Assessing new cell phone text and video services

The cell phone is a social medium developing into a multimedia digital platform that provides, obtains, and shares personal and social information. Thus, digital divide, social support, and privacy issues familiar to students of the Internet are here applied to understanding why people may be more or less interested in new text and video cell phone services. The first part of this study develops a basic model of demographic, social, and prior technology use influences on interest in three categories of cell phone text and video services derived from uses and gratifications studies of traditional and new media services—surveillance, entertainment, and instrumental. Hypotheses from this model were tested using data from an April 2007 US national random-digit dialing telephone survey. The by-now familiar digital divide demographics had both indirect and direct influences on assessments of these sets of services, although primarily for entertainment services (which were also negatively influenced by concerns about privacy threats). Surveillance services—here, providing location of family, friends and self to each other—were more positively assessed when family and friends lived closer, and with less prior communication technology use. Instrumental services—such as directions when lost and health emergency information—were more positively assessed by those with greater social support and a stronger belief in privacy rights. Thus, while overall only the entertainment services were even moderately explained, there were understandable differences in influences among the three sets of services, with demographic factors predominating.     

The Psychological Basis of Opportunity Identification: Entrepreneurial Alertness

Opportunity identification represents a unique entrepreneurial behavior yet its processes and dynamics remain mysterious. Entrepreneurial alertness, a distinctive set of perceptual and information-processing skills, has been advanced as the cognitive engine driving the opportunity identification process. To date, empirical support has been equivocal; however, these early studies suffer from fundamental mistakes in theory and method. These mistakes are examined and addressed. A research agenda for the systematic and conceptually sound study of entrepreneurial alertness and opportunity identification is outlined.     

Market-oriented reforms,globalization and the recent transformation of Latin American innovation systems

Market-oriented structural reforms were implemented in Latin America under the expectation that the transition from an "inward-oriented", "state-led" growth strategy to one which was more "market-led" and "outward-oriented" was going to be rewarded by a sustainable long-term improvement in the region's rate of economic expansion and productivity growth. The competitive discipline imposed by a more open and deregulated economic regime was expected to induce faster innovation and technological modernization efforts from firms and individuals and, thereafter, a gradual but steady "convergence" to world-wide income and productivity standards. A global look at the region's performance throughout the 1980s and 1990s tells us that such a priori expectation was far from realistic. The paper examines why this has been so.     

Die Bewertung von Handelsrisiken eines Übertragungsnetzbetreibers anhand einer Monte-Carlo-Simulation

EnBW Transportnetze AG (TNG) is the transmission system operator (TSO) of Energie Baden-Württemberg AG. Due to the Renewable Energy Sources Act, the TSOs are obliged to take-up the (fluctuating) complete amount of electricity made of renewable resources. The TSOs have to transform this feeding into a constant output. Therefore, TNG has started trading on the European Power Exchange. The amount of electricity needed to be bought and sold respectively in order to create a constant output involves risks because of price volatility. As a result of the merit-order-effect, these risks increase. Due to this effect, procurement costs generally exceed sales revenues despite of well-balanced quantitative electricity tradings. For evaluating the procurement and merchandise risk at the intraday market, a Monte-Carlo-Simulation is executed on the basis of historical turnover data.     

Mexico's Tariff Policy

Abstract . While there is common agreement that Mexico's Industrialization period was helped by a protective commercial policy, there has been little testing of this hypothesis. This paper investigates the possibility that Mexico may have used her changing tariff postures not to provide aid for her growing industries but rather to improve either her terms of trade, her revenues or her balance of payments during the 1930–1965 period. The research shows that except for isolated instances none of the individual arguments examined, nor their combination, could explain Mexico's tariff policy. It is therefore concluded that tariffs for protection were employed to achieve industrial development.     

Mapping circular economy activities in the European Union: Patterns of implementation and their correlates in small and medium‐sized enterprises

With the European Commission looking for ways to incentivize the adoption of circular economy (CE) activities by small and medium‐sized enterprises (SMEs) in the European Union (EU), further insights into the implementation of CE activities across member states are needed. We analyse a European Commission survey conducted in 2016 among approximately 11,000 firms in EU‐28 member states in order to throw light on the conditions in which SMEs engage in five specific CE activities. In contrast to previous studies arguing that CE activities are independent of each other, we present novel findings demonstrating that seven patterns of engagement in CE can be identified in which activities are systematically interdependent. Further, we show that these patterns are associated with the organizational properties of SMEs and are differentially distributed among EU member states and industrial sectors. The interdependency of activities forms a hierarchy in which waste minimization is the most likely activity to be implemented in SMEs, followed, in descending order of likelihood, by replanning of energy use, redesigning products and services, and finally using renewable energy and replanning water usage. The findings have theoretical, managerial, and policy implications for the adoption of interdependent CE activities.     

US telecommunications privacy policy : Socio-political responses to technological advances

Deciding on who should know about Americans' private telephone conversations and other forms of telecommunicating has always been an issue fraught with, on the one hand, fear of intrusive government or corporate agents and, on the other, a desire for government and corporations to control crime and vend services respectively. This article looks at how legal and legislative compromises have been reached in order to address differing goals, and what forms future privacy issues may take. The discussion focuses first on the political origins of the USA's current laws governing privacy and the telephone, then on novel privacy issues arising out of new telecommunications technologies.     

Joint ventures as a means of assembling complementary inputs

In recent years, economists have devoted considerable attention to mechanisms through which firms can cooperate, particularly in the conduct of R&D. This literature had tended to focus on cooperation's effects inoutput markets. In contrast, the present analysis examines the effects of cooperation oninput markets. In particular, joint ventures are often said to be motivated by the desire to assemble complementary assets into a package needed to conduct a successful project. Some of the ways in which joint ventures may faciliate the acquisition of needed inputs are explored.This article was originally prepared for the Penn State International Symposium on Joint Ventures and Strategic Alliances, April 6–8, 1992. I am grateful to the conference participants, to seminar participants at Duke University and Harvard Business School and to an anonymous referee for useful comments and suggestions. I would also like to thank my colleague Benjamin Hermalin for his careful reading of an earlier draft and for many insightful discussions of the issues raised here. This material is based on work supported by the National Science Foundation under Award No. SES-9112076.