Managerial firms’ profitability,unions, and environmental taxes

This article examines how determining an optimal environmental tax in a Cournot duopoly with unionized labour markets and managerial firms departing from the strict profit-maximization. It is shown that firm-specific monopoly unions that set wages (1) reduce both the environmental tax and environmental damage and (2) counterintuitively, increase firms’ profitability when the abatement technology is not too “efficient”, and the public evaluation of environmental quality is sufficiently high. Within this framework, the work also develops the endogenous game played by firms that must choose between sales delegation (SD) and profit-maximization. Results show that the SD contract always emerges as the unique, deadlock sub-game perfect Nash equilibrium, thereby solving the (prisoner's) dilemma emerging in the related existing literature assuming a competitive labour market.     

Hedonic consumption experience in videogaming: A multidimensional perspective

Prior research primarily considers consumers' hedonic gaming experience, defined as an individual's level of pleasure, emotional gratification, and enjoyment from playing a videogame, from a unidimensional perspective. However, given the growing range of technology-enabled, hedonic game-related (e.g., aesthetic, competition, or social) elements, we argue that this one-dimensional view is rapidly becoming dated. Correspondingly, we propose a broadened multi-dimensional perspective of videogamers' hedonic experience, as informed by hedonic consumption theory and the theory of planned behavior. Using a sample of 294 gamers, our results confirm the existence of gamers' multi (i.e., seven)-dimensional hedonic consumption experience comprising escapism, fantasy, role-projection, emotional involvement, enjoyment, arousal, and sensory experience. We also find that gamers' emotional involvement, enjoyment, arousal, and sensory experience, in particular, drive their attitude formation toward a videogame, in turn impacting users' videogaming intent and behavior. We conclude by discussing implications that arise from our research.     

我国对外反倾销的产业保护绩效优化研究

基于产业组织绩效优化的视角,提出了实现国内外企业公平竞争的反倾销税率优化原则以及在不同的产业结构中适度的反倾销运作的机理和实践标准,并从产业特性和可持续发展角度提出了政策建议.     

Brand placements in video games: How local in-game experiences influence brand attitudes

Brand placements are omnipresent in video games, but their overall effect on brand attitudes is small and varies substantially between studies. The present research takes an evaluative conditioning perspective to explain when and how brand placements in video games influence brand attitudes. In two experiments with a 3D first-person video game, we show that only brands encountered during positive in-game experiences benefit from the placement, but not those encountered during negative in-game experiences. Building on the cognitive processes underlying evaluative conditioning, we also show that brand attitudes largely depend on the memory for the pairing of a brand with positive/negative in-game experiences. Pairing memory and thus also evaluative conditioning effects increase when players attend to the pairing of brands and positive/negative experiences, for example, when such pairings are a central part of the game's storyline. Overall, our findings show that evaluative conditioning and its cognitive mechanisms can be utilized to explain and predict advertising effects in applied settings, such as brand placements in video games.     

Closed-loop Nash competition for liquidity

We study a multiplayer stochastic differential game, where agents interact through their joint price impact on an asset that they trade to exploit a common trading signal. In this context, we prove that a closed-loop Nash equilibrium exists if the price impact parameter is small enough. Compared to the corresponding open-loop Nash equilibrium, both the agents' optimal trading rates and their performance move towards the central-planner solution, in that excessive trading due to lack of coordination is reduced. However, the size of this effect is modest for plausible parameter values.