The impact of natural disasters on household income,expenditure, poverty and inequality: evidence from Vietnam

Natural disasters are expected exacerbate poverty and inequality, but little evidence exists to support the impact at household level. This article examines the effect of natural disasters on household income, expenditure, poverty and inequality using the Vietnam Household Living Standard Survey in 2008. The effects of a natural disaster on household income and expenditure, corrected for fixed effects and potential endogeneity bias, are estimated at 6.9% and 7.1% declines in Vietnamese household per capita income and expenditure, respectively. Natural disasters demonstrably worsen expenditure poverty and inequality in Vietnam, and thus should be considered as a factor in designing poverty alleviation policies.     

Web Services for Negotiation and Bargaining in Electronic Markets: Design Requirements, Proof-of-Concepts, and Potential Applications to e-Procurement

Information Systems researchers continue to develop Web services hoping that, in a near future, these services will be widely offered in the e-marketplace, using a Web-based protocol that is universally adopted for posting, locating and invoking available services. Posting services does not, however, necessarily lead to market transactions, and a number of brokering activities are needed to facilitate trade. These include, but are not limited to, service discovery and ranking, price negotiation and contract preparation. We propose a set of Web services that support the process of negotiation and bargaining to facilitate the matching of supply and demand of Web services. As a market broker, these web services would help (a) discover the supply/demand of web services in e-marketplaces; (b) find the most appropriate available service for a specific request; (c) facilitate services be modified if needed to satisfy user's needs; (d) arbitrate the pricing mechanism with the recourse to bargaining whenever necessary; and (e) generate a contract. As a proof of concept, we illustrate the potential use of Web services for negotiation and bargaining in e-procurement.     

Bank risk in uncertain times: Do credit rationing and revenue diversification matter?

We show that bank risk rises, particularly for larger banks and those with greater interest-sensitive liabilities, during times of economic policy uncertainty through two economic channels: “credit rationing” and “revenue diversification.” The credit rationing channel shows that economic policy uncertainty increases aggregate loan spreads, exacerbating both adverse selection and moral hazard problems leading to higher bank risk. The revenue diversification channel suggests that as economic policy uncertainty reduces bank profits from traditional interest-based products, banks diversify into other non-traditional activities, thereby increasing their instability. Overall, our findings highlight the impact of economic policy uncertainty on exacerbating bank risk.     

Bank market power and revenue diversification: Evidence from selected ASEAN countries

This paper examines the association between bank market power and revenue diversification using a sample of 153 commercial banks from five Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) member countries (Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Thailand and Vietnam). We find a non-linear relationship between bank market power and revenue diversification, where at lower degrees of market power (in loan and deposit markets) banks concentrate on revenue diversification. In contrast, those with greater market power focus more on traditional interest-based products. Our findings also indicate that credit losses experienced earlier, during and after the Asian financial crisis have encouraged ASEAN banks to diversify into non-traditional activities to compensate for their excessive losses. When the markets recovered and loan demand increased, however, traditional interest-based business has become more important. These results remain consistent across all models providing robust results.     

The Power of Promoting Healthy Brands: Familiarity in Healthy Product Decision Making

This research investigates consumer decision making and brand commitment for brands promoted as “healthy.” The authors examine the relationship of brand familiarity to brand credibility, brand quality, purchase intentions, and brand commitment. The findings indicate that familiarity can help increase purchase intentions and brand commitment for healthy brands with low credibility. However, to go beyond a transactional exchange to one that is relational in nature, familiarity, credibility, and quality are all crucial for fostering brand commitment.     

Eating Their Feelings: Examining Emotional Eating in At-Risk Groups in the United States

Emotional eating affects many individuals and can lead to food overconsumption. The present research provides a theoretical foundation for examining the influence of food advertising, social norms, and related mediating influences on emotional eating. Insight offered through interviews with emotional eaters and an emotional eating conceptual model demonstrate that emotional eating is heavily influenced by food advertising, which can incite desire and ruminative thoughts about food. Additionally, emotional eaters may enlist prefactuals in the form of hedonic rationalizations to justify unhealthy eating behavior. Evidence from this research also suggests that individuals who emotionally eat may be doing so because such behavior has been learned. Finally, despite regulatory and policy efforts to create more informed consumers by providing nutrient content information on labels and packaging, emotional eaters possess little motivation to process this information. Implications for public policy and social marketing initiatives are discussed.     

Fear advertisements: influencing consumers to make better health decisions

From a goal-theoretic framework, this paper proposes that fear-based framing of health messages can lead to positive decision intentions, thus helping consumers make better future health-related choices. Across two experiments, findings demonstrate that the type of advertisement (fear versus hope) and food prime (indulgent versus non-indulgent) interact to determine goal-related choice focus – such as subsequent indulgence intention or intention to implement an exercise health goal. Research implications include the suggestion that if marketers properly execute fear-primed promotional messages with non-indulgent food offerings, they can satisfy the notion that ‘One good health decision can lead to another.’     

A multi-agent-based negotiation support system for distributed transmission cost allocation

We have developed a multi-agent system (MAS), based on the network flow model and KQML, called MASCAN, to support negotiations in the cost allocation of network transmission. This is very important to industries that have different entities connected with lines or pipes, such as the Internet and telecommunications. Such an approach is especially useful to the utility industries, such as electricity and gas, and the transportation industry. In the system, each agent represents a node in a network, for example supplier or consumer. Agents do not receive any centralized controls or information from centralized sources to guarantee autonomy–a key requirement for the agent. In this all decisions are made locally based on the rules or knowledge that each agent has or captured to communicate or coordinate with other agents for the cheapest path under fair-play requirements. We also assume that each agent is rational, that is, one of the goals or objectives of agent decisions or movements is to minimize costs or increase profits. The solution to cost allocation is to search for the equilibrium point of a non-cooperative game subject to the given constraints, for example network capacity. We applied MASCAN to model and support the negotiation of cost allocation in power transmission, and the results and how this approach supported the process of negotiation are perceived to be closer to the real-world negotiation and the outcomes were accepted more easily by the participants. Copyright © 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.