George Ritzer: Explorations in the Sociology of Consumption. Fast Food,Credit Cards and Casinos

Journal of Consumer Policy -     

Challenges in quantitative economic analysis in support of multilateral trade negotiations

A wide range of economic analysis of agricultural trade liberalization was performed prior to and during the Uruguay Round of trade negotiations. Views differ as to the effectiveness of this research, although most would agree that it became less relevant as the negotiations progressed. This paper reviews the contributions of economists to the trade liberalization debate, with an emphasis on the quantitative assessment of multilateral agricultural trade liberalization. With a new round of agricultural trade negotiations scheduled to begin in 1999 it is crucial that the quantitative work required to support these negotiations begin in the near future. The authors conclude that the Uruguay Round outcome provides numerous challenges and opportunities in analyzing the traditional agenda of agricultural trade liberalization. In addition, new issues will be added to the agenda of the next round of negotiations. These include: trade and the environment, competition policy and intellectual property rights. It is important that economists begin to develop a research agenda that can address these issues and become activists in addressing these topics in public forums.     

Structured,Qualitative Comparison

This article defines qualitative data as representations of human acts and utterances, conventionally analysed in the form of long, coherent texts. The purpose of qualitative research is to interpret the actors' understandings and intentions.On the background of this definition, I make a distinction between variable-coding and theme-coding and between code-oriented and content-oriented analysis. Variable-coding of the text-content should be avoided, since this implies reducing multi-dimensional qualitative data to single-dimensional data. However, variable-coding of background-information can be used together with theme-coding of the text-content without corrupting the qualitative data. I call this approach structured, qualitative comparison. In that way it is possible to retain the many levels of meaning of qualitative data throughout the research-process, while focusing on the importance of macro-variables or scope-conditions, which indicate the potential area of validity of the findings.By examples from a comparison of Norwegian and German factories, I demonstrate the usefulness of such a content-oriented analysis-style for qualitative research, as well as for combining qualitative and quantitative data. In this way, the basic characteristics of qualitative data are preserved throughout the research-process.     

Do American and European Industrial Organization Economists Differ?

This paper compares results from two surveys among American and European industrial organisation (IO) economists on various IO and broader economic issues. Although differences between the two groups are generally rather small, some systematic differences seem to exist. These differences are more pronounced when judgments about the efficacy of government policies and the workings of the market are concerned than when judgments about methodology and the present and future state of the IO field are concerned. American IO economists tend to exhibit more confidence in the market's capability to allocate resources than their European counterparts.     

Strategy-proof allocation of fixed costs

An economy can produce and consume a fixed-cost excludable public good only if its members fully fund the cost of the good. In this paper, we characterize the entire class of mechanisms for the provision of the public good and its cost that are Pareto optimal among the set of strategy-proof, voluntarily-participatory, budget-balancing, non-bossy, and replacement-monotonic mechanisms. We demonstrate that this class of mechanisms is quite small and can be characterized as simple step-price mechanisms.Received: 10 July 2001, Accepted: 5 February 2003, JEL Classification: C72, D71This work was done while Dearden was visiting Center for Economic Research, Tilburg University, The Netherlands. He is thankful for their gracious hospitality. The authors thank the editors and reviewers for their thoughtful comments.