Taxation for the 21st century: the automated payment transaction (APT) tax

This paper examines the desirability and feasibility of replacing the present system of personal and corporate income, sales, excise, capital gains, import and export duties, gift and estate taxes with a single comprehensive revenue neutral Automated Payment Transaction (APT) tax. In its simplest form, the APT tax consists of a flat tax levied on all transactions. The tax is automatically assessed and collected when transactions are settled through the electronic technology of the banking/payments system. The APT tax introduces progressivity through the tax base since the volume of final payments includes exchanges of titles to property and is therefore more highly skewed than the conventional income or consumption tax base. The wealthy carry out a disproportionate share of total transactions and therefore bear a disproportionate burden of the tax despite its flat rate structure. The automated recording of all APT tax payments by firms and individuals eliminates the need to file tax and information returns and creates a degree of transparency and perceived fairness that induces greater tax compliance. Also, the tax has lower administrative and compliance cost. Like all taxes, the APT tax creates new distortions whose costs must be weighted against the benefits obtained by replacing the current tax system.     

Raising rivals' costs: The entry of an upstream monopolist into downstream markets

A regulated upstream monopolist provides an input to firms in a downstream market. If the monopolist enters the downstream market, a natural concern is that it will act so as to raise its downstream rivals' costs. An offsetting incentive is that a higher downstream price will reduce demand for the input, which reduces the monopolist's profit. Conditions under which one incentive dominates the other are derived. The monopolist may desire to lower its downstream rivals' costs rather than raise them. These findings suggest that regulatory policy towards such downstream entry should not focus exclusively on the ability to discriminate.     

An Iterative Process for International Negotiations on Acid Rain in Northern Europe Using a General Convex Formulation

This paper proposes a game theoretical approach of internationalnegotiations on transboundary pollution. This approach is distinguished bya discrete time formulation and by a suitable formulation of the localinformation assumption on cost and damage functions: at each stage of thenegotiation, the parties assign the best possible cooperative state, giventhe available information, as an objective for the next stage. It is shownthat the resulting sequences of states converges from a non-cooperativesituation to an international optimum in a finite number of stages.Furthermore, a financial transfer structure is also presented that makesthe desired sequence of states individually rational and stategically stable.The concepts are applied in a numerical simulation of the SO₂transboundary pollution problem related to acid rain in Northern Europe.     

Preservation: Planning for the survival of things

Preservation—the immortalisation of living and designed things—is a channel for transmitting messages from the past to the future. Image is all important for conveying the meaning. To be preserved, a thing must have a constituency of supporters and a long-lived institution to serve as trustee: when appreciators of the message are no longer recruited, extinction is at hand. Community ecology, if extended to images, suggests some appropriate preservation policies for societies approaching steady state, eg adding to the total stock of biomass, to diversity, and to useful knowledge, while promoting new organised relationships between man and environment.     

An Empirical Investigation into the Excessive-Choice Effect

Recent marketing and psychological studies have shown that more choice does not always benefit consumers. This excessive-choice effect (ECE) is examined empirically using food items in four experiments. The first experiment investigates whether people would voluntarily reduce their choice-set size. The second seeks to replicate previous experimental results. The third and fourth experiments employ nonhypothetical Becker-DeGroot-Marschak (BDM) soda auctions and hypothetical ground beef choice experiments to further detect the prevalence of the ECE in alternative settings and explore the role of personality in decision tasks. Results suggest the ECE exists, but is less prevalent than previous studies suggest.     

Consumer education and the OECD electronic commerce consumer protection guidelines

This paper explores the implications of e‐commerce transactions and the lack of consumer protection regulation on consumer educators and curricula. The discussion is divided into five sections: conceptualizing e‐commerce; the juggernaut of e‐commerce; consumer education defined, especially consumer protection in the electronic market‐place; the Organization for Economic Co‐operation and Development (OECD) 1998 Ottawa conference on electronic commerce; and the implications of this fluid market and policy context on consumer educators. Empowerment of the consumer, the ultimate objective of consumer education, is a total challenge in the global electronic market‐place, but a challenge that must be embraced by staying informed, becoming a consumer advocate, as well as educator, and remaining ever vigilant as curricula are developed for the domestic consumer transacting in an electronic global market.     

Prospects for Personalization on the Internet

Personalization is a key component of an interactive marketing strategy. Its purpose is to adapt a standardized product or service to an individual customer's needs. The goal is to create profit for the producer and increased value for the consumer. This goal fits nicely into traditional notions of segmentation. Applications of personalization have advanced greatly in conjunction with the Internet, since it provides an environment that is information rich and well suited to interactivity. This article reviews past research on personalization and considers some examples of personalization in practice. We discuss what we believe are key problems and directions for personalization in the future.     

Implications of Realization Uncertainty on Random Utility Models: The Case of Lottery Rationed Hunting

Conditional multinomial logit (MNL) models are often used to estimate the value of nonmarket resources under the assumption that consumer choices will be realized with certainty. The conditional MNL may not be appropriate when choices made may not be realized with certainty, such as when rationing mechanisms are used as a means of managing nonmarket resources. Two models that address this issue, developed by Boxall (1995) and Rouwendal (1989), are compared here to estimate welfare measures for moose hunting in Newfoundland. The results from these two models differ significantly from the results of a simple conditional MNL model .
Les modèles logit multinomiaux conditionnels (MNL) sont souvent utiliés pour calculer la valeur de ressources non marchandes, dans une hypothèse de départ voulant que les choir du consommateur sont assurés d'être réalisés. Ce genre de modèle peut toutefois ne pas convenir lorsque les choix fait ne sont pas assurés d'être pleinement réalisés, comme dans les cas où des mécanismes de rationnement sont imposés comme moyen de gérer ces ressources non marchandes. Nous comparons deux modèles conçus et mis au point, l'un par Boxall (1995), l'autre par Rouwendal (1989), pour estimer les mesures des effets socio-économiques d'une réglementation de la chasse de l'orignal a Terre-Neuve. Il apparaêt que ces deux modèles aboutissent à des résultats significativement différents de ceux obtenus par un modèle MNL conditionnet simple .     

Japanese managerial and organizational learning

The article describes how the external forces of Japanese culture, industrial organization, and government intervention support managerial and organizational learning. It provides an overview of the culturally explicit philosophies that govern and stimulate learning in Japan, then explains how these philosophies are exhibited in Japanese management practice today. A model is presented which demonstrates the relationships among external forces, philosophical origins, management practice, and managerial and organizational learning. The conclusion is that managerial and organizational learning constitute one of Japan's most valuable competitive advantages. © 1998 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.