Don't Tax the Net

Electronic commerce has the potential to reduce transaction costs drastically. It is the most dynamic sector of the world economy. Governments should restrain themselves from extending taxes to electronic commerce or they will reduce the gains from innovation.     

Attitudes Towards Income Risk in the Presence of Quantity Constraints

Considering a consumer with standard preferences, I trace out how quantity constraints on markets impact on relative risk aversion and prudence. I first show how this impact decomposes into a local curvature effect and an endogenously changing risk aversion/prudence effect. Next, I calibrate both effects on relative risk aversion and prudence, using estimates on household demand for durables and labour supply. The calibrations show that commitments to durable goods have large effects on attitudes towards risk. And while small wedges between realised and desired levels of labour supply have only moderate effects, becoming full time unemployed on a 60 per cent unemployment benefit significantly raises risk aversion and prudence.     

Research and development policy in the USA: Implications for satellite communications

Research and development in fields as diverse as microelectronics and space vehicles have profoundly affected the technologies of information transmission, as well as the way in which government regulates the communications and information service industries. This article focuses on R&D policy in the USA, drawing from 1984 OTA reports. The article focuses briefly on industry and universities and at greater length on government actions and policies, indicating possible implications for communication satellites.     

Design-Based Properties of Linear Calibrated Estimators of a Finite Population Total

We extend Godambe's famous nonexistence theorem to classes of linear calibrated estimators. We also propose a new method for comparing sampling strategies in the design‐based framework without recourse to simulation.     

Australia at the Crossroads: Radical Free Market or Progressive Liberalism? Key Issues and Conclusions

The author highlights the alternative choices open to Australian policy makers in their quest to achieve an acceptable balance between three potentially conflicting quality goals: improved efficiency (GDP per capita), full employment, and distributional equity.     

Marketing planning in the larger family business

In recent decades a considerable literature on marketing planning has accumulated. The larger part relates to marketing planning in big firms with specialized, professional managers. There are books on the subject, like that of Malcolm McDonald which has gone through several editions, and there is also a steady stream of articles in the academic journals. In addition, the marketing planning activities of big firms are referred to by many more writers in the overlapping but broader contexts of “strategic marketing” and “strategic planning”. A lesser part of the literature relates to marketing planning in small firms. The small firms in question are usually very small. Typically they are owner‐managed and employ just a handful of people in a single location. The purpose of this study is to fill a gap in the literature by examining a medium‐sized firm; a category which seems to have been neglected by researchers.

Most modern economies are characterized by a significant group of middle‐sized firms, still owner‐managed, but with multi‐million dollar turnovers. Many of these remain family companies and constitute an important reservoir of business initiative. One such family business is the focus of this study. Given the relative lack of scrutiny of such firms to date, the author decided to conduct an in depth evaluation from within one large, family firm rather than seek by means of questionnaire to obtain information from a significant sample of the group. The results of the study suggest that neither the existing typologies of small firm approaches to marketing nor the formal models of marketing planning attributed to big companies necessarily characterize the marketing planning and management of larger, family businesses.     

A Taxonomic Evaluation of Advertising Budgeting Models

The advertising budget allocation decision has been recognized as a critical decision that should receive logical, scientific determination. However, actual decision-making practice indicates that marketers typically use qualitative, non-scientific methods when setting advertising budgets. This article discusses the reasons for this practice by focusing on the properties of qualitative models which make them attractive to practitioners and the properties of quantitative models which make them unattractive. To assist in this analysis, a taxonomy for the classification of various qualitative and quantitative budget models is constructed, the emphasis of which is on the perceived usefulness of a budget model to practitioners.