Competition and Price Discrimination: Evidence from the Parking Garage Industry

We study the relationship between competition and price discrimination through an empirical examination of hourly price schedules in the parking garage industry. We find that the degree of price schedule curvature decreases with competition, implying a greater proportionate drop in low‐end prices than in high‐end prices when competition intensifies. Our findings suggest that competition constrains a firm's capacity to exercise price discrimination, confirming the classic textbook theory. We also offer possible explanations for our findings, including a search cost explanation, for which we find some support in the data.     

When do Non‐Family CEOs Outperform in Family Firms? Agency and Behavioural Agency Perspectives

Family firms represent a globally dominant form of organization, yet they confront a steep challenge of finding and managing competent leaders. Sometimes, these leaders cannot be found within the owning family. To date we know little about the governance contexts under which non‐family leaders thrive or founder. Guided by concepts from agency theory and behavioural agency theory, we examine the conditions of ownership and leadership that promote superior performance among non‐family CEOs of family firms. Our analysis of 893 Italian family firms demonstrates that these leaders outperform when they are monitored by multiple major family owners as opposed to a single owner; they also outperform when they are not required to share power with co‐CEOs who are family members, and who may be motivated by parochial family socioemotional priorities.     

Entrepreneurial Boldness and Excessive Investment

We analyze investment by a population of hyperbolic discounting entrepreneurs. In order to avoid inefficient procrastination, agents with good prospects about their chances of success may choose to forego free information and to invest boldly. This explains an excessive level of investment in the economy. Building on this observation, we show that low risk-free interest rates favor bold entrepreneurship and entry mistakes. Furthermore, public intervention can be socially desirable: Forcing agents to acquire information before deciding whether to invest may reduce competitive interest rates and may be beneficial for all individuals in the economy .

And thus the native hue of resolution Is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought, And enterprises of great pith and moment With this regard their currents turn awry, And lose the name of action.                      Hamlet , Act 3: Scene 1.

     

Beyond a Livable and Green Neighborhood: Asserting Control,Sovereignty and Transgression in the Casc Antic of Barcelona

During the past 15 years, the Casc Antic, a traditionally low‐income and immigrant neighborhood in Barcelona, has been the site of community‐based mobilization to revitalize abandoned areas and improve local environmental conditions. The organization of residents and their supporters is situated within a broader context of urban political and socioeconomic change — the transformation of the urban economy into a decentralized, global and technology‐ and service‐focused system, accompanied by rising socioeconomic inequality and displacement in inner‐city areas. To date, few studies in the urban environmental arena have been placed within processes of urban change and offer specificity on the purposes, intents and goals that poor and minority residents develop as they understand, resist and challenge their marginality. Why do residents of marginalized neighborhoods and their supporters organize to proactively improve livability and environmental quality? To what extent do the environmental struggles of marginalized communities serve as means to advance more complex political agendas in the city? Through the examination of neighborhood organization for livability in the Casc Antic, I analyze how activists use their environmental endeavors as tools to address stigmas attached to their place, control the land and its boundaries, and build a more transgressive form of democracy.     

An alternative proof of the nonemptiness of the private core

Summary. We focus on the private core [19] of an economy with a finite number of agents with differential information, a continuum of states and an infinite number of commodities. We state a nonemptiness result for the private core and provide a proof based on a fixed-point argument. Received: October 4, 1999; revised version: June 7, 2000     

The export of manpower from Pakistan to the Middle East, 1975–1985

This article summarizes the major findings of recent research undertaken on: (1) Pakistani migration to the Middle East, and (2) on international labour migration in the Middle East and North Africa. The export of manpower from Pakistan for temporary employment in the Middle East has risen dramatically since the oil boom of the mid-1970s. As a consequence, remittances, which constitute the major gain from migration, have become an important source of foreign exchange, amounting to almost 80% of total merchandise export earnings by 1980/ 1981. The direct beneficiaries of these remittances are a million or so migrant households, whose average premigration income was somewhat above the national average household income. Remittances have enabled these households to significantly increase current consumption and purchase assets with the potential of improving their future income stream. Domestic labour has also benefited to the extent that migration has contributed to rising real wages in recent years.Migration has not, however, been an unqualified gain for the economy as a whole. The major cost has been the decline in productivity caused by the departure of quality labour among manual skills and professional categories, both of which cannot be easily replaced. It seems that, on balance, Pakistan has benefited from this labour export. Prospects for continuing migration on a substantial scale remain good for the near future, provided, of course, that projected growth rates of oil exporters materialize. The net benefits for the economy from migration in the coming years will primarily depend upon the extent to which scarce skills can be speedily replaced and remittances utilized to build productivity-increasing assets.     

Mapping accessibility in Belgium: a tool for land-use and transport planning?

This paper compares the spatial structure of car accessibility to towns and to railway stations during peak and off-peak hours in Belgium for the country’s 2616 municipalities. A clustering method is applied. It is shown that in a highly urbanised country, the situation is far from being spatially equitable in terms of accessibility, and some areas are more favoured than others. Congestion increases spatial inequalities, differently according to absolute or relative measures of change. By means of examples, this paper shows that even simple accessibility indicators could be useful to support decisions taken by planners and politicians (e.g. as regards the development of residential, industrial and business park areas). Maps indicate the spatial inequalities in terms of accessibility to urban centres and transport nodes, and the impact of congestion on these inequalities. The absolute and relative time losses due to congestion affect different areas in different ways. The location of new developments further increases the congestion problem and the spatial disparities. This paper also insists on the caution that should be adopted when measuring and interpreting “accessibility”, its measurements, its inputs, its temporal changes in absolute and relative terms as well as the need for spatially disaggregated data.     

Influence through ignorance

An individual (the leader) with free access to information decides how much public evidence to collect. Conditional on this information, another individual with conflicting preferences (the follower) undertakes an action that affects the payoff of both players. In this game of incomplete but symmetric information, we characterize the rents obtained by the leader as a result of his control of the generation of public information. These rents capture the degree of influence exerted by a chairman on a committee from his capacity to keep discussions alive or call a vote. Similar insights are obtained if the leader decides first how much private information he collects, and then how much verifiable information he transmits to the follower.