Stability and instability in oligopoly

For regular oligopolies (both homogeneous and heterogeneous) the (local) Cournot-Nash equilibria are the (non-degenerate) critical points of a Morse-Smale vector field, defined on the feasible region of non-negative prices and outputs. When at the boundary of this feasible region this vector field points inwards, it follows from the Morse inequalities that there is at least one stable equilibrium. When there is a unique, non-stable, interior equilibrium, necessarily the vector field points outwards somewhere along the boundary of the feasible region. This raises to a stable boundary equilibrium.     

Quantitative Assessment of U.S. Wheat Performance for Quality Characteristics

Quality of U. S. grain exports has been a contentious issue over the past decade. Nowhere is the issue more hotly debated than for wheat. At the core of the debate has been the ability of Canada to command a premium for its wheat in foreign markets. Buyers' perceptions of quality have been suggested as an explanation, but empirical evidence on the quality attributes responsible for this country-of-origin premium has been limited to hedonic pricing studies. This paper quantifies purchasers' perceptions of the relative importance of quality characteristics for the world's major importing countries. This is done by calculating three indices. The attainment index measures how well buyers' perceptions of the importance of the characteristic matches buyers' perceptions of how well it is being supplied. The supply index measures buyers' perceptions on how well a characteristic is being supplied. The demand index measures how important the buyers perceive a particular characteristic to be. Then buyers' perceptions of the performance of U.S. and Canadian wheats are evaluated, given the perceived importance of each characteristic, and related to previous empirical results. Finally, these results are compared for alternative groupings of importing countries.     

The Use of Management Accounting Techniques by Small and Medium‐Sized Enterprises: A Field Study of Canadian and Australian Practice

Small and medium‐sized enterprises (SMEs) represent a large and important part of developed economies. However, little is known about the extent to which SMEs use contemporary management accounting (MA) techniques such as costing systems, budgets, responsibility center reporting, and analysis for decision making. To address this gap in the literature, we conducted in‐depth field interviews at 22 SMEs to: (1) determine the extent to which common MA techniques and tools are being used by SMEs; and (2) explore the underlying reasons why specific MA techniques are not being used. We find that of the 19 common MA techniques covered in our interviews, a very small number are moderately or highly used by our respondent companies. Moreover, we find that manufacturing companies in our study are more likely to use a broader set of techniques such as costing systems, operating budgets, and variance analysis and that smaller, early‐stage SMEs are the lightest users of MA tools overall. We identify three main factors affecting the adoption and use of MA techniques: (1) the perceived decision‐usefulness of the technique; (2) the complexity of the SMEs’ operating environment; and (3) the age of the SME. We discuss the contributions of our study and its potential implications for MA educators, developers of professional education programs, designers of SME control systems, and textbook authors.     

Grocers' window displays: The eclipse of a British tradition

By reference to period retailing narratives, this paper examines the changed significance of shop window displays for British grocers with the transition from counter‐based to self‐service from the late 1940s to the 1960s. The ‘well‐dressed’ window showing a selection of goods and price offers became an early casualty of changed retail practices. Opportunities presented by self‐service for comprehensive stock displays and in‐store promotion proved a decisive challenge to the art of the grocer's window display. These displays had been ubiquitous; large and small shops alike tried to impress passers‐by with examples of their stock range. Self‐service shops had different internal space requirements and soon it was more important that potential customers could see the well‐stocked aisles and activity within.     

Union organizing in Britain: a survey of policy and practice

Analysis of the reasons for trade union decline in developed economies has pointed to their failure to invest in effective methods of recruitment as a contributory factor. This article presents survey and case research to examine the extent to which union failure in recruitment and organizing has been rectified in the United Kingdom. The evidence indicates a varied but nevertheless substantial re-direction of union effort towards recruitment since the mid-1990s and is used to identify the characteristics of 'recruiting unions' which have invested more heavily and adopted more ambitious recruitment targets. Recruiting unions are found to be those which are receptive to learning new approaches to recruitment from overseas and which have relatively advanced arrangements for the representation of women and minorities in their internal systems of government.     

Forms of Explanation; Rethinking the Questions in Social Theory

The aim of this study is to investigate whether the so-called crowding in effects of complementarity or the crowding out effects of substitution occurred between public investment and private investment in Brazil from 1982 to 2013. This will be carried out through a theoretical debate on the investment general dynamics and an econometric analysis of vector error correction (VEC) model for the Brazilian case. The trajectory of the Brazilian economy and the empirical results show the presence of crowding in between public and private investments in the period, in accordance with the Post-Keynesian approaches. The crowding in is justified by the effects on demand via the Keynesian multiplier and via the expansion of the domestic market (particularly provided by infrastructure) and by the effects on the supply of private capital through the reduction of production costs, the increase in productivity, and through structural changes facilitated by public policy. Complementarity with regard to both the investments of the public administration and of federal government-owned/controlled enterprises is confirmed. Furthermore, a significant causal relationship is observed between public investment and the output of industrial manufacturing, which, from the structuralist perspective, is a sector that is considered a driving force of the economy. The special contributions of this paper are its time series for public investment and the variety of models that show crowding in between public and private investment.     

CRM analytics: The fuel for the engine

How often are there articles about customer relations (CRM) in the press today? Almost as many as there were about Year 2000 last year! How many companies state that the customer is king but can do or are doing anything about this? Few really attempt to improve or build relationships with customers or increase their product holdings; treating a customer as an individual and not just another record is still rare. The opinion in many companies seems to be that they can buy a system to deliver what is needed, which is true, but the system is only as good as the rules that drive it, hence the emergence of CRM analytics. This paper aims to illustrate to the reader how a company can start to apply CRM from an analytical rather than from a purely technological angle.     

Value versus Growth International Real Estate Investment

We use office and retail properties return data for the United States and some Asia Pacific cities to ascertain the relative performance of value and growth investment strategies. The results reveal that value portfolios outperform growth portfolios. Furthermore, while the results show that risk varies over time, time‐varying risk analyses generally do not support the risk‐based explanation for the value premium. Similarly, conditional market regressions do not explain the value premium anomaly as all the alphas are positive and significant. Moreover, the results imply that naïve extrapolation of past performance could be a credible explanation for the value premium.     

Property Tax and Housing Returns

This paper evaluates the effects of property tax on housing. While land tax and capital gains tax are widely used for curbing hoarding of land and speculation, its effectiveness is inconclusive. The imposition of a capital gains tax will impair the liquidity of property transaction, lower the rate of return on property investment, and reduce revenue from land sales which represents an important tax resource for the communities. This paper shows that a capital gains tax is capitalized into housing prices. Individuals tend to postpone the purchase of houses because of transaction taxes. Using an impulse response function, we show that a transaction tax has a dynamic negative impact on housing returns. While this paper focuses on Hong kong, for the purpose of comparison Singapore and Taiwan are also discussed.