On the frontier between possibility and impossibility theorems in social choice

This paper attemts to make precise the frontier between possibility and impossibility theorems in social choice. It is shown that some criterion of rejection of some alternative is the critical factor. In the absence of such a condition, it is possible to construct a fairly wide class of “democratic” decision rules which satisfies a class of consistency conditions. Any one of these, together with the criterion of rejection, generates a power structure similar to the ones discovered by Arrow, Gibbard, and others when the decision rule is required to satisfy the weak Pareto principle and the independence condition.     

Managing Channel Profits: The Role of Managerial Incentives

The existing literature has examined how manufacturers can enhance profits by employing specific channel structures and channel coordination mechanisms. In this paper, we examine the implications of strategically designed managerial incentives for channel performance in a duopoly. We first analyze how equilibrium outcomes (especially manufacturer profits) are altered when the manufacturers provide their channel managers with strategically designed incentives. Following that, we examine how optimal channel structure decisions are altered when manufacturers provide their managers with strategic incentives, i.e., we examine how strategic incentives moderate optimal channel structure decisions. In contrast with the existing literature, we find that an asymmetric channel structure with one manufacturer employing a profit-maximizing retailer and the other integrated manufacturer providing strategic incentives for the channel manager in charge of pricing, is an equilibrium outcome under certain conditions. We then compare how the implications of strategic incentives differ from those of channel structure decisions and channel coordination initiatives, and discuss when and why strategic incentives yield superior outcomes from the manufacturer’s perspective. Our results shed light on the sparsely researched role of managerial incentives in the channel context.     

Modeling and Forecasting the Sales of Technology Products

Managers in technology product markets require sales response models that provide substantive insights into the effects of marketing activities as well as reliable sales forecasts. Such markets are characterized by frequent introductions and withdrawals of multiple models by different companies. Thus, the data available on the performance of any individual model is scarce. A second characteristic is that the effects of product attributes and marketing activities could change over time as different types of consumers participate in the market at different points in time. Given sparse data, it becomes critical to specify a model that allows pooling of information across brand-models while at the same time providing brand-model specific parameters. We accomplish this via a hierarchical Bayesian model specification. Further, to capture the effects of changing consumer preferences over time, we specify a time varying parameter model. Our modeling framework therefore, integrates a hierarchical Bayesian model within a time varying parameter framework to develop a dynamic hierarchical Bayesian model. We employ data on digital cameras in the U.S. market to estimate the parameters of our proposed model. We use thirty-three months of national level data on the digital camera market with the data series beginning very close to the inception of this product category. We find that while there is little variation in reliance of benefits by early adopters, the second wave of adopters focus on Ease of Use followed by later adopters who rely on Storage and Image Quality. Looking at the elasticities of demand with respect to the various benefits, we find that at around the halfway point of our data series, the industry as a whole would have been better off investing in increasing image quality rather than storage if costs associated with the two are equal. However, at the end of the time horizon both benefits appear to have about equal impact. Further, the relative benefits of improving these attributes vary across brands and points in time. We then generate single period and multiple period ahead sales forecasts. We make different assumptions about information availability and find that the average (across brand-models and time) MAPE ranges from 7.5 to 14.5% for the model. We provide extensive comparisons of our model with 4 potential alternatives and find that our model outperforms these alternatives on the nature of substantive insights obtained as well as in forecasting out-of-sample especially when there is a very short time window of data.     

The return premiums to accruals quality

Using a battery of look-ahead-bias free measures of accruals quality (AQ), we find a strong and long-lasting negative relation between future returns and AQ. In decile portfolios that rank on AQ, a hedge portfolio that goes long in the lowest decile and short in the highest decile generates an annualized, risk-adjusted return of 4–12 % over 1-month to 5-year horizons, depending on the AQ measure and the portfolio weighting scheme. The return premiums associated with AQ are, (1) robust to a wide range of AQ measures, (2) robust to a battery of return-informative variables, and (3) not driven by low-priced or small stocks, earnings shocks, or the fourth-quarter effect. The documented premiums are consistent with the information uncertainty effect where firm uncertainty is negatively related to future returns.     

Situating the tourist gaze: from appropriation to negotiation

For decades, scholars have emphasized the power of the Western tourist gaze to construct Third World destinations as the ‘Exotic Other'. Scholars have also shown that ‘Third World’ tourism fuelled by media fantasies of the Other represents neo-colonization in the twenty-first century. However, considering all its intentions/claims of impartiality, tourism research has generally travelled in only one direction (from the West to the East). In this study, conducted in Goa and Puducherry, focusing on the social contexts in which people are viewed and photographed, we ask – what do the ‘Third World’ people think of Westerners gazing at them, and their surroundings? How do Western tourists react when photographed by domestic tourists? What are the power relations within which the photographer and the photographed are located? We recognize that no simplistic analyses are possible in the postcolonial context. Directing a critical lens at the tourist gaze, this essay moves from an understanding of the gaze as appropriating to that of the gaze as negotiated.     

Investigating the effects of a line extension or new brand introduction on market structure

Market structure has been characterized by the locations of brands in the perceptual space of households (perceptual map) and the importance weights associated with the attributes of this map. It is hypothesized that a line extension or a new brand introduced into this market could potentially affect the brand locations or the importance weights. We show how a simple extension of a recent approach to market structure analysis enables us to empirically identify which, if any, of these two aspects of market structure is affected by the line extension or new brand. An empirical application to the detergent product market is provided.     

EXTREMIST PLATFORMS: POLITICAL CONSEQUENCES OF PROFIT-SEEKING MEDIA

We analyze how information about candidate quality affects the choice of electoral platforms made by an office-motivated political challenger. The incumbent is of known quality and located at the ideal policy of the voter. The voter cares for both policy and the candidates' quality and can learn about the challenger's quality by buying information. A high-quality challenger then has an incentive to signal her quality by choosing a policy that induces the voter to buy information. We first study the benchmark case in which the information is supplied exogenously, and its quality is independent of the challenger's platform; this yields multiple equilibria and indeterminacy of equilibrium platforms. By contrast, when the information is supplied by a profit-maximizing media outlet, its quality depends on the challenger's platform and we obtain a unique equilibrium platform. In particular, when the incumbent's quality is relatively low, the media coverage rises and the challenger's platform diverges further from the voter's ideal policy as the voter's preference for quality increases.     

采用双网络结构的压缩视频超分辨率重建

在实际应用中,为了节省带宽和方便存储,图像和视频通常被下采样和压缩,而降质的图像与视频无法满足人们的实际需求。针对这一问题,采用了一种双网络结构的超分辨率重建方法,首先建立下采视频与压缩后的低分辨率视频的映射关系,然后建立质量增强的压缩视频与原始视频的映射关系,最终在输出端可以得到质量提升的视频帧。在网络中,采用密集残差块来提取压缩视频中丰富的局部分层特征,并结合全局残差学习恢复视频中的高频信息。在压缩环节,采用高性能视频编码来验证所提算法的有效性。实验结果表明,相比于主流的视频编码标准和先进的超分辨率重建算法,所提方法能有效提升编码视频的率失真性能。     

The ‘Triple-alliance’ perspective for new industry creation: Lessons from the flat panel industry in Taiwan

This paper describes how the development of the microelectronics industry in Taiwan has followed an evolutionary path that eventually led to the formation of the ‘Triple-alliance’. The ‘Triple-alliance’ model postulates that a nation's industrialization is fundamentally underpinned by the arrangement of three distinct institutions: state bureaucracy, domestic business groups and multinational corporations. The paper delineates the role of each participating institution in the context of Taiwan's microelectronics industry, and discusses the interaction between domestic and foreign institutions to demonstrate how the alliance facilitates the transfer and absorption of technology. Using the creation of the flat panel display industry in Taiwan as an example, the paper shows that understanding the interactions among these three institutions is essential for uncovering how technology-intensive industries are created in late-industrializing countries. The paper adopts an evolutionary approach in tracing how the web of linkages and alliances among these three institutions has led to the successful creation of Taiwan's technology-intensive flat panel display industry.