The Pro-competitive Effect of Two-Part Tariffs

Two producers delegate sales of differentiated products to common retailers, each with a monopoly position. Each producer can offer either a linear or a two-part tariff. In the single-period game each producer's dominant strategy is to use a two-part tariff. If the two producers' products are sufficiently close substitutes and the discount factor is sufficiently high, both producers offering linear tariffs can be sustained as an equilibrium outcome in an infinitely repeated game.     

Austrian Demography and Housing Demand: Is There a Connection

This paper analyses the role of demographic factors in the Austrian housing market. Linking demographic issues, in conjunction with the Austrian private housing finance, to the housing demand is the focus of the empirical model developed in this paper. We find statistical support that the demographic factors help to explain for housing demand. However, we emphasize that demographic factor such as the adult population with net migration effect is only one of the key variables which contributes in understanding the Austrian housing demand. Some of our other empirical findings indicate that the Austrian housing demand is inelastic to various economic factors is a concern for some housing policies.     

The Effects of Conflict Types, Dimensions, and Emergent States on Group Outcomes

In this study, we examine three types of conflict (task, relationship, and process) and four dimensions of conflict (emotions, norms, resolution efficacy, and importance) in decision making groups. We also investigate emergent states (e.g., trust, respect, cohesiveness; Marks et al. 2001; Acad Manag Rev 26: 530–547) as mediating the effects of the conflict types and dimensions on group outcomes (productivity and viability). All three types of conflict decreased positive emergent states in groups and this led to a decrease in group viability (the ability of a team to retain its members through their satisfaction and willingness to continue working together; Balkundi and Harrison 2006; Acad Manag J 49: 49–68). This effect was alleviated by resolution efficacy (the belief that the conflict can be easily resolved) regarding process conflict, but could be exacerbated by any negative emotion associated with relationship conflict. Norms that encouraged task conflict also increased positive emergent states within groups, which marginally and positively influenced group performance.     

Mobility, Residential Location and the American Dream: The Intrametropolitan Geography of Minority Homeownership

This article applies data from Washington, DC, Chicago and Los Angeles to estimate three-level nested multinomial logit models of household mobility, residential location and homeownership tenure choice. Model simulation indicates that shocks to income can significantly elevate the homeownership attainment of minority households; however, their urban settlement and homeownership patterns remain substantially more concentrated than those of whites. Simulated equilibration of black economic status with that of whites results in an approximate doubling of homeownership rates among black movers to central city areas. In contrast, homeownership rates among black movers to suburban and outlying areas lag far behind those of whites.     

Getting it right the second time

Once a business performs a complex activity well, the parent organization often wants to replicate that success. But doing that is surprisingly difficult, and businesses nearly always fail when they try to reproduce a best practice. The reason? People approaching best-practice replication are overly optimistic and overconfident. They try to perfect an operation that's running nearly flawlessly, or they try to piece together different practices to create the perfect hybrid. Getting it right the second time (and all the times after that) involves adjusting for overconfidence in your own abilities and imposing strict discipline on the process and the organization. The authors studied numerous business settings to find out how organizational routines were successfully reproduced, and they identified five steps for successful replication. First, make sure you've got something that can be copied and that's worth copying. Some processes don't lend themselves to duplication; others can be copied but maybe shouldn't be. Second, work from a single template. It provides proof success, performance measurements, a tactical approach, and a reference for when problems arise. Third, copy the example exactly, and fourth, make changes only after you achieve acceptable results. The people who developed the template have probably already encountered many of the problems you want to "fix," so it's best to create a working system before you introduce changes. Fifth, don't throw away the template. If your copy doesn't work, you can use the template to identify and solve problems. Best-practice replication, while less glamorous than pure innovation, contributes enormously to the bottom line of most companies. The article's examples--Banc One, Rank Xerox, Intel, Starbucks, and Re/Max Israel--prove that exact copying is a non-trivial, challenging accomplishment.     

Aggregation, Persistence and Volatility in a Macro Model

We introduce firm heterogeneity into the standard monopolistically competitive real business cycle (RBC) model. The fundamental equilibrium path is derived and the time–series properties of aggregate GDP are studied analytically. Although firms' productivities are subject to temporary shocks, the aggregate process displays a surprising novel form of nonlinearity and long memory which had not been built into the model at the outset. This aggregate GDP turns out to have very different properties from log–linear time–series models such as auto–regressive (AR) models and their extensions. It displays very strong persistence, which ends abruptly with a sudden change of tendency, giving its autocorrelation function (ACF) an S –shape. Although persistent, it is mean–reverting, unlike the everlasting memory of unit–root processes. Its volatility is of a greater order of magnitude than that of any of its components, so small micro–shocks can generate large macro fluctuations. It is also characterized by long, asymmetric cycles of random lengths. Increased monopoly power tends to reduce the amplitude and increase the persistence of business cycles. Strikingly, we find that the empirical ACFs constructed from GDP data for the U.K. and the U.S. display this characteristic S –shape.     

Evaluative and factual ad claims,knowledge level,and making inferences

A lab study examined the effect of type of ad claim (factual versus evaluative) and knowledge level on subjects' product feature inference making from three camera ads. Each ad had some missing brand information. The results showed that as knowledge increased, so did inference making. Also, there was a significant interaction between ad claim and knowledge. Inference making was positively correlated with knowledge level for factual ads but not for evaluative ones. Finally, subjects made very few inferences to fill in missing ad features but instead did more interpretive processing.