Spatial diffusion of a new loyalty program through a retail market

Retailers who wish to launch new innovations into their markets can be much more effective if they understand the geographic forces which affect consumer adoption of those innovations. A research field which studies this process is spatial diffusion. This paper explores and models the processes and driving forces of spatial diffusion across a market area following the launch of a new loyalty card program by a national retailer. Event history modeling is used to estimate the effects of distance, the impact of the firm’s marketing efforts, and the role of previous adopters in influencing the speed and spatial pattern of the adoption process. The results, in addition to yielding new insights into the processes involved in spatial diffusion, support previous findings on the importance of targeting the Innovator adopter group in a new product launch.     

Spatial Cournot competition and economic welfare: a note

We investigated welfare implications in location-quantity models in a symmetric linear city. We found that when firms are not agglomerated in equilibrium, increasing the distance between firms raises (reduces) producer surplus and social welfare (consumer surplus). Moreover, central agglomeration is always optimal for consumers among symmetric locations, but not necessarily for producers. Central agglomeration can be inefficient even if it is the unique equilibrium outcome. In short, the firms are more likely to agglomerate or locate closer than what welfare maximizers would dictate, whereas they locate farther apart than what consumer surplus maximizers would recommend.     

Methods, results and policy implications of poverty and food security mapping assessments

The importance of poverty reduction to the world development agenda has motivated greater interest in the geographic dimensions of poverty and food security. This special issue of Food Policy includes examples of poverty and food security mapping used to support policy development in agricultural and rural areas. The volume includes eight country case studies and one cross-country comparison that illustrate advances in our capacity to assess welfare over large areas and at detailed spatial resolutions. Poverty mapping facilitates assessments of the role of environmental factors on the broad spatial pattern of poverty and food security. Evaluating proximity and accessibility in welfare outcomes can improve our knowledge of poverty patterns and processes. Spatial statistics can enhance our understanding of geographic and neighbourhood effects on poverty and food security outcomes. The development of effective policies requires increased collaboration among stakeholders, researchers and policy makers in constructing and using poverty and food security maps.     

Child hunger in the developing world: An analysis of environmental and social correlates

Using two complementary methods in a framework that allows incorporating both environmental and household-level factors, we explore the correlates of underweight status among children. We use individual children as the units of analysis in 19 African countries, and subnational survey strata in 43 African, Asian and Latin American countries. We consider the relationship between household-level demographic and health survey data, environmental factors from external geospatial data sets and two indicators of malnutrition among children aged 1–3, deviations from the international standards of weight-for-age and height-for-age. We discuss methods for data integration. In general, household determinants explain more variation than environmental factors, perhaps partly due to more error-prone measurement at the community level. Among individual children, some measures of agricultural capacity are related to lower incidence of child hunger, while among regions, measures relating to urbanness and population density show a stronger relationship. We give recommendations for further study, data collection and policy making.     

Preemptive mergers under spatial competition

Mergers for market power generally benefit outsider firms more than participating firms. Hence, outsiders should welcome such mergers between their competitors but, frequently, this is not the case. Under spatial competition some outsiders gain more than the participating firms but others might benefit less. Thus, if the number of admissible mergers is limited, firms may decide to merge to preempt rival mergers. This paper studies the incentives for preemptive merger by firms engaged in spatial competition.     

Economic impacts of adjacency and green-up constraints on timber production at a landscape scale

Although many different forest certification standards exist, harvest adjacency and green-up regulations are common to most certifying bodies. This study develops a means for evaluating trade-offs associated with implementation of nth-order adjacency and green-up constraints on a 1.7 million ha landscape in Oregon in the US. Depending on the type of adjacency structure and delay between harvests, the opportunity cost of the restrictions, estimated by the change in discounted sum of producer and consumer surplus in the regional log market, ranged from 0.25% to 66% (or US $60 million to $15.3 billion) of the unconstrained value. Increasing green-up delays beyond 30–40 years had little effect on estimated opportunity cost of the modeled restrictions.     

Multistrategic Spatial Competition in Banking

This paper presents a model whereby banking firms use various strategies (price and non‐price) simultaneously in a monopolistically competitive model of spatial competition when the various strategies are used across different markets in the presence of a multioutput technology. The theoretical model is estimated with Spanish data pertaining to the pre‐ and post‐deregulatory periods in order to investigate the effects of deregulation of both interest rates and branches on the (differential) strategic conduct of private and savings bank.     

税收安排对中国城乡收入差距的影响 ——基于2003~2012年空间面板模型的实证分析

利用中国2003~2012年31个省级面板数据,在测度区域城乡收入差距的基础上,通过空间计量模型,研究了税收安排对城乡收入差距的影响。结果表明,中国城乡收入差距基本呈现出“东部沿海地区最低,中部较低,西部最高”的空间分布格局;宏观税负、个人所得税以及消费税的增加扩大了城乡收入差距,房产税的增加缩小了城乡收入差距;而经济发展水平、财政支出、通货膨胀、城市化率、基础设施建设和教育程度都从不同方面影响着城乡收入差距。     

中国区域空间结构的三次转型与重构

在工业化、城市化的推动下,区域空间结构会有规律地发生三次转型,即区域经济社会发展以农村为主导向以城市为主导的转型,城市化发展由以单个城市为主导向以城市群为主导的转型,城市群发展向同城化的转型。由于我国地域广阔,区域差异很大,区域空间结构的三次转型在我国发生的时序不同,全国范围、四大地区、不同省区的区域空间结构都有不同的演进规律。"十二五"与"十三五"期间,我国正处于转型发展的关键时期,各地应创新城镇化发展道路,推进区域空间结构的转型。