Ethics and Equity: Enforcing Ethical Standards in Commercial Relationships

Lawyers and the legal system have been much criticized in recent years. Despite popular perceptions, the legal system contains numerous mechanisms and rules designed to ensure fair results. This paper shows how the legal system tries to implement, in commercial transactions, the ethical principles of truthfulness and fairness. The Anglo-American development of Equity Courts is reviewed briefly. Several examples of the Law's enforcement of ethical principles are presented, in four different legal areas: Contracts, Securities, Goods, and Real Estate. The intent here is to present an overview of the problem, with area-specific illustrations, rather than a comprehenisve examination of the cases in just one area.     

Are Local TV Markets Separate Markets?

In sweeping revisions the US Telecommunications Act of 1996 relaxed rules respecting broadcast TV ownership regulations. In particular Congress directed the Federal Communication Commission (FCC) to conduct a rulemaking on whether the 'duopoly rules' preventing businesses from owning multiple broadcast stations in the same market should be relaxed, modified or eliminated. Naturally, this directive raises questions concerning competition. Specifically, would concentration and consolidation of local media firms have deleterious effects on advertising rates, output and consumer choice? In the present paper we examine, using own-price and cross-price elasticity demand estimates, the question of whether local TV markets constitute a separate market for advertising. Our structural tests, with appropriate caveats, reveal that local TV advertising is not, by itself, a distinct market - one relevant for antitrust action.     

Foreign acquisitions by Chinese firms: A strategic intent perspective

This article presents a strategic intent perspective (SIP) to analyze the foreign acquisitions made by Chinese firms. It suggests that Chinese firms strategically use cross-border acquisitions to achieve goals, such as acquiring strategic capabilities to offset their competitive disadvantages and leveraging their unique ownership advantages, while making use of institutional incentives and minimizing institutional constraints. The SIP is supported by the evidence from three firms that we studied, where dozens of interviews were conducted, including the one with the founder of Lenovo. This study contributes to extant international business theories by incorporating the SIP to examine internationalization strategies of firms from developing countries.     

Trade and the (dis)incentive to reform labor markets: The case of reform in the European Union

We study the relation between international trade and the gains to reform labor markets by removing firing restrictions. We find that trade linkages imply substantially smaller benefits to reform than those calculated in the closed economy general equilibrium model of Hopenhayn and Rogerson [Hopenhayn, Hugo, Rogerson, Richard, 1993. Job Turnover and policy evaluations: a general equilibrium analysis. Journal of Political Economy 101 (5), 915–938 October]. When economies trade, labor market policies in one country spill over to other countries through their effect on the terms of trade. A key finding in the open economy is that the share of the welfare gains from domestic labor market reform exported substantially exceeds the share of goods exported. Thus, with international trade, a country retains little to no benefit from unilaterally reforming its labor market. A coordinated elimination of firing taxes yields considerable benefits. We also find that the U.K. benefits from labor market reform by its continental trading partners. These insights provide some explanation for recent efforts toward labor market reform in the European Union.     

Applications of system dynamics in marketing: Editorial

This special issue of the JBR illustrates a range of applications of modeling and simulation from the system dynamics perspective to problems in marketing and related areas. The papers pertain to the diffusion of new products and technologies, advertising effectiveness, management decision-making, forecasting, project dynamics, and innovation and leadership. Papers presented in this special issue were selected from submissions to attend a two-day workshop on applications of system dynamics in marketing, held at the Johnson School of Management, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York, in June 2007.     

Pharmaceutical Economics

Business Economics - The role economists play in shaping the direction and outcome of business research and policy decisions of a very important part of the healthcare industry—the...     

Variability in agricultural productivity and rural household consumption inequality: Evidence from Nigeria and Uganda

This paper uses multiple rounds of panel data to assess the distributional implications of the variability in agricultural productivity in Nigeria and Uganda. It uses both a conventional decomposition and a regression‐based inequality decomposition approach to estimate the impact of climate‐induced variability in agricultural productivity. To mitigate the endogeneity associated with unobserved time‐invariant and time‐variant household fixed effects, we use rainfall shocks as a proxy for estimating the exogenous variability in agricultural productivity that affects consumption. Results suggest that a 10% increase in the variability of agricultural productivity tends to decrease household consumption by 38 and 52% on average for Nigeria and Uganda, respectively. Controlling for other factors, variability in agricultural productivity contributed to between 25% and 43% of consumption inequality between 2010 and 2015 for Nigeria; and 16% and 31% of consumption inequality between 2009 and 2011 for Uganda. We also show that variability in agricultural productivity increases changes in consumption inequality over time.     

Financial development,income and income inequality

Journal of Economic Interaction and Coordination - The aim of this paper is twofold. Firstly, we present a model in which both income and income inequality are jointly determined in a...     

Forecast reconciliation: A geometric view with new insights on bias correction

A geometric interpretation is developed for so-called reconciliation methodologies used to forecast time series that adhere to known linear constraints. In particular, a general framework is established that nests many existing popular reconciliation methods within the class of projections. This interpretation facilitates the derivation of novel theoretical results. First, reconciliation via projection is guaranteed to improve forecast accuracy with respect to a class of loss functions based on a generalised distance metric. Second, the Minimum Trace (MinT) method minimises expected loss for this same class of loss functions. Third, the geometric interpretation provides a new proof that forecast reconciliation using projections results in unbiased forecasts, provided that the initial base forecasts are also unbiased. Approaches for dealing with biased base forecasts are proposed. An extensive empirical study of Australian tourism flows demonstrates the theoretical results of the paper and shows that bias correction prior to reconciliation outperforms alternatives that only bias-correct or only reconcile forecasts.     

New Technology in Shopping: Forecasting Electronic Shopping With the Use of a Neuro-Fuzzy System

This article presents the application of neuro-fuzzy techniques in forecasting a new technology in shopping. Neural networks have been used successfully to forecast time series due to their significant properties of treating nonlinear data with self-learning capability. However, neural networks suffer the difficulty of dealing with qualitative information and the “black box” syndrome that more or less limits their applications in practice. To overcome the drawbacks of neural networks, in this study, we proposed a fuzzy neural network that is a class of adaptive networks functionally equivalent to a fuzzy inference system. The results derived from the experiment based on electronic sales indicated that the suggested fuzzy neural network could be an efficient system to forecast a new technology in shopping. Experimental results also show that the neuro-fuzzy approach outperforms the other two conventional models (AR and ARMA).