Innovation Process 'Fuel Cell Vehicle': What Strategy Promises to be Most Successful?

Many car manufacturers recognize fuel cell vehicles as future substitutes for conventional cars with internal combustion engines. According to press releases and brochures, different strategic approaches of the automobile companies to fuel cell technology can be identified. These strategies match to a high degree the market entry strategies known from strategic marketing literature. A system dynamics model that reflects the beginning innovation process and the strategic approaches of a pioneer (first to market), an early follower (early to market) and a late follower (late to market) has been built. It examines the future prospects of the car manufacturers' strategies in three different scenarios, which illuminate possible future developments of external influences like politics or fuel infrastructure.     

Nonlinear and asymmetric returns on customer satisfaction: do they vary across situations and consumers?

Customer satisfaction is generally acknowledged as a key determinant of the value a customer contributes to a firm. Following the widespread recognition that the relationship is nonlinear and possibly even asymmetric, the authors develop a framework for understanding and predicting functional differences across consumers and situations. The resultant conceptualization proposes two general categories of moderating factors: Type I moderators, which induce functional changes by impacting the underlying comparison standards employed in the CS formation process, and Type II moderators, which cause the function to change by altering the interplay of cognitive and affective modes of the satisfaction experience. The authors employ firm reputation as an example of a Type I moderation and customer involvement as an example of a Type II moderation to illustrate differences between these types of moderation and to highlight how exactly each type of moderation changes the functional nature of the focal relationship. Specifically, a firm with a strong reputation benefits from a broader zone of tolerance than a firm of minor reputation, and highly involved customers react more intensively to extreme changes in satisfaction than do low involvement consumers.     

How the baby boomers' retirement wave distorts model‐based output gap estimates

This paper illustrates, based on an example, the importance of consistency between empirical measurement and the concept of variables in estimated macroeconomic models. Since standard New Keynesian models do not account for demographic trends and sectoral shifts, I propose adjusting hours worked per capita used to estimate such models accordingly to enhance the consistency between the data and the model. Without this adjustment, low‐frequency shifts in hours lead to unreasonable trends in the output gap, caused by the close link between hours and the output gap in such models. The retirement wave of baby boomers, for example, lowers US aggregate hours per capita, which leads to erroneous permanently negative output gap estimates following the Great Recession. After correcting hours for changes in the age composition, the estimated output gap closes gradually instead following the years after the Great Recession.     

A Cautionary Note on the Use of Benefit Metrics for Cost-Effective Conservation

Cost-effective land conservation techniques, such as optimization, have the potential to contribute substantially to the provision of many important environmental benefits, such as biodiversity protection, flood control, food security, water quality, and reduction of greenhouse gas emissions. There has been a recent push for conservation organizations to adopt project selection optimization approaches such as binary linear programming. The metrics used to measure the benefits of a project however, are often poorly defined in that they do not directly compute a value. These scores represent normalized measurements of underlying values that are likely log-normally distributed. Applying such metrics in optimization will tend to undervalue high-benefit projects and select a suboptimal portfolio of projects relative to simpler approaches. This suboptimal performance can lead to losses in efficiency as high as 30%. We propose a hybrid optimization heuristic that can improve performance and, additionally, provide conservation professionals with more flexibility and freedom to select conservation projects at their discretion—potentially overcoming a substantial real-world adaptation hurdle.     

Building and leveraging sports brands: evidence from 50 years of German professional soccer

Although professional sports are a major interest for consumers and a soaring contributor to economic growth, very little is known about how sports brands are built over time and what makes some sports clubs’ market performance so much stronger than others. Based on a unique dataset of 40 German professional soccer brands tracked from 1963 through 2014, this research studies how the value drivers recruitment, winning, and publicity feed sales-based brand equity (SBBE) and attendance. One of the novel findings is that not only do strong brands benefit from higher levels of SBBE, but they are also able to leverage SBBE more effectively the longer they are on the market, which widens the gap between strong and weak brands across time. We also find that the effect of the value drivers on attendance evolves from direct to indirect via SBBE. Overall, the increasing brand leverage effect yields important implications for marketing theory and for sports brand management.     

A note on representativeness and household finance

Previous research has shown that social households have a higher probability of owning risky assets. Using a representative sample of the German population, we demonstrate that the sociability effect is much stronger among people younger than 50.     

Evaluating Point and Density Forecasts of DSGE Models

This paper investigates the accuracy of forecasts from four dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) models for inflation, output growth and the federal funds rate using a real‐time dataset synchronized with the Fed's Greenbook projections. Conditioning the model forecasts on the Greenbook nowcasts leads to forecasts that are as accurate as the Greenbook projections for output growth and the federal funds rate. Only for inflation are the model forecasts dominated by the Greenbook projections. A comparison with forecasts from Bayesian vector autoregressions shows that the economic structure of the DSGE models which is useful for the interpretation of forecasts does not lower the accuracy of forecasts. Combining forecasts of several DSGE models increases precision in comparison to individual model forecasts. Comparing density forecasts with the actual distribution of observations shows that DSGE models overestimate uncertainty around point forecasts. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Expected inflation, expected stock returns, and money illusion: What can we learn from survey expectations?

We show empirically that survey-based measures of expected inflation are significant and strong predictors of future aggregate stock returns in several industrialized countries both in-sample and out-of-sample. Empirically discriminating between competing sources of this return predictability by virtue of a comprehensive set of expectations data, we find that money illusion seems to be the driving force behind our results. Another popular hypothesis – inflation as a proxy for aggregate risk aversion – is not supported by thedata.