A Pre-purchase Product Trial of a Monopolist with Multiple Products

For the heterogeneous consumers who do not know their individual utilities from a new product, a pre-purchase product trial would be helpful. We found out that a monopoly firm with two similar products would have a strong incentive not to allow a pre-purchase product trial, even though it is socially optimal to allow it. Furthermore, it is more likely for a monopoly firm with a pre-purchase product trial policy to introduce a new product to the market when introducing a new product is socially optimal.     

PanelWhiz and the Australian Longitudinal Data Infrastructure in Economics

PanelWhiz is a graphical user interface that was written for the statistical software, Stata SE/MP Version 11 (Win/Mac/Linux) or later, which allows users to extract data from complicated multi‐level longitudinal datasets in an easy and efficient manner. Specifically, Australian datasets, such as Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia Survey, Medicine in Australia: Balancing Employment and Life, Growing Up in Australia: The Longitudinal Study of Australian Children, Footprints in Time—The Longitudinal Study of Indigenous Children and Consumer Attitudes, Sentiments & Expectations in Australia, have already been integrated into the common platform of the PanelWhiz system.     

Reciprocity and voting

In this paper we present a two-period model where a left-wing and a right-wing political party are solely interested in the policies they pursue. We assume that voters display reciprocal behavior. By contrast, political parties are not motivated by reciprocity. We show that reciprocity may have dramatic consequences for models of voting behavior. The incentive to be kind to the median voter may ensure that a position closer to the median voter's position is adopted even if political parties are not directly interested in being elected and cannot commit to a political stance during an election campaign. Moreover, reciprocity increases incumbency advantages.     

Heterogeneous preferences of green vehicles by vehicle size: Analysis of Seoul case

Although there are several policies for promoting green vehicles, green vehicles have yet to penetrate the market to the extent desired. To attain the goal, a complete understanding of consumers’ preferences of green vehicles is essential. This paper proposes and specifies the fuel-type choice models among conventional gasoline vehicles, hybrid electric vehicles, plug-in hybrid electric vehicles, and electric vehicles by vehicle size using the stated preferences data collected in Seoul, Korea. The results highlight the need to accommodate the correlation between similar alternatives and the unobserved heterogeneity within the context of choosing a green vehicle. The choice probabilities of green vehicles are affected by the relative impacts of the vehicles’ attributes and socio-demographic variables, and both of these variables are affected by the sizes of the vehicles. For compact size and mid-size vehicles, the effects of operating costs were less than those of purchase prices; however, for the subcompact vehicles, the effects of operating cost were greater than those of purchase price. The parameter of operating costs was not statistically significant in the full-size model. With respect to electric vehicles, the availability of fuel stations would be more important in Seoul than in the U.S. These results can also be useful for policy makers in that they provide information about the impact of green vehicles’ attributes on the choice probabilities of green vehicles.     

Factors affecting international event visitors’ behavioral intentions: the moderating role of attachment avoidance

ABSTRACT

This study developed and tested a theoretical framework of event quality, motivation, value, and destination image in order to investigate visitors’ behavioral intentions to revisit an international event, along with the moderating role of attachment avoidance. Results revealed that the relationships among event quality, motivation, value, image, and behavioral intentions were highly significant. Attachment avoidance was additionally found to moderate the relationships between quality and value, motivation and value, value and destination image, and value and behavioral intentions. Findings further provide specific implications for both theoretical insight and marketing practice in the context of annual and international events.     

The effect of payment type on product-related emotions: evidence from an experimental study

Consumption and payments have been shown to be closely associated in consumers' minds. Based on the idea of ‘coupling’, it is hypothesized that product-related emotions will differ depending on payment type (i.e. repayment and prepayment). Moreover, it has been suggested that forecasted emotions do not always correspond to experienced emotions. This is tested in a longitudinal experiment, which simulated a saving and credit situation, and assessed forecasted and experienced product-related emotions. As hypothesized, prepayment led to more positive product-related emotions than repayment. Moreover, participants showed some inconsistencies between forecasted and experienced emotions. Implications for marketing and consumer education are discussed.     

Planned or Emergent Strategy Making? Exploring the Formation of Corporate Sustainability Strategies

In strategy research, there is a consensus that strategy making resides on a continuum from planned to emergent where most strategies are made in a mixed way. Different contingency factors have been suggested to explain the factors that influence strategy making. Sustainability research seems to overlook most of this development and assumes instead that sustainability strategies are made in a purely planned way. We contribute to a better understanding of the role of different strategy making modes for sustainability in three ways. First, we point to the bias towards planned strategy formation in sustainability research. Second, we propose a new contingency factor to help explain sustainability strategy making based on the nature of the problem addressed. Third, we discuss strategy making for different types of sustainability problems. We argue that planned strategy making is expected for salient and non‐wicked problems while emergent strategy making is likely for non‐salient and wicked problems. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment     

The Hausman test and weak instruments

We consider the following problem. There is a structural equation of interest that contains an explanatory variable that theory predicts is endogenous. There are one or more instrumental variables that credibly are exogenous with regard to this structural equation, but which have limited explanatory power for the endogenous variable. Further, there is one or more potentially ‘strong’ instruments, which has much more explanatory power but which may not be exogenous. Hausman (1978) provided a test for the exogeneity of the second instrument when none of the instruments are weak. Here, we focus on how the standard Hausman test does in the presence of weak instruments using the Staiger–Stock asymptotics. It is natural to conjecture that the standard version of the Hausman test would be invalid in the weak instrument case, which we confirm. However, we provide a version of the Hausman test that is valid even in the presence of weak IV and illustrate how to implement the test in the presence of heteroskedasticity. We show that the situation we analyze occurs in several important economic examples. Our Monte Carlo experiments show that our procedure works relatively well in finite samples. We should note that our test is not consistent, although we believe that it is impossible to construct a consistent test with weak instruments.     

Discussion: Statistics Research in Business and Industry ‐ The General Electric Experience

For over 60 years, the statistics group at General Electric (GE) has used statistical methods to successfully address key company issues, both reactively and in recent years more and more proactively and holistically. Much of this work invariably calls for some degree of statistics research, including what we now call statistical engineering. We briefly review the history of research at GE, describe the accomplishments, research, and evolution of the GE statistics group over time, and present our views on the state of statistics research in business and industry.