Snipers, Stalkers, and Nibblers: Online Auction Business Ethics

Spirited disagreement exists among online auction participants over the ethics of sniping: delaying one's bid until the closing seconds of an online auction. Through analysis of the structural features of online auctions and by deploying Rawls's (1955) distinction between justifying an action under a practice and justifying the practice itself, I argue that: (i) the disagreement is better conceived as one over the ethics of online auction hosting (and therefore, over business ethics) than over the ethics of online auction participation; (ii) so conceived, the argument against sniping is nonetheless implausible; and (iii) the disagreement remains interesting not on the merits, but for the curious fact that it is bidders who complain about sniping.     

Nostalgia in post-socialist Russia: Exploring applications to advertising strategy

This article investigates nostalgia in post-socialist Russia from a consumer behavior perspective. The research includes the following components: 1) an overview of nostalgia and nostalgia proneness as a personality trait among Russians in the context of recent societal changes, 2) an analysis of four categories of nostalgia (personal, interpersonal, cultural, and virtual) and themes in nostalgia experiences provided by Russian respondents, and 3) a discussion of specific stimuli and advertising content in the Russian marketplace designed to evoke individual and collective nostalgia. The major nostalgia themes—specifically, the break-up of the Soviet Union, nature, and food—identified in the Russian responses are related to advertising and marketing elements for Russian products. The article also discusses the implications of consumer nostalgia for marketing and advertising strategy in the post-socialist Russian economy.     

Sufficient Decisions in Multi‐Sided and Multiproduct Markets

We show that in many models where firms make multiple decisions, analysis can be made more tractable by re‐formulating the model into one in which each firm makes a single choice, which we call a sufficient decision. The transformation allows application of standard techniques in these settings, including pass‐through for tax incidence and upward pricing pressure for merger analysis. The transformation works because the assumption of profit maximization links the firms’ decisions together. Examples include models of monopoly and oligopoly in two‐sided markets, where a natural sufficient decision may be the number of transactions that the firm facilitates, and multiproduct markets.     

Implementation of International Environmental Commitments in Countries in Transition

MOCT-MOST: Economic Policy in Transitional Economies -     

Spontaneous (non)emergence of property rights

The paper analyses preferences of private owners over the degree of property rights protection. It is shown that inequality in resource ownership and/or relative inefficiency of production technologies could make wealthier agents favour less than full protection of property rights. If such agents control the choice of a property rights regime, fully secured property rights will not emerge from the grassroots. This conclusion is consistent with the failure to create an efficient property rights system in Russia.     

Internet service provision and content services: paid peering and competition between internet providers

We consider the relationship of Internet service providers (ISP) and content service providers (CP) in the Internet ecosystem. Currently, the position of ISPs is challenged by the emergence of powerful content service providers, especially with the spreading of bandwidth-demanding video services. The further investment in the network capacity may be hindered by prevailing business models that largely exclude the ISPs from sharing in the major cash flows resulting from content provision. We develop modeling tools for evaluation of business models of ISPs and present results of an analysis of two models with the potential for the generation of additional cash flows for ISP: paid content peering and service differentiation. Firstly, we show that under certain conditions on the cost structure and the level of demand elasticity and uncertainty, it can be profitable for a powerful content provider to resort to paid content peering, thus transferring to the ISP a part of his content provision revenue. The resulting business model may provide substantial benefits to all major participants in this ecosystem: network providers, content and service providers and end users. After this we consider competition in the Internet provision sector and show that - also in this case - the paid content peering can help ISPs to expand the network capacity and at the same time increase profits of content providers. The end users benefit from the lower prices for content services. Finally, we consider the situation when an ISP differentiates the service offer by engaging in content provision, thus entering in direct competition with content providers.     

Stability of jurisdiction structures under the equal share and median rules

We consider a finite society with of individuals distributed along the real line. The individuals form jurisdictions to consume public projects, equally share their costs and, in addition, bear a transportation cost to the location of the project. We examine a core and Nash notions of stable jurisdiction structures and show that in hedonic games both solution sets could be empty. We demonstrate that in a quasi-hedonic set-up there is a Nash stable partition, but, in general, there are no core stable partitions. We then examine a subclass of societies that admits the existence of both types of stable partitions. Financial support through grants R98-0631 from the Economic Education and Research Consortium, # NSh-1939.2003.6 School Support, Russian Foundation for Basic Research No. 04-02-17227, and the Russian Science Support Foundation is gratefully acknowledged.     

Runs in an ordered sequence of random variables

Let be independent and identically distributed random variables with continuous distribution function. Denote by the corresponding order statistics. In the present paper, the concept of -neighbourhood runs, which is an extension of the usual run concept to the continuous case, is developed for the sequence of ordered random variables