Innovation, embeddedness and policy: evidence from life sciences in three UK regions

This paper draws upon a survey of the life science and biotechnology regions of Oxford, Central Scotland and South West England to examine the innovation and embeddedness traits of the regions. The insights into the compositional weaknesses and strengths of the regions suggest opportunities and threats for the future development of the UK's life sciences and biotechnology. The discussion moves forward debates on biotechnology, regional innovation, regional economic development and policy by posing research questions relating to the gap of knowledge of two under-researched regions, the need for a differentiated view of regions and a public policy approach tailored towards them, as well as the prospects of 'engineering' high-tech regions. Some of the highlighted policy challenges are common to the three regions, while others are region-specific and reflect the variations of regional make-up and stage of development.     

The persistence of current and proposed measures of operating cash flow

The measurement of operating cash flow using U.S. generally accepted accounting principles (GAAP) currently requires deductions for interest and income tax payments, and prohibits deductions for capital expenditures. In contrast, the IASB and the FASB are jointly proposing a new measure of operating cash flow which prohibits deductions for interest and income tax payments, and requires deductions for capital expenditures. This study compares the persistence of the current and proposed measures of operating cash flow, and the industry-specific results indicate that there is no significant difference between the persistence of the two measures for more than three-fourths of the industries in the sample. Moreover, the Boards’ constituents are recommending the use of a subtotal of operating cash flow prior to capital expenditures, and the results of this study suggest that this subtotal is more persistent for a limited number of industries than the current measure. Overall, the results of this study suggest that the predictive ability of operating cash flow will not change significantly for most industries.     

The Bard of Savagery: Thorstein Veblen and Modern Social Theory

The hypothesis of this paper is that a detailed history of a specific location and period is more effective for isolating the important characteristics of institutions than studies which span multiple millennia across the globe. To illustrate this hypothesis, I examine three Italian city-states in the period between eleventh and sixteenth centuries. This was a time when the "commercial revolution" was underway in these city-states. As a result, there were institutional innovations in settlement patterns, work organization, and self-governing institutions to help provide for mutual defense and for the internalization of gains from long-distance trade. I contrast this case study with the methodology and findings employed by Douglass C. North, John J. Wallis, and Barry R. Weingast (2009) in Violence and Social Orders. Rather than analyze the importance of beliefs and the protection of property rights as in prior work of theirs, the authors here focus on the "Schumpeterian competition" between impersonal organizations as an effective institutional form to control violence. Moreover, the timeframe of their book extends to "all recorded human history." In contrast to North, Wallis, and Weingast's approach, I concentrate on Genoa, Florence, and Venice in an effort to explain more effectively the emergence of the public/private divide and the relationship between politics and economics in modern industrial society. Experimentation in medieval Italy in mediating conflict between newly emerging classes, innovating in public finance to support the military, and focusing on broad civic participation in the political process had a lasting impact on the development of the state as an institution.     

Evolutionäre Algorithmen im Marketing

Evolutionary algorithms (EA) are search heuristics, which simulate the basic principles of biological evolution and by reenacting the evolutionary mutation and selection processes, find optimum solutions in a predefined environment. In this article we examine the current state of research on EA in fields related to marketing and discuss potential applications in marketing research. Based on a bibliographic network and factor analysis, we identify nine focus areas in current research, most of which are in the operations research area. In particular, interactive EA hitherto have hardly ever been used in marketing research. In consumer surveys they can be linked to elements of classical market research in order to design products that provide consumers with maximum benefit from their viewpoint. Thanks to their model-free approach, evolutionary algorithms offer an alternative to conjoint analyses.     

Biased recommendations from biased and unbiased experts

When can you trust an expert to provide honest advice? We develop and test a recommendation game where an expert helps a decision maker choose among two actions that benefit the expert and an outside option that does not. For instance, a salesperson recommends one of two products to a customer who may instead purchase nothing. Subject behavior in a laboratory experiment is largely consistent with predictions from the cheap talk literature. For sufficient symmetry in payoffs, recommendations are persuasive in that they raise the chance that the decision maker takes one of the actions rather than the outside option. If the expert is known to have a payoff bias toward an action, such as a salesperson receiving a higher commission on one product, the decision maker partially discounts a recommendation for it and is more likely to take the outside option. If the bias is uncertain, then biased experts lie even more, whereas unbiased experts follow a political correctness strategy of pushing the opposite action so as to be more persuasive. Even when the expert is known to be unbiased, if the decision maker already favors an action the expert panders toward it, and the decision maker partially discounts the recommendation. The comparative static predictions hold with any degree of lying aversion up to pure cheap talk, and most subjects exhibit some limited lying aversion. The results highlight that the transparency of expert incentives can improve communication, but need not ensure unbiased advice.     

Endogenously chosen travel costs and the travel cost model: an application to mountain biking at Moab,Utah

The travel cost model is frequently used to estimate net willingness to pay for recreation at remote sites by using the visitor's travel costs as a proxy for the price of recreation. However, some concern has been raised over the validity of using the visitor's stated travel costs as a proxy for price. This paper addresses some of these concerns, by examining the possible over-estimation of consumer surplus due to endogenously chosen travel costs. This paper extends past theoretical work for the linear model by developing a correction for endogenously chosen travel costs in more commonly used nonlinear models such as the Poisson or count data model. Also provided is the first empirical test of the presence of endogeneity and an estimate of the magnitude of the error from ignoring endogeneity in travel costs. After applying this test and the correction to data that was gathered for mountain biking at Moab, Utah the estimate of consumer surplus falls from US $153 to US $135, which is a 12% reduction.     

Hayek's Geldtheoretische Untersuchungen: New insights from a 1925–29 typescript

German Ferdinand Tönnies (1855?-?1936) and American Thorstein Veblen (1857?-?1929) are influential figures in the history of the social sciences, whose intellectual relationship has been ignored. However, there are important and illuminating similarities and differences in their critiques of Karl Marx (1818?-?83), as well as in the transition from community to modernity in Western culture and society. This article begins with their account of the nature of the Western community in the Middle Ages and its passage to modernity via the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution. It culminates with their critiques of Marx and his and their mutual efforts to construct an ersatz community to replace the one that was lost.