Scarcity Message Effects on Consumption Behavior: Limited Edition Product Considerations

Recently, many luxury brands have begun to launch limited edition (LE) products. When this happens, advertisers implement two typical types of scarcity messages for LE products: limited‐time scarcity (LTS) versus limited‐quantity scarcity (LQS) messages (Cialdini, 2008). Prior research offered empirical evidence that these scarcity messages make consumers feel that LE products are more special, unique, and valuable, and thus, positively influence their evaluation of the product (Aggarwal, Jun, & Huh, 2011). The current study examined the differential effects of LTS and LQS messages on different types of LE products by focusing on consumers’ need for uniqueness.     

Political Entrepreneurs and the Transfer Demanding Process: Homesteading the Unassigned District

This paper introduces the transfer-demanding entrepreneur to help bridge the gap between static equilibria in an interest group theory of government and process theories. The transfer demanding entrepreneur acts in a creative, discontinuous fashion to organize latent demand for a particular transfer into an effective interest group. The disequilibrating, re-equilibrating transfer demanding entrepreneur provides a theoretical framework for understanding the movement between static political equilibria. This paper considers the transfer demanding entrepreneurship necessary to bring together the western railroads, organized labor, and potential Oklahoma colonists in the passage of white settlement and coal-lease ratification legislation in the Indian Territory.     

The Economic Burden of Health Care,Funeral, and Burial Expenditures at the End of Life

Research suggests that widows and wodowers experience substantial economic vulnerability. Using nationally representative data from the Consumer Expenditure Surveys 1980–2000, we describe pre‐widowhood shifts in medical and funeral/burial expenditures and discuss how these changes may affect post‐widowhood economic well‐being. Our analyses suggest that funeral/burial and medical expenditures, when combined, typically constitute a 63.1% income share for recently widowed households. Discussion focuses on what role consumer educators can play in helping families better manage end‐of‐life expenditures.     

Russian industries at the beginning of 2011: Current issues and investment climate

The results of a regular survey of companies in the real economic sector conducted by the laboratory of analysis and forecasting of microeconomical processes of the Institute of Economic Forecasting, Russian Academy of Sciences, are analyzed and commented.     

Problems in the creation of an optimal currency zone in the Commonwealth of Independent States

The paper evaluates the features of the Commonwealth of Independent States as a regional economic union of states on the territory of the former Soviet Union. It examines the most noticeable conceptual approaches to the definition of strategy, the directions of CIS development, and the monetary and credit mechanisms of interactions among member states, as well as the feasibility of CIS transformation into an efficient economic union of states.     

A Test of the Persistence in the Performance of UK Managed Funds

We employ a United Kingdom data set of weekly returns from a sample of investment trust companies available on the Datastream database. We analyse the relative performance of the funds and determine whether a 'good' (above-median), past-performance is indicative of future performance. Our study focuses on within sample relative performance. We examine persistence in performance in the short and long run based on a number of tests. Overall we find that both raw and risk-adjusted returns exhibit evidence of persistence in performance in the long run but not in the very short run.