Hungarian Cuisine With Respect to Restaurant Awards and Consumers’ Opinion

After the fall of the Iron Curtain many trends and innovations reached Hungary, and so did gastronomic development. As a result, 2 restaurants in Budapest were awarded a Michelin star. This article aims to track consumers' awareness of these changes. It also explores the nature of Hungarian cuisine. An extract from an interview with Katalin Pintér (Onyx restaurant, Budapest), is also published in the article. The research is based on an analysis of a questionnaire that investigates consumers' attitudes toward new trends in Hungarian gastronomy. The results indicate that there is little interest in the recent gastro-revolution and haute cuisine.     

Residual demand measures of market power of Russian wheat exporters

Traditionally, the international wheat market has been considered a good example of a market with perfect competition. Yet, several articles provide evidence of imperfect competition and price discrimination in the wheat trade. However, these studies focused on traditional high‐quality wheat exporters such as Canada and the United States. In contrast, this article investigates whether Russian wheat exporters exercise market power in eight selected importing countries using the residual demand elasticity (RDE) model. The article makes two major contributions. First, it focuses on a nontraditional exporter, who exports mainly wheat of mediocre quality to low‐ and middle‐income countries. Second, the RDE model is estimated for the first time using a nonlinear estimator, the instrumental variable Poisson pseudo‐maximum likelihood estimator. This is important because the double logarithmic functional form can provide biased results in the presence of heteroskedasticity. The results indicate that Russian wheat exporters can exercise market power in only a few markets, while they are price takers in the majority of importing countries.     

Are Russian Wheat Exporters Able to Price Discriminate? Empirical Evidence from the Last Decade

Significant changes have taken place in the world wheat market in the last decade. Russia, a former net wheat importer, has become a leading exporter with a world market share of 11.2% in 2009. This increasing importance and the discussion about the establishment of a grain‐OPEC consisting of Ukraine, Kazakhstan and Russia has raised the issue of pricing behaviour of Russian wheat exporters. Although there are several studies on the pricing behaviour of Canadian and US wheat exporters, there is none so far for Russian wheat exporters. This study provides a quantitative analysis of the pricing behaviour of Russian wheat exporters, explicitly taking account of the export tax imposed between 2007 and 2008. We employ a pricing‐to‐market (PTM) model on quarterly Russian wheat‐export data, covering the period from 2002 to 2010 and 25 export destinations. Our findings indicate that (i) Russian wheat exporters exercised PTM in only a few importing countries over the whole time period, and (ii) PTM behaviour was more pronounced in the aftermath of the export tax period (i.e. 2008–2010) than before.     

The effect of environmental information on investment allocation decisions – an experimental study

This paper focuses on the use of environmental information in investment decision making. The research approach employed is based on an experiment where three groups of final year finance students were asked to allocate investment funds between two companies based on financial accounts and information material from these companies in which environmental information was included in varying degrees. The overall conclusion is that the qualitative environmental information affects short term allocation decisions, hence indicating a risk reduction potential of environmental information comparable to the classic interpretation of financial information. The quantitative environmental information included in the experiment seems to mitigate rather than extend the directional effect of more environmental information. The evidence also seems to indicate that decision makers are not always aware which information categories affect their decision making. Hence, this has implications for how the potential value of environmental information is to be assessed. Finally, experimental studies as a methodology seem to be better suited to indicate actual effects of different types of information on decision making than attitude surveys. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment.