Online marketing: When to offer a refund for advanced sales

Advance selling is a marketing strategy commonly used by online retailers to increase sales by exploiting consumer valuation uncertainty. Recently, some online retailers have started to allow refunds on products sold in advance. On the one hand this reduces the net advance sales, but on the other hand it allows a higher advance sales price. This research is the first to explore the overall effect of allowing a refund on profits from advance sales, identifying conditions where advance selling with or without refunds (or no advance selling at all) is best. We analytically compare the profits of three advance selling strategies: none, without refund, and with refund. We show that selling in advance and allowing a refund is optimal for products with a relatively small profit margin and small strategic market size, and that the added profit can be considerable. Our results guide managers in selecting the right advance selling strategy. To facilitate this, we graphically display, based on the two dimensions of regular profit margin and strategic market size, under what conditions the different strategies are optimal.     

Can corporate social responsibility resolve the sanitation question in developing Asian countries?

The existing state of sanitation in developing Asian countries fails to deliver a level of service that is adequate for meeting the human right to a standard of living consistent with dignity and health, or for sustaining the capacity for future generations to have access to clean water resources and healthy ecosystems. We argue that translating the current neo-centralised technologies and institutional arrangements mainstreamed by industrialised countries would not resolve the problem in the context of developing countries. Instead it is necessary to ‘leap frog’ to the emerging technological and institutional arrangements that are responsive to current needs and contexts and to potential risks. The sustainability focus and often decentralised technologies of this emergent stage in sanitation present many opportunities for new actors to enter the urban sanitation industry. At the same time, there are many barriers to entry, particularly from the perspective of conventional business management focused on increasing shareholder value.We propose that perspectives from the corporate social responsibility discourse have the potential to provide both the ‘pull’ for seizing the business opportunity for profit while serving social needs, and the ‘push’ to overcome the barriers in order to serve a wider social purpose for corporations. The wealth of nations, at least as reported in ubiquitous GDP terms, has greatly increased through the activities of corporations driven by a profit motive; but the increased poverty, injustice and ecosystem degradation that have resulted from economic activity suggest that corporations perhaps ought to have regard for broader concerns beyond shareholder value. We explore how the alternative relational view of a corporation, as a metaphorical person within society who adopts a moral code consistent with both Buddhist economics and Adam Smith's philosophy, may facilitate profitable corporations that provide better economic, ecological and social outcomes in serving the need for sustainable sanitation services in developing Asian countries.     

Business strategies and the transition to low‐carbon cities

Cities are key drivers of global climate change, with the majority of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions being tied to urban life. Local actions to mitigate and adapt to climate change are essential for stabilization of the global climate and can also help to address other urban ecological problems such as pollution, decreasing biodiversity, etc. Companies are important urban actors in the development of low‐carbon cities because they provide a multitude of goods and services to city populations and directly influence urban carbon dioxide (CO₂) emissions. This is a new area of research. While studies on corporate sustainability are numerous, there is little, if any, existing research that examines the role of companies in climate change adaptation and mitigation within specific urban areas. Urban ecologists also have not examined how corporate activity affects urban systems. Taking a multi‐disciplinary systems approach, we present a conceptual model of the role of companies in managing urban interactions with the climate system. We also present empirical findings illustrating how one company ‘partners’ with the city of Rotterdam to test electric vehicles as a pilot project for urban climate adaptation and mitigation. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment.     

Issues in New Political Economy: An Overview

A brief overview of the historical background, nature, and rapid growth in volume and scope of new political economy since the early 1980s is provided. the paper continues with some general reflections on the strengths and weaknesses of the new political economy approach, illustrated by the other contributions to this special issue of the Journal of Economic Surveys . The final Section summarises these contributions.     

New Political Economy

Alberto Alesina and Nouriel Roubini with Gerald D. Cohen, Political Cycles and the Macroeconomy
Avinash K. Dixit, The Making of Economic Policy: A Transaction-Cost Politics Perspective.
Gordon Pepper, Inside Thatcher's Monetarist Revolution     

Clawbacks,Holdbacks, and CEO Contracting

“Clawbacks” are much discussed in the context of senior executive compensation, yet the discussion has largely ignored the presence of holdbacks that are already in place in many firms. Holdbacks are deferred compensation that is potentially foregone in the event that the CEO leaves the firm without good reason or they are dismissed for wrong‐doing. They are explicit or written features of a CEOs employment contract. Holdbacks are already in use at 70% of S&P 500 firms and average $18.4 million each. Firms with higher CEO replacement costs, greater information asymmetry, a recent bad experience (fraud, lawsuit, or restatement), or in more certain environments are more likely to have a holdback. In contrast, clawback adoptions are mainly driven by firms' bad experiences and external pressure from shareholders. Holdbacks and incentive‐based compensation are substitutes, as termination incentives can reduce the need for incentive compensation. As managers reasonably demand a premium for accepting risky compensation, a measure of abnormal compensation is positively associated with holdbacks, but there is no significant association between clawbacks and holdbacks. These findings suggest that the holdbacks many firms already have in place could help an “ex‐post settling up” in the event of financial misconduct, or even simply misstated financials. As companies have more control over the amounts held back ex‐ante, holdbacks are potentially more efficient.     

Consumption asset pricing and the term structure

We investigate the relationship between consumption and the term structure using U.K. interest rate data. We demonstrate that the term structure contains information about future economic activity as implied by the benchmark time separable power utility consumption based capital asset pricing model (C-CAPM) since the yield spread has forecasting power for future consumption growth. Further, we analyze the ability of this benchmark and two alternative models which adopt utility functions characterized by non-separability, namely, the extension to the habit formation model of Campbell and Cochrane (1999) proposed by Wachter (2006) and the housing C-CAPM proposed by Piazzesi, Schneider and Tuzel (2007). Our findings are supportive of the habit formation specification of Wachter (2006), other models fail to yield economically plausible parameter values.     

Regulating Insider Trading In Betting Markets

Although trading in securities in conventional financial markets on the basis of inside information is restricted by law, the rules against such trading in betting markets are rather more ambiguous. It is argued in this paper that, since insider trading in betting markets imposes a cost on the great majority of bettors, tighter strictures against such trading would benefit all but the insiders. This case is supported by the use of empirical evidence which shows that betting markets which are characterized by tighter controls against insider activity are also characterized by a significantly lower incidence of such activity.     

Bertrand versus Cournot revisited

Summary. Bertrand criticized Cournot's analysis of the competitive process, arguing that firms should be seen as playing a strategy of setting price below competitors' prices (henceforth, the Bertrand strategy) instead of a strategy of accepting the price needed to sell an optimal quantity (the Cournot strategy). We characterize Nash equilibria in a generalized model in which firms choose among Cournot and Bertrand strategies. Best responses always exist in this model. For the duopoly case, we show that iterated best responses converge under mild assumptions on initial states either to Cournot equilibrium or to an equilibrium in which only one firm plays the Bertrand strategy with price equal to marginal cost and that firm has zero sales. Received: December 11, 1995; revised version October 2, 1996