美国大选中的互联网

超级大国就是不同，纯属“内政”的美国总统选举能吸引全世界关注的目光。当年的互联网将莱温斯基的海军蓝裙子高高挂起，名声大震，互联网和美国政客从此结下了缘分。时过境迁，虽然这次选举中，候选人不再把互联网挂在嘴边，但互联网的作用确实在深化。首先是互联网不仅成了总统候选人的武器，也在悄悄改变着总统选举。候选人都建立了自己的网站，内容丰富多彩。如布拉德利的网页上介绍小甜饼的制作方法，小布什则把自己小时候的照片和家中小猫小狗的照片搬上网站。     

全球变化的驱动力

科技塑造的现实正以超越我们想象的速度发展着,戈尔提醒人们,不要陷入对技术和科学的机械化理解。"一直都有两个阿尔·戈尔。有一个热衷于技术的戈尔,他在2000年竞选美国总统时,提出用互联网拍卖剩余的政府资产。但还有一个大声谴责现代资本主义社会缺乏节制的戈尔。"没错,戈尔是主张推动美国"信息高速公路"发展的     

人能笃实,自有辉光

1860年,林肯与民主党候选人道格拉斯一同竞选美国总统。与出身贫民的林肯不同,道格拉斯是当时煊赫一时的知名人物。他倚仗财势,专门准备了一辆竞选列车,还在车后安装了一门礼炮,所至之处都要鸣放礼炮32响。在他看来,只要在气势上压倒林肯这个穷小子,就能顺利当上总统。     

金融危机造福奥巴马

百年一遇的金融危机成为美国民主党总统候选人奥巴马最有利的政治筹码,或许能帮助他登上总统的宝座。在梦魇般的"9.11"席卷美国的七年后,9月14日晚,噩梦再次降临美国。当晚,美国第四大投资银行雷曼兄弟公司宣布破产,而美国第三大投资银行美林公司被美国银行收购。至此,美     

“总统”们开始吵架了

在美国当官还真不容易啊,首先要自我介绍一下,然后被人这样盘问来盘问去,还时不时被打断自己的谈话,当得实在不爽2008年美国总统选举在即,两党候选人已经开始为选战摩拳擦掌,展开激烈的竞争。前期是筹备经费比赛,作为金钱政治直接体现的总统选举,没有强大     

欧美名流的“造假门”

欧美政界中曾经陷入“造假门”的最有名人物也许莫过于美国现任副总统乔.拜登了。1987年,作为民主党总统候选人的他在竞选时声称自己曾以全额奖学金就读雪城大学法学院,毕业时成绩位于全届学生前50%。他甚至抄袭他人演讲稿,堂而皇之地公开发表。但事实上,他的成绩在85名学生中排名第76,并且仅获得基于财务需求的非全额助学金。     

宽容是福

1860年,平民出身的林肯为竞选美国第十六任总统在参议院发表演说,遭到一个参议员的当众羞辱。这位参议员说:"林肯先生,在你开始演讲之前,我希望你记住,你是一个鞋匠的儿子。"他的目的是要打击林肯的自尊心,让他退出竞选。当时的美国社会非常看重门第,那位参议员的话引起了哄堂大笑,使林肯面临十分尴尬的局面。     

美国两党未来航天政策比较

正2016年美国总统竞选结果即将揭晓,对于航天政策方面双方的主要观点如下:共和党总统候选人特朗普认为,美国过去在空间探测上的投资已经给美国经济、安全以及国家尊严感带来了惊人的回报,美国今天的空间计划需要有一个新的视野。21世纪的空间政策需要公共任务与商业解决方案的更广泛融合,以及能够辨别出真正的威胁与机遇的敏锐性,政府必须认识到空间不再是政府独占的领域,里根总统在很多年前就预见到了这场革命,他在1984年签署了《商业航天发射法》。NASA的核心任务必须是激励人心的探测     

专业化做秀

10月1日,中央电视台第九套节目实况转播了美国总统竞选中,克里与布什的第一场电视辩论。在北京一间熙熙攘攘的大商场里,由好几十台电视组成的电视墙,也在同时播放两位总统候选人辩论的画面。一位正在挑选DVD播放机的年轻女孩,在驻足观看了10分钟之后,一本正经地对身边的男友说,“看人家多有风度,感觉上多诚实,要是这样的人卖DVD,肯定不会骗人的。”然后,就拉着男友和售货员讨价还价去了。克里和布什不可能来北京卖DVD,但这位女孩的感觉没错。事实上,在美国总统选举中,竞选者在公开场合的一举一动,一言一行,确实都是经过精心策划和设计的…     

股东权力又迈出“一步”

今年10月，南方保健公司（Healthsouth）通过一项条例，如果股东提名的董事候选人战胜公司提名的候选人成功入主董事会，那么股东可以申请对其竞选费用中的合理部分予以报销。南方保健这一做法成为股东权力在董事选举领域的最新突破。     

Video conferencing meetings: Changing patterns of business communication

Electronic mediated communication is an increasingly popular form of communication within and across organisations. This paper presents research on the implementation, training and use of video-conferencing systems on different sites of a multi-national oil company. We find that error, delay but mainly social costs influence the choice and use of this communication medium.     

Sunk Costs,Accommodation, and the Welfare Effects of Entry

Although economists usually support the unrestricted entry of firms into an industry, entry may lower social welfare if there are setup costs or if entrants have a cost disadvantage. We consider the welfare effects of entry within a standard Cournot model where some of an incumbent firm’s costs are sunk. We find that the range of parameter values over which entry can harm welfare declines monotonically in the fraction of cost that are sunk. Furthermore, the presence of even a small fraction of sunk costs often reverses an assessment that entry harms welfare.     

Can the small dairy farm remain competitive in US agriculture?

Smaller dairy farms in the US are observed to have higher costs than larger farms, and whether those higher costs are due to technology or inefficiency has implications for policy to address the small farm. If high cost of production on smaller farms is due to a higher cost frontier, then to make small farms competitive would require research to devise and design technology that is suitable for small farms. If instead high cost is due to inefficiency, then educational approaches are needed to ensure small dairy farms use technology efficiently. To determine the cause of higher costs on small farms, the cost of milk production by farm size was decomposed into frontier and efficiency components with a stochastic cost curve using data on USA dairy farms. Although the frontier cost of production decreases with farm size, that cost reduction is not as pronounced as a cost curve that includes inefficiency. The higher cost of production on many smaller farms is caused by inefficiency rather than technology.     

Delegation of Contracting in the Private Provision of Public Services

We use an incomplete-contract approach to compare contracting out by a public sector agency with the delegation of contracting out to a public-private partnership (PPP) that is a joint venture between private and public sector agents. The PPP maximizes a linear combination of profit and social benefit. Such delegation may be desirable to curb innovations that reduce the cost of provision but also reduce social benefit. Delegation may be undesirable for innovations that increase social benefit but also raise costs. Our results are explained in terms of the shadow cost of public funds and the negotiating stance of the PPP.     

Asymmetric Cost Pass-Through in Multi-Unit Procurement Auctions: An Experimental Approach*

We explore input cost pass-through in multi-unit procurement auctions. Whether cost shocks are private versus common across firms has important implications for discriminatory, but not uniform price auctions. We provide evidence of asymmetric pass-through of private cost shocks in discriminatory auctions. Unlike uniform price auctions, revenue-maximizing bidders in discriminatory auctions ‘pad’ bids close to the expected clearing price for units with costs below that price, but they do not bid below cost on higher cost units. Therefore, if costs are higher than expected, the clearing price rises and if costs are lower than expected, the clearing price remains high.     

Pseudo-Generic Products and Barriers to Entry in Pharmaceutical Markets

This paper examines incentives for brand-name pharmaceutical producers to market pseudo-generic versions of their own branded products upon the expiry of patent protection.Using a two-stage game model, we determine that under plausible demand and cost conditions, brand-name incumbents can find it profitable to produce pseudo-generics as a means of blocking rivals' entry even when independent firms producing true generics face low entry costs.The model shows that social welfare can be higher when firms use pseudo-generics instead of capacity for entry deterrence as long as substitutability between brand-name and generic products is sufficiently high.     

Search Costs and Investment in Quality

In this paper we analyze how lower search costs affect firms' incentives to invest in quality. We identify two conflicting effects. On the one hand, lower search costs increase incentives to invest in quality by eroding the market share of low quality firms and increasing the market share of high quality firms. On the other hand, by intensifying price competition, lower search costs adversely affect high quality firms more than low quality firms. The net effect of a change in the search cost on quality is shown to depend on the initial quality distribution. There is a critical value such that, if the proportion of high quality firms is initially below this value, lower search costs increase this proportion, whereas if the initial quality is above this value, lower search cost decreases the proportion of high quality firms. We show that our results are consistent with a ‘superstar effect.’     

Cost reductions or reputation enhancement as motives for mergers: The logic of multihospital systems

This paper examines two motives for the formation of local multihospital systems: cost reduction and reputation enhancement. Systems may reduce costs by eliminating redundancies and reducing administrative costs. Integration may also lower costs for consumers seeking consistently high qualiiy. We hypothesize that if systems achieve either cost or reputation benefits, then member hospitals will ‘look’ different from random collections of hospitals. We find that local systems do not appear to have lower costs but do appear to enjoy reputation benefits over nonsystem hospitals. Our findings challenge the assumptions behind popular health reform initiatives.     

A general model to compute activity-based waste disposal costs for health care products

ABSTRACT

Hospitals are large producers of solid waste, of which some is benign, some is extremely hazardous, and much is in between. The cost of segregating and disposing of products in these waste streams is high, and studies have shown there is considerable potential to reduce these costs while simultaneously decreasing environmental impact. In this article we develop an activity-based costing method that assigns waste disposal costs proportionally to each product. By providing disposal cost information at this level of aggregation it is possible to directly influence purchasing decisions, identify priority products for focused interventions, and determine the ratio of a product's purchasing cost to disposal cost. The method is tested on products with different purchasing costs, disposal costs, physical characteristics, and disposal processes.     

Informative Advertising Competition

This paper investigates informative price advertising in an established-product Hotelling duopoly where firms compete for shares of a fixed market. Prices are uncertain because firms’ costs are private information. For a sufficiently low cost of advertising, advertising necessarily arises in equilibrium. Also, the less balanced the initial distributions over costs, the greater the potential for informative advertising. Moreover, whenever firms use informative advertising, it increases the firms’ expected profits, and social welfare, relative to the outcome without advertising.