Improving the effectiveness of persuasive communications: Matching message with functional profile

The functional approach to improving communication strategy has received little attention. This research attempts to partially correct this oversight by experimentally verifying the major functional hypothesis: matching message with functional profile brings about attitude change. Working adults were integrated into an experiment which was a before-after with control. The major functional hypothesis was confirmed at the 0.10 level. An associated hypothesis regarding the relative ease of changing value- expressive attitudes compared to utilitarian attitudes was confirmed at the 0.10 level. The results show the importance of matching message with functional profile and highlight the potential inherent in the functional approach.     

Unilateral and bilateral trade policies for a minimum-wage economy

This paper considers optimal commercial policy for a trading economy which departs from neo-classical characteristics only in that a minimum-wage constraint gives rise to unemployment. Although for a flexible-wage fully employed economy the Baldwin envelope yields dominant domestic production-cum-trade possibilities, unilateral imposition of an optimum tariff is shown not necessarily to be optimal commercial policy for the minimum-wage economy. Rather, there exists an envelope, derived from foreigners' trade indifference and attained via bilateral trade policy, which dominates the Baldwin envelope when the optimum tariff is zero (as Brecher has shown it can be for a minimum-wage economy), and can still yield superior production-cum-trade possibilities when the optimum tariff is non-zero.     

SOME RECENT RESEARCH INTO HOME HEATING

As part of an investigation into the performance of heating systems and the effectiveness of energy saving measures, temperatures have been monitored in forty centrally heated homes. The addition of extra insulation had no effect on the way people operated their heating system or on the temperature level set in the main living room. However, bedrooms were warmer and the importance of individual room temperature controls demonstrated. Differences between people's thermal requirements in domestic and office environments are considered.     

ALTERNATIVE PRODUCTION FRONTIER METHODOLOGIES AND DAIRY FARM EFFICIENCY

This paper estimates technical efficiency (TE) measures using four alternative production frontier models, and evaluates the sensitivity of the results to the choice of methodology. The Cobb-Douglas functional form along with data for 1982 and 1983 from 404 dairy farms located throughout six northeastern states in the US are used in the estimation. A general conclusion is that, broadly speaking, frontier function models are neutrally upwardly scaled versions of the OLS or average model. A second conclusion is that different models yield markedly different efficiency levels across firms. However, the correlation between the indexes from the various methods is high, which implies that the ordinal ranking of firms according to their measured level of technical efficiency appears to be independent of the method used for a given year. By comparison, the correlation between efficiency indexes for the same method across time, although positive, is much lower than the previous set of correlations. Correlation analysis of efficiency versus farm size and of efficiency versus returns over variable costs, based on the alternative models, yielded consistent results.