Customer ignorance, price-cap regulation, and rent-seeking in mobile roaming

Mobile phone usage when traveling abroad is expensive. Although the network connection switches frequently between available networks, the choice of network is largely independent of wholesale prices. As a consequence, we show that wholesale prices are strategic substitutes. The recent European price-cap regulation forces firms to reduce wholesale and retail roaming prices, but does not solve the underlying problem. There may thus be a permanent need for regulation analogous to what we have for domestic call termination. Furthermore, we show that there is a risk that wholesale price-cap regulation stimulates wasteful rent-seeking activity.     

Panda and elephant – contesting animal icons in Thai tourism

In May 2009, during a period of rising political polarization in Thailand, a cub was unexpectedly born in Chiang Mai's Zoo to a pair of Chinese pandas. The authorities used the occasion to boost the crisis-ridden tourism to the northern Thai city, instigating an unprecedented national craze around the tiny cub, and promoting a massive pilgrimage of domestic visitors to the zoo. In a conspicuous act of protest against the prioritization of the foreign pandas, some elephant keepers in the Ayutthya kraal, painted their animals in panda colors, leading to an implicit contest between the two animal icons. In this case study, the wider theoretical and comparative implications of that contest are analyzed. Whereas previous studies of tourists engagement with captive wild animals paid scant attention to its wider social context, the article examines the cultural and economic background of the contest, and the manner in which it became implicated in the process of political polarization between the societal center and the periphery.     

基于智能车竞赛推动民办院校电类专业改革及科技创新

智能车竞赛影响力广泛深远,随着民办院校对于该项赛事的参与,也暴露了民办院校在电类教学和学生科技创新能力培养等方面的问题,结合实际竞赛与教学经验,给出了基于智能车竞赛推动民办院校电类专业教学改革及科技创新的具体方案,旨在培养符合院情、国情的应用型人才。     

“论文研习”实践教学模式初探

以＂论文研习＂的途径开展实践教学,不仅能藉由学生论文之选题,把握专业的发展走势,而且在老师的指导下,围绕专业论文所进行的选题、加工、研习、讲授、反思等环节,提高学生提出问题并运用所学知识分析、解决问题的能力。论文研习会上,通过学生与老师的角色互换,也使学生在表达思想、随机应变等方面得到了锻炼。     

Using a Simple Contest to Illustrate Mechanism Design

This article describes a simple classroom activity that illustrates how economic theory can be used for mechanism design. The rules for a set of contests are presented; the results typically obtained from these contests illustrate how the prize structure can be manipulated in order to produce a particular outcome. Specifically, this activity is designed to show how changing the prize structure can impact both the contestants’ average efforts and the effort level of the hardest-working contestant. The activity can be run in a 50-minute class, has instructions that fit on a single piece of paper, and, although it can be run in large classes, requires only six students.     

Local government centralization and corporate ESG performance: Evidence from China’s county-to-district reform

As a city–county consolidation with Chinese characteristics, China’s county-to-district (CtD) reform transfers a county’s autonomy to a city, thereby strengthening the administrative, decision-making, fiscal and other powers of the prefecture-level municipal government, which effectively enables the centralization of local governments. Based on this exogenous quasi-natural experiment, we use a difference-in-differences (DID) approach to empirically examine the impact of prefecture-level municipal government centralization on companies’ ESG performance. The results show that municipal government centralization can significantly promote corporate ESG performance, which represents environmental protection, social responsibility and corporate governance behavior. The mechanism analysis also shows that the CtD reform can address market segmentation, alleviate policy uncertainty and reduce rent-seeking, which further improves ESG performance.