Indoor Climate Control: The Global Demand for Heating,Ventilating, and Air-Conditioning Equipment

World demand for heating, ventilating, and air-conditioning (HVAC) equipment is expected to rise in absolute terms during the current five-year period, but the rate of growth is slowing. However, growth is still in excess of that recorded by both global building construction expenditures and world gross domestic product. In 2007, $63.1 billion was spent on HVAC. The Asia-Pacific region now accounts for about 45 percent of the total. The two major categories of HVAC are cooling equipment, which accounts for 71 percent of the total, while heating equipment is responsible for the remaining 29 percent. The commercial market dominates the residential market by a ratio of 65:35. There are hundreds of suppliers around the world, but the eight leading firms have about 50 percent of the market.     

Rorty,Caputo and business ethics without metaphysics: ethical theories as normative narratives

Using the works of Richard Rorty and John Caputo, I want to suggest that we might be better off treating the traditional ethical theories of Kant, Mill, Aristotle and Hobbes as normative narratives rather than as justificatory schemes for moral decision making to be set up against one another. In a spirit akin to Husserl's ‘bracketing’ of metaphysics, when discussing ethical theories in business ethics, we can easily avoid metaphysics and use an approach that sees ethical theory as socially convincing normative narratives – narratives that unify us with others insofar as they describe our phenomenological experiences in a way with which many of us mutually resonate. I will do this by attempting to show how John Caputo's thinking in Against Ethics and Rorty's postmodern pragmatism might be appropriated to some extent by us in business ethics.     

The mediating effects of perception and emotion: Digital signage in mall atmospherics

Digital signage (DS), public screens showing video, is an important, little-researched topic. The “direct” route in the elaboration likelihood model suggests that DS influences cognition, which then influences emotions whereas the “peripheral” route is emotion→cognition. We predict that these operate in parallel and report a survey of mall consumers (n=315). DS has a significant, positive, total effect on approach behaviors, mediated by positive affect and (arguably) perception of mall environment. Results extend the limited capacity model of mediated message processing from television to DS, which predicts the effectiveness of vivid moving visual images as atmospheric stimuli.     

Group Structured Reasoning for Coalescing Group Decisions

In this paper we present the notion of structured reasoning through a model, called the Generic/Actual Argument Model (GAAM). The model which has been used as a computational representation for machine modelling of reasoning and for hybrid combinations of human and machine reasoning can be used as a coalescent framework for decision making. Whilst the notion of structuring reasoning is not new, structured reasoning is advanced as a technique where group consensus on reasoning structures at various levels can be used to facilitate the comprehension of complex reasoning particularly where there are multiple perspectives. For an issue, the approach provides a scaffolding structure for cognitive co-operation and a normative reasoning structure against which group participants can identify points of difference and points in common as well as the nature of the differences and similarities. Intra-group transparency characterized by the ability to recognise points in common and understand the nature of differences is important to the process of coalescing group decisions that carry maximum group support.     

Creating a Public Good to Fight Monopolization: The Formation of Broadcast Music,Inc.

Entry by vertical integration to defeatmonopolization has played an important role in severalantitrust cases. Yet the source of financing for suchentry is unclear, given that the entrant represents apublic good to the vertically related firms. Whilethere are a number of theoretical and experimentalstudies on the private supply of a public good, thereis little empirical estimation on this topic. Thispaper examis business contributions to the creation ofBroadcast Music, Inc. (BMI) in 1940. BMI was createdby broadcasters specifically to fight monopolization,and represented investment in a pure public good. This study finds that several factors led tocontributions to create BMI. In particular, networkaffiliation increased the probability that a stationwould join BMI. There is also evidence stations inless competitive markets were more likely to join,indicating that the rents from the creation of BMIwere less likely to be competed away in suchmarkets.     

The Risk Exposure of Emerging Equity Markets

The low correlation between returns in emerging equity marketsand industrial equity markets implies that the global investorwould benefit from diversification in emerging markets. Thisarticle explores the sensitivity of the emerging-market returnsto measures of global economic risk. When these traditionalmeasures of risk are used, the emerging markets have littleor no sensitivity. This finding is consistent with these markets'being segmented from world capital markets. However, the correlationbetween the emerging-market returns and the risk factors appearsto be changing over time.     

The EU Budget and the CAP: An Agenda for the Review?

The promised review of the EU Budget in 2008 offers an opportunity to bring CAP financing into line with logic, justice and the rest of EU policy. Currently, the CAP is unique amongst European policies in being both mandatory and requiring 100 per cent financing by the EU budget. While this made good sense at the policy's inception, it is now an obsolete anachronism. A sensible and defensible agenda for financial reform, which is all that is on the reform agenda at present, is to make the EU budget responsible for only a fraction (say 25 per cent) of the costs of the current CAP, instead of the present 100 per cent. This would bring CAP financing into line with other EU policies, and make member states separately responsible for the balance for their own farmers, as they so wish, up to the CAP budgetary ceiling already agreed. Any resulting competition between member states in the extent and means by which they continue (or not) to support farmers through direct payments would be controlled through EU Competition and single market policies. Such competition would also provide a good opportunity for experiments with policy development, to the advantage of all, since different policies are required for the different stages of development and different local conditions now evident within the EU.     

Markets,torts, and social inefficiency

We provide a model wherein oligopolists produce differentiated products that also have a safety attribute. Consumption of these products may lead to harm (to consumers and/or third parties), lawsuits, and compensation, either via settlement or trial. Firm‐level costs reflect both safety investment and production activities, as well as liability‐related costs. Compensation is incomplete, both because of inefficiencies in the bargaining process and (possibly) because of statutorily established limits on awards. We compare the market equilibrium safety effort and output levels to what a planner who is able to set safety standards, but takes the market equilibrium output as given, would choose.