Why do global long‐term scenarios for agriculture differ? An overview of the AgMIP Global Economic Model Intercomparison

Recent studies assessing plausible futures for agricultural markets and global food security have had contradictory outcomes. To advance our understanding of the sources of the differences, 10 global economic models that produce long‐term scenarios were asked to compare a reference scenario with alternate socioeconomic, climate change, and bioenergy scenarios using a common set of key drivers. Several key conclusions emerge from this exercise: First, for a comparison of scenario results to be meaningful, a careful analysis of the interpretation of the relevant model variables is essential. For instance, the use of “real world commodity prices” differs widely across models, and comparing the prices without accounting for their different meanings can lead to misleading results. Second, results suggest that, once some key assumptions are harmonized, the variability in general trends across models declines but remains important. For example, given the common assumptions of the reference scenario, models show average annual rates of changes of real global producer prices for agricultural products on average ranging between ?0.4% and +0.7% between the 2005 base year and 2050. This compares to an average decline of real agricultural prices of 4% p.a. between the 1960s and the 2000s. Several other common trends are shown, for example, relating to key global growth areas for agricultural production and consumption. Third, differences in basic model parameters such as income and price elasticities, sometimes hidden in the way market behavior is modeled, result in significant differences in the details. Fourth, the analysis shows that agro‐economic modelers aiming to inform the agricultural and development policy debate require better data and analysis on both economic behavior and biophysical drivers. More interdisciplinary modeling efforts are required to cross‐fertilize analyses at different scales.     

DO MANAGERS MATTER: EVIDENCE FROM E‐SPORTS

Growing importance of human resources places the role of managers at the core of company efficiency. However, there are studies that demonstrate the efficiency of teams without a manager, so‐called self‐managed teams, is higher comparing with managed teams. Thus, despite the focus on managerial efficiency in the economic literature, the issue of whether a team needs a manager is far from settled. In this paper, we use a quasi‐experimental setting from e‐Sports (competitive video gaming) to understand whether the hiring a manager is of benefit to team performance. The empirical part of the study is based on endogenous switching regression model. This method allows investigating what performance of self‐managed team would be if it will have a manager and vice versa. The dataset includes the information of prize money and features of top e‐Sports teams in Counter‐Strike: Global Offensive (e‐Sports discipline) from 2013 to 2017. The main finding of this study is that managed teams perform better than self‐managed ones but this is not due to the manager. (JEL Z2, M54, L25)     

A web-based multi-agent decision support system for a city-oriented management of cruise arrivals

Cruise tourism represents a strategic sector for the economic growth of several countries, impacting on different direct and indirect markets. The arrival of cruises in a city represents an unmissable opportunity to increment its tourist market penetration. Nevertheless, the management of an unforeseen number of passengers that need to visit a city in a short time may also have a negative impact, so reducing the expected benefits. This is mainly due to the difficulty of taking the right decisions when organizing the dispatching of passengers in different city areas since these decisions depend on several conditions that can also dynamically occur, and may have an impact on different city sectors. Here, a decision support system is proposed to help involved stakeholders to make decisions to plan passengers' transportation in the city and also to evaluate the consequences for the city if the plans are really implemented. The system is designed according to the multi-agent paradigm, so allowing one to easily manage the necessary coordination among different entities and data sources that are usually distributed and need to cooperate to provide useful suggestions. In addition, a prototype of a web-based application is provided to end users, so that it can run on heterogeneous platforms, and it can be easily accessed by different users from different devices, as it is the case for the considered application domain.     

New Perspectives on Customer Relationships: How Relational Models Influence Customer Experience and How They Are Activated

Abstract

Much research has been conducted into the determinants of customer experience. However, these studies do not include relationship norms as a possible determinant of customer experience. Nevertheless, there are strong indications that the relationship norms used by a customer are an important factor in customer behavior and customer experience. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the influence of relational models on customer experience and to explain possible differences in presence of relational models. This paper describes the results of two studies. The first study focuses on the effects of relational models on customer experience. This first study shows that the type of relationship has a strong influence on customer experience in terms of consumption emotions, customer satisfaction, and recommendation intention. Knowing that differences in the presence of relational models have a strong influence on customer experience, a second study focuses on finding a possible explanation for the differences in the presence of relational models. We hypothesize that differences in the presence of relational models can be explained by how organizations approach their customers and how customers perceive the organization. Especially, the perceived organizational involvement and freedom of choice as perceived by the customer play an important role. The second study, therefore, focuses on the influence of perceived organizational involvement and freedom of choice on relational models. The study shows that organizational involvement and freedom of choice have a significant impact on the activation of relational models. The findings are interesting for organizations that want to improve customer experience.     

Do house prices reflect fundamentals? Aggregate and panel data evidence

We investigate whether recently high and consequently rapidly decreasing U.S. house prices have been justified by fundamental factors such as personal income, population, house rent, stock market wealth, building costs, and mortgage rate. We first conduct the standard unit root and cointegration tests with aggregate data. Nationwide analysis potentially suffers from problems of the low power of stationarity tests and the ignorance of dependence among regional house markets. Therefore, we also employ panel data stationarity tests which are robust to cross-sectional dependence. Contrary to previous panel studies of the U.S. housing market, we consider several, not just one, fundamental factors. Our results confirm that panel data unit root tests have greater power as compared with univariate tests. However, the overall conclusions are the same for both methodologies. The house price does not align with the fundamentals in sub-samples prior to 1996 and from 1997 to 2006. It appears that the real estate prices take long swings from their fundamental value and it can take decades before they revert to it. The most recent correction (a collapsed bubble) occurred around 2006.     

Did rent deregulation alter tenure choice decisions in the Czech Republic?

Our study is the first that explicitly links rent deregulation and the choice between owning and renting (the tenure choice) using household decisions over a 1‐year period. The rent deregulation process in the Czech Republic started in 2006, two years after joining the European Union. By design, the maximum regulated rent appreciation depended explicitly on real estate prices, which accelerated the pace of deregulation due to rapidly rising prices at the time. A unique dataset enables us to track the tenure choice of households from consumption surveys for subsequent years. The proportion of households that switched from renting to owning sharply increased among renters of regulated apartments. We show that this change was caused by the deregulation process. In contrast, rent deregulation makes owners and renters paying market rent less likely to change ownership status.     

Domestic mindsets and early international performance: The moderating effect of global industry conditions

We develop and test a sensemaking model of early internationalization that ties domestic mindsets to international industry conditions and early international performance. Our central contention is that the fit between international industry conditions and domestic mindsets will lead to superior early international performance. We test this contention with a sample of 178 large and established domestic firms from 20 industries. Our results highlight the role of domestic mindsets in the early phases of internationalization and prescribe the types of domestic mindsets needed to maximize early international performance in global, multi‐domestic, and transnational industry conditions. Our results also provide valuable insights to top managers of large and established firms on how to reduce the risk of failure and how to successfully prepare for and cope with international environments by matching their domestic mindsets with international industry environments. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Creationism versus Evolutionism in Economics: Societal Consequences of Economic Doctrine

In the 1940s and 1950s, institutionalist economists rapidly lost their influence over American economics. In parallel, a new mainstream emerged, and the institutionalists were extremely dissatisfied with the path taken by the economic science. We analyze the opinions and feelings about this context to shed light on the institutionalists’ understanding of the new mainstream economics. We construct a historical account of the institutionalists’ dissatisfaction with post-war economics based on archival material from the personal papers of Allan Gruchy, John Gambs, John Blair, and Clarence Ayres. In the period analyzed, the economists, who would later found the Association for Evolutionary Economics, acted as dissenters rather than institutionalists. In part, this explains the pluralistic path that the association has followed ever since its foundation.