Increasing the Role of Environmental Taxes and Charges as a Policy Instrument in Developing Countries

A bstract .   The judicious use of natural resources is a crucial prerequisite for sustainable growth not just in developed countries but even more so in the third world. More generally, natural resource use is determined to a substantial degree by the tax structure governing a country's economic activity. When a tax constitution can be designed that stimulates the judicious use of natural resources, an important step toward achieving sustainable growth has been made. Designing such a constitution is not a simple task, however. For third-world countries, the task is further complicated by at least three factors. First, the tax system has to be exceedingly simple, since both number and quality of tax instruments available to third-world governments tend to be limited. Second, the legal system tends to mirror the state of economic development. This limits not only the tax structure an economy can bear; it also limits a government's ability to regulate natural resource use by legal means. Third, the more elaborate a legal system, the more diversity it affords its country for economic activity, including opportunities for the division of labor, that is, international competition and trade.     

The structure and evolution of business-to-business marketing: A citation and co-citation analysis

The field of business-to-business (B2B) marketing has grown considerably in the past four decades. However the state of knowledge about its structure and evolution remains limited. Who are the key players and what are the key papers in B2B marketing? What main research topics have been investigated over time? This article answers these questions by applying bibliometric methods for the first time to the existing body of scholarly B2B research. The key findings reveal a highly dynamic discipline in the 1970s and 1980s, when new knowledge was being intensively exchanged among an increasing number of B2B researchers. Since that time, the pace of development has slowed, and diversification in the discipline manifested itself in a distinctive number of core research subfields. Yet initial research topics such as organizational buying behavior, where much research is still undone, are to a large extent not addressed by modern B2B scholars.     

Nonlinear and asymmetric returns on customer satisfaction: do they vary across situations and consumers?

Customer satisfaction is generally acknowledged as a key determinant of the value a customer contributes to a firm. Following the widespread recognition that the relationship is nonlinear and possibly even asymmetric, the authors develop a framework for understanding and predicting functional differences across consumers and situations. The resultant conceptualization proposes two general categories of moderating factors: Type I moderators, which induce functional changes by impacting the underlying comparison standards employed in the CS formation process, and Type II moderators, which cause the function to change by altering the interplay of cognitive and affective modes of the satisfaction experience. The authors employ firm reputation as an example of a Type I moderation and customer involvement as an example of a Type II moderation to illustrate differences between these types of moderation and to highlight how exactly each type of moderation changes the functional nature of the focal relationship. Specifically, a firm with a strong reputation benefits from a broader zone of tolerance than a firm of minor reputation, and highly involved customers react more intensively to extreme changes in satisfaction than do low involvement consumers.     

Management Practices and Productivity in Germany

Based on a novel dataset, the ‘German Management and Organizational Practices’ (GMOP) Survey, we calculate establishment‐specific management scores following Bloom and van Reenen as indicators of management quality. We find substantial heterogeneity in management practices across establishments in Germany, with small establishments having lower scores than large establishments on average. We show a robust positive and economically important association between the management score and establishment level productivity in Germany. This association increases with establishment size. Comparison to a similar survey in the United States indicates that the average management score is lower in Germany than in the United States. Overall, our results point toward lower management quality being at least in part to blame for the differences in aggregate productivity between Germany and the United States.     

Vertical educational diversity and innovation performance

This paper uses panel data of Swiss firms to analyse the impact of education-level diversity in the workforce on innovation performance, addressing endogeneity by exploiting within-firm variation as well as variation in labour supply across regions. We find that vertical educational diversity increases the extensive margin of R&D and product innovation, particularly new product innovation. However, the relationship with process innovation, R&D intensity, and product innovation intensity is insignificant. These results are in line with the idea that vertical educational diversity enhances the creative moment of the invention phase, while it has no effect on the commercialization phase due to the relevance of coordination and communication costs relative to the gains in creativity.     

Parimutuel Lotteries: Gamblers' Behavior and the Demand for Tickets

In a parimutuel lottery, players face a strategic situation. We investigate how rational lottery players should choose combinations of numbers. Using data from the Austrian Lotto we compare this to actual behavior. We propose a relationship between the number of tickets and the expected loss of taking part, based on both theoretical and empirical findings about players' behavior. Rollovers introduce exogenous price variation allowing to estimate properties of a demand function sensitive to the expected loss. Contrary to previous work our model accounts for conscious selection.     

Consumer Power: A Comparison of the Old Economy and the Internet Economy

From the very beginning of the Internet, a decisive shift from supplier power to consumer power was predicted by several authors and is still maintained in recent literature. Although the Internet has grown rapidly within the last years and electronic markets have evolved, a theoretical framework for consumer power on the Internet still cannot be identified. Few authors have taken efforts to apply common concepts of power theory to the characteristics of the Internet. Based on the concept of French and Raven, this paper analyses consumer power in traditional markets and then compares it to the situation on the Internet. This comparison shows that the Internet enables consumers (a) to overcome most information asymmetries that characterize traditional consumer markets and thus obtain high levels of market transparency, (b) to easily band together against companies and impose sanctions via exit and voice, and (c) to take on a more active role in the value chain and influence products and prices according to individual preferences. A broad literature review reveals that empirical findings confirm these hypotheses to a great extent. The authors conclude by summarizing the results and drawing implications from two different angles, namely from a marketing and a consumer policy perspective.     

Every Future Needs a Past:1 A Personal View of the History of JBBM

ABSTRACT

Purpose: The purpose of the paper is to underline that the rise of the Journal of Business-to-Business Marketing (JBBM) cannot be explained without taking into account the development of the Institute for the Study of Business Markets (ISBM) at Penn State. JBBM is interpreted as one module in a bigger puzzle. It is the past that at least partly influences the future.

Findings: Has JBBM walked its talk? Yes! The editors have tried to stick to their goals. Although JBBM tries to offer a variety of topics there is an emphasis on relationship marketing which somewhat narrows the perspective. A pendulum effect appears to be at play: at first, one has to convince the scientific community that relations matter. But if you are successful, the relationship topic becomes so important that it supersedes other topics. Besides the dominance of relationship topics, JBBM is characterized by internationality of all parties involved. Content-wise, special aspects are theory orientation and educational approaches when teaching B2B Marketing.

Originality: The paper takes a personal view on the development of JBBM. Subjective assumptions combined with quantitative data make it possible to draw a consistent picture of the development of JBBM.     

A theoretical and empirical investigation into investment activities of technologically-intensive Chinese state-owned enterprises in the UK

This paper examines the determinants of direct investment in the UK by technology-intensive Chinese state-owned enterprises (SOEs). It also investigates the ways in which investment strategies are being employed for entry to the UK and to achieve access to technology. Drawing on an inductive case study strategy it is found that Chinese SOEs are motivated by their ambitions to close the technology gap by tapping into UK knowledge networks. In terms of entry strategies, the findings indicate that the initial focus on existing technology subsequently shifts to the creation of added R&D capacity and new technology. This is achieved from a permanent UK R&D base which is integrated into the parent companies’ wider R&D networks. Technology creation is enabled by adoption of divergent management practices, especially at operational level, reflecting the parent companies’ surprisingly adaptable mindsets.