The durability of consumer durables

The life span of a product is a key component in assessing its environmental impact. Until very recently, however, product durability was far from prominent in the environmental debate. This has begun to change due to mounting concern about waste, the prospect of producer ‘take back’ schemes and the importance of quality in highly competitive international markets. This has led to product durability emerging on the business and environment agenda. This paper explores the significance of product life spans and identifies currently available data on the life-span of consumer durables. It defines product life and argues that, from an environmental perspective, optimum product life, rather than maximum product life should be the goal. It suggests that potential advantages to businesses of manufacturing and retailing products with longer life spans include improved environmental foresight (i.e. a greater responsiveness to new social trends, changes in consumer behaviour and tighter government regulations), an enhanced reputation for quality, greater potential market share and increased customer loyalty. Addressing claims that manufacturers deliberately make products with the intention that they should have life spans below the known technical potential, the paper identifies some of the influences upon manufacturers which encourage shorter product life spans. Finally, some means by which longer life products might be encouraged are proposed.     

Measuring Market Orientation: Exploring a Market Oriented Approach

This paper demonstrates that applications of existing approaches to measuring market orientation are myopic, non-comparative and over-reliant on the views of single respondents. Consequently, a multi-perspective, multi-informant approach for measuring market orientation is generated which focuses on gauging customers', competitors' and intra-organizational members' perceptions of the market orientation of an organization. To evaluate the psychometric properties of this approach an application of this design in a survey of manufacturing industry is subjected to tests for inter-rater reliability, scale reliability, content validity, criterion-related validity and construct validity. The conclusion of this evaluation is that the developed measure is both a reliable and valid means of gauging market orientation. The paper concludes with a series of implications for both theorists and practitioners.     

Missing Markets and Redundant Reservoirs

This paper uses a two-sector, two-period,spatial model of groundwater usage withstochastic surface water supply to illustratethe potential for the suboptimal management ofthe timing of groundwater uses. A ``timeprofile externality' is said to exist when thetiming of groundwater extraction by one set ofusers impacts on the time profile of wateravailability to another set of users. Theexistence of the time of use externalitydepends on the presence of importantdifferences in the preferences between thecontrol and non-control sectors. It alsodepends on the absence of the markets thatwould internalise these differences. Oneimportant implication of the existence of suchexternalities is that they can inducesub-optimal insurance investments in the formof water storage capital, i.e., unnecessarysurface water reservoirs.     

New Evidence of the Impact of Dividend Taxation and on the Identity of the Marginal Investor

This paper examines the impact of a major change in dividend taxation introduced in the United Kingdom in July 1997. The reform was structured in such a way that the immediate impact fell almost entirely on the largest investor class in the United Kingdom, namely pension funds. We find significant changes in the valuation of dividend income after the reform, in particular for high-yielding companies. These results provide strong support for the hypothesis that taxation affects the valuation of companies, and that pension funds were the effective marginal investors for high-yielding companies.     

Myopic loss aversion and the equity premium puzzle reconsidered

Benartzi and Thaler [The Quarterly Journal of Economics 110 (1995) 73–92] offer a quasi-rational explanation for the equity premium puzzle. We reconsider their methodology and, making a simple modification to it, find that their analysis is not robust.     

Managing New Product Design and Development: an Anglo-German Study

This article reports the results of a study of innovation and product development at 245 manufacturing sites in the UK and Germany. It examines the relationship between design and performance and the competitiveness of the UK and Germany in design and manufacturing. Overall, few sites reached "world-class" standards - 9% in Germany and 3% in the UK, although many sites were not far below these standards.