The riches of relevance

This paper looks at the reality of joined-up communications in the financial sector, taking into account new developments in variable printing and insertion that allow a far greater degree of personalisation than ever before. Personalised reporting on financial products used to be very much a service only for the highest value customers. Now, the economics offered by high-speed variable colour printing mean that even the low-value customers can receive such a service. Next, the paper looks at the emerging practice of using bills and statements as a medium for targeted advertising, known as transpromo (transpromotional) advertising. The available advertising value of unused white space on bills and statements stands at £502?807?600 in the UK alone and represents a huge, as yet, fully unexploited opportunity. The issue of personalised web content is also explored in order to demonstrate its ability to improve customer retention, satisfaction, cross-sales and ultimately profitability. How to measure the outcomes of such targeted activity is tackled in the penultimate section, which examines the key underlying business measurement that should result from efficient and effective database marketing. Finally, the paper addresses the issue of managing customer retention post-mergers and acquisitions, particularly in respect of one-to-one communications challenges.     

Policy Implications of the Effects of Concentration and Multimarket Contact in China’s Airline Market

Unlike many other mergers in developed countries, which might have been assessed and their effects estimated by antitrust authorities before being granted antitrust immunity, the airline mergers that swept China’s airline industry in 2002 occurred with no antitrust challenge. These mergers provide the opportunity to study important market power issues in China’s airline markets. Given that increased concentration and multimarket contact are the main legacies of an airline merger, the effects of mergers on these variables can raise the potential for the exercise of market power. However, an examination of the period 2002–2004 during which the Chinese airline mergers occurred shows that the resulting increased concentration and enhanced multimarket contact did not have important consequences for airfares in Chinese city-pair markets. The presence of Hainan Airlines appears to have played an important role in suppressing the airfares charged by China Eastern and China Southern.     

Effects of Transparency in Procurement Practices on Government Expenditure: A Case Study of Municipal Public Works

This paper examines the effect of improved transparency in the bidder qualification process, using the experience gained from a case study of municipal public works auctions. A difference-in-differences analysis reveals that improved transparency reduces procurement cost by up to 8%. This finding is robust with regard to the concerns of both endogeneity and sample selectivity. The bidding-function estimates, combined with features of Japanese procurement system, imply that the introduction of transparent practices is insufficient to bring about efficiency in public procurement.      

Einflussfaktoren auf die Bereitschaft von Privatkunden, Ökostrom nachzufragen

The present study investigates impacts of attitudinal and perceptual characteristics of residential electricity consumers on their intention to use a green power tariff/supplier in the future. The work rests on a standardized telephone survey of 267 household electricity consumers of a German power supplier. Multivariate Partial Least Squares analysis indicates that, regardless of a person’s level of actual power consumption in the recent past, the intention to use green electricity is significantly higher among customers who have a positive general attitude towards environmental protection measures and who report an endorsing valuation of green power by their close social contacts. In a subsample of participants with a low actual electricity consumption in the year preceding the survey the intention to use green energy is significantly positively affected by the weight an individual attaches to electricity prices in one’s own supplier selection decisions and the person’s belief that one’s present power company takes over social responsibility. In contrast, in the subgroup of respondents with a high actual electricity consumption customers’ intention to use green energy is significantly enhanced by the degree of perceived dissimilarity among power company offerings. The findings are used to derive suggestions for green energy marketing measures of power companies and future energy consumer research.     

Capital liquidity and residents’ consumption decision: An asymmetry analysis of economic prosperity

Among the current literatures that discuss the influence exerted on residents’ consumption behavior by capital liquidity, some often independently decide the demarcation point of the liquidity restriction that affects residents’ consumption behavior, without taking into account when the economy is flourishing whether residents will be influenced by the restriction of the liquidity that their consumption behaviors can not be fully carried out. We introduce a threshold model which varies according to the actual GDP and other financial indicators (money supply, average stock index and balance of bank loans) to discuss residents’ consumption behavior in China under different economic states. The empirical results show that when the economy flourishes or resuscitates, residents’ income of the same period have not notable influence on their consumption, which suggests that residents’ consumption behavior does not considerably change according to the fluctuation of the current income, but conforms with the constant income-life cycle hypothesis. Moreover, two estimated values 0.7504 and 0.8597, as economic boom measures, all fall in the boom stable stage—basically consists with the early-warning index of the macro-economy boom issued by National Bureau of Statistics of China. It shows that the macro-economic boom is not notablely influenced by capital liquidity, so is residents’ consumption behavior.     

Free Trade versus Autarky under Asymmetric Cournot Oligopoly

The paper compares free trade with autarky in an asymmetric multi‐country world under Cournot competition with constant returns to scale and linear demand. We derive respective conditions under which free trade will hurt a country's consumers, benefit its firms, induce it to export, increase its output and raise its welfare. We show that these conditions are linked in a clear order, with one implying the next. We further demonstrate that free trade can reduce world total output and total consumer surplus as well as world welfare. Along the way, we correct several oversights in the literature.