Alfred E. Kahn, 1917–2010

Our introduction to this compendium reviews Alfred Kahn’s academic and policy interests, his activities as a regulator and advisor to governments and companies, and the interactions between these aspects of his life as an economist. Although best known for his research on the economics of regulation and his application of microeconomic principles in his role as a regulator and advisor, Kahn’s academic research portfolio was much more diverse. He wrote about patent policy, economic development, antitrust policy, and other topics, in addition to his work on regulation and deregulation. Even before becoming a regulator he was actively involved in applying economic principles to regulatory problems as an advisor and consultant. In all of his work Kahn recognized that markets were imperfect, but that policies aimed at improving market performance often made things worse. His experience as a regulator and consultant strengthened his recognition that the costs of imperfect regulation had to be carefully balanced against the costs of imperfect markets. One had to search for the best that could be done in an imperfect world. Kahn was particularly fascinated by the challenges of designing and implementing policies to govern the transition from regulated monopoly or oligopoly to an industry that would ultimately rely primarily on competitive markets to govern firm behavior and performance. Fred Kahn was an extraordinary man who is missed greatly by his many friends and colleagues representing a wide range of political orientations and approaches to economic and public policy analysis.     

Telecommunication in the US: From Regulation to Competition (Almost)

Alfred E. Kahn was an observer and practitioner of telecommunications regulation as technology changed the industry from a natural monopoly to a platform-based oligopoly among telephone, cable, satellite, and wireless carriers. Regulation and legislation were slow to recognize these changes, and large welfare losses occurred, some of which could have been avoided if regulators, legislators and economists had followed Fred’s economic advice: Prices must be informed by costs; the relevant costs are actual incremental costs; costs and prices are an outcome of a Schumpeterian competitive process, not the starting point; excluding firms from markets is fundamentally anticompetitive; a reliance on imperfect markets subject to antitrust law is preferable to necessarily imperfect regulation; and a regulatory transition to deregulation entails propensities to micromanage the process to generate preferred outcomes, visible competitors, and expedient price reductions.     

Standardization Alliance Networks,Standard-Setting Influence,and New Product Outcomes*

Standardization alliances evolve through collaborations among firms for developing and implementing industry technical standards. Cooperative standard setting can help allied firms to gain access to external knowledge and technologies, but it is unclear how the configuration of a standardization alliance can result in improving a firm’s performance in new product development. This study examines how standardization alliance network-based resource advantages vary across a firm’s network position and the firm’s ability to influence industry standard setting and new product outcomes. Empirical analyses, based on archival data from 170 Chinese automobile manufacturers from 1999 to 2013, indicate that firms that span structural holes in standardization alliance networks gain an advantage when focusing on early new product introductions but suffer a disadvantage when aiming at more innovative products. In contrast, taking a central position in standardization alliance networks is negatively related to a firm’s speed in bringing new products to market but positively related to the firm’s new product introduction rate. Further, standard-setting influence significantly mediates the effect of network position on a firm’s new product speed to market. Increasing centrality and structural holes can lead to the improvement of a firm’s standard-setting influence, and this, in turn, positively affects speed to market.     

Donald Turner’s Merger Guidelines as an Antitrust Watershed

The idea of agency-issued guidelines as an effective enforcement tool was novel indeed when Professor Donald F. Turner unveiled it as a priority upon being nominated to be head the Justice Department’s Antitrust Division in 1965. This chapter reviews how Turner and we who were on his team worked to create the Merger Guidelines that were issued on his last day in office in May 1968. It also discusses how Turner’s novel merger guidelines idea has since been widely used in United States and globally.     

反倾销政策对企业生产决策行为的影响分析——基于DTGMIC模型

反倾销政策实施的主要目的是既能抑制国外产品的倾销,又能弥补国内产业遭受的损害,实现国内相关产业的发展。因此,反倾销政策制定的合适与否关系到其效果的实现程度。本文以反倾销政策对企业生产决策行为的影响为研究对象,通过构建动态两阶段非完全竞争博弈模型分析了反倾销政策对企业生产决策行为的影响过程,得出了相应的结论。该结论的得出为我国反倾销调查机关制定反倾销政策提供了相应的理论依据。     

Communication for a sustainable society

What would be a sustainable society in the year 2000? What communication facilities would it require? Alternatively, what changes in communications could produce a sustainable society? The prevailing scenarios of an ‘information society’ and a ‘wired world’ seem to have followed the second question. They have not defined a sustainable society, but assumed, like the post-industrial theorists, Bell and Kahn, that it would have to be a projection of the main features of post-war social developments. Making this assumption, they have little else to explore but a sort of technical determinism: how new means of communication will transform the factory, the office, the home, etc. The question they have posed is; which developments in communications technology will best enable us to realize, in the shortest time and at least cost, the developmental trends inherent in our societies? The trends most commonly noted are those of maximizing income, maximizing leisure time, maximizing individual choice, and maximizing individual security.     

The evolution of Coca-Cola Australia’s soft drink reformulation strategy 2003–2017: A thematic analysis of corporate documents

Governments around the world are pressuring the soft drink industry to reformulate sugary drinks, in particular through taxes on sugar content or front-of-pack labels identifying products high in sugar. Even in countries with no sugary drink tax, such as Australia, the soft drink industry has a reformulation policy. While reformulation is often framed as a “win-win” solution for business and public health, many public health experts consider it to be a political strategy to improve corporate reputations and minimise the threat of regulation. We use a case study of Australia’s largest soft drink company, Coca-Cola Australia, to examine the evolution of corporate reformulation policies. We analysed a dataset of 144 corporate documents published between 2003 and 2017 to analyse how Coca-Cola’s policies changed and how it described and justified its reformulation initiatives. Between 2003 and 2017, Coca-Cola Australia shifted its reformulation strategy from “offering choice” to “systematic” sugar reformulation. It also presented two predominant rationales for reformulation: that it would grow its business and that it was “part of the solution” to obesity. We discuss these findings in relation to market and regulatory challenges facing the soft drink industry globally, including the spread of sugary drink taxes as well as consumer rejection of artificial sweeteners. This paper examines how a regional branch of the world’s largest soft drink company is adapting to pressures to reduce the sugar in its products as well as the tensions and barriers it faces in negotiating different consumer and public health interpretations of healthy beverages.     

关于天然气批发环节客户评价体系及精准营销的思考

近年来,中国天然气行业市场化改革不断深化,市场原有竞争格局受到挑战,但供应商现有客户评价管理较为粗放,客户评价体系不尽完善。新形势下的天然气行业客户评价及精准营销体系亟待建立,新体系遵循的原则包括:多维衡量,因地制宜;分类细化,量化评价;结合场景,灵活运用。可依据"销量、价格、效益、信用、协作"5个维度及15个指标,选取所需指标并赋予权重,获取指标数据源,运用分数归类定级方法进行判断。客户评价是工具,精准营销是措施。建议从做好精准营销基础项目、立足本职工作替客户分忧、运用大数据探索精准营销3个层面进行规划与升级。     

我国汽车行业出口贸易的影响因素及出口潜力研究——基于面板数据模型的实证分析

自新中国成立以来,我国汽车行业经过了几十年的发展,现在已经开始大量走出国门。本文利用与我国汽车贸易最密切的34个国家,通过构建扩张的引力模型,对影响我国汽车出口的因素进行了实证分析。结果表明：距离、GDP、互惠贸易、总产量等都对我国汽车行业出口贸易有显著影响。在此基础上,对我国汽车行业的出口潜力进行预测,并提出相应的对策建议。     

Household income,women’s income share and food calorie intake in South Western Nigeria

Current debates on the nature of intra-household preferences and resource control raises the question of how intra-household redistribution of income from men and women compares with increasing total household income as strategies for increasing calorie intake among low income households. I estimate calorie-income and calorie-women’s income share elasticities for a random sample of low income households from the rural areas of south western Nigeria. I find that calorie-income elasticity is positive and small, 0.194, but four times as large as calorie-women’s income share elasticity, suggesting that calorie intake is affected more by total disposable income than by its distribution pattern. Second, I find a small and negative effect of women’s income share on per caput calorie intake, −0.04, which is a rejection of the hypothesis that increases in women’s share of income will increase calorie intake and suggests that intra-household income re-distribution from men to women may not be an effective policy for increasing food calorie intake among households in the study area.     

OPPORTUNITY AND CONSTRAINT: ORGANIZATIONS’ LEARNING FROM THE OPERATING AND COMPETITIVE EXPERIENCE OF INDUSTRIES

Organizational learning is central to a number of strategic theories. Recent arguments, however, identify risks associated with learning from own experience in the form of overattention to the short term and local conditions. The experience of the industry may offer opportunities for organizational learning that the experience of the organization does not, because industry experience is more varied, and not tied to the path-dependent history of any one organization. We investigate the influence of own experience and of two types of industry experience on the failure rates of U.S. hotel chains. The two types of industry experience are operating experience, which is a discounted sum of the units operated by U.S. hotel chains in the history of the industry, and competitive experience, which is a discounted sum of the number of failures of U.S. hotel chains in the history of the industry. We find that (a) organizations initially benefit from their own experience, but are harmed in the long run, (b) generalist organizations are more weakly affected by their own experience than specialists, (c) organizations benefit from their industry’s operating experience, accumulated both before and after the organization’s entry, and (d) organizations benefit from their industry’s competitive experience, but only after the organization’s entry. © 1997 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

中国工业碳排放影响因素与CKC重组效应——基于STIRPAT模型的分行业动态面板数据实证研究

新世纪以来中国工业转型特征明显,行业CO2排放强度呈波动下降走势,但2003年工业再度重型化和2008年金融危机导致排放强度明显上升。基于改进的STIRPAT模型,本文利用动态面板数据实证研究了工业碳排放的影响因素,并详细考察了中国工业CO2库兹涅茨曲线(CKC)的类型及成因。主要结论是:中国工业CKC呈"N型"走势,而非传统的"倒U型",即CO2排放与经济增长在倒U型走势之后又形成拐点,出现"重组"现象;投资规模与排放显著正相关,研发强度不是影响排放的主要因素,CO2排放是个动态调整过程,存在明显的滞后效应;政府节能减排政策有助于降低排放,减排治理政策应从产业结构、技术进步、宏观经济环境以及环境规制等多方面综合考虑。     

对我国石油行业进一步转变发展方式的思考

近几十年来,我国石油行业在转变发展方式中实现了快速发展,市场化程度、国际化水平不断提高,产业布局和结构得到优化,创新能力增强,发展空间扩大,综合实力、国际竞争力大幅提升。但也应清醒地看到,与世界领先的国际石油公司相比,我国石油行业总体上大而不强的问题仍比较突出,产业结构仍需进一步优化,发展质量和国际竞争力仍需进一步提高,进一步转变发展方式仍非常必要和紧迫。未来石油行业应完善行业管理体制机制,引导发展方式转变;调整优化产业布局和经济结构;更加注重发展的有效性,提高资本利用效率和价值创造能力;更加注重产业发展的可持续性,拓展资源接替和市场接替空间,扩大清洁能源生产规模,降低污染物排放水平。转变发展方式的本质是发展,但更应注重发展的质量,追求又好又快的发展,石油行业转变发展方式也要坚持在发展中促转变,在转变中谋发展。     

中国城市化进程对服务业影响的实证分析——事实、悖论与解释

与发达国家城市化进程对服务业影响的一般规律相背离,通过对改革开放30年中国城市化进程与服务业发展的实证分析发现,＂城市化率对服务业就业比重的变化存在负贡献作用＂、＂城镇人口规模指数对服务业劳动生产率的变化存在负贡献作用＂、＂城镇居民人均可支配收入指数对服务业增加值比重的变化存在负贡献作用＂等若干悖论,并重点从制度安排、阶段特征等角度解释中国城市化进程与服务业发展相背离的原因。     

Product specification under a threat of entry: Evidence from Airlines’ departure times

I examine how incumbent airlines adjust their departure times in response to the threat of entry by Southwest Airlines. I find that incumbents space their flights more evenly throughout the day when faced with potential entry. This reaction depends strongly on the level of the incumbent’s market share and hub status at the endpoint airports of a market. The evidence suggests that incumbents’ actions are designed to deter, rather than accommodate, entry. I do not find effects on flight frequency, suggesting that incumbents may rely more on the strategic choice of product attributes than on product proliferation to deter entry.     

Effective competition and ineffective mobile industry regulation in South Africa

The most striking feature of South Africa’s mobile market is the skewed allocation of spectrum and a seemingly endless sequence of failed attempts to hold an auction for it. A shortage of spectrum (or the inefficient assignment of it) is blamed, among other things, for South Africa’s relatively slow LTE 4G speeds. Through historical accident, the country has two mobile data networks in addition to the four licensed mobile operators. The response of operators has been to innovate using roaming and network sharing agreements; as we explore in this paper, these have become the de facto spectrum allocation process.This paper looks at how the de facto industry structure has been moulded by spectrum holdings and sharing arrangements and asks how spectrum management could be improved. We observe that, although the number of mobile operators has effectively been reduced to 3 (a number which would raise concern in some circles), there exist a variety of arrangements between those three and other spectrum and network operators. The smallest of the current three mobile operators is still not able to offer a nationwide mobile service without a roaming agreement but, at the same time, the two larger operators depend critically on spectrum and roaming agreements themselves, mainly with the two physical data network operators that function as wholesale providers.The Independent Communications Authority of South Africa (ICASA) was established as a consequence of a new constitution that was adopted in 1996 and it helped to create new institutional arrangements for the burgeoning mobile industry. The authority has nevertheless continued to be hampered, as we shall demonstrate, by political imperatives. This has been pointed out by other authors over the past twenty years and we add to this body of evidence by considering the spectrum auction planned (again) for 2021.The “2021” auction is in fact an iteration of the auction originally announced in May 2010 and then abandoned (Song, 2011). The same thing happened again in 2016 (Paelo & Robb, 2020). Late in 2020, the regulator again announced an auction, due to take place during 2021 but by the second quarter of the year, two of the four national operators had already obtained a court injunction to stop it. The process is intertwined with a political imperative to establish a public wireless open-access network, which we discuss in detail.We describe how the industry has navigated around policy and regulatory dysfunction and how competitive interaction among the South African operators has managed to prevail. Following Hausman & Taylor’s (2013) lead in their work on the United States, in this paper we provide a commentary on apparently perverse outcomes from significant regulatory, judicial and legislative actions (or, perhaps more accurately, inactions) governing the South African mobile telecommunications industry from the commencement of the current constitutional arrangements in 1996 to the present.     

The effect of CEOs on firm performance

The extent to which CEOs influence firm performance is fundamental to scholarly understanding of how organizations work; yet, this linkage is poorly understood. Previous empirical efforts to examine the link between CEOs and firm performance using variance decomposition, while provocative, nevertheless suffer from methodological problems that systematically understate the relative impact of CEOs on firm performance compared to industry and firm effects. This study addresses these methodological problems and reexamines the percentage of the variance in firm performance explained by heterogeneity in CEOs. The results of this study suggest that in certain settings the ‘CEO effect’ on corporate‐parent performance is substantially more important than that of industry and firm effects, but only moderately more important than industry and firm effects on business‐segment performance. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Lean planning in the semi-process industry, a case study

The lean approach is an idealizing improvement approach that has an enormous impact in the field of operations management. It started in the automotive industry and has since been widely applied in discrete manufacturing. However, extensions to the (semi-) process industry have been much slower. Resource characteristics of the (semi-) process industry obstruct a straightforward application. The notion of the point of discretization for the (semi-) process industry is helpful here. This notion builds on the fact that in most (semi-) process industries there is a point in production where process production turns into discrete production. Downstream of this point lean principles are applicable in a straightforward manner, while upstream lean needs to be interpreted in a more liberal way. In this article we address this issue by a case study. The study considers how the principles of ‘flow’ and ‘pull’ production - suggesting a regular, demand-driven product flow - may be implemented for the (semi-) process industry by introducing cyclic schedules. The conjectures guiding the case study are: (i) Cyclic schedules fit in a lean improvement approach for the semi-process industry, (ii) Cyclic schedules help to improve production quality and supply-chain coordination and (iii) Discrete event simulation is a useful tool in facilitating a participative design of a cyclic schedule. The case study is extensively described to be able to judge how the context of the changes and the intervention process contribute to the results of the intervention.     

交易环境属性、主体特征与纵向一体化

本文以交易成本经济学框架为理论基点,选取我国工业行业和上市企业数据,构建动态面板模型,多层次深入分析决定企业纵向一体化程度的关键因素。研究认为,①不同类型的企业和行业的纵向一体化水平具有不同变化特征,且企业的纵向一体化水平具有动态变动特征。②解释企业纵向一体化水平变动的综合框架应包括三大类因素:交易环境、属性和主体特征。③资产专用性水平对纵向一体化的影响产生滞后效应,且大部分维度对不同特征的企业影响方向有所差异。本文的研究结果对我国不同类型的企业兼并重组等纵向一体化决策具有借鉴意义。