Materialism,fashion consumers and gender: a cross‐cultural study

The purpose of this study was to examine the relationships among materialism, gender and fashion consumer groups from two countries – one representative of an individualistic culture (US) and one representative of a collectivistic culture (Korea). Participants were 397 students from a university in Korea (n = 221) and a university in the US (n = 176) who completed the questionnaire. The materialism construct showed adequate reliability for participants in both cultures. Fashion change agents scored higher on materialism (centrality and success) than fashion followers. Females scored higher on materialism than males which seemed to be based on higher scores on the centrality subscale. Participants from the US and Korea differed on all three subscales of materialism with US participants scoring higher on centrality but lower on success and happiness than Korean participants. The findings of this study provide valuable implications for fashion marketers and retailers in Korea and US. The findings are limited to Korean and US consumers and cannot be generalized to other cultures. This paper fills a gap in the literature by comparing materialistic values between genders and fashion consumer groups in an individualistic culture (US) and a collectivistic culture (Korea).     

Has the IASB Been Successful in Making Accounting Earnings More Useful for Prediction and Valuation? UK Evidence

When producing International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS), one of the main goals of the International Accounting Standards Board (IASB) was to create a set of standards which were more useful to investors as a predictive tool. We assess the success of the IASB in achieving this goal by investigating the effects of the introduction of IFRS on the relative information content of reported earnings and forecasted earnings under UK generally accepted accounting practices (GAAP) and IFRS. Results indicate that the value relevance of forecasted earnings is significantly lower under IFRS while the value relevance of reported earnings is significantly larger. These findings suggest that IFRS substitutes price‐relevant information previously provided to the market in the form of analyst forecasts with information encoded by companies in their reported earnings. This implies that the IASB was indeed successful in its stated goal and points towards IFRS forecasts being more accurate and less dispersed than UK GAAP forecasts. This, in turn, implies that analysts are able to provide more informative forecasts under IFRS than under pre‐IFRS regimes and that the aforementioned substitution effect is not a consequence of any decrease in the quality of forecasts under the new regime.     

Money and Crime in a Cash‐In‐Advance Model

A cash‐in‐advance model, in which holding money is risky, is constructed to study the coexistence of multiple means of payment and monetary policy implications. In steady‐state equilibrium, the marginal rate of substitution of cash goods for credit goods depends on the crime rate as well as the nominal interest rate. Credit may be in use, although the return on money is not positive. With theft, a money injection reduces the crime rate and makes cash more preferable for a greater variety of goods. Inflation improves welfare. However, without theft, inflation makes credit more preferable and decreases welfare. In general, the Friedman rule is not optimal.     

Accessing Tourists’ Unconscious Associations about International Destinations: Data Fuzzification of Reaction Times in the Implicit Association Test

Starting with the proposition that shorter reaction time implies stronger implicit preference, this study assesses destination-related top-of-mind awareness (TOMA) by examining respondent reaction time to specific destination icons. A total 87 college students were recruited to complete self-report surveys and computer-based implicit association tests (IAT). The results show that participants’ responses vary depending on the two measures (i.e., self-report surveys and IATs). Through a data fuzzification method, the study demonstrates that the IAT would enhance our understanding of tourist TOMA, particularly related to familiarity issues. The implications of the study pertain to destination marketing are fully discussed.     

The political economy of defense procurement and acquisition: The case of South Korean ministry of defense

South Korea faces growing problems in the area of productivity and competitiveness throughout its economy. These problems are also present in the economies of the armed forces. The purpose of this paper is to present methods of improving the productivity of the South Korean Ministry of Defense's acquisition and procurement processes. It also attempts to mention the South Korean defense environment including defense industry after the Second World War, to point out the problems of Korean Fighter Program (KFP) as a case study, to explain concepts and principles of Total Quality Management, which is a management philosophy and methods, and to provide with the possible solutions of its defense acquisition and procurement represented as KFP.     

Petty corruption

This paper analyzes a petty corruption model in which the entrepreneur’s type is drawn from an absolutely continuous probability distribution function F over [0, 1], and perfect Bayesian equilibrium is adopted as the solution concept for a one-stage game. In the one-stage game, if there is more than one bureaucrat, no project is approved with a strictly positive probability. For an infinitely repeated game, I show that the single window policy strictly increases the social benefits in a socially optimal equilibrium. I would like to thank Mukul Majumdar for valuable guidance and encouragement. I am also grateful to Kaushik Basu, Fernando Vega-Redondo, an anonymous referee, seminar participants at the international meeting for public economic theory (PET07) and especially Ani Guerdjikova and Roy Radner for helpful comments. Thanks are due to Hideaki Goto and Eunkyeong Lee for useful conversation.     

Dynamic R&D Competition, Research Line Diversity, and Intellectual Property Rights

This paper develops a simple model of sequential innovations with a diversity of research lines. Competitive strategies of firms for R&D are analyzed at each stage in a sequence of innovations. We compare two alternative regimes of enforcing patent law, as a mechanism to provide adequate incentives for R&D at each stage. The regime that protects the research line gives monopoly rights to an entire line of research, hence limiting the utilization of the previous knowledge and retarding subsequent innovations. The other regime protects the product, which facilitates the use of previous knowledge at the expense of providing inadequate protection to the ideas embodied in the product, and results in underinvestment in the first stage.     

PRODUCER COOPERATIVES,INPUT PRICING AND LAND ALLOCATION

This paper considers input pricing rules for a producer cooperative which supplies its members with two inputs: a publicly provided private input (water), and a local public input (road services). An Israeli Moshav which allocates land equally among producers is a good example. The cooperative uses a two-part pricing rule: a product-dependent uniform fee (head tax) and a user charge per unit of the private input. Discrimination of head tax among the producer groups is shown to dominate that of user charge in the short run. However, land reallocation among producers can result in a Pareto-superior pricing rule and the Henry George theorem emerges in the long run. Thus, allowing land leasing while maintaining equal rights to land increases producer welfare.