A choice experiment on fuel taxation and earmarking in Norway

Pigouvian taxes are efficient — but unpopular among voters — and hence often politically infeasible. Earmarking of revenues has been widely reported to increase public support for taxes, but earmarking is generally not the most efficient use of the revenues. This trade-off between efficiency and political feasibility is the motivation for our primary research objective: to quantify the effect of earmarking on support for fuel tax rises. Our secondary research objective is to investigate why earmarking increases support. Using data from a representative sample of the Norwegian voter population (N = 1147), we estimate models of voter preferences for fuel taxes using logistic regression models. Our results show that, in the absence of earmarking, the majority of voters would like to reduce fuel taxes, but earmarking the revenues for environmental measures has a substantial effect on voter support for fuel tax increases, garnering a majority for increases of up to 15% above present levels. Further analysis indicates that a prime reason why earmarking for environmental measures is popular is that it increases the perceived environmental effectiveness of the tax, and hence its legitimacy as an environmental rather than a fiscal policy instrument.     

Organizational adaptation to changing contingencies

Old, mechanistic firms need to change their technology and organizational forms to adapt to new market conditions. However, contingency theories of organization link the capacity for this kind of innovation with organic organizational forms, hence the firms seemingly have to change before they can start changing. The article develops a basis for an extension of these theories which looks in more detail at adaptation processes. A perspective on organizational functioning is introduced that sees continuity as fundamental to change, instead of treating innovation and stagnation as two unconnected phenomena. This perspective, called RTK for short, rests on an investigation of three aspects of organizations: their networks of routines for all activities, the local theories held and developed, and the contextual knowledge at the points of operation. It is then argued that change processes with which firms can successfully cope should be anchored in virtuous circles in existing routine networks.     

Reversed servitization paths: a case analysis of two manufacturers

The literature on service business in manufacturing companies posits that manufacturers “servitize” by increasing the proportion of services offered. This study presents two paths that are contrary to such forward-unidirectional servitization, indicating “reversed servitization.” In the first case, a capital goods manufacturer lost visibility to its installed base due to evolving product technology. We use the case of photocopier manufacturer Xerox to support our findings; a regulation change forced Xerox to move from a service-based toward a product-based business model. We thus propose that influencing environmental factors need to be researched and that the literature of organizational ecology may serve as a complementary perspective.     

Indicators of development or dependency in disguise? Assessing domestic inventive capacity in South Korean and Chinese infrastructural ICT standards

Domestic infrastructural information and communication technology (ICT) standards can be items of assertion for newly industrialised countries as they signal a capacity for breaking dependence on foreign technology and potentially drawing revenue from international export. This paper asks, with an in-depth study of a selection of recent South Korean and Chinese infrastructural ICT standards, to what degree it is warranted to correlate the production of standards with dependency-breaking technological capacity. A composite picture is found. On one side, a large portion of promoted domestic standards are creative imitations of foreign technologies with limited, if any, proportions of embedded domestic patents. This indicates a lack of capacity for challenging technological dependence. On the other side, several of the technologies studied signal emerging South Korean and Chinese capacity for embedding cutting-edge patents in infrastructural ICT standards when participating in global standardisation consortiums.     

Bridging the Energy Efficiency Gap: A Field Experiment on Lifetime Energy Costs and Household Appliances

Providing consumers with information that can lead to more energy-efficient choices can help reduce energy use and greenhouse gas emissions while reducing costs to consumers. A natural field experiment is conducted in collaboration with an electrical retailer to test strategies for influencing sales of household appliances. The experiment involves two product categories, fridge-freezers and tumble driers. Information on lifetime energy cost of appliances is provided through a label and training of sales staff. For fridge-freezers, the authors find no significant effects. For tumble driers, the combined treatment and training treatment reduce average energy use of tumble driers sold by 4.9% and 3.4%, respectively. The effect is strongest initially, over 12% on average for the first 3 months for the combined treatment but declines over time. The effect is significant at the 5% level for the combined treatment while not significant for sales staff training.