A Segmentation of Volunteers at the 2013 Austin City Limits Music Festival: Insights and Future Directions

Volunteers at music festivals play a critical role in festival operation and success. As the music festival industry continues to grow, the ability for these large productions to effectively execute a large volunteer program is augmented. Volunteers from the 2013 Austin City Limits Music Festival were surveyed in regards to their self-image congruency, motivation, satisfaction, and intent to return as a volunteer at the festival. Analysis resulted in three distinct segments which has significant practical implications for festival management. Academic implications exist with the addition of self-image congruency and further discovery of volunteers in the festival and event industry.     

The effective use of marketing research consultants

Relatively little has been written about effectively managing the buyer-seller relationship for marketing research services. To provide insights into effectively managing this relationship, a survey of both buyers and sellers of marketing research services was conducted. Major findings were that proper problem definition, a familiarity with research methods by the research buyer, and continuous communication between buyer and seller were critical determinants of a successful consultant relationship. For best results the market research buyer-seller relationship should be treated as a mutually beneficial one, not one of conflict or acrimony.     

Improving the effectiveness of persuasive communications: Matching message with functional profile

The functional approach to improving communication strategy has received little attention. This research attempts to partially correct this oversight by experimentally verifying the major functional hypothesis: matching message with functional profile brings about attitude change. Working adults were integrated into an experiment which was a before-after with control. The major functional hypothesis was confirmed at the 0.10 level. An associated hypothesis regarding the relative ease of changing value- expressive attitudes compared to utilitarian attitudes was confirmed at the 0.10 level. The results show the importance of matching message with functional profile and highlight the potential inherent in the functional approach.     

A fundamental flaw of debt limitations for state and local governments

Debt limitations, though adopted with the noblest of intentions, have failed to reduce governmental borrowing because of the ease with which they can be circumvented. This article identifies a critical deficiency of debt limitations: the difficulty of developing a definition of debt that is broad enough to prevent governments from using subterfuges to increase borrowing capacity and yet is sufficiently narrow to enable them to carry out their assigned functions. It reviews the history of debt limitations and the judicial interpretations of them. It shows how courts have analyzed leases and other executory contracts that create debts so as to permit form to take precedence over economic substance.     

The optimal policy rule under rational expectations and multiplier uncertainty

This paper shows the role of macro policy under multiplier uncertainty when expectations are rational and the supply structure is affected by price level variance. Policy less is a function of price level variance and possibly of the expected price level. If the letter argument is omitted from the less function, optimal policy simply minimizes the horizontal variance of the aggregate demand curve. If it is not omitted, the level of policy depends on the responsiveness of the supply structure to price level variance, and there may be multiple local policy optima.     

略论自由间接引语在女性文学中的运用

自由间接引语是文学作品中具有特殊文体功能的语言形式。文章意在分析这种侧面叙事手法用于女性小说后取得的独特效果,以它在简·奥斯丁的《傲慢与偏见》中的运用为例,对其文体效果加以分类和评述,认为自由间接引语的运用加强了小说本身的讽刺效果,成功地解剖人物叙述表面的矛盾,揭示人物心理后面潜藏的深刻社会背景,从而更深层地宣扬了女性作家忤逆男性为纲的保守社会的思想。     

Cultural Economy Planning in Creative Cities: Discourse and Practice

While a growing body of research analyses the functional mechanisms of the cultural or creative economy, there has been little attention devoted to understanding how local governments translate this work into policy. Moreover, research in this vein focuses predominately on Richard Florida's creative class thesis rather than considering the wider body of work that may influence policy. This article seeks to develop a deeper understanding of how municipalities conceptualize and plan for the cultural economy through the lens of two cities held up as model ‘creative cities’ — Austin, Texas and Toronto, Ontario. The work pays particular attention to how the cities adopt and adapt leading theories, strategies and discourses of the cultural economy. While policy documents indicate that the cities embrace the creative city model, in practice agencies tend to adapt conventional economic development strategies for cultural economy activity and appropriate the language of the creative city for multiple purposes.     

Comparative dynamics in a life cycle theory of the firm

Important insights and contributions to the corporate financial manager's decision problem have been provided by the balanced-growth financial modeling literature, e.g., see [4, 5, 8, 10, 11, 13, 15]. In the spirit of this research, the objective of this paper is twofold. First, a normative model of the dynamic financial planning process in a deterministic environment is constructed wherein the traditional, steady-state assumptions are relaxed. In contrast to prior models, the firm is allowed to pay a liquidating dividend and faces a time-dependent investment rate of return, interest rate, and equity discount rate. Necessary and sufficient conditions for the levered firm's optimal investment-financing-dividend policy decisions which maximize the wealth of its investors are developed, and a solution synthesis technique is employed to catalogue the different decisions at each time instant in terms of three earnings-growth stages over the firm's life cycle. Over this life cycle, the firm experiences high, low, and negative growth stages, with the latter stage distinguished by a liquidating dividend payout and retirement of debt outstanding. Secondly, the life cycle depiction further permits an analysis of the effects, in terms of both direction and magnitude, on the optimal duration of the firm's different growth stages and optimal growth rates due to changes in the firm's return on investment, debt-equity ratio, borrowing rate, equity discount rate, depreciation rate, and flotation costs via a comparative dynamics and simulation framework. Changes in the return on investment are found to have the most influence on the duration of the firm's growth periods and their respective earnings growth rates, while changes in the mix of financing and depreciation rate tend to have the least effect. Furthermore, the magnitudinal impact of marginal changes in any of the above firm variables is greatest at low levels of debt-to-equity and growth-in-earnings and quickly dissipates as the degree of leverage increases.