The Russian Tax System and Its International Competitiveness

The last several years were very favourable to the development of the Russian economy. While this has partly been the consequence of favourable conditions on the international markets for raw materials, the economic policy of President Vladimir Putin, including the tax reforms initiated at the end of the 1990s, also played a major role. Our authors examine in detail the effects of the tax reforms to date and point out the room for further improvements under Putin’s successor, Medvedev.     

Simple and Painless? The Limitations of Spillover in Environmental Campaigning

The comfortable perception that global environmental challenges can be met through marginal lifestyle changes no longer bears scrutiny. The cumulative impact of large numbers of individuals making marginal improvements in their environmental impact will be a marginal collective improvement in environmental impact. Yet, we live at a time when we need urgent and ambitious changes. An appeal to environmental imperatives is more likely to lead to spillover into other pro-environmental behaviours than an appeal to financial self-interest or social status.

Sequential Mergers and Antitrust Authority’s Decisions in Stackelberg Markets

This paper analyses a sequential merger formation game in a setting where: (i) firms compete à la Stackelberg; (ii) mergers may give rise to endogenous efficiency gains; and (iii) every merger has to be submitted for approval to the Antitrust Authority (AA). Two different types of AA are studied: first, we assume a myopic AA, which accepts or rejects a given merger without considering that this merger may be followed by other mergers; and, second, a forward looking AA, which anticipates the final industry structure a merger will give rise to, if approved. We conclude that these two types of AA adopt similar decisions whenever a merger would not trigger the exit of outsider firms. Their decisions are, however, shown to be very different when evaluating exit-inducing merger proposals.     

Altering the past to influence the future: the effect of mental unpacking on past evaluations and future preferences

Consumers use affective evaluations of past hedonic experiences in their future decision-making. However, past evaluations such as how enjoyable the experience was may be hard to retrieve, and consumers tend to recall what they did (i.e. the constituent activities of the prior experience) in order to reconstruct them. It is proposed here that recalling these constituent activities in a packed versus unpacked fashion will distort both the reconstruction process and its outcome. Results from two experiments show that mental unpacking interacted with experience enjoyment to alter past evaluations in two ways: if the enjoyment of the experience was high, unpacked recalls increased remembered enjoyment, but unpacking decreased remembered enjoyment if the experience enjoyment was low. Finally, mediation analysis indicated that the unpacking by enjoyment interaction distorted future preferences through the mediating role of remembered enjoyment.     

Consumption-related emotions over time: Fit between prediction and experience

Consumers base many decisions on affective forecasts, i.e., predictions about future emotions. These predictions, however, are susceptible to systematic biases. The present paper examines the accuracy of predicting emotional change in the consumer context. The goals of the study were to examine whether predictions of a change in consumption-related emotions fit actual experienced change and whether original predictions are remembered correctly. A two-wave longitudinal survey with 86 consumers in Austria and the UK showed that consumers who had bought shoes overestimated the decrease of positive consumption-related emotions over time. Results indicate that the intuitive theory of adaptation is related to the prediction bias. Moreover, participants misremembered original predictions as more consistent with actual experienced emotions. This hindsight bias hinders consumers from learning from previous prediction errors.     

Effects of Family Socialization in the Organizational Commitment of the Family Firms from the Moral Economy Perspective

South Korean industrial conglomerates (chaebols) are discussed in the context of value-based management (VBM). Recent economics and finance literature on the diversion of corporate resources from the firm to the controlling shareholders (tunneling), for which chaebols are notoriously known, is discussed. Chaebols have engaged in empire building and expropriation of minority shareholders, distorting the process of efficient resource allocation in South Korea, and became the root cause of the 1997 financial crisis. We argue that the 1997 crisis should be viewed as a consequence of chaebols’ systematic deviation from the guiding principles of VBM. We use tunneling within chaebols as an example of the need to directly address prohibition of the expropriation of minority shareholders as a primary postulate of VBM. We argue that VBM should require that the value generated by the firm not be expropriated from minorities, or any stakeholders, by dominant shareholders. We also examine moral and ethical considerations and present explanations as to why the unethical practice of tunneling has been tolerated by the South Korean public. We show that public opinion on tunneling is changing and that the treatment of minority shareholders by chaebols’ controlling families is becoming increasingly unacceptable to South Koreans.     

Pricing multi-class network services using the Shapley Value

This paper investigates pricing issues in class-based networks. Classes of packets having lower impatience and longer average delay receive monetary compensations. The inter-class price differential is determined by the inter-class compensations. The paper also presents rules for allocating network resource to each class. The corresponding payoff (disutility share) for each class is driven by the Shapley Value of the associated cooperative game.