Incomplete regulation, market competition and collusion

Regulators often do not regulate all firms competing in a given sector. Due to product substitutability, unregulated competitors have incentives to bribe regulated firms to have them overstate their costs and produce less, thereby softening competition. The best collusion-proof contract entails distortions both for inefficient and efficient regulated firms (distortion ‘at the top’). But a contract inducing active collusion may do better by allowing the regulator to ‘team up’ with the regulated firm to indirectly tax its competitor. The best such contract is characterized. It is such that the unregulated firm pays the regulated one to have it truthfully reveals its inefficiency. We finally compare those contracts.     

A Market and Spatial Perspective of Health Tourism Destinations: The Hungarian Experience

Since health tourism is one of the most popular and most dynamically developing products of modern tourism, this paper aims at studying the characteristic features of health tourism destinations from a regional and spatial perspective. Accordingly, the authors would like to introduce a new approach of spatial and product analysis of tourism where the market and spatial relations and relevance of health tourism were analysed through the example of Hungary. Although the classic medical tourism centres were established on natural medical water basis, by today, due to product diversification, continuous innovation and the involvement of medical services into health tourism, the geographical embeddedness seems to disappear, thus basically restructuring the market. The methodological novelty of the research is that exceeding the classic supply–demand algorithm, we compiled a complex viewpoint system adequate to the specialities of the given product characteristics. In our study, the authors intend to survey the special characteristics of health tourism focusing on medical destinations through Hungarian examples since the country's leading position in the global market is well recognized, including medical services. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The impact of leniency and whistle-blowing programs on cartels

Antitrust authorities have set up leniency programs for cartel members that denounce their collusive agreements. These programs help prosecute participants and can thereby deter collusion. We compare the impact of reduced fines and positive rewards and argue that rewarding individuals, including firm employees, can deter collusion in a more effective way.We discuss possible adverse effects of whistle-blowing programs on firms' behavior, and particularly on turnover, incentives to innovate and cooperation. We also explore explanations for the puzzling fact that managers keep incriminating evidence and argue reward programs actually provide additional incentives for keeping such evidence.     

Deregulation and environmental differentiation in the electric utility industry

This paper analyzes how economic deregulation impacts firm strategies and environmental quality in the electric utility industry. We find evidence that the deregulation introduced to this historically staid industry has stimulated environmental differentiation. Differentiation is most likely to appear where its point of uniqueness is valued by customers, and we confirm this relationship in our sample. Specifically, utilities that served customers who exhibited higher levels of environmental sensitivity generated more ‘green’ power. The tendency for firms to differentiate in this way is lessened if they are relatively more dependent on coal‐fired generation or relatively more efficient. Thus, there is evidence that firms sort themselves into either differentiation or low‐cost strategies as the competitive realities of a deregulated world unfold. Deregulation and the ensuing environmental differentiation illustrate how utilities exploited formerly unmet customer demand for green power. The result has been greater levels of renewable generation and, hence, a cleaner environment. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Cross-listing effect on information environment of foreign firms: ADR type and country characteristics

We examine sources of improvement in the information environment of foreign firms that cross-listed in the United States as American Depositary Receipts (ADRs) between 1995 and 2005. We analyze changes in the number and dispersion of analyst recommendations on foreign firms following their cross-listing. We find increases in analyst coverage intensity across all four types of ADR programs, especially among firms that were listed on organized exchanges (the listing effect), and those that adopted capital raising ADR programs (the financing effect). Our results suggest that the listing effect is more persistent than the financing effect. On the other hand, reductions in recommendation dispersion are observed mainly for firms that choose non-capital raising ADRs and those from emerging markets. Overall, improvements in information environment are more profound among foreign firms originating from countries with greater information asymmetry, namely, countries with weaker legal tradition and rule of law, and countries that are less familiar to U.S. investors.     

LE RENOUVELLEMENT PÉRIODIQUE DES CONTRATS DE CONCESSION: LE CAS DES SERVICES DE L'EAU

RESUME ** :  Le renouvellement régulier des contrats de concession apparaît nécessaire pour bénéficier de concurrence dans certains secteurs, comme l'eau. Nous décrivons les contrats et la règle de renouvellement optimaux dans ce contexte. Ils arbitrent entre les diminutions de coûts, en cas de changement de concessionnaire, et les incitations à investir à long terme du concessionnaire en place. La meilleure information du concessionnaire en place sur des éléments constituant une valeur commune de la concession est importante. Nous montrons que ses conséquences diffèrent fortement du cas des enchères de biens.     

Imperial Governance: Governing Inwards or Outwards?

This article presents an analysis of the European Union and of the integration process using the concept of empire. It also offers a critical reflexion on the use of the concept of empire to analyse contemporary polities. It argues that many scholars of politics have a biased understanding of this concept, which is ‘tailored’ to analyse only one type of empire, the colonial empire, and to disregard the existence of another type of empire. To escape this trap, the article suggests the use of two concepts, ‘inwards imperial governance’ and ‘outwards imperial governance’. These concepts make it possible to account for different types of empire in the past as well as contemporary polities. They also help shed a different light on the EU’s empirehood and its evolution over time. In its concluding remarks, the article suggests the potential usefulness of these concepts for the analysis of other contemporary cases.     

Corporate Sustainable Innovation and Employee Behavior

Corporate sustainable innovation is a major driver of institutional change, and its success can be largely attributed to employees. While some scholars have described the importance of intrinsic motivations and flexibility to facilitate innovation, others have argued that constraints and extrinsic motivations stimulate innovation. In the context of sustainable innovation, we explore which employee work practices are more conducive to firm-level innovation in corporate sustainability. Our results, based on a sample of 4640 French employees from 1764 firms, confirm the positive impact of intrinsic motivations (through employee social interactions), and the negative impact of job strain (through high imposed work pace), on corporate sustainable innovation. We also find that extrinsic rewards, through pay satisfaction, counteract the negative effect of job strain to promote sustainable innovation. This indicates that intrinsic and extrinsic rewards can work in tandem to facilitate sustainable innovation.     

French Retirement Reforms and Intragenerational Equity in Retirement Duration

As most developed countries, France has gone over the last 20 years through a process of pension system reforms, mainly aiming at increasing the average retirement age, through increasing the required number of contribution years or through postponing legal (minimal and/or normal) ages. Public debates over which lever should be preferred have been paramount in France, with concerns focusing on redistribution issues between high wage high life-expectancy and low-wage low life-expectancy workers. In this paper, we empirically address this issue by simulating the differentiated impacts of the past French reforms on average retirement ages across wage quartiles. Our simulations show that increasing the required duration criterion—as was done by the 1993 and 2003 reforms–have redistributive impact as regards retirement age, while increasing the normal age—as was done by the 2010 reform—has a counter-distributive impact. The redistributive impact on average of the required duration criterion however only holds thanks to the fact that disabled workers—most of them in the lowest wage quartile—are exempted from it. Last, increasing minimal age has ambiguous impacts according to gender: redistributive among women but counter-distributive among men.     

Social media marketing in wine tourism: winery owners’ perceptions

This paper examines winery owners’ attitudes and perceptions regarding the use of social media in marketing and promoting wine tourism online. Empirical evidence is provided by a sample of 20 winery owners in the North Italian region of Langhe, who have engaged to a greater or lesser extent in social media. The findings show that while the majority of winery owners recognise the social, economic and emotional benefits of social media, they are far from exploiting its full potential, partially due to barriers such as their agricultural mentality and the time-consuming nature of social media.