Purchasing natural personal care products in the era of fake news? The moderation effect of brand trust

Natural personal care products are gaining popularity due to their benefits in terms of health and well-being. However, consumers are wary of these products and are guided by the fake news circulating about them. Since natural product consumption offers several personal and environmental benefits, it would be worthwhile to understand consumers’ tendency to let fake news influence their consumption decisions. Accordingly, the current study examined the association of fake news and purchasing behaviour towards natural personal care products, utilising Stimulus-Organism-Behaviour-Consequence (SOBC) as the theoretical framework. The study proposed openness to change as the stimulus, perceived benefits and perceived risks as organismic internal states, purchase intentions as the behaviour, and the propensity of believing and acting on fake news as the consequence, which is further associated with system trust. The model was tested by analysing data collected from 390 existing consumers, considering the moderation effect of brand trust and controlling the effect of age and gender. The findings confirmed that openness to change is associated with perceived benefits and risks. Furthermore, perceived benefits and system trust are associated with purchase intentions, which are, in turn, associated with the propensity of believing and acting on fake news. The study presents several novel contributions to theory and practice.     

Strong Nash equilibrium in games with common and complementary local utilities

A rather general class of strategic games is described where the coalitional improvements are acyclic and hence strong Nash equilibria exist: The players derive their utilities from the use of certain facilities; all players using a facility extract the same amount of local utility therefrom, which amount depends both on the set of users and on their actions, and is decreasing in the set of users; the ultimate utility of each player is the minimum of the local utilities at all relevant facilities. Two important subclasses are “games with structured utilities,” basic properties of which were discovered in 1970s and 1980s, and “bottleneck congestion games,” which attracted researchers’ attention quite recently. The former games are representative in the sense that every game from the whole class is isomorphic to one of them. The necessity of the minimum aggregation for the existence of strong Nash equilibria, actually, just Pareto optimal Nash equilibria, in all games of this type is established.     

The substitutes condition and the lattice structure of the set of stable allocations

In the many-to-one matching model with contracts, I show that there is no restriction on preferences weaker than substitutable preferences which guarantees that the set of stable allocations is a lattice. Thus, when contracts are not substitutes, removing agents from the economy may decrease the payoffs to existing agents on both sides of the market.     

Is there decentralization in North Korea? Evidence and lessons from the sloping land management program 2004–2014

In the 1990s, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (North Korea) suffered from severe food shortages and large-scale deforestation, which triggered a stage of rural conservation reform. Since 2004, with support from the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation (SDC), North Korea’s Ministry of Land and Environmental Protection (MoLEP) has implemented a Sloping Land Management Program (SLMP). The SLMP established sloping land user groups and granted these groups the right to use marginal land for agroforestry development. This devolution of land rights from state control onto local groups is a landmark in North Korea, and this decentralization initiative has now expanded to over eight counties to involve thousands of households. It has also led to the launch of a National Agroforestry Policy and Strategy. Drawing from both qualitative and quantitative data collected from 2008 to 2014, this paper documents the process and effects of the SLMP. It argues that the decentralization reform in land management has contributed to not only food security with increased food crop diversity and productivity, but also notably forest recovery through an expansion of tree plantations and agroforestry practices on degraded sloping lands. However, an insufficient power transfer in the form of a lack of timber rights granted to the local user groups has hampered the effectiveness of the SLMP. There are also institutional and geopolitical challenges that are limiting further scaling-up of land-use decentralization across the country. The policy implication calls for more international investment as well as national land-use policy reforms in order to promote and facilitate further decentralization of sloping land management and to secure greater use rights for sloping land user groups.     

Auction winning,social dynamics and non-compliance in a payment for ecosystem services scheme in Indonesia

Conservation auctions for payment for ecosystem services (PES) are useful to identify the levels of incentives that will cover the opportunity costs of farmers supplying ecosystem services. Although auctions are increasingly used for allocation in PES schemes, the factors that lead to their successful implementation and eventual environmental outcomes are poorly understood in developing countries. We investigated the socio-economic and institutional contexts that led to smallholders' auction winning and eventual compliance using linear mixed-effects models, and post-auction and post-contract surveys. We employed a case study of a conservation contract preceded by a sealed-bid, multiple round, uniform price auction for watershed services from coffee farmers in Lampung, Indonesia. The auction participants presented low education levels, low asset endowments and small plot sizes. The study obtained evidence that farmers with larger plot areas were more likely to win the contracts, suggesting economies of scale. Most farmers considered the auction a fair self-selection mechanism to allocate contracts where allocation was not influenced by power or social rank. Non-compliance was associated with labor availability constraints, short duration of land ownership and existence of previous conservation applications, suggesting lax of capability to invest in applying conservation agriculture. Final bids were however not good predictors of compliance, among other factors, calling into question the potential of auctions to elicit the actual incentive from the farmers. Ensuring that farmers understand the purposes of auctions for effective contract allocation beyond a mere game and identifying farmers that might encounter difficulties fulfilling the contract could increase the likelihood that such a PES scheme would be successful.     

Usury laws and private credit in Lima,Peru. Evidence from notarized records

I examine the impact of usury laws on the Peruvian credit market between 1825 and 1852. Using a new data set of nearly 2,000 loans from archival sources, I show that the repeal of colonial anti-usury laws in early 1833 had an important effect on the allocation of credit in Lima. It increased interest rates and promoted access to credit. Furthermore, lenders made loans with greater maturities after the repeal of usury laws.     

移动电子商务交易安全研究

移动电子商务带来便利的同时也带来了新的安全问题,设备的多样性和移动网络环境的复杂性使得确保移动电子商务交易安全更加困难,本文通过分析现阶段移动电子商务的交易模式,提出现有移动电子商务交易过程中存在的安全问题与安全隐患,最后提出了较为可行的解决方案。     

Heterogeneous returns to chemical fertilizer at the intensive margins: Insights from Nepal

Increased fertilizer use is considered important for agricultural development in low-income countries. Promoting increased use of chemical fertilizer by lowering its price may be ineffective if demand is price inelastic. In theory, the price elasticity of demand depends on the returns to its use, but the evidence is scarce. Furthermore, while returns are often estimated for small changes in chemical fertilizer use, returns to larger changes in its use (intensive margins) are less understood. Through the inter-zonal comparisons in Nepal, we provide indicative evidence that greater returns to chemical fertilizer are associated with greater price elasticities of demand. Moreover, the evidence suggests that returns at the intensive margins, rather than returns to small changes, may largely account for inter-zonal differences in returns to chemical fertilizer within Nepal. The results suggest that better understanding the returns at the intensive margins is critical for effective agricultural inputs policies in developing countries.     

Which accessible travel products are people with disabilities willing to pay more? A choice experiment

Despite the rapidly increasing number of tourists with disabilities, which is known to have a strong nexus with senior travel market, tourism industry has paid little attention to the distinctive preferences of these tourists for accessible travel products. Using a sample of Koreans with mobility disabilities, this study aims to better understand how they make decisions to choose optimal accessible travel products. The results of the choice experiment indicate that respondents place the heaviest weight on the accessibility of accommodation facilities for their maximization of travel satisfaction. The results also suggest that tourists with disabilities show higher willingness-to-pay values on particular tour buses equipped with more accessibility devices. Based on study findings, this study provides several management implications that help tourism professionals develop appropriate accessible travel products for their clientele with disabilities.     

Economic consequences of war: Evidence from Sri Lanka

We propose a theoretical and econometric framework to evaluate the impact of war on economic growth of a developing country with an open economy. The theoretical framework encompasses both the neoclassical and endogenous growth models. We test this framework using Sri Lankan data. The war had significant and negative effects both in the short and long-run (annual average of 9% of GDP). High returns from investment in physical capital did not translate in sizable positive externalities. Only short-run significant effects of openness on growth are found. Inconsistent politically driven policies towards openness are the likely reason.