Beer Advertising and Marketing Update: Structure,Conduct, and Social Costs

Beer advertising is a topic that has frequently attracted the attention of industrial organization economists. This update reviews major events, data trends, and research for each of three issues: (1) the importance of advertising and product differentiation for structural change in the brewing industry; (2) the manner and extent to which brewers can strategically alter market shares using advertising; and (3) the social costs of beer advertising and marketing, including advertising bans, targeting of underage youth, and recent changes in the three-tier system of alcohol distribution. Major legal decisions pertaining to commercial speech and other regulations also are discussed.JEL Classifications: L66, L13, M37     

Regulation and Measuring Cost-Efficiency with Panel Data Models: Application to Electricity Distribution Utilities

This paper examines the performance of panel data models in measuring cost-efficiency of electricity distribution utilities. Different cost frontier models are applied to a sample of 59 utilities operating in Switzerland from 1988 to 1996. The estimated coefficients and inefficiency scores are compared across different specifications. The results indicate that while the average inefficiency is not sensitive to the econometric specification, the efficiency ranking varies significantly across models. The reasonably low out-of-sample prediction errors suggest that panel data models can be used as a prediction instrument in order to narrow the information gap between the regulator and regulated companies.     

Works Councils and Separations: Voice,Monopoly, and Insurance Effects

Using a large linked employer–employee data set for Germany, we find that the existence of a works council is associated with a lower separation rate to employment, in particular for workers with low tenure. While works council monopoly effects show up in all specifications, clear voice effects are only visible for low tenured workers. Works councils also reduce separations to nonemployment, and this impact is more pronounced for men. Insurance effects only show up for workers with tenure of more than 2 years. Our results indicate that works councils to some extent represent the interests of a specific clientele.     

政府干预、自然资源与经济增长:基于中国地区层面的研究

政府干预因素是否与资源利用效率密切正相关,并进而导致中国地区经济增长存在“资源之咒”现象是学界关注的重要问题。本文从理论上证明了政府干预低效率与“资源之咒”现象、经济增长率低下是密切相关的,在此基础上利用地区面板数据进行了实证检验。研究发现:在控制住海港距离、政府干预等因素后,“资源之咒”的命题在中国并不明显;资源因素与政府干预因素在我国不是正相关关系,而是呈现负相关关系。     

Demand for farm animal welfare and producer implications: Results from a field experiment in Michigan

This study utilizes a Becker-DeGroot-Marschak (BDM) mechanism to assess Michigan consumer demand for animal welfare practices. Results are examined in the context of changing farm production costs and producer marketing margins. We find that while consumers are willing to pay significant premiums for animal welfare standards, failing to account for the costs associated with producing the entire animal under the new system could lead to suboptimal policy that negatively affects producer welfare. Our results suggest that consumer premiums for animal welfare are product specific and that WTP estimates should not be generalized to the entire animal. We discuss policy implications of our findings and highlight the importance of considering producer costs when evaluating consumer demand for farm animal welfare practices.     

Demand for coffee in Sweden: The role of prices, preferences and market power

There is a widespread belief that consumer coffee prices are high relative to bean prices and that lower consumer prices would lead to substantial increases in bean exports from Third-World countries. This issue is evaluated by analysing how retail prices, preferences and market power influence coffee demand in Sweden. A demand function is estimated for the period 1968–2002 and used, together with information on import prices of coffee beans, to simulate an oligopoly model. This approach gives estimates of the maximum average degree of market power and shows how coffee demand would react to reductions in marginal cost to its minimum level. The maximum level of market power is found to be low, but it generates large spreads between consumer and bean prices because the price elasticity has low absolute values. Moreover, the impact of a price decrease would be small because long-run coffee demand is dominated by changes in the population structure in combination with different preferences across age groups. Hence, a change to perfect competition would only have a negligible effect on bean imports.     

Big Data for Creating and Capturing Value in the Digitalized Environment: Unpacking the Effects of Volume,Variety, and Veracity on Firm Performance*

Despite significant academic and managerial interest in big data, there is a dearth of research on how big data impacts the long‐term firm performance. Reasons for this gap include a lack of objective indices to measure big data availability and its impact, and the tendency of studies to ignore the costs associated with collecting and analyzing big data, assuming that big data automatically delivers benefits to firms. Focusing on how firms create and capture value from big data about customers, we use the resource‐based view and three dimensions of big data (i.e., volume, variety, and veracity) to understand when the benefits outweigh the costs. Relying on the number of downloads of mobile device applications, we find that volume of big data has a negative effect on firm performance. This result suggests that the “bigness” of big data alone does not ensure value creation for a firm, and could even constitute a “dark side” of big data. Because big data variety—measured as the number of types of information taken per each application—moderates the negative effects of big data volume, simultaneous high values of volume and variety allow firms to create value that positively affects their performance. In addition, high levels of veracity (i.e., a high percentage of employees devoted to big data analysis), are linked to firms benefiting from big data via value capture. These findings shed light on the circumstances in which big data can be beneficial for firms, contributing to a better theoretical understanding of the opportunities and challenges and providing useful indications to managers.     

反垄断、规制与产业组织研究新进展--中国工业经济研究与开发促进会2005年年会暨产业组织与政府规制研讨会学术观点综述

本文对中国工业经济研究与开发促进会2005年年会暨产业组织与政府规制研讨会的主要学术观点进行了介绍，综述了反垄断、规制与产业组织研究的新进展，涉及纵向限制、双边市场、网络融合、集体谈判等前沿内容。     

Demand‐side strategy,relational advantage,and partner‐driven corporate scope: The case for client‐led diversification

Research Summary: We advance research on corporate diversification by joining insights from the demand‐side and relational views in strategy to offer a novel theory of client‐led diversification. We propose that client‐led diversification results from a combination of the customer‐driven opportunities emphasized in the demand‐side view and the creation of added value through relational assets that is a central tenet of the relational view. Furthermore, we hypothesize that suppliers’ client‐specific knowledge, clients’ relational commitment to suppliers, and growth opportunities in clients’ markets (relative to the suppliers’ own markets) will magnify the client‐led diversification effect. We test our hypotheses using a longitudinal dataset on patent law firms and their diversification into new domains of patent prosecution work for their corporate clients. Managerial Summary: Explanations of why firms diversify into new lines of business have largely concerned the redeployment of underutilized resources, with little regard to opportunities or influences stemming from firms’ existing customers. In our article, we show how the changing scope of business needs from a knowledge‐based supplier firm's set of existing clients is a central driver of supplier‐firm diversification, and this is especially the case when the level of relational assets shared between a supplier and its clients is higher. In a competitive landscape where suppliers compete intensively for the business of clients, our results show how managers can increase the likelihood of capturing additional business from its existing exchange relationships rather than bearing the risks of seeking new exchange relationships.     

Testing alternative theories of the firm: transaction cost,knowledge-based,and measurement explanations for make-or-buy decisions in information services

Firms boundary choices have undergone careful examination in recent years, particularly in information services. While transaction cost economics provides a widely tested explanation for boundary choice, more recent theoretical work advances competing knowledge-based and measurement cost explanations. Similar to transaction cost economics, these theories examine the impact of exchange attributes on the performance of markets and hierarchies as institutions of governance. These theories, however, offer alternative attributes to those suggested by transaction cost economics or offer alternative mechanisms through which similar attributes influence make–buy choices. Traditional empirical specifications of make–buy models are unable to comparatively test among these alternative theories. By developing and testing a model of comparative institutional performance rather than institutional choice, we examine the degree of support for these competing explanations of boundary choice. Hypotheses are tested using data on the governance of nine information services at 152 companies. Our results suggest that a theory of the firm and a theory of boundary choice is likely to be complex, requiring integration of transaction cost, knowledge-based, and measurement reasoning. © 1998 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The organizational adoption of high-technology products “for use”: Effects of size, preferences, and radicalness of impact

This research reports the results of a study on organizational adoption of high-technology products “for use” in contrast to “for manufacture.” Additionally, the study examines high-technology adoptions which often have different issues that are important to the decision process relative when compared to the adoption of less-technical products. For example, the level of compatibility or the availability of complementary products (e.g., network externality considerations) are often important issues for high-technology adoptions. As such, this study provides additional information in the relatively underresearched organizational adoption literature, particularly as it relates to high-technology products. In order to maintain connectivity with past work, we look at the firm size versus adoption issue. At the same time, we add new information by also examining how organizational preferences for products, and the degree of radicalness of the products affect organizational adoption. We use a proportional-hazards model to test our hypotheses using panel data on 400 firms that are drawn from 14 industries. As part of the research effort we developed an improved scale for judging the radicalness of a product than has been used in prior research. Furthermore, we extended the Booz, Allen, & Hamilton New Product Categories (1982) approach to incorporate innovation impact. As expected, the results show that size “does matter,” but that it is modified by degree of product radicalness and organizational preference. Interestingly, we found that for high-technology products “for use,” organizations prefer radical impact products but adopt incremental impact products. Hence, preferences and purchase behaviors do not match.