Strategies of Product and Process Innovation: A Loglinear Analysis

Utterback and Abernathy (1975) developed a dynamic innovation model to explain the patterns of product and process innovation and to show which types of innovation would be most strategically appropriate for firms with particular objectives. In this paper the relation-ships between type and/or source of innovation and a number of firm-characteristic variables are examined. Loglinear regression is employed to determine the extent of the postulated relationships in a set of actual industry data on product innovation. The loglinear model provided results which were highly consistent with predictions made on the basis of previous research into product and process innovation.     

Quality Uncertainty as Resolution of the Bertrand Paradox

It is well‐known that product differentiation eliminates the Bertrand paradox (i.e. marginal cost pricing under duopoly). While differentiation is often justified with reference to the consumer's ‘preference for variety’, the conditions under which such a preference is likely to arise are rarely considered. We investigate this question in a setting in which uncertainty about product quality can endogenously generate either convex or non‐convex preferences. We show that even when two goods are ex ante homogeneous, quality uncertainty can eliminate the Bertrand paradox.     

Turbulence underneath the big calm? The micro-evidence behind Italian productivity dynamics

Italy ranked last in terms of manufacturing productivity growth according to OECD estimates over the last decade, with a flat, if not declining, trend. In this work we investigate the underlying firm-level dynamics of enterprises on the basis of a database developed by the Italian Statistical Office (ISTAT) covering the period 1989?C2004 and containing information on more than 100,000 firms. Over this period not only have the indicators of the central tendency of the distribution of labor productivity not significantly changed, but also the whole sectoral distributions have remained relatively stable over time, with their support at least not shrinking, or even possibly widening, over time. This is even more surprising if one takes into consideration the ??Euro?? shock that occurred during the period investigated. On the contrary, we observe that inter-decile differences in productivity have been increasing. Further, heterogeneous firms?? characteristics (i.e. export activity and innovation) seem to have contributed to boosting such intra-industry differences. Given such wide heterogeneities we resort to quantile regressions to identify the impact of a set of regressors at different levels of the conditional distribution of labor productivity. One phenomenon that we observe is what we call a tendency toward ??neo-dualism?? involving the co-existence of a small group of dynamic firms with a bigger ensemble of much less technologically progressive ones.     

A general theory of controllability and expectations anchoring for small-open economies

Rational expectations are often used as an argument against policy activism, as they may undermine or neutralize the policymaker’s actions. Although this sometimes happens, rational expectations do not always imply policy invariance or ineffectiveness. In fact, in certain circumstances rational expectations can enhance our power to control an economy over time. In those cases, policy announcements can be used to extend the impact of conventional policy instruments. We present a general forward-looking policy framework and use it to provide a formal rationale for testing when policymakers can and cannot expect to be able to manage expectations. To describe the relevance of our results applications are shown for policy design in small-open economies. Those are the cases where domestic policies are at their weakest and our ability to influence expectations most constrained.     

Non-manipulable domains for the Borda count

Summary. We characterize the preference domains on which the Borda count satisfies Arrows independence of irrelevant alternatives condition. Under a weak richness condition, these domains are obtained by fixing one preference ordering and including all its cyclic permutations (Condorcet cycles). We then ask on which domains the Borda count is non-manipulable. It turns out that it is non-manipulable on a broader class of domains when combined with appropriately chosen tie-breaking rules. On the other hand, we also prove that the rich domains on which the Borda count is non-manipulable for all possible tie-breaking rules are again the cyclic permutation domains.Received: 24 November 2003, Revised: 12 December 2004, JEL Classification Numbers: D71. Correspondence to: Clemens PuppeThe third author gratefully acknowledges the financial support from the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG), Graduiertenkolleg 629 at the University of Bonn and from the Hungarian Scientific Research Fund (OTKA F 043496).     

Trade credit in SMEs: a quantile regression approach

This article analyses the determinants of the trade credit in Spanish manufacturing small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) from a new perspective. Specifically, we focus on the relationship between trade credit and other relevance financial resources: bank credit and self-financing. For the first time in the literature, a quantile regression approach is used, which takes into account the heterogeneity of firms in different quantiles of trade credit distribution. Our results show that the relationship between trade credit and other financial sources presents dissimilarities, including differences in sign, on SMEs with different degrees of trade credit. Our findings help to clarify the confusing results achieved in previous research on this topic.     

Trust and reciprocity: extensions and robustness of triadic design

Our paper reconsiders the triadic design proposed by Cox (Games and Economic Behavior 46:260–281, 2004) to identify trust and reciprocity in investment games. Specifically, we extend the design in two directions. First, we collect information on investors’ choices by using both the direct-response (as does Cox) and strategy methods. Using the latter, we are able to condition reciprocity on initial inequality, which is endogenous when investigating reciprocity. We demonstrate that the triadic design provides evidence for reciprocity once that initial inequality is considered. Second, we elicit expectations and test their coherence with the triadic outcomes. By examining the relationship between trust actions and expected gains, we analyze whether investors’ expectations are consistent with their behavior. Finally, we test for the existence of an emotional bias, i.e., whether expectation mismatches induce trustees to change actual choices from the planned ones.     

Production Theory: Accounting for Firm Heterogeneity and Technical Change

The paper presents a new framework to assess firm level heterogeneity and to study the rate and direction of technical change. Building on the analysis of revealed short‐run production functions by Hildenbrand ( 1981 ), we propose the (normalized) volume of the zonotope composed by vectors‐firms as indicator of inter‐firm heterogeneity. Moreover, the angles that the zonotope's main diagonal form with the axes provide a measure of the rates and directions of productivity change. The proposed framework also accounts for n‐inputs and m‐outputs and, crucially, the measures of heterogeneity and technical change do not require many of the standard assumptions from production theory.