Producer co-operatives in nineteenth-century British economic thought

Drawing on the popular radicalism of the day and his own development of the theory of the stationary state, John Stuart Mill had argued on normative and positive grounds that capitalist firms were transitional institutions and should/would evolve into producer co-operatives. In Britain, Mill's work set off a dialogue among mainstream economists. Contributors included Thornton, Fawcett, and Cairnes from Mill's “school,” as well as Jevons and Marshall who while sympathetic endorsed the less radical reform of profit sharing. Ironically, much of the socialist left, including Beatrice Potter (Webb), praised Mill's concerns, but rejected producer co-operatives in favour of nationalisation. By the early twentieth century, Mill's message resonated only with the guild socialists who kept the radical argument for producer co-operatives alive. The subtext of the paper is that modern liberals have too conveniently lost connection with this important history and its radical/liberal message of capitalism as a transitional mode.     

Consumer Rationality and Consumer Sovereignty

Important social benefits of the market system are predicated on the assumption that consumers can effectively pursue their interest in the marketplace. Cause for concern exists to the extent that high consumption expenditures lead to relatively low levels of personal savings in the U.S. To the extent that they do, in fact, over spend, consumers appear to deviate from economic assumptions of rationality. This paper examines four conceptions of rationality (two variants of rational choice theory, institutionalism, and one derived from economic sociology), with a view to evaluating implications for consumer sovereignty under each. By explicitly accounting for differences among individuals, economic sociology appears to offer more realistic policy solutions.     

消费者金融行为、消费者金融教育和消费者福利

消费者金融行为的研究是一个多学科的研究领域,并在近十年来开始得到主流经济学和金融学的重视。消费者金融行为的研究集中在如何定义、描述、理解和预测、改变、发展,以及比较消费者的金融行为。本文从上述六个方面对美国关于消费者金融行为的研究进行了简要综述,并讨论了消费者金融行为与消费者金融教育、消费者福利之间的关系。最后,对中国消费者金融学的研究提出了几点建议,希望对中国消费者金融学领域的发展有所贡献。     

消费信贷难点

<正> 消费信贷是金融机构采用信用放款或抵押放款的方式向消费者发放的一种贷款,是消费信用的主要形式。它既是利用信贷手段促进商品销售的有效方式,也是启动消费品市场,提高资源利用率,促进消费结构和主业结构升级的有力杠杆。因此我国政府、银行、企业和理论界都十分重视消费信贷的发展,特别是自中国人民银行总行1999年《关于开展个人消费信贷的指导意见》下发以来,以住房贷款为主的个人消费信贷业务更是进入了前所未有的快速发展阶段。到2001年底,全国个人消费贷款当年新增2592亿元,占贷款新增总额的19.4％,其业务范围也逐步扩展到了汽车、教育、旅游、高档家电、住宅装修、医疗保险等领域。但从整体而言,目前我国消费信贷发展状况并不理想,其效果和经营效益与西方发达国     

Consumer behaviour in Austria

Zusammenfassung Mit dieser Arbeit wollen wir vor allem zwei Fragen beantworten. Führen verschiedene Ansätze zur Erklärung des Konsumentenverhaltens letztlich zu ähnlichen Schätzwerten für Einkommens- und Preiselastizitäten, so daß es nicht von übermäßiger Bedeutung ist, für welchen Ansatz man sich entscheidet. Verursachte die Rezession von 1975 eine Änderung im Verhalten der Konsumenten, wie dies manchmal unterstellt wurde. Um diese Fragen zu klären, testeten wir vier gängige Konsumtheorien mit österreichischen Daten, und zwar eine in den Logarithmen lineare Konsumfunktion, die Theorie der Konsumgewohnheiten vonBrown, das Modell vonHouthakker—Taylor und den Ansatz vonCoen—Hickman. Die Auswahl dieser Ansätze zur Erklärung des Konsumentenverhaltens erfolgte nicht rein willkürlich. Ursprünglich beabsichtigten wir alle bedeutenden Konsumtheorien zu testen. Dieses Vorhaben scheiterte aber daran, daß die dafür benötigten Daten in Österreich zur Zeit noch nicht vorhanden sind. Wir mußten uns daher mit einem Test der oben erwähnten Konsumtheorien zufrieden geben.

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Contributed paper presented at the European Meeting of the Econometric Society, Vienna, September 6–9, 1977.     

The effects of human resources management practices on the organizational performances of Canadian financial co-operatives

Reading through academic literature with a critical eye shows that the relation between human resources management (HRM) and the performance of the firm is a relatively unknown phenomenon. This relation is sometimes described as a "black box". Far from claiming to have closed the debate, this article sets forth an original approach that represents an undisputable input which allows a better understanding of this phenomenon.
Even if there are many theories that try to explain this relation, only the universalistic approach of human resources will be of interest. While using both a qualitative and a quantitative approach, our research shows that some HRM practices do seem to give a competitive advantage to Canadian financial co-operative enterprises.     

Limited Consumer Attention in International Trade

This paper introduces a model of limited consumer attention into an otherwise standard new trade theory model with love‐of‐variety preferences and heterogeneous firms. In this setting, we show that international integration needs not be welfare enhancing if the consumers' capacity to gather and process information is limited. Rather, it intensifies competition for scarce consumer attention, which causes mutual overbidding of producers in their advertising expenditures. The mutual overbidding renders advertising—which is informative in principle—wasteful and diverts purchases to imported goods at an inefficient scale. Wasteful advertising provides scope for policy intervention in the form of an advertising tax. However, if the tax instrument is not allowed to discriminate against foreign producers, it cannot eliminate inefficient diversion of consumer purchases to imports; hence it needs not be successful in securing gains from international integration in this framework.     

Local export spillovers in France

This paper investigates the presence of local export spillovers on both the extensive (the decision to start exporting) and the intensive (the export volume) margins of trade, using data on French individual export flows, at the product-level and by destination country, between 1998 and 2003. We investigate whether the individual decision to start exporting and exported volume are influenced by the presence of nearby product and/or destination specific exporters, using a gravity-type equation estimated at the firm-level. Spillovers are considered at a fine geographical level corresponding to employment areas (348 in France). We control for the new economic geography-type selection of firms into agglomerated areas, and for the local price effects of firms agglomeration. Results show evidence of the presence of export spillovers on the export decision but not on the exported volume. We interpret this as a first evidence of export spillovers acting through the fixed rather than the variable cost. Spillovers on the decision to start exporting are stronger when specific, by product and destination, and are not significant when considered on all products-all destinations. Moreover, export spillovers exhibit a spatial decay within France: the effect of other exporting firms on the export decision is stronger within employment areas and declines with distance.     

我国优质蔬菜消费者麻木和敏感行为初探

消费者是整个优质蔬菜产业管理过程的最终目标指向,其在优质蔬菜消费问题上所体现的态度和消费倾向会对政府和企业行为选择产生深刻影响.研究我国优质蔬菜消费者行为,对积极推进我国优质蔬菜产业快速、健康发展具有重要的理论价值和现实意义.本文在国内外研究现状和评价的基础上,另辟蹊径,从优质蔬菜消费者行为的外在表现--消费者麻木和消费者敏感入手,结合相关案例剖析了其效应,透析了影响优质蔬菜消费者行为外在表现的内在原因,并提出了相关对策.     

我国优质蔬菜消费者麻木和敏感行为初探

消费者是整个优质蔬菜产业管理过程的最终目标指向,其在优质蔬菜消费问题上所体现的态度和消费倾向会对政府和企业行为选择产生深刻影响。研究我国优质蔬菜消费者行为,对积极推进我国优质蔬菜产业快速、健康发展具有重要的理论价值和现实意义。本文在国内外研究现状和评价的基础上,另辟蹊径,从优质蔬菜消费者行为的外在表现——消费者麻木和消费者敏感入手,结合相关案例剖析了其效应,透析了影响优质蔬菜消费者行为外在表现的内在原因,并提出了相关对策。     

Consumer debt and unemployment

We present evidence that US consumer debt has varied inversely with unemployment rates since 1990, potentially reflecting responses by households and/or lenders to adverse labour market conditions, and helping explain why consumer debt recently fell despite low interest rates. For several measures of debt, unemployment exhibits greater explanatory power and economic significance than interest rates.     

消费者创新性研究综述

从消费者创新性理论研究长期关注和存有争议的概念、维度、度量模型及前因和后果等方面,对消费者创新性理论的研究成果进行梳理、比较与分析,尽可能去除模糊不清的认识。     

消费者购物介入成本分析

本文对比分析了购物活动中不同决策情形下的消费者介入成本,并给出介入成本的构成,在此基础上设计了考虑消费者介入成本的购物决策模型.求解表明消费者花费的搜索时间与时间限制有关.时间越宽松,投入的搜索时间越多;工资率越高,投入的搜索时间就越少;由搜索时间引致风险降低而节约的成本越多,投入的搜索时间就越多.通过比较从商店直接选购和从网上购物的两种介入成本,阐述了开展B-C电子商务的企业优势和劣势,并提出了企业用以降低消费者介入成本的措施.     

Consumer choice and television

A consumer choice model which described 48 television programmes in terms of 48 specially constructed orthogonal characteristics was employed to predict how frequently adult US males would watch each of eight shows chosen for testing purposes. The first half of the random sample of 789 was used to construct estimates of the relevant structures and parameters including parameters of viewer utility functions. The second half was used for testing purposes. The predictive error was significantly less - 28 per cent less- than a naive alternative. This 28 per cent was apparently a significantly greater reduction than a comparable percentage found by BOWMAN and FARLEY (1972) using other techniques and the same data.