exogène. Le mandant a recours à un système de suivi imparfait qui fait le point, à l'intention du public, sur la réalisation de l'état en question. L'étude de ce modèle permet une meilleure compréhension des conséquences du suivi sur la nature de contrat d'emploi optimal et des déterminants de la valeur du suivi dans un modèle caractérisé par une information asymétrique.