Value Creation in the Video Game Industry: Industry Economics,Consumer Benefits,and Research Opportunities

In the past twenty years, the video game industry has established itself as a significant contributor to the global entertainment economy. Compared to more established entertainment industries such as movies and music, limited scholarly research in marketing has addressed the processes that create value for companies and consumers in the context of video games which are now available on multiple devices (e.g., consoles, portables, mobile devices) and through multiple channels (e.g., retail and online). The authors therefore develop a conceptual framework of value creation through video games, highlight important findings from extant research in marketing and other disciplines, and apply the framework to derive future research opportunities.     

Verbraucherschutz als Teil der Marktordnung

In market orders, consumer protection is a necessary complement to competition policy in order to secure competition on the merits and the functioning of markets. Insights from behavioural economics show that disclosure obligations may not help boundedly rational consumers and that the standard paradigm of the “responsible and sovereign consumer” has to be modifi ed. “Nudging” and “debiasing” may be instrumental in preserving market freedom, while at the same time helping consumers to achieve desired results.     

Co‐creation in Radical Service Innovation: A Systematic Analysis of Microlevel Processes

This empirical paper presents the results of a detailed case‐study investigation of co‐creation in radical service innovation. The rationale for the paper is that detailed interventions must be tracked to offer a realistic account of how co‐creation occurs. This provides a strong empirical contribution to the emerging body of scholars developing the co‐creation paradigm, predominantly characterized by conceptual advances in service‐dominant logic. Our focus is on radical service innovation, which is disruptive in the sector. The overall aim of the paper is to unravel the nature of microlevel processes of co‐creation in radical service innovation. The study adopts sequential analysis to examine co‐creation. Patterns of sequences of actions and interactions associated with 40 incremental developments, involving multiple actors, are investigated. These co‐created innovative developments underpin the emergence of a radical telematics‐based motor insurance service. The findings suggest that the co‐creation path is not simple or uni‐faceted, and the paper unravels the nature of complex patterns of activities and interactions, Our in‐depth systematic analysis illuminates a combination approach with two main patterns of sequences: one dominated by ad‐hoc and enduring independent innovation activities by network actors and one dominated by lead‐firm innovation and interaction activity. The findings advance knowledge of the way co‐creation occurs in radical service innovation. The study results suggest that managerial attention be placed to, first, finding ways to induce independent innovative behavior from network partners and, second, to the development of interaction mechanisms to foster sharing and visualization of such innovation advances.     

On the robustness of risk-based asset allocations

Since the subprime crisis, portfolios based on risk diversification are of great interest to both academic researchers and market practitioners. They have also been employed by several asset management firms and their performance appears promising. Since they do not rely on estimates of expected returns, they are assumed to be robust. The same argument holds for minimum variance and equally weighted portfolios. In this paper, we consider a Monte Carlo simulation, as well as an empirical global portfolio dataset, to study the effect of estimation errors on the outcomes of two recently proposed asset allocations, the equally weighted risk contribution (ERC) and the principal component analysis (PCA) portfolio. The ERC portfolio is more robust to changes in the input parameters and has a smaller estimation error than the Markowitz approaches, whereas the PCA portfolio is even more unstable than the classical approaches. In the worst-case scenario, neither approach delivers what it promises. However, in every case the resulting return?Crisk relationship is dominated by the Markowitz approaches.     

Aid and the Soft Budget Constraint

The author applies the theory of the soft budget constraint to explain some stylized facts regarding the outcomes and practice of international aid, including ineffectiveness, white elephants, and volatility. The soft budget constraint can also make aid counterproductive. Nonetheless, actual aid institutions may be constrained optimal responses to soft budgets and commonly suggested reforms such as improved donor coordination in aid, focus on fewer countries and projects, and less volatility of aid may lower the effectiveness of aid. The soft budget is also consistent with conservative project selection and the recent focus on "ownership."     

PRICING CORPORATE SECURITIES UNDER NOISY ASSET INFORMATION

This paper considers the pricing of corporate securities of a given firm, in particular equity, when investors do not have full information on the firm's asset value. We show that under noisy asset information, the pricing of corporate securities leads to a nonlinear filtering problem. This problem is solved by a Markov chain approximation, leading to an efficient finite-dimensional approximative filter for the asset value. We discuss several applications and illustrate our results with a simulation study.