Evaluating cultural industries: investigating visitors' satisfaction in theatres

This study investigates visitors' satisfaction with their subjective experience in theatres. Reconciling research on theatre marketing and theatre studies, a model of visitors' satisfaction in theatre is suggested and an instrument to capture visitors' satisfaction and its determinants is developed. Results from a field study (n?=?158) on three performances of ‘Twelfth Night or What You Will’ (Shakespeare) in a German community theatre revealed spectators' perception of stage direction and their emotional response as significant determinants. Comparing experienced to inexperienced visitors' judgements, no differences were found. Conclusions for theatre marketing are drawn.     

Exploring the influence of customers' time horizon perspectives on the satisfaction–loyalty link

Anecdotal evidence suggests that older individuals behave more emotionally and less cognitively due to their decreasing biological, cognitive, and/or social abilities, or a combination thereof. However, in the psychology and aging literatures, recent research indicates that the sense of future time is a better predictor of consumer perceptions, attitudes, and behaviors than chronological age. Tying in with these research streams, this paper introduces individuals' future time perspective (FTP) as a moderator of the well-known satisfaction–loyalty relationship. More precisely, this paper demonstrates that FTP influences the satisfaction–loyalty relationship by (1) driving customer loyalty, and (2) moderating the relationship between these two constructs. Besides contributing an important concept to the business research literature, the findings provide evidence that explains the previous heterogeneous results of chronological age-related research. This concept allows for a more nuanced analysis of aging's impact on the perceptions, attitudes, and behaviors of consumers.     

Wealth Effects of Rare Earth Prices and China’s Rare Earth Elements Policy

This article identifies power, subjectivity, and practices of freedom as neglected but significant elements for understanding the ethics of social entrepreneurship. While the ethics of social entrepreneurship is typically conceptualized in conjunction with innate properties or moral commitments of the individual, we problematize this view based on its presupposition of an essentialist conception of the authentic subject. We offer, based on Foucault’s ethical oeuvre, a practice-based alternative which sees ethics as being exercised through a critical and creative dealing with the limits imposed by power, notably as they pertain to the conditioning of the neoliberal subject. To this end, we first draw on prior research which looks at how practitioners of social enterprises engage with government policies that demand that they should act and think more like prototypical entrepreneurs. Instead of simply endorsing the kind of entrepreneurial subjectivity implied in prevailing policies, our results indicate that practitioners are mostly reluctant to identify themselves with the invocation of governmental power, often rejecting the subjectivity offered to them by discourse. Conceiving these acts of resistance as emblematic of how social entrepreneurs practice ethics by retaining a skeptical attitude toward attempts that seek to determine who they should be and how they should live, we introduce three vignettes that illustrate how practices of freedom relate to critique, the care for others, and reflected choice. We conclude that a practice-based approach of ethics can advance our understanding of how social entrepreneurs actively produce conditions of freedom for themselves as well as for others without supposing a ‘true self’ or a utopian space of liberty beyond power.     

THE DOUBLE ROLE OF SKILLED LABOR,NEW TECHNOLOGIES AND WAGE INEQUALITY

We examine the relationship between the supply of skilled labor, technological change and relative wages. In accounting for the role of skilled labor in both production activities and productivity‐ enhancing ‘support’ activities we derive the following results. First, an increase in the supply of skilled labor raises the employment share of non‐production labor within firms, without lowering relative wages. Second, new technologies raise wage inequality only in so far as they give incentives to firms to reallocate skilled labor towards non‐production activities. In contrast, skill‐biased technological change of the sort usually considered in the literature does not affect wage inequality.     

Zehn Jahre Makroökonomischer Dialog — eine Zwischenbilanz

Zusammenfassung  Der Makro?konomische Dialog (MED) wurde vor zehn Jahren — nahezu zeitgleich mit dem Beginn der dritten Stufe der Europ?ischen Wirtschafts- und W?hrungsunion (EWWU) — konzipiert und umgesetzt. Wie sind die Erfahrungen mit diesem Instrument der wirtschaftspolitischen Koordinierung auf europ?ischer Ebene? Wie kann der MED noch wirksamer zu einer spannungsfreien Wachstums- und Besch?ftigungsdynamik im gesamten Euroraum beitragen? Dr. Volker Hallwirth, 54, und Dr. Willi Koll, 61, sind Mitarbeiter im Bundesministerium für Wirtschaft und Technologie. Sie geben hier ihre pers?nliche Meinung wieder. W. Koll war seit Beginn im Herbst 1999 bis Herbst 2006 Vorsitzender des Makro?konomischen Dialogs auf technischer Ebene und Berichterstatter im Makro?konomischen Dialog auf politischer Ebene; V. Hallwirth war jeweils an den inhaltlichen Vorbereitungen beteiligt.     

MEAN VARIANCE PREFERENCES, EXPECTATIONS FORMATION, AND THE DYNAMICS OF RANDOM ASSET PRICES

This paper analyzes the dynamics of an explicit random process of prices and price expectations of finitely many assets in an economy with overlapping generations of heterogeneous consumers. They maximize expected utility with respect to subjective transition probabilities defined by Markov kernels which describe the forecasting behavior of agents. Given such forecasting rules (predictors) and an exogenous process of dividends, the evolution of equilibrium asset prices and expectations is described by a random dynamical system in the sense of Arnold (1998) . The paper investigates the long-run behavior (stationary solutions) by proving the existence and stability of random fixed points for mean-variance preferences under various predictors, including unbiased predictions, and adaptive, as well as OLS forecasting. An explicit characterization of rational expectations solutions is given, providing a full dynamic characterization of asset price processes for the classical CAPM in the case of stationary OLG economies. Numerical simulations are used to compare the performance of the different predictors under an AR(1) dividend process.     

Courts and contract enforcement in transition agriculture: theory and evidence from Poland

The paper investigates theoretically and empirically the role of courts for contract enforcement in transition agriculture. In a survey of 306 Polish farmers conducted in 1999, only 38.5% respondents reported to believe that they could use courts to enforce contracts with their most important customer. Furthermore, those who believed the legal system could be used would accept significant financial losses before taking action. We develop a theoretical model, based on the costs and benefits of court enforcement, which captures the boundary between contracts to be regarded as 'enforceable' and 'not-enforceable' and, simultaneously, the threshold of taking legal action. The empirical analysis strongly supports our model: (1) the farmers' responses can be explained by cost-benefit calculations regarding the use of courts, (2) the legal 'enforceability' of contracts depends not only on the efficiency of the legal system but also on the attributes of the transaction, the contracts and the relationship between buyer and seller and (3) the threshold of taking legal action is significantly influenced by indirect costs of court enforcement, such as the disruption of a valuable business relationship, and by the availability of alternative enforcement mechanisms.