Settlement of Disputes Within the World Trade Organisation: A Guide to the Jurisprudence

The Urugauy Round of Multilateral Trade Negotiations led to the development of a revised set of procedures on dispute settlement. These procedures dealt with a number of significant problems that had arisen under GATT dispute settlement experience. In spite of these important reforms, there are numerous, complex and contentious questions of legal adjudication that any formal dispute settlement system must face. The article outlines the aims and organs of dispute settlement under the WTO. It addresses some of the key questions as to standing, interpetation, evidence and adjudicatory practices and processes. While ongoing moitoring and reform is necessary, an important thesis is that the inherent nature of legal adjudication forces uncertain determinations that can too easily give rise to unwarranted criticism of the system as a whole.     

On lemons and indigestibility: resource assembly through joint ventures

We revisit the relationship between two theoretical perspectives on joint ventures—the asymmetric information view and the indigestibility view. The former emphasizes the ex ante valuation challenges firms confront in combining resources, while the latter attends to ex post transaction costs arising from the extraction and integration of indivisible resources. We argue that these two views are complementary, rather than competing, in explaining the usefulness of joint ventures. We also suggest that the perspectives are overlapping inasmuch as resource indivisibility contributes to asymmetric information. Copyright © 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

An Empirical Analysis of the Relationship Between Capital Acquisition and Bankruptcy Laws

Ineffective capital acquisition decisions at start-up may lead to business failure and bankruptcy; a result which is both costly and disruptive to the owners and other stakeholders of the firm. To cope with the risk of failure, owners embark on a variety of risk-reducing activities whereas the U.S. government attempts to moderate the downside effects of such failures through the rules surrounding bankruptcy. Previous studies imply that as owners become more aware of the protections offered through the government regulation of bankruptcy, they should become less concerned with the effects of failure and be willing to raise higher levels of initial capital. Raising higher levels of initial capital, in turn, leads owners to take actions intended to reduce firm risk and to minimize the threat to their personal financial security. Data from a sample of small firms confirm our hypothesis by showing that as the level of initial capital acquisition increases, owners embark on activities intended to reduce firm risk. However, capital acquisition is not associated with the owner's familiarity with bankruptcy regulations. As a result, governmental objectives in establishing these regulations may not be achieved. Our findings have implications for firms' owners, consultants, and policymakers, in terms of the relationship between an entrepreneur's knowledge of bankruptcy laws and the financing of their enterprises.     

Leapfrogging in mobile telephony: A measure for comparing country performance

There is widespread agreement as to what constitutes leapfrogging in technology and also that mobile phones are a good example of this phenomenon. What is lacking in the literature, however, is any attempt to operationalize the notion of leapfrogging in a way that allows us to rank different countries. The purpose of this paper accordingly is to provide such a measure using both the ratio of mobile to fixed telephones and a weighting of this ratio for a particular country by its share in the total number of mobile phones in the sample. The proposed measure yields a number of insights that cannot be gained by using only the ratio of mobile to fixed telephones. Yet, for a number of the best performing countries this ratio is very much in evidence.     

From the relative to the absolute digital divide in developing countries

This paper argues that the literature on the digital divide is based heavily on relative rather than absolute magnitudes, although the latter has more welfare significance. It is clear that the former concept has been falling sharply in recent years yet such calculations have not been made for the absolute divide. One contribution of this paper is to redress this gap in the literature for both mobile phones and the Internet using a sample of more than sixty countries. The results tend to be broadly consistent with findings from the literature on the adoption and diffusion of IT in developing countries generally and Africa in particular.     

Strong reciprocity and team production: Theory and evidence

Punishment of shirkers is often an effective means of attenuating incentive problems and sustaining coordination in work teams. Explanations of the motivation to punish generally rely either on small group size or on a Folk theorem that requires coordinated punishment and, hence, highly accurate information concerning the behavior of each player. We provide a model of team production in which the punishment of shirkers depends on strong reciprocity: the willingness of some team members to contribute altruistically to a joint project and also to bear costs in order to discipline fellow members who do not contribute. This alternative does not require small group size, complex coordinated punishing activities, or implausible informational assumptions. An experimental public goods game provides evidence for the behavioral relevance of strong reciprocity and how it differs from unconditional altruism.     

The co-evolution of technology and methods of standard setting: the case of the mobile phone industry

This paper applies the concept of co-evolution to technology, institutions, and industry structure in the mobile phone industry with a focus on technology and the institution/method of standard setting. The paper shows how changes in technology have caused the method of standard setting to come full circle. New switching technologies, in particular electronic switching, enabled a change from integral to modular problem solving and thus a change from quasi-vertical integration to open standard setting in the wireline telecommunications industry in the late 1970s and later in the mobile phone industry. Growth in those mobile phone markets that initially implemented an open standard setting process encouraged other countries to adopt similar types of standard setting where government agencies and firms were the mechanisms for this transmission of open standard setting methods. However, the latest technological change, the mobile Internet, requires integral problem solving and this has caused quasi-vertical integration to return in the form of service providers determining the mobile Internet standards and the specifications for the phones that support their mobile Internet services. A new set of firms is transmitting these methods of standard setting to the rest of the world.

Utility theoretic semi-logarithmic incomplete demand systems in a natural experiment: Forest fire impacts on recreational values and use

This study develops a utility theoretic demand model for an arbitrary number of goods that handles correlation between goods and over time. The bivariate compound Poisson estimator is applied to a semi-logarithmic incomplete demand system to estimate the demand for wilderness recreation and the associated welfare measures both prior to and post a 40,000 acre wilderness fire in Washington. Forest fires can simultaneously affect the environmental qualities of many recreational sites; this highlights the need for a utility theoretic demand system approach for modeling consumer behavior that handles the dynamic behavioral and statistical interdependencies over goods and time. Results suggest an increase in consumer welfare per trip post fire, after an initial period of low values, relative to before the fire.     

Pragmatic Sustainability: Translating Environmental Ethics into Competitive Advantage

A travel management programme allows an organisation to manage corporate travel expenditure, and through a well-formulated travel policy, to control its travel expenses. However, traveller non-compliance of the travel policy is an increasing area of concern with surveys conducted amongst travellers showing various reasons for non-compliance, both deliberate and unknowing. The purpose of this article is to look beyond the reasons and identify the underlying factors that influence travel policy compliance. Two broad categories of factors that lead to non-compliance are distinguished: those related to the corporate travel policy as formulated and communicated by the organisation, referred to as corporate-related factors and including issues of corporate culture and business ethics; and those related to the person of the corporate traveller, referred as personal-related factors and including issues of personal ethics. This article makes a first attempt at identifying factors that have not previously been recognised in those industry or academic studies done on non-compliance or violation of the corporate travel policy.