Animal foods and climate change: shadowing eating practices

Animal farming exceeds all forms of transport in terms of global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. Despite the implications of the seriousness of addressing animal farming in relation to mitigating the effects of GHG emissions, to date, the relationship between consumer behaviour and climate change has tended to neglect the role of animal foods. This paper reports on a pilot study in which six UK households were ‘shadowed’ to facilitate the investigation of the relationship between animal food practices and environmental practices, as they emerge in day‐to‐day life. Results indicate that most participants make no connection between the two issues at present, in terms of awareness or practice. However, animal foods do have an ambiguous and complex status in most participants' food practices; for instance, being viewed as problematic for reasons of health or animal welfare. This finding suggests that further research is needed into the potential for raising awareness of the link between animal‐based foods and climate change. This might have a role to play in shifting food practices towards more plant‐based, less GHG intensive, foods.     

Competitiveness, resources, and capabilities: empirical evidence from retail banking

This research aims to identify and measure bank employee perceptions of the determinants of competitiveness in terms of resources, skills, and capabilities within the retail banking sector. All the 40 branches of a leading Portuguese bank—the Caixa Geral de Depósitos—operating in two Portuguese districts were surveyed. Our results show that bank competitiveness differs according to performance evaluation, human resource (HR) planning, the system of incentives, and managerial motivation. They also demonstrate that human capital is a source of success in the business of banks, which relies heavily on stable and enduring relationships with customers. The study also provides recommendations for retail bank managers seeking to refine their HR strategies as a means of improving their competitiveness.     

Globalization,Skill Accumulation and the Skill Premium

We analyze the impact of globalization upon the skill premium (inequality) in advanced countries from a two‐goods North–South model with skill accumulation. Globalization consists of an increase in the size of the South. Its impact on inequality depends on its intensity and on the pre‐globalization proportion of skilled workers. The post‐globalization inequality is a non‐monotonic function of the pre‐globalization proportion of skilled workers and of the globalization intensity. The impact is different for the generation in work and for the following generations. There is a threshold value of the skill endowment under (above) which inequality is lower (higher) after than before globalization.     

An algebraic index theorem for non-smooth economies

In this paper, we prove an existence theorem for equilibria in production economies with increasing returns, which generalizes the classic results on this topic. In particular, we eliminate both the free-disposal assumptions and any smoothness requirements on the boundary of the production sets. For this purpose, we propose a new definition of the topological degree for non-convex-valued correspondences defined on non-smooth topological manifolds.     

The kinetic quality of store design: An Exploration of its influence on shopping experience

Kinetic quality of store space is the appreciation of the store with regard to the movements and gestures that can be performed during the shopping trip. Few researches have studied this concept despite its potential influence on shopping outcomes. In this paper, we show that the kinetic quality of the store has an impact on hedonic and utilitarian shopping values and on purchase. The impact on shopping value is similar in magnitude to that of atmospheric quality. Music and visual esthetics positively influence kinetic quality.     

Spatial Evolution of Social Norms in a Common-Pool Resource Game

We study the conditions for the emergence of cooperation in a spatial common-pool resource (CPR) game. We consider three types of agents: cooperators, defectors and enforcers. The role of enforcers is to punish defectors for overharvesting the resource. Agents are located on a circle and they only observe the actions of their two nearest neighbors. Their payoffs are determined by both local and global interactions and they modify their actions by imitating the strategy in their neighborhood with the highest average payoffs on average. Using theoretical and numerical analysis, we find a large diversity of equilibria to be the outcome of the game. In particular, we find conditions for the occurrence of equilibria in which the three strategies coexist. We also derive the stability of these equilibria. Finally, we show that introducing resource dynamics in the system favors the occurrence of cooperative equilibria.      

Investment, credit, and endogenous cycles

This paper presents a general-equilibrium dynamic Ramsey-type model that can generate endogenous cycle. We assume two different representative agents, borrowers and lenders, and financial intermediaries with inside and outside money. We investigate under which conditions this model presents a cyclical relationship between capital and loans. The sources of endogenous fluctuations in this model come from a credit restriction in the representative-borrower problem.     

Do People Accurately Anticipate Sanctions?

We provide lab data from four different games that allow us to study whether people have accurate expectations regarding monetary sanctions (punishment/reward) and nonmonetary sanctions (disapproval/approval). Although the strength of the sanction is always predicted with some error (particularly in the case of monetary sanctions), we observe that (i) most subjects anticipate correctly the sign of the average sanction, (ii) expectations covary with sanctions, (iii) the average expectation is very often not significantly different than the average actual sanction, and (iv) the errors exhibit no systematic bias, except in those situations where rewards are frequent. In this line, we find some evidence that punishment is better anticipated than rewards.