What do commissars do?

The note considers the possible interaction between the narrowing of wage differentials in China and the degree of hierarchy-cum-supervision at the plant level in the Chinese economy. It is argued that the Chinese regime may end up with greater hierarchy in its techniques of production, paradoxically, as a result of the narrowing of wage differentials. In developing this thesis, the note raises an issue of novelty in the theory of comparative economic systems.     

A framework for managing customer expectations

Marketing scholars have argued that firms should meet or exceed customer expectations in order to achieve customer satisfaction. Often, however, customer expectations maybe unjustified, infeasible, or unproductive to meet. These need to be shaped rather than fulfilled. The authors identify three broad approaches to the shaping of customer expectations: human resource management, framing, and compliance. These are described along with the type of expectation shaping tasks for which each is appropriate and illustrations of marketing mix tools which implement them.     

General theory of cost minimization strategies of continuous audit of databases

The minimization of cost is an important issue in the domain of continuous auditing (CA) research [Pathak Jagdish, Chaouch Ben, Sriram Ram, 2005. Minimizing cost of continuous audit: Counting and time dependent strategies. Journal of Accounting and Public Policy 24(1), 61–75]. This cited study of continuous audit of databases motivated us to work further and provide a general, complete and precise solution. In the present study, we propose an efficient algorithm in terms of long term cost for counting and periodic strategies of continuous auditing as suggested by Pathak et al. study. The improved algorithms contribute to accounting literature in general and continuous audit in particular in the form of general theory proposed for minimizing the cost of CA of databases.     

Necessarily welfare-enhancing customs unions with industrialization constraints: The Cooper-Massell-Johnson-Bhagwati conjecture

This paper demonstrates that welfare-improving Customs Unions can be guaranteed even if we are constrained by specific non-economic government objectives, thus proving the Cooper-Massell-Johnson-Bhagwati conjecture. We consider a ‘production’ objective here, where a member country requires the output of a particular sector (e.g. a target level of industrialization) to be maintained at the pre-union level, and show that welfare-improving Customs Unions can still be achieved. It is straightforward to show that this result can be extended to other non-economic objectives as well.