Communicating greener strategies: a study of on-pack communication

Developing and implementing successful green strategies depends upon good communication. Faced with an increasingly cynical public, companies are finding it difficult to communicate improvements in their eco-performance to the marketplace in a way that will enable them to generate a competitive advantage. This difficulty is compounded by the problems involved in using traditional communications media for a task to which they are often poorly suited. Advertising for example, is difficult to formulate around green issues which are complex and hard to put across within the sort of short, style-orientated information bite that characterises many contemporary campaigns. Companies are looking for alternatives, and for packaged goods manufacturers are using the product's package as a communications channel. It reaches all existing (if not all potential) customers, and on-pack information is typically seen by consumers as relatively credible. This paper provides an exploratory study of on-pack information in part of the environmental ‘front-line’; the anti-perspirant and deodorant (APD) market. Options for on-pack communication are examined along with some of the issues that arise from trying to engage in environmental communication with the customer using packaging as the medium. © 1997 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment.     

Book Reviews: Recensions de livres

Les entreprises de services Jean Nollet et John Haywood-Farmer Réussir la qualitéde service Marcel Alain. Laval Marketing de services, le défi relationnel Michel Langlois et Gérard Tocquer. Organizational Behaviour: A Canadian Perspective Hugh J. Arnold, Daniel C. Feldman, and Gerry Hunt Organizational Behaviour: Understanding Life at Work (3rd edition) Gary Johns. Managing Organizational Behaviour (1st Canadian edition) John R. Schermerhorn, Jr., Andrew J. Templer, R. Julian Cattaneo, James G. Hunt, and Richard N. Osborn.     

Ageing,retirement and pension reforms

The gist of this paper is that the financial problems of pensions arise not only from the ageing of the population but also from the progressive reduction of the retirement age. It shows that social security systems explain in part such a reduction and indicates why reforms encounter so many political obstacles even though they would benefit most retirees, particularly those with few resources.     

Can People Explain Their Own Vote? Introspective Questions as Indicators of Salience in the 1995 Quebec Referendum on Sovereignty

Most scholars doubt that voters are able to explain their own vote. We argue that introspective questions whereby respondents are invited to tell, in their own words, the reasons why they vote the way they do, provide useful information on which considerations are most salient in their voting decisions. We show that open-ended questions about reasons for voting Yes or No in the 1995 Quebec referendum on sovereignty help us to sort out subgroups of voters for whom a given consideration is more salient.     

Adoption and use of mobile banking by low‐income individuals in Senegal

The wide use of mobile phones increases low‐income individuals’ access to a large range of services. One of these services is mobile banking (m‐banking). Today, m‐banking represents a key vector of financial inclusion in many countries in sub‐Saharan Africa, especially Senegal. Based on technology adoption theories applied to households in developing countries, this paper studies the determinants of the adoption and use of m‐banking. We distinguish between possession or adoption and actual use of m‐banking and examine the interdependence between these two decisions by using the Heckman sample selection model, through a sample of 1,052 individuals in the suburbs of Dakar. Our main results are that the two decisions (adoption and use) are not independent of each other. Individual characteristics, such as education, possession of a bank account, and family network effects, are determinants of the adoption, and age, gender, and being a member of a tontine are determinants of the use. A major result of this study concerns women’s low propensity to adopt m‐banking because of their low levels of education. However, compared with men, when women adopt m‐banking, they have a stronger propensity to use it.     

Measuring market power in the French Comte cheese market

A new empirical industrial organisation approach is used tomeasure seller market power in the French Comté cheesemarket, characterised by government-approved supply control.The estimation is performed on quarterly data at the wholesalestage over the period 1985–2005. Three different elasticityshifters are included in the demand specification, and the supplyequation accounts for the existence of the European dairy quotapolicy. The market power estimate is small and statisticallyinsignificant. Monopoly is clearly rejected. Results appearto be robust to the choice of functional form and suggest littleeffect of the supply control scheme on consumer prices.     

The evolutionary stability of perfectly competitive behavior

Summary. In a (generalized) symmetric aggregative game, payoffs depend only on individual strategy and an aggregate of all strategies. Players behaving as if they were negligible would optimize taking the aggregate as given. We provide evolutionary and dynamic foundations for such behavior when the game satisfies supermodularity conditions. The results obtained are also useful to characterize evolutionarily stable strategies in a finite population.Received: 29 December 2002, Revised: 27 January 2004, JEL Classification Numbers: C72, D41, D43.An earlier version of this paper was titled The Evolutionary Logic of Feeling Small and was written while the first author was affiliated with the University of Salamanca (Spain). We are indebted to Ken Binmore, Larry Blume, Luis Corchón, Georg Kirchsteiger, Paco Marhuenda, Akihiko Matsui, Diego Moreno, Manfred Nermuth, Klaus Ritzberger, Jörgen Weibull, an anonymous referee, and seminar participants at the universities of Vienna, Carlos III de Madrid, and Salamanca for many helpful comments and suggestions. Obviously, only the authors are responsible for any errors and omissions. We gratefully acknowledge financial support from the Austrian Science Fund (FWF) under Project P15281 as well as from the Austrian Exchange Service (ÖAD) and the Spanish Ministry of Education and Culture under the Spain-Austria Acciones Integradas respective projects HU02-4 and 18/2003.     

Cost and Production Duality: The Case of the Regulated Firm

This paper examines a generalization of cost-production duality for regulated firms. It derives an equivalency between the production function and conditional factor demands for the case where the firm's optimization problem is subject to a set of additional (regulatory) constraints. This procedure is extended to an optimization problem within a dynamic framework which leads to the recovery of the firm's technology.