A study on the competitive strategy of the universal postal service provider

We analysed how the universal postal service providers could employ their specificities to achieve an advantage over the growing competition. The basic input for the model is expert opinions. We interviewed 18 experts in five stages. As a multiple criteria decision support method, we used an analytic hierarchy process. Further, we proposed a geometric method for determining the business area where a company should focus its biggest attention to achieve the best result. By implementing the proposed model, a company should obtain two types of business directions, the first related to the proposed activities and the second to the business areas. To demonstrate the applicability of the proposed methodology, we tested and verified it in the case of the Serbian universal postal service provider which is a state-owned company called the Post of Serbia.     

Two measures of organizational flexibility

Since the second half of the past century, increasingly flexible organizational forms have been appearing among firms. However, while hierarchies are easily described, too few mathematical tools are available for flexible organizations. In this article, two measures are proposed in order to assess the state and trend of flexible organizations. The first of these measures is based on information waste, which occurs whenever information is classified into categories. The second measure is based on duplication of operations. The underlying idea is that firms have an endogenous drive towards organizational configurations where waste of information and duplication of operations are minimized. However, environmental uncertainty may require some flexibility, which is ensured by cognitive processes that discard some information as well as by parallel undertaking of similar actions.     

Just looking for a good game: competitive balance in the Korean Professional Baseball League

Rottenberg’s uncertainty of outcome hypothesis is about preferences that can vary across fans and sports. We provide the first evidence of the empirical power of the hypothesis in the Korean Professional Baseball League (KPBL). In a panel data set, team-level aggregation over years shows that fans of this league attend in ways consistent with the hypothesis at the level of game uncertainty and consecutive season uncertainty, but only the first is statistically significant. KPBL fans appear to just be looking for a good game. This is consistent with the nearly complete concentration of post-season participation among a very few teams outside of the major population centre in Seoul and a lack of local team identification among KPBL fans. Our work adds to the diversity of league structures in the competitive balance literature since talent levels in KPBL are the result of parent company advertising choices rather than geographic identification. There are research questions and a policy implication.     

Prospective measures of competitive balance application to money lines in the national hockey league

The authors have previously introduced the concept of utilizing point spreads to measure competitive balance in professional sports and a methodology for doing so. They assessed competitive balance in the National Football League and the National Basketball Association. This methodology was extended to measuring competitive balance utilizing money lines in major league baseball. This study starts by applying the same model to the money lines for the 2005–2015 seasons to measure competitive balance in the National Hockey League. It then statistically adjusts the money lines under various scenarios to estimate the effects of overtime rules and shootouts on competitive balance. Similar analyses of overtime effects on competitive balance of other sports are also completed for comparison purposes. The results indicate that competitive balance in the National Hockey League increased rather substantially during this period and that overtime rules and shootouts have had a much larger positive impact on competitive balance in the NHL than overtime approaches have had on the competitive balance of any of the other sports examined.     

Prospective measures of competitive balance: application to money lines in major league baseball

This study examines competitive balance in Major League Baseball (MLB) by looking at the money lines for the games during the regular season. The assertion is that the closer the money lines are to indicating that each team has an equal chance of winning each game, the more competitive balance there is in the league. This study extends the model developed by Bowman et al. (2012), which used point spreads to assess competitive balance in the National Football League (NFL) and the National Basketball Association (NBA). In this study, money lines for the 1999–2011 seasons were used to develop several measures of competitive balance. The results indicate that competitive balance increased rather substantially during this period. A by-product of this research is to identify the most highly rated team and pitcher. In 2002, New York Yankees were the highest rated team and from the year 2000 Pedro Martinez was the highest rated pitcher.     

Austrian themes,data, and sports economics

This paper uses data from Major League Baseball and themes from Moneyball by Michael Lewis to empirically illustrate Kirznerian entrepreneurship. While Kirzner envisioned competition in markets for profit, the sports economics literature shows that sporting competition has things in common with market competition. This is important because a strength of sports economics, namely, the abundant data, can help overcome a perceived weakness of Austrian economics, namely, the lack of empirical content. This paper describes and empirically confirms how certain front office decision makers of the Oakland Athletics were alert to opportunities that were being overlooked by other baseball executives.

健康运动，远离肥胖

随着人民生活水平的不断提高,肥胖已经成为全球瞩目的公共健康问题。肥胖以及相关的综合症严重威胁着人类的健康,影响着运动能力和身体素质。通过对肥胖的成因以及诊断标准的分析,论述运动减肥的可能机制,从而确定健康有效的减肥方法,达到健康减肥的目的,并且为全民健身提供参考依据。     

Temptation, self-control, and competitive nonlinear pricing

Standard pricing theories consider consumers without temptation. With temptation and costly self-control, consumers dislike choice sets with tempting alternatives. We study firms' strategy against such consumers, using Gul–Pesendorfer preferences and a game where firms compete by offering menus.     

Bargaining, binding contracts, and competitive wages

In a model where many workers bargain with one firm and sign binding contracts, we show existence of a stationary subgame perfect equilibrium. If the production function satisfies decreasing returns, each worker receives a share of his marginal product (treating all other workers as employed) in equilibrium. Thus, wages are competitive. This is in contrast to Stole and Zweibel (1996, Rev. Econ. Stud. 63, 375–410), who assume that contracts are non-binding and find that the payoff of a worker is a weighted average of the inframarginal contributions. Hence, binding contracts imply lower wages than non-binding contracts.     

Revenue risks,insurance, and the behavior of competitive firms

This paper explores some issues relating to a competitive firm's choice of the levels of output and insurance cover when faced with certain types of revenue risks. The analysis generalizes and extends existing results. In particular, we examine the implication, for the level of output and of insurance cover, of different risk attitudes of the firm under variable and fixed premium schemes. The possibility of using the premium schedule in, say, an export credit-guarantee scheme, as an instrument for stimulating the firm's output is noted.     

Sponsorship of the FIFA world cup,shareholder wealth,and the impact of corruption

The Fédération Internationale de Football Association's World Cup (FIFA WC) is one of the most popular sporting events in the world in general and Europe in particular, and famous for the extraordinary amount of sponsorship fees it attracts. To create value for the stockholders of FIFA’s respective commercial affiliates, these sponsorship expenses should be exceeded by (discounted) future cash flows in order to make this investment profitable. This study analyses return effects for stockholders of FIFA WC Commercial Affiliates, while distinguishing between several image scenarios pertaining to FIFA and applying several models for calculating abnormal returns. We find weak evidence for significant positive abnormal returns of announced FIFA sponsorships in case of a stable FIFA image across different return models. In contrast, we find negative abnormal returns when the latest corruption scandals around FIFA became public. We also detect negative price effects when Gianni Infantino was announced as new FIFA president. The image-related price effects become less pronounced for FIFA Partners and initially closed sponsorship contracts. Finally, we do not find any image-related spillover effects for main competitors of firms sponsoring FIFA.     

Modelling exchange of probabilistic opinions

Summary. This paper studies how communication or exchange of opinions influences correlation of beliefs. The paper focuses on a situation in which agents communicate with each other infinitely many times without observing data. It is an extension to the ‘Expert Problem’ in Bayesian theory, where the informational flow is asymmetric. Moreover, this paper generalizes the existing literature of communication that employs the common prior assumption (CPA) by allowing for heterogeneous beliefs. Some basic convergence results are shown in contrast with the results obtained under the CPA. Furthermore, several economic implications of the basic results are provided. Received: August 27, 2001; revised version: April 16, 2002 RID="*" ID="*" The results presented in this paper are taken from my Ph.D. thesis at Stanford University. I gratefully acknowledge the inspiration obtained from innumerable discussions with Mordecai Kurz about this subject. Also, I appreciate comments from Kenneth J. Arrow, Peter J. Hammond, Maurizio Motolese, Carsten K. Nielsen, Ho-Mou Wu and the anonymous referee.     

Search theory,competitive equilibrium,and the Nash bargaining solution

We investigate a canonical search-theoretic model without entry. Two agents are randomly matched with a long side being rationed. The matched agents face a pair of randomly drawn non-transferable payoffs, and then choose whether or not to form a partnership subject to a small probability of exogenous break down. As this probability and friction vanish, the Nash bargaining solution emerges as the unique undominated strategy equilibrium outcome if the mass of each party is the same. If the size of one party is larger than the other, the short side extracts the entire surplus, a sharp contrast to Rubinstein and Wolinsky (1985) [16].     

Sraffa,Okun, and the theory of the imperfectly competitive firm

Piero Sraffa's Production of Commodities by Means of Commodities is wedded to Arthur Okun's Prices and Quantities to bring out important implications for the theory of the imperfectly competitive firm. The implications relate to firm objectives and to firm behavior in both the ‘vertical’ environment (relations with suppliers) and the ‘horizontal’ environment (relations with customers and competitors).     

Theories of the firm, competitive advantage and government policy

To improve the effectiveness of government policy, it is necessay to develop a good picture of what a firms in a knowledge-intensive economy is and does. In this paper, we have drawn on the recent surge of books and articles on the resource- and knowledge-based theories of the firm and their implications for competitive advantage. We would like to contribute to that discussion summarizing that debate and exploring the implications for government policy. In new theories of the firm, emphasis is placed on the crucial importance of knowledge, a production factor which is not easily imitated. Exampb of government policy which are based on these new inskhts are the recognition of the importance of demanding clients, the emphasis on the unique potential of the local business environment and the stimulation of transfer of knowledge between firms and networks instead of subsidizing project for knowledge development in isolated firms. A more realistic view of business behaviour will improve the effectiveness of policy, thereby generally improving the competitive position of firms.     

Price uncertainty,economies of scale and the competitive firm

The supply correspondence of a competitive firm facing price uncertainty is characterized assuming the firm to be asymptotically risk averse.     

Overcoming environmental scarcity,inequality and structural imbalance in the world economy

The world economy faces two major threats: increasing environmental degradation and a growing gap between rich and poor. The root cause is that natural resources—or natural capital—is underpriced, and hence overly exploited, whereas human capital—the skills embodied in the workforce—is insufficient to meet demand. This outcome has three important consequences. First, all sectors of an economy will use too much natural resources relative to skilled labor. Second, the skilled workers throughout the economy will have higher real incomes and thus will be better off. Third, wealth inequality will increase, as the income gap between skilled and unskilled workers widens. Addressing this structural imbalance requires correcting the two underlying distortions, which are the chronic under-pricing of natural capital and the under-investment in human capital. This must be accompanied by a new suite of policies to provide improved incentives for more balanced wealth creation.     

Non-computability of competitive equilibrium

Summary. We provide a “computable counterexample” to the Arrow-Debreu competitive equilibrium existence theorem [2]. In particular, we find an exchange economy in which all components are (Turing) computable, but in which no competitive equilibrium is computable. This result can be interpreted as an impossibility result in both computability-bounded rationality (cf. Binmore [5], Richter and Wong [35]) and computational economics (cf. Scarf [39]). To prove the theorem, we establish a “computable counterexample” to Brouwer's Fixed Point Theorem (similar to Orevkov [32]) and a computable analogue of a characterization of excess demand functions (cf. Mas-Colell [26], Geanakoplos [16], Wong [50]). Received: September 9, 1997; revised version: December 17, 1997     

A competitive general equilibrium model of technology transfer,innovation, and obsolescence

A general equilibrium production model is developed where technologies are embodied in capital goods of different vintages indexed in a continuum. A difference in the extent of existing knowledge determines a wage gap between a developed (north) and a developing region (south). With free flow of technology, relatively backward technologies move to the south. With innovation in the north, a technology cycle is created by which some of the technologies are pushed out of the north into the south. This also tends to widen the wage gap between the regions.