What Drives Fraud in a Credence Goods Market? – Evidence from a Field Study

This paper investigates the impact of competition on an expert firm's incentive to defraud its customers in a credence goods market. Controlling for the competence of car repair shops, their financial situation, and reputational concerns, we use and complement the data set from a nationwide field study conducted by the German Automobile Association that regularly checks the reliability of garages in Germany. We find that more intense competition lowers a firm's incentive to defraud its customers.     

Trade policy substitution: theory and evidence

Review of World Economics - With the help of a political economy model, we show that the extent of ‘trade policy substitution’—namely, substitution of tariffs with non-tariff...     

Tobacco retail licences and state formation in early modern England and Wales

This article addresses one under‐studied aspect of Charles I's finances during his Personal Rule: the licensing of tobacco retailers. While it was ultimately a failed project, the tobacco retail licence project was fiscally successful before the transformative events of the 1640s triggered its demise. The project enabled tobacco retail licensees to establish commercial outlets for the marketing of tobacco throughout England and Wales, and cooperation with pre‐existing officeholders contributed to the apprehension of unlicensed retailers. Ultimately, the geographic breadth of tobacco licences translated into much‐needed royal revenue which, when added to other projects and patents, contributed to the king's financial survival. The evidence presented here suggests that we may want to rethink some of our assumptions for how the process of state formation worked and that earlier seventeenth‐century ‘prototypes’ of taxation were more fiscally successful than previously recognized.     

Pivotal Buyers and Bargaining Position

Securing sales to a large buyer can be pivotal to a supplier's decision to produce. While conventional wisdom suggests that being pivotal improves a buyer's bargaining position, the opposite is shown in a multilateral bargaining model. If other buyers' payments fall short of costs, a pivotal buyer must cover the shortfall or forfeit consumption. This affords leverage that the supplier lacks when bargaining with non-pivotal buyers. The analysis illuminates contracting in markets with high fixed costs, such as cable television programming, motion pictures, and large-scale project finance, and has implications for the FCC's horizontal ownership limits on cable system operators.     

Regime switching in the yield curve

The article investigates the effect of interest‐rate variance on the shape of the yield curve with the use of a bivariate two‐state Markov switching model for the short‐rate changes and the yield curve slope. The two states are characterized by the variance of the short‐rate changes: low and high variance. In the high‐variance regime the yield curve becomes steeper with the interest‐rate variance; in the low‐variance regime the slope is independent hereof. A nonswitching specification amounts to averaging across the two states. The economy is in the high‐variance state during unusual economic periods. © 2004 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Jrl Fut Mark 24:315–336, 2004     

B‐TO‐B E‐COMMERCE: A CONTENT ANALYTICAL ASSESSMENT OF MOTOR CARRIER WEBSITES

An Internet presence is a critical early component in the process of building towards a fully operational and unified e‐commerce strategy. E‐commerce has significantly impacted logistics/supply chain strategies and the development and implementation of a website have become key issues for many firms within the transportation industry. This study provides an overview of website content within the motor carrier industry. Content analysis was used to assess the site design, informational content, and the interactive content of 152 motor carrier websites, and to compare the features offered on the Top 100 motor carrier firm websites with those offered on the sites of smaller carrier firms.     

Web information tracking using ontologies

Bringing knowledge management to practice one typically has to focus on concrete problems that exist in the daily work of the knowledge worker. We consider the task of tracking relevant information on the Web as important and time consuming, and thus as a concrete problem. In this paper we introduce an integrated approach for Web information tracking using ontologies. The overall approach has been implemented within a case study carried out at DaimlerChrysler AG. Copyright © 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The impact of the WARN Act on firm value

The Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification (WARN) Act of 1989 mandated that at least 60 days advance notice be given to employees. Critics argued that its passage would decrease managerial flexibility in closing plants, subsequently reducing firm values. This study addresses this issue by examining the stock market's reaction to announcements leading to the eventual enactment of the WARN legislation. We find evidence indicating negative effects of the legislation on stock returns of small firms.