Economics at the FTC: Multi-level Marketing and a Coal Joint Venture

Review of Industrial Organization - Economists in the Federal Trade Commission’s Bureau of Economics support the Commission’s dual missions of protecting consumers and maintaining...     

Application of the Information Bottleneck method to discover user profiles in a Web store

ABSTRACT

The paper deals with the problem of discovering groups of Web users with similar behavioral patterns on an e-commerce site. We introduce a novel approach to the unsupervised classification of user sessions, based on session attributes related to the user click-stream behavior, to gain insight into characteristics of various user profiles. The approach uses the agglomerative Information Bottleneck (IB) algorithm. Based on log data for a real online store, efficiency of the approach in terms of its ability to differentiate between buying and non-buying sessions was validated, indicating some possible practical applications of the our method. Experiments performed for a number of session samples showed that the method is capable of separating both types of sessions to a large extent. A detailed analysis was performed for the number of clusters ranging from two to seven, and the results were compared to those achieved by applying the most common clustering algorithm, k-means. Increasing the number of clusters generally leads to better results for both algorithms. However, IB demonstrated much higher average efficiency than k-means for the corresponding number of clusters, and this superiority was especially clear for lower number of clusters. The IB-based division of user sessions into seven clusters gives the mean entropy value of 0.28, which means the 95% separation of sessions of both types. Furthermore, a big advantage of our approach is that it gives a possibility to analyze the probability distribution of session attributes in individual clusters, which allows one to discover hidden knowledge about common characteristics of various user profiles and use this knowledge to support managerial decisions.     

A new take on an old structure? Creative and slow tourism in Krakow (Poland)

The contemporary tourism market trends indicate an increasing need for the individualisation of tourist experience and necessitate a move away from the standardisation of tourism products, including those offered within the cities that primarily market their cultural heritage. The concept of creative tourism as a way of practising cultural tourism is a response to the changing needs and expectations of tourists. This is because it offers non-traditional uses for the cultural potential of cities. This article attempts to embed creative tourism in the overall tourist product using an example of a historic city – Krakow. The authors examine the development of tourism products in Krakow, focusing primarily on cultural and historical heritage tourism and secondarily on new forms of tourism that have emerged, such as creative tourism and slow tourism. They analyse this issue in terms of districts – traditional and new tourist areas, indicating the potential for tourism growth.     

REFORMING HEALTH AND SOCIAL SERVICES IN POLAND - An overview

The transformations taking place in Poland aim, among others, at adapting the system to new conditions of a market economy. The irrationality of funding social services by the budget made it necessary to restrict the role played by the State in their funding. It means the need for changes concerning not only institutional reforms but also new sources of income. The goal of this paper is to present the main directions of reforms occurring in the Polish economy on the example of health care. The paper concentrates on the problems of implementation, the reform in health care, its reasons and consequences. The trends indicate that the process of reforms is going in the direction of developing new methods and forms of funding and reducing the share of budgetary funds in the funding of social services. The state responsible for the reforms makes an attempt to create appropriate legal and organizational conditions for the question of institutions providing social services.     

Classification schemes and the study of social mobility: A detailed examination of the Blau-Duncan categories

The Blau-Duncan system of seventeen occuptational categories has frequently been used as the basis for the study of social mobility patterns in the contemporary United States. In this paper, we examine the validity of these categories by subdividing them in various ways and examining the mobility flows in this more detailed classification. Initial log-linear and cluster analyses using data from the Occupational Changes in a Generation II (OCG-II) survey suggest that the Blau-Duncan scheme hides certain patterns of social structuration, and we form new classification systems on the basis of these results. However, cross-validation analyses using the cumulative General Social Survey data set show that the improvements associated with our schemes do not generalize beyond the OCG-II data. Thus, we recommend continued use of the Blau-Duncan categories, given that they have been employed so often in previous work.     

Recast directive on European works councils: cosmetic surgery or substantial progress?

Overdue by nine years, contested by employers and awaited by trade unions, a review of the European works council Directive 94/45/EC finally became reality in 2009. This article presents background information about the positions of the European social partners and other institutional EU actors in order to understand the outcome of the events of 2008–09. Focus is directed towards providing a general overview of the new elements in the recast directive on European works councils (EWCs). Keeping the different views on EWCs of the social partners in perspective, the article argues that the recast directive, despite its shortcomings, represents progress rather than superficial cosmetic surgery.     

Changes in living conditions in Poland under economic transition

This paper presents changes in living conditions which have taken place in Polish provinces during the transformation period. To define the changes, 31 measures grouped into 12 fields have been established representing some basic aspects of living conditions. They years 1990 and 1994 were taken as the period of comparison. For analysis of changes in the value of living conditions, indicators were made using the statistical measures of dispersion, dynamics, and a graphic method. The average standard of living has decreased by 4.5 of one percentage point. Among 49 administrative provinces in Poland, only seven noted an increase. It is concluded that there are growing regional disparities in the living conditions of Polish people     

Maximum likelihood estimators of the dagum model parameters

This paper will show the sample size needed to provide good maximum likelihood estimators of the Dagum model parameters. The principal goal of this study is to verify the asymptotic properties of these estimators for finite sample sizes comparable to the ones employed in the real surveys (for example, the Labor Force Survey).     

Evolutionary models in economics: a survey of methods and building blocks

This paper assesses methods and components of formal evolutionary-economic modelling. Methods are broadly classified into evolutionary game theory and selection dynamics, evolutionary computation and multi-agent models, each with relevant subcategories. The components or building blocks are organized into diversity, innovation, selection, bounded rationality, diffusion, path dependency and lock-in, coevolution, multilevel and group selection, and mechanisms of growth. The number of alternatives that has been proposed for each category is vast, making it difficult to comprehend the variety of assumptions and formalizations underlying existing evolutionary-economic models. Our survey aims to clarify for each model component the choice range, formal expressions, associated assumptions, and possible techniques for formalization. Our study is unique in that it provides more information about the formal details of specific model components and is considerably more inclusive than earlier reviews.