Productive Signaling Equilibria and Over-Maintenance: An Application to Real Estate Markets

When there is asymmetric information regarding the quality of a traded durable asset, the informed seller might signal asset quality to prospective uninformed buyers by investing in improvements and maintenance. In contrast to Spence (1973), however, this signal may be productive. We derive conditions of signal productivity under which signaling separating, signaling pooling, and no-signaling pooling equilibria persist. We examine welfare implications of the model and identify the over-investment in maintenance effect that persists in efficient markets with asymmetric information and productive signaling. Furthermore, we conduct comparative statics analysis of the results and show the range of parameter values in which a particular equilibrium is attained. While the model and its outcomes apply to various durable assets, we particularly refer in the analysis to real estate markets.     

Matching Demand and Supply in a Weightless Economy: Market-driven Creativity with and without IPRs

Many cultural products have the same nonrival nature as scientific knowledge. They therefore face identical difficulties in creation and dissemination. One traditional view says market failure is endemic: Societies tolerate monopolistic inefficiency in intellectual property (IP) protection to incentivize the creation and distribution of intellectual assets. This paper examines that tradeoff in dynamic, representative agent general equilibrium, and characterizes socially efficient creativity. Markets for intellectual assets protected by IP rights can produce too much or too little innovation.     

The Implications of Business-to-Business and Consumer Market Differences for B2B Branding Strategy

By integrating existing conceptual models and research findings, this effort examines the noteworthy differences between the B2B and the consumer market contexts and the implications of those differences on the formulation of B2B brand strategies. We introduce the B2B-Consumer Market Dimensions Continuum as a tool to identify key differences between the two markets. The continuum is used to suggest the branding approach that is most likely to be successful in a B2B organization's brand-building efforts.     

An Evaluation of Economic Models to Provide Policy Advice in Response to the BSE Crisis in Canada

The days following the discovery of BSE in Canada were characterized by considerable uncertainty for both policy makers and industry stakeholders. This paper develops eight criteria for economic systems models that would provide information on the impacts of border closures and the effects of programs designed to alleviate some of the financial strain on industry stakeholders. The eight criteria provide a framework to evaluate two economic models used extensively by policy makers in Canada to provide policy guidance in addition to a survey of published economics literature related to the Canadian beef industry prior to the discovery of the BSE case in May 2003. The results suggest a need to improve the combination of knowledge and modeling skills and techniques before another tragedy strikes the agricultural industry in Canada. Les jours qui ont suivi la découverte d'un cas d'ESB au Canada ont semé beaucoup d'incertitude chez les décideurs et les acteurs de l'industrie. Dans la présente étude, nous avons élaboré huit critères pour des modèles de systèmes économiques qui fourniraient de l'information sur les répercussions de la fermeture des frontières et sur les effets des programmes visant à atténuer une partie des contraintes financières auxquelles sont confrontés les acteurs de l'industrie. Les huit critères offrent un cadre pour évaluer deux modèles économiques que les décideurs au Canada utilisent fréquemment pour déterminer une orientation politique, en plus d'un tour d'horizon de la littérature économique sur l'industrie bovine au Canada avant la découverte du premier cas d'ESB en mai 2003. Les résultats ont montré la nécessité d'améliorer la combinaison connaissances, compétences et techniques de modélisation avant qu'une autre tragédie ne frappe l'industrie agricole canadienne.     

Usefulness of consolidated government accounts: A comparative study

This comparative empirical study on consolidated government accounting reforms in the United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand, Canada and Sweden reveals contextual differences affecting their adoption and usefulness. It can help policy-makers, public managers, and academics understand the gap between claims associated with the adoption of accounting technologies and their usefulness, as well as provide insights into dichotomies between their global proliferation and localized adaptations.     

Project success and project team management: Evidence from capital projects in the process industries

Efficient project execution is a key business objective in many domains and particularly so for capital projects in the process industries, but existing project management research gives little direction about how project team factors influence three important capital project outcomes: cost, schedule, and operability. After an extensive cross-disciplinary review of the general team and project management literatures, we constructed and tested a theoretically based, five-dimensional model of organizational context, project team design, project team leadership, project team processes, and project outcome factors. We examined the model by means of an empirical study of 56 newly completed capital projects executed by 15 Fortune 500 companies in the process industries. The results indicate the value of disaggregating project outcomes for research purposes. Different bundles of project team factors were found to drive project cost, schedule, and operability. Project team efficacy, cross-functional project teams, autonomous project team structure, and virtual office usage were the strongest predictors of project cost effectiveness. Continuity of project leadership, cross-functional project teams, and project manager incentives were the strongest predictors of project construction schedule. In contrast, clear project goals and an office design to facilitate effective communication were the main predictors of plant operability. Implications of these findings for researchers and project practitioners are discussed. One major practical implication of our findings is that project managers need to clearly focus and prioritize their goals for each project so they can adopt the appropriate bundles of project team practices that will facilitate their goal achievement.     

Are family firms really superior performers?

Although international evidence suggests that families may be unhelpful to firm performance, recent analyses of U.S. public companies indicate that family firms outperform. This study probes these contrasting findings by investigating more fine-grained measures of family business in the U.S. Specifically, it makes a fundamental but neglected distinction between lone founder businesses in which no relatives of a founder are involved, and true family businesses that do include multiple family members as major owners or managers. The research also seeks to overcome issues of endogeneity and selection bias by examining both Fortune 1000 firms and a random sample of 100 much smaller public companies. The results show that findings are indeed highly sensitive both to the way in which family businesses are defined and to the nature of the sample. Fortune 1000 firms that include relatives as owners or managers never outperform in market valuation, even during the first generation. Only businesses with a lone founder outperform. Moreover neither lone founder nor family firms exhibited superior valuations within a randomly drawn sample of companies. Our results confirm the difficulty of attributing superior performance to a particular governance variable.     

全球半导体工业新阶段即将来临

十多年前．全球半导体工业似乎面临着一个不可逾越的挑战。不断变窄的工艺技术带来的开发和制造成本的快速提升威胁着全球半导体工业的继续增长。由于这些新工艺的复杂性带来了内在的不可避