Regulating the Platform Economy: How to Protect Workers While Promoting Innovation

The rise of the platform economy has made it a topic of great interest among European policymakers, as evidenced by the European Commission’s 2016 Communication “A European agenda for the collaborative economy”. The regulatory challenges facing policymakers are manifold, ranging from taxation to competition policy to worker protection. Furthermore, many basic aspects of the platform economy are unclear, such as its size, the number of workers who take part in it and, indeed, its very definition. What types of regulation are necessary to ensure that the benefits of the platform economy are maximised for all Europeans? How can the productivity gains associated with the platform economy be distributed throughout society? Perhaps most importantly, how can policymakers support innovation while also protecting consumers, workers and communities?     

Market pioneers, late movers, and the resource-based view (RBV): A conceptual model

Lieberman and Montgomery note that “…we see benefits from linking empirical findings on first-mover advantages with the complementary stream of research on the resource-based view of the firm” (1998, p. 1111); they suggest that such a link will help explain differences in firm performance. Therefore, this study develops a conceptual framework linking FMAs with the resource-based view of the firm (RBV); in doing so, this framework explains the links between entry timing, resource management, and firm performance. Specifically, this study examines FMAs in light of a four-step resource management process [Morgan RM. Relationship marketing and marketing strategy: the evolution of relationship strategy within the organization. In: Sheth JN, Parvatiyar A, editors. Handbook of Relationship Marketing. Thousand Oaks, California: SAGE Publications, 2000. p. 481–504.; Morgan RM, Hunt S. Relationship-based competitive advantage: the role of relationship marketing in marketing strategy. J Bus Res 1999; 46 (November): 281–90.] consisting of: 1) efficient acquisition (EA), 2) bundling/combining (BC), 3) positioning (POS), and 4) maintenance/protection (MP). The link between FMAs and the resource management process helps explain why so few first movers retain their advantages.     

WEB-IS (integrated system): an overall view

WEB-IS, Web-based Integrated System, allows remote, interactive visualization of large-scale 3-D data over the Internet, along with data analysis and data mining. In this paper, we discuss the overall structure of WEB-IS. Up until now we have developed three sub-modules geared towards geophysical problems. WEB-IS1 allows geoscientists to navigate through their 3-D geophysical data, such as seismic structures or numerical simulations, and interactively analyze the statistics or apply data-mining techniques, such as cluster analysis. WEB-IS2 lets a user control Amira (a powerful 3-D visualization package) remotely and analyze, render and view large datasets across the Internet. WEB-IS3 is an imaging service that enables the user to control the scale of features to view through interactive zooming. In the near future, we propose to integrate the three components together through a middleware framework called NaradaBrokering (iNtegrated Asynchronous Real-time Adaptive Distributed Architecture, a distributed messaging infrastructure that can be used to intelligently route data between the originators and registered consumers) without regard for time or location. As a result, WEB-IS will improve its scalability and acquire properties of fault-tolerance. WEB-IS uses a combination of Java, C++, and through the use of NaradaBrokering will seamlessly integrate the server-side processing and user interaction utilities on the client. The server takes care of the processor intensive tasks, such as visualization and data mining, and sends either the resulting bitmap image or statistical results to the middleware across the Internet for viewing. WEB-IS is an easy-to-use service, which will eventually help geoscientists collaborate from different sites in a natural manner. It will be very useful in the next 10 years because of the increasing number of space missions and geophysical campaigns.     

Institutions and public investment: an empirical analysis

This paper investigates the effect of institutional quality on the levels, volatility and quality of public investment. Our findings suggest an inverse relationship between public investment levels and institutional quality, supporting the idea that governments use public investment as a vehicle for rent seeking. We also find that lower quality of governance increases the volatility of public investment. Finally, we provide some tentative evidence of a positive relationship between institutional quality and the quality of infrastructure. Policymakers who aim to reduce infrastructure needs through capital spending should take measures to strengthen institutional capacity to manage public investments.     

Why are Some Agencies Perceived as more Committed to Diversity than Others? An analysis of public-sector diversity climates

Positive diversity climates are associated with an array of benefits for public organizations. However, it is not clear why some agencies are perceived as more committed to diversity than others. This paper hypothesizes about how group and management characteristics, social identities, and procedural justice may shape perceptions of diversity climate. It then tests these expectations using cross-sectional data drawn from the US federal workforce. It shows that employees’ social identities and perceptions of procedural justice were strong predictors of perceptions of diversity climate. There was less evidence that the representativeness of management and personnel diversity were related to diversity climate.     

Fundamental‐based Market Strategies

A significant body of literature has raised the possibility that portfolio outperformance based on a simple accounting‐based investment strategy can persist through time because markets may ignore and potentially misinterpret financial market signals. Employing a fundamental‐based strategy, we show that superior performance can be earned consistently through time by identifying and investing in firms with more favourable performance and credit signals. The strength of these portfolios are additionally characterised by the ability of the strategies to avoid firms with poor future prospects. These findings are robust across varying time periods after both transaction costs and related market constraints are considered.     

A supermartingale relation for multivariate risk measures

The equivalence between multiportfolio time consistency of a dynamic multivariate risk measure and a supermartingale property is proven. Furthermore, the dual variables under which this set-valued supermartingale is a martingale are characterized as the worst-case dual variables in the dual representation of the risk measure. Examples of multivariate risk measures satisfying the supermartingale property are given. Crucial for obtaining the results are dual representations of scalarizations of set-valued dynamic risk measures, which are of independent interest in the fast growing literature on multivariate risks.     

Big brands,big cities: How the population penalty affects common,identity relevant brands in densely populated areas

The population density of a geographical area has a well-known and strong positive effect on sales in the area. Yet, for some brands, there may be factors that affect the strength of this density-sales relationship. The present research shows that for product categories that consumers use to signal their identities (e.g., clothing, restaurants and cars), the strength of this relationship varies with brand commonness. Consumers residing in densely populated areas are motivated to express their distinctiveness by reducing their preference for identity relevant brands that are common, such as large chains and brands owned by many people. Thus, as identity-relevant brands become more common, they suffer from a “population penalty” – a weakening of the positive effect of population density on sales. We show this effect with three experiments and two empirical analyses of automobile and alcohol sales. Our findings extend literature on distinctiveness theory by demonstrating these effects at the community level and provide insights for marketers on accounting and adjusting for this effect.     

美国与金融新世界

很快,美国的金融危机就会告一段落──这可能需要一个月,也可能需要一年。然而,不管何时结束,这场危机对美国而言都标志着一个新纪元的开始。从1945年二战结束到现在的这六十多年来,美国一直是全球资本和资本     

Shifting the blame to a powerless intermediary

We extend the results of Bartling and Fischbacher (Rev. Econ. Stud. 79(1):67–87, 2012) by showing that, by delegating to an intermediary, a dictator facing an allocation decision can effectively shift blame onto the delegee even when doing so necessarily eliminates the possibility of a fair outcome. Dictators choosing selfishly via an intermediary are punished less and earn greater profits than those who do so directly. Despite being powerless to influence the fairness of the outcome, an intermediary given the choice between two unfair outcomes is punished more than when the dictator chooses one directly. This is not the case when the intermediary merely can initiate the random selection of one of the outcomes. Our findings reinforce and clarify the usefulness of agency as a tool to evade perceived culpability.