From collaborative community to competitive market: the quest to build a crowdsourcing platform for social innovation

Crowdsourcing presents new opportunities to generate social innovation. However, many crowdsourcing social innovation initiatives struggle with turning their promising projects into sustaining platforms. We studied how to design crowdsourcing platforms for social innovation by building and examining a platform called travel2change. We illustrate a framework of crowdsourcing platform building blocks based on the evolution of our case study from a collaborative community to a competitive market. Thriving platforms have a clear purpose, they facilitate value‐creating interactions for well‐understood actors and build a valid business model. The insights reveal design principles to guide organizations that seek to leverage crowdsourcing for social impact.     

Waking the sleeping beauty: Swarovski’s open innovation journey

Even in today’s turbulent business environment, there are companies in many industries that have enjoyed decades of relatively undisturbed success. However, eventually, after such prolonged periods of calm, existing market positions are challenged. We describe such companies as ‘Sleeping Beauties’ and discuss how they can reinvent themselves through opening up of their boundaries and moving from compartmentalized exploitation and exploration efforts to a more dynamic ambidexterity model. We analyse Swarovski’s open innovation journey in this regard, instigated as a response to recent changes in its business environment. Our analysis of this process offers useful insights for companies struggling with similar problems.     

On the monetary policy in an economy with banks endogenously creating money

This paper attempts to employ a microeconomic model (industrial-organization approach to banking) to formalize the concept that banks in an economy may also unilaterally create money, at least initially, rather than passively multiplying the base money exogenously issued by the Central Bank in the money creation process. It shows that in equilibrium, banks may indeed create money (bank deposits) when making loans without relying on the newly issued base money from the Central Bank. Instead, the endogenously created money by banks would cause the Central Bank to endogenously adjust base money to hit the target policy interest rate.     

Financial Social Accounting Matrix: a useful tool for understanding the macro-financial linkages of an economy

This article extends the traditional methodology of social accounting by building a Financial Social Accounting Matrix (FSAM) and a corresponding Satellite Asset–Liability Matrix for Spain. In so doing, the difficulties that typically arise in consolidating data from the National Bureau of Statistics (INE) and the Bank of Spain (BdE) were overcome. This is the first FSAM for the Spanish economy and might provide new tools to deepen the analysis of the financial sector and of the determinants of financial vulnerability associated with interactions with other sectors of the economy. As a novel contribution to the literature, this paper incorporated a structural path analysis grounded in the FSAM multiplier to identify the principal paths through which financial shocks are transmitted.     

Accounting for Environmental Services: Contrasting the SEEA and the ENRAP Approaches

Both the System of Integrated Environment and Economic Accounting (SEEA) and the Environmental and Natural Resources Accounting Project (ENRAP) are efforts to expand conventional national economic accounts in order to better reflect interactions between the market economy and the natural environment. In order to maintain a close relationship to the System of National Accounts (SNA) accounting standards, SEEA adopts conventional definitions of productive sectors. However, SEEA fails to account for many valuable services of the natural environment and encourages the use of techniques that provide misleading and poor estimates of depreciation and damage to the environment. ENRAP addresses these deficiencies by explicitly recognizing that the natural environment is a productive economic sector. ENRAP encourages the use of imputation approaches that draw on techniques common in the environmental economics literature. These approaches are consistent with definitions of depreciation and environmental damage widely accepted in economic theory. The principles that underlie the ENRAP approach provide a basis for contrasting ENRAP and SEEA empirically. Using Philippine data, SEEA-type estimates are compared with those of ENRAP.     

Sign and phase asymmetry: News, economic activity and the stock market

In this paper, we present a general model of the joint data generating process underlying economic activity and stock market returns allowing for complex nonlinear feedbacks and interdependencies between the conditional means and conditional volatilities of the variables. We propose statistics that capture the long and short run responses of the system to the arrival of news, conditioning on the sign and time of arrival of the news. The model is applied to US data. We find that there are significant differences between the short and long run responses of economic activity and stock returns to the arrival of news. Moreover, for certain classifications of news, the respective responses of economic activity and stock returns vary according to the nature of the news and the phase of the business cycle at which the news arrives.     

The sunk-cost effect and optimal two-part pricing

This paper examines how the sunk-cost effect on consumers’ purchasing behavior may reset the optimal two-part pricing. It shows that the sunk-cost effect of a membership fee provides the firm an incentive to raise the unit price and/or to increase the market coverage by charging a lower membership fee.     

The lower bound and the causes of monetary policy inertia: evidence from Sweden

In 2009, in the midst of a global recession, Sweden’s Riksbank approached a lower bound on nominal interest rates. This encounter with the lower bound provides a natural experiment for investigating the causes of monetary policy inertia. To exploit this experiment, we estimate Taylor rules with Tobit specifications that permit both interest rate smoothing and persistent shocks (serial correlation) as explanations for inertia. The interest rate smoothing hypothesis leads to a specification in which lagged actual values of the dependent variable appear on the right-hand side of the Taylor rule, while the persistent shocks hypothesis leads to a specification in which lagged values of an unobserved latent dependent variable appear on the right-hand side of the Taylor rule. The divergence of actual and latent dependent variables that occurs at the lower bound provides leverage in distinguishing the two hypotheses. For a conventional Taylor rule, we find evidence of both sources of inertia. For a modified Taylor rule that includes a measure of financial stress, our evidence suggests that interest rate smoothing is the principal source of monetary policy inertia.     

The Environmental Supply of Farm Households: A Flexible Willingness to Accept Model

The purpose of the paper is toanalyse farmers' participation inenvironmental schemes, which are gaining agrowing importance within the Europeanagricultural policy. These schemes areimplemented through voluntary contracts thatpay farmers for the provision of environmentalservices. The microeconomic model that isdeveloped is a farm household model thatincorporates the producer and consumerbehaviour of the farmer to optimise hisenvironmental supply considering that theenvironmental service that he is supplying alsohas the characteristics of a public good. Defined as the difference between the profitloss in providing the environmental service andthe willingness to pay to consume this service,the household's willingness to accept (WTA)is compared with two flexible WTA measures thataccount for the technological flexibility ofthe environmental supply. Data come from asurvey of an agri-environmental schemeimplemented in the Walloon region of Belgiumsince 1995 and intended to protect the nestingof some endangered bird species. Econometricresults show that contingent valuation is areliable method to reveal the behaviours offarmers facing the invitation to participate inthis scheme. They also confirm that farmerbehaviour is also influenced by environmental preference.