On the individual moving average inequality

Summary A very simple deduction of a recently treated inequality is presented and some variations on this proof, drawing together various properties, are discussed. Closure of moving average processes undermultiplication is also mentioned.     

Relationships in business markets: Exchange episodes,value creation,and their empirical assessment

Conclusion David Wilson (1995) has provided us with much grist for thought with his integrated framework for customer-supplier relationship development. In focusing on which constructs are “active” and therefore most meaningful at each stage, he has opened a new vista for research in this area. Our models and empirical research ought to reflect this, but to date they largely have not. I have suggested qualitative, longitudinal research as a preferred next step in gaining the knowledge that we will need to make field-survey, longitudinal research worthwhile. Wilson also is to be lauded for drawing greater attention to value creation as a central undertaking in customer-supplier relationships. Understanding and actualizing value creation (and value sharing) are critical aspects of the market-sensing and customer-linking capabilities in market-driven organizations (Day 1994), yet the mechanisms underlying them and the methodologies for accurately assessing them remain largely unknown. Here, particularly for tool development research, it would seem to be an opportune time for business marketing academics and practitioners to form their own collaborative relationships for mutual gain. His research interests are in working relationships between firms in business markets and measurement techniques. His articles have appeared inHarvard Business Review, Journal of Marketing, Journal of Marketing Research, Management Science, Psychological Bulletin, andPsychometrika, among others. He has been vice president of the Business Marketing Division of the American Marketing Association and is a fellow of the American Psychological Association.     

Handling health-care costs in the '90s

Managed-care programs with utilization reviews may be the best approach to cost cutting. But to really curb costs, providers, insurers, employers and employees must form partnerships to overcome the outrageous inflation in the U.S. health-care system.     

Socioeconomic predictors of forest use values in the Peruvian Amazon: A potential tool for biodiversity conservation

Conservation is a crisis discipline requiring rapid action with limited funds. This study examines the potential of socioeconomic variables to predict forest use values. If natural resource use can be predicted from socioeconomic data, conservation planners could rapidly identify and focus conservation programs on the sectors of local populations that most intensively utilize local flora and fauna. Families in three communities in the northern Peruvian Amazon were surveyed over a 6-month period. Data were collected on use of flora and fauna from six locally determined use categories (food, medicine and poisons, wood, weavings, adornments, and “other”) in forest types of three age classes (fallow fields—very young forests, young secondary forests, and old secondary forests). Forest use values were the dependant variables calculated in $/ha/year. Socioeconomic variables included: age, education, family size, residence time, land worked, land owned, number of fishing nets, chickens, pigs, cows, and/or mules owned (all proxies for productive assets), and level of ecological knowledge (ability of informants to correctly identify forest species and answer basic questions about their biology). Ordinary least square multiple regressions were run independently for each forest type. Regressions were also run separately for the two most valuable use categories, food and wood. Low R² adjusted values (all < 0.3) reflect the difficulty in predicting human behavior due to confounding variables and complex interactions. Residence time and a household's community of residence were the most significant predictors of forest use values. Households in Vista Alegre, the community with the highest density of people and smallest landholdings per household, extracted the highest value of forest products per hectare. The longer a family stayed in any community the higher the value of forest goods they extracted. If families that lived in an area longest are the most intensive extractors of forest products, they should be a major focus for conservation programming. In addition, the higher value of products extracted from forests by some families may make them more open to strategies seeking to protect long-term viability of the resources they utilize. The importance of residence time also indicates that planners need to account for changes in the resource use patterns of stakeholders over time.     

On the existence of rational expectations equilibrium

We prove a theorem on the existence of rational expectations general economic equilibrium when agents condition on prices as well as on private information, and maximize the expectation of a state-dependent utility function. The key to the result is a new idealization of what it means for a set of empirical distributions to support agents' expectations. This idealization depends on the notion that agents compare their expectations with continuous versions of the random empirical distributions that are generated by the workings of the economy. The existence theorem covers all strictly concave utility functions, arbitrary distributions of the state variable, and situations in which the dimension of the state variable is large relative to the number of commodities.     

Academic Economic Opinion in East Asia

Surveys of economists' opinions have been reported from around the world over the past two decades, but never (as far as we are aware) from a non-Western country. This article presents the results of our survey of academic economists drawn from ten East Asian nations. Respondents gave their views on a number of economic propositions ranging across issues of deregulation, government business enterprises, micro-economic and labour market reform, income distribution, and attitudes to the market. Finally, the article reports the results of multidimensional scaling techniques which were used to compare the attitudes of East Asian academic economists toward the market with those of their international colleagues. Overall, we found that while our colleagues in Asia make some allowances for circumstances unique to fast-growing developing economies, their predilection toward market solutions to economic problems reflects that of their (predominantly) Western training. Economists in the ‘Tiger’ nations (Hong Kong, Singapore, Taiwan and South Korea) more closely reflect the views of colleagues in the market-friendly West (especially North America, Australia and Germany) than do economists in the newly emerging (‘non-Tiger’) nations such as Malaysia, Thailand, Indonesia and the Philippines.     

Market clearing and derivative pricing

Summary. We develop a method of assigning unique prices to derivative securities, including options, in the continuous-time finance model developed in Raimondo (2001). In contrast with the martingale method of valuing options, which cannot distinguish among infinitely many possible option pricing processes for a given underlying securities price process when markets are dynamically incomplete, our option prices are uniquely determined in equilibrium in closed form as a function of the underlying economic data.Received: 14 April 2003, Revised: 7 January 2004, JEL Classification Numbers: G13, D52.This paper is dedicated to Birgit Grodal, whose strength and character we greatly admire. We are very grateful to Darrell Duffie, Steve Evans, Botond Koszegi, Roger Purves, Jacob Sagi, Chris Shannon, Bill Zame and an anonymous refereee for very helpful discussions and comments. The work of both authors was supported by Grant SES-9710424, and Andersons work was supported by Grant SES-0214164, from the National Science Foundation.     

OPPORTUNISTIC MATCHING IN THE HOUSING MARKET*

We construct a model of the housing market in which agents differ in their flow values while searching. Agents enter the market relaxed (with high flow values) but move to a desperate state (low flow values) at a Poisson rate if they have not already transacted. We characterize the equilibrium steady‐state matching pattern and the joint distribution of price and time to sale (for sellers). The expected price conditional on time to sale falls with time spent on the market, whereas the conditional variance of price first rises and then falls with time on the market.     

Buyer and seller perceptions of transportation purchasing variables

The study in this article involved the investigation of 15 carrier selection variables over three dimensions by three groups with high involvement in the purchasing decision—traffic managers, sales representatives, and sales managers. The primary focus of the study was the identification of significant differences in the assessment of importance of the technical abilities of a carrier, the service orientation of a carrier and the image of a carrier as perceived by sales managers and sales representatives representing the selling systems, and traffic managers representing the buying systems.