Towards a classification of marine wildlife crime: Marketing strategies to curtail illegal fishing,malicious acts,and waterway pollution

Much effort has been dedicated to fighting wildlife crime with modest results. This paper focuses on marine wildlife crime, which suffers from a certain level of neglect due to terrestrial bias (a predominant focus on land animals). Despite legislative and enforcement efforts, there has been little integration of marketing techniques to curtail marine wildlife crime. For these reasons, we set out to study current issues surrounding marine wildlife crime by conducting interviews with three experts in areas of marine education, research, and legislation. The interviews provide an overview of the threats to marine wildlife, aid in the development of a classification of marine wildlife crime, and provide strategies as to what marketing actions may be useful to reduce it.     

Book reviews

Ohne Zusammenfassung     

Quantifying the benefits of entry into local phone service

Local telecommunications competition was an important goal of the 1996 Telecommunications Act. We evaluate the consumer welfare effects of entry into residential local telephone service in New York State using household‐level data from September 1999 to March 2003. We address the prevalence of nonlinear tariffs by developing a discrete/continuous demand model that allows for service bundling and unobservable provider quality. We find that the average subscriber to the entrants' services gains a monthly equivalent of $2.33, or 6.2% of her bill, in welfare from competition. These gains accrue primarily from firm differentiation and new plan introductions rather than from price effects.     

News‐Specific Price Discovery in Credit Default Swap Markets

We examine the lead and lag relation between equity and credit default swap (CDS) markets. We find that price discovery in equity markets only leads CDS markets following aggregate positive news and not so following other news. While difficult to reconcile with standard asset pricing theories, asymmetric price adjustment is common in goods markets, arising from intermediary power. We provide an explanation for this asymmetry based on dealers exploiting informational advantages vis‐à‐vis investors with hedging motives. Consistent with this explanation, we find that the patterns we document are related to firm‐level proxies for hedging demand, as well as economy‐wide measures of information asymmetries.     

Exploring consumer knowledge structures using associative network analysis

This paper offers a new perspective on consumer knowledge analysis that combines Human Associative Memory (HAM) models from cognitive psychology with network analytic approaches in order to gain deeper insights into consumers” mental representations, such as brand images. An illustrative case study compares the associative networks of a manufacturer brand with a retail brand and is used to demonstrate the application and interpretation of various network measures. Network analysis is conducted on three levels: Node‐level analysis yields insights about salient brand image components that can be affected through short‐term marketing activities. Group‐level analysis is concerned with brand image dimensions that characterize a brand and can be strategically influenced in the medium term. Finally, network‐level analysis examines the network structure as a whole, drawing parallels to brand imagery, which needs to be managed over the long term. Management implications are derived and suggestions for further research are provided. © 2010 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.     

Currency boards as a path towards the Eurozone: lessons from the Baltics

In the early 1990s, the three Baltic states adopted de jure (Estonia 1992, Lithuania 1994) or de facto (Latvia) currency boards. After operating under boards for two decades, Estonia (2011), Latvia (2014) and Lithuania (2015) exited to the Eurozone. The paper takes a qualitative look at their experience through the lens of the currency board literature. Viewed over the entire period of operation, the boards delivered on the inflation stabilization objective with little evidence of a growth or trade penalty. The high average performance was however accompanied by high volatility on both the nominal and the real side. While the boards avoided both currency and sovereign debt crises, they contributed to vulnerabilities, notably the 2004–2010 boom-bust cycle. The Baltic experience re-enforces policy lessons from earlier crisis under fixed exchange rates: vigilance and timely response to incipient vulnerabilities associated with short-term capital-inflows and over-heating.     

A Review of: THE EVALUATION OF RISKY INTERRELATED INVESTMENTS by Frederick S. Hillier

The flood of publications and seminars on activity costing in the last few years suggests that companies suddenly encountered a need for better management accounting information in the 1980s. In fact, management accounting's relevance to most business decision-making deteriorated steadily since the 1950s. However, most companies did not perceive these inadequacies in management accounting until the early 1980s. Current interest in activity management and activity costing reflects the convergence around 1980 of two forces: a long-undetected set of problems in management accounting that seems to originate in the 1950s; and the growth of new competitive pressures in the 1970s that made companies acutely aware of these problems. Although these two forces arose independently, their interaction in the 1970s led to the rise of activity-based management thinking. This paper describes the past, present, and future of activity-based management: past uses of financial accounting information that confounded companies' efforts to plan marketing strategies and to control operations after the 1950s; present ideas for solving these problems with activity-based management concepts such as activity costing; and the likely future direction of activity-based management thought.