The Procompetitive Effect of Demand-Enhancing Check-Off Programs

This article explores demand-enhancing check-off programs and how such programs may influence both private programs as well as industry market structure. Under duopoly, a firm may increase its sales through privately funding product quality improvements. However, such endogenous sunk costs may also be used to exclude a rival. Industry-funded check-off programs affect firms' strategies and can be procompetitive. The rationale lies not only in how the check-off enhancement is perceived by consumers but also in the way the check-off's crowding-out effect reduces the ability of a firm to use its private expenditures to bar a rival's market access.     

Inside innovation persistence: New evidence from Italian micro-data

This paper contributes the analysis of the persistence of innovation activities, as measured by different innovation indicators and explores its past and path dependent characteristics. The study provides new insights on the role of R&D investments in innovation persistence and analyses differentiated patterns of persistence across product and process innovation, by accounting for complementarity effects between the two types of innovative behaviour. The empirical analysis is based on a sample of 451 Italian manufacturing companies observed during the years 1998–2006. Results highlight the relevance of innovation persistence. The highest level of persistence is found for R&D-based innovation activities, witnessing the actual presence of significant entry and exit barriers. Moreover, we obtain more robust evidence of persistence for product innovation than for process innovation when complementarity effects between the two types of innovation are accounted for.     

An Evaluation of California's Mandated Commodity Promotion Programs

This article provides an overview of mandated commodity programs in California, and summarizes and interprets existing evidence on their economic impacts. The analysis draws upon the recent book edited by the authors: The Economics of Commodity Promotion Programs: Lessons from California . New York: Peter Lang Publishing, April 2005. The book documents the institutional arrangements, summarizes the history of recent litigation, and presents the results of a number of benefit–cost studies of mandated commodity programs in California. The overwhelming conclusion from the studies reported in the article is that the programs have been very profitable for California's agricultural producers.     

Generic Advertising and Product Differentiation

This article considers whether generic advertising lowers the differentiation among competing brands of the same good. Analytical results show that if the benefits from generic advertising from increased demand are outweighed by the costs from lower product differentiation then high–quality producers will not benefit from generic promotion. Hypotheses are tested empirically under a conditional–logit approach using retail–market sales and advertising data for the U.S. prune industry. Results from this study provide evidence that generic advertising has a slight differential effect on the perceived qualities of different brands.     

Systemic technology policies: Issues and instruments

In this Introduction, we review the arguments that underpinned the workshop on which the special section is grounded and provide a structured sequence for the contents of the seven selected papers that comprise the section.     

The joint venture company in Soviet law

Part 1 of this article appeared inMoct-Most n. 2/1991.     

How Should Food Safety Certification Be Financed?

An analytical framework where consumers are imperfectly informed about the safety of products is used to investigate the welfare effects of a public certification system. Several certification fees under alternative structures of certification cost are analyzed. By maintaining competition among numerous sellers, voluntary certification financed by a per-unit fee is efficient (and sufficient) to signal product safety. However, mandatory certification linked with a fixed user fee may be necessary if a seller wields monopoly power. Further, certification by a single, private agency results in a distorted fee.