The Commons with Capital Markets

We explore a dynamic commons problem and assess the welfare consequences of access to capital markets. The commons has a high intrinsic rate of return but its fruits cannot be secured by individual agents. Capital market access allows resources to be held securely and intertemporally transferred, but at a lower rate of return. In a two period model, we completely characterise symmetric consumption and extraction behaviour in four environments: under a strategic and a competitive equilibrium concept, and with and without market access. Strategic equilibria dominate competitive ones: while agents disagree over how to divide the resource, all would prefer it to be larger; the strategic concept allows them to anticipate returns to their conservation. As the number of agents becomes infinite, the strategic outcome converges to the competitive; as the number of agents falls to one, it converges to the planner’s. Market access has a positive effect on welfare owing to its consumption and extraction smoothing properties and a negative effect owing to its creation of an outside option to the commons, encouraging its depletion. A sufficient condition for autarky to dominate market access for some levels of communal endowment is that the world market discount factor exceed the subjective discount factor. Multiple equilibria may arise: these result from market access, not the equilibrium concept. The authors thank Ralph Bailey, Siddhartha Bandyopadhyay, Matthew Cole, Carl Devore, Felix Kubler, Chirantan Ganguly, Martin Jensen, Indrajit Ray, Celine Rochon, Dave Rusin, participants at the Royal Economic Society 2005 and an anonymous referee for valuable comments. They are grateful for funding under the ESRC’s World Economy and Finance programme (RES-156-25-0022).     

关于旅游学科基本概念的共识性问题

文章梳理并分析了国内外旅游学术界长期以来对旅游定义、旅游本质、旅游与休闲的关系、旅游与旅行的关系等基本问题的分歧性意见,在辨析各种观点合理性与非合理性的基础上,概括出旅游学术界在5个方面的基本共识,即旅游是指人的活动;概念性定义才能确立旅游本质;旅游本质应由“余暇＋异地＋体验”三者共同决定;休闲和旅行的范畴大于旅游;狭义旅游定义不会贬损旅游产业和学科地位。文章呼吁旅游学术界以“求大同存小异”的态度尽早形成科学共同体。     

基于隐喻抽取技术的烟草商业企业客户服务体验研究

近年来,随着烟草企业数字化转型不断推进、新型客我关系逐步建立、工商零协同营销不断深入,卷烟营销队伍转型升级已然势在必行。以ZMET隐喻抽取技术和扎根理论为理论基础,通过对烟草零售客户关于卷烟营销工作服务体验的调研,构建零售客户的体验心智模型,从而了解对于服务对象而言,成功开展卷烟营销工作包含的属性元素、用户需求以及价值,形成H（属性）、C（用户需求）、V（价值）共识地图,进而找出当前卷烟营销一线人员在市场营销服务工作中存在的问题。最后,从行业、企业、员工三个层面提出烟草营销队伍转型的建议。     

The Value of Adjusting the Bias in Recommendations: International Evidence

The financial literature has shown that both earnings forecasts and investment recommendations are optimistically biased. However, while the bias in earnings forecasts has decreased over time and even some recent studies show that they are no longer optimistic, in the case of investment recommendations this bias still remains relatively constant over time. Therefore, it seems that recommendations are less credible to investors than earnings forecasts. The vast majority of recommendation studies have been carried out at the country level. In this paper, we use an international context to study whether profitable investment strategies exist when adjusting the recommendation bias of each analysed country. The adjustment we propose to correct this bias takes into account the differences across countries, and also varies in time to correct for the changes in bias over time within countries. Our empirical results show that there are in fact significant differences in the level of bias among countries, with the US and the UK being the countries with the highest bias. Second, the adjusted consensus portfolios are more orthogonal to typical investment styles (size, book‐to‐market and attention) and we find that investors could implement a higher number of profitable investment strategies using this adjusted measure. In this line, the results show that the countries with the lowest bias obtain the highest risk adjusted abnormal returns. Third, our work entails a practical implication, as it shows the value embedded in a simple necessary adjustment in the global asset management context. This is an important result showing that profitable investment strategies exist when considering a global portfolio based on adjusted recommendations.     

Using and Influence Level of Information to Explain the Non-consensus Process Loss

Much of the Group Support System (GSS) literature comparing GSS groups with manual groups has produced contrarian results. One of the more confusing is that GSS groups have a higher level of non-consensus than manual groups. Lack of consensus in GSS groups is considered to be a negative aspect of GSS. This paper argues that low levels of consensus are not necessarily harmful and should be expected given the assumptions about GSSs. This study uses an alternate measure to compare face-to-face groups with GSS groups; an influence level of information. Experimental results using an influence level of information show no difference between face-to-face group members and GSS group members. We discuss these implications, as well as additional directions for further consensus research.     

The future of walking in Europe: a Delphi project to identify expert opinion on future walking scenarios

There is increasing recognition of the importance of walking to the sustainability of cities, set against a continuing decline in everyday walking. This paper reports on a research project, which predicts trends in walking in Europe by 2010 by seeking opinion of experts who are knowledgeable about non-motorised transport. There is a consensus that there will be more walking for leisure and health, but less everyday walking. This will happen despite walking being seen as more important and there being more facilities, infrastructure, information and funding for walking.     

The Delphi method in forecasting financial markets— An experimental study

Experts were used as Delphi panellists and asked to present forecasts on financial market variables in a controlled experiment. We found that the respondents with the least accurate or least conventional views were particularly likely to modify their answers. Most of these modifications were in the right direction but too small, probably because of belief-perseverance bias. This paper also presents two post-survey adjustment methods for Delphi method based forecasts. First, we present a potential method to correct for the belief perseverance bias. The results seem promising. Secondly, we test a conditional forecasting process, which unexpectedly proves unsuccessful.     

Integrating intuition and artificial intelligence in organizational decision-making

Artificial intelligence (AI) is fundamentally changing organizational decision-making processes. With the abilities to self-learn and to improve decision quality, AI is now taking over many decision responsibilities that were formerly assigned to humans alone. However, the effectiveness of AI for ill-structured and uncertain decision environments is still in question. In such decision contexts that have no precedent on which to base a solution, humans have historically relied on their intuition to make decisions. Yet intuition, too, has been found to have weaknesses that restrict decision quality. Therefore, this article introduces a decision-making model that effectively integrates the strengths of both intuition and AI while minimizing the vulnerabilities of each method. The model specifies when and how both modes should be combined for effective organizational decision-making. In addition, the article presents important future research considerations relating to AI for both practitioners and academics.     

A virtual and anonymous, deliberative and analytic participation process for planning and evaluation: The Concept Mapping Policy Delphi

Integrating knowledge and values across a range of stakeholders and experts is a common goal of, and challenge in, forecasting and planning processes across numerous decision-making domains. In this paper we present a virtual and anonymous, deliberative and analytical participatory group process which we applied in a planning study. The process was a combination of concept mapping and a policy Delphi. The Concept Mapping Policy Delphi offers an iterative process that is meant to foster critical, dissensus-based thinking by a group about an evaluation problem. In particular, it offers a platform on which to structure the group brainstorming of ideas, integrates knowledge and values, and creates a shared conceptual framework for addressing evaluation problems. We discuss the merits and limitations of this process and compare it with other public engagement mechanisms for decision-making. We argue that the use of a Concept Mapping Policy Delphi is relevant in forecasting and decision-making processes that aim to integrate information which is from various disparate points of view in order to clarify arguments and values, democratize and mediate public participation, and/or provide strategic advice about scenarios or planning options, while mitigating the problematic aspects of face-to-face group processes.     

Production and Employment Impacts of Biotechnology —Input-output Analysis for Germany

Biotechnology is often regarded as a key technology with high potential for far-reaching social, environmental and economic impacts. Among others, the development and diffusion of biotechnology may have considerable economic effects on production and employment. This paper analyses the economic impacts of different prospective diffusion paths of biotechnology in some major application fields for Germany. Bottom-up technology information from the literature, expert judgements and explicit scenario assumptions for various impact factors are combined and integrated in an input-output framework to calculate direct and indirect production and employment effects. The impact on net production and employment differs greatly between the different application sectors and depends on the respective importance of the various impact mechanisms. The indirect economic effects are rather high and exceed the direct economic effects. These findings show the importance of a bottom-up approach as well as the consideration of the indirect economic effects for appropriate analyses of the impact of biotechnology.