analysis of new product diffusion using a four segment trial repeat model a four segment trial repeat model is developed to model sales of a frequently purchased product in the early stage of the product s life cycle the model can be calibrated using aggregate data alone two versions of the model one emphasizing the competitive aspect of marketing communications and another emphasizing the informative aspect are estimated from data on 21 newly launched pharmaceutical products the model provides valuable diagnostics such as an early estimate of the long run market share of the new product a decomposition of total sales into trial sales due to marketing activities trial sales due to word of mouth and repeat sales the changing composition of the trial market and repeat market over time and the time when the trial market is expected to be saturated in addition the effectiveness of the entrant s marketing efforts word of mouth communication and buyers trial experience are analyzed with the model a cross sectional analysis based on the empirical estimation results of our model reveals interesting insights into product introduction strategies we find that 1 the effectiveness of the firms communication activities on trial is related mainly to product quality attributes and market growth whereas that of word of mouth is associated with product class characteristics and market competitiveness and 2 the effect of product trial on repeat purchases is related mainly to product quality attributes and various market characteristics such as size growth competitiveness and familiarity

a parsimonious model for forecasting gross box office revenues of motion pictures the primary objective of this paper is to develop a parsimonious model for forecasting the gross box office revenues of new motion pictures based on early box office data the paper also seeks to provide insights into the impact of distribution policies on the adoption of new products the model is intended to assist motion picture exhibitor chains retailers in managing their exhibition capacity and in negotiating exhibition license agreements with distributors studios by allowing them to project the box office potential of the movies they plan to or currently exhibit based on early box office results it is also of interest to practitioners in other software industries e g music books cd roms where the distribution intensity is highly variable over the product life cycle and is an important determinant of new product adoption patterns the model and its extensions are of interest to academic researchers interested in modeling distribution effects in new product adoption as well as forecasters looking for ways to leverage historical data on related products to forecast the sales of new products we draw upon a queuing theory framework to conceptualize stochastically the consumer s movie adoption process in two steps the time to decide to see the new movie and the time to act on the adoption decision the parameter for the time to decide process captures the intensity of information intensity flowing from various information sources while the parameter for the time to act process is related to the delay created by limited distribution intensity and other factors our conceptualization extends existing new product forecasting models which assume that consumers act instantaneously on the motivating information they receive about the new product the resulting model is parsimonious yet it accommodates a wide range of adoption patterns in addition the stochastic formulation allows us to quantify the uncertainty surrounding the expected adoption pattern in the empirical testing we focus on the most parsimonious version of the modeling framework boxmod i a model that assumes stationarity with respect to the two shape parameters that characterize the adoption process the model produces fairly accurate early forecasts using at most the first three weeks of data for calibration and the predictive performance of the model compares favorably with benchmark models we propose extensions of the basic model that account for more realistic non stationary distribution intensity patterns including a wide release pattern that relies on intensive distribution and promotion and a platform release pattern that involves a gradual buildup of distribution intensity finally we present an adaptive weighing scheme that combines initial parameter estimates obtained from a meta analysis procedure with estimates obtained from early data to produce forecasts of box office revenues for a new movie when little or no box office data are available an important finding from the empirical testing is that motion picture box office revenue patterns display remarkable empirical regularity we find that there are only three classes of adoption patterns and these can all be represented within the basic model by using a two parameter exponential or erlang 2 probability distribution or a three parameter generalized gamma distribution we also find that cumulative box office revenues can be predicted with reasonable accuracy often within 10 of the actual using as little as two or three data points however our attempts to predict revenue patterns without any sales data meet with limited success while the scale parameter can be estimated reasonably well from a historical database of parameter values we find that it is considerably more difficult to predict the shape parameters using historical data the parsimony we seek in developing the model comes at the cost of several limiting assumptions we assume that the time to decide subprocess and the time to act subprocess are independent which may not be the case if decisions on continued exhibition by retailers are endogenously related to box office revenues over the life cycle in the basic model formulation we also assume that the time to act process can be represented by an exponential distribution which may not always be the case while we provide some empirical evidence to support these assumptions further research could relax these and other assumptions to enrich the basic model although this would entail some loss in parsimony

a bayesian model to forecast new product performance in domestic and international markets this paper attempts to shed light on the following research questions when a firm introduces a new product or service how can it effectively use the different information sources available to generate reliable new product performance forecasts how can the firm account for varying information availability at different stages of the new product launch and generate forecasts at each stage we address these questions in the context of the sequential launches of motion pictures in international markets players in the motion picture industry require forecasts at different stages of the movie launch process to aid decision making and the information sets available to generate such forecasts vary at different stages despite the importance of such forecasts the industry struggles to understand and predict sales of new movies in domestic and overseas markets we develop a bayesian modeling framework that predicts first week viewership for new movies in both domestic and several international markets we focus on the first week because industry players involved in international markets studios distributors and exhibitors are most interested in these predictions we draw on existing literature on forecasting performance of new movies to formulate our model specifically we model the number of viewers of a movie in a given week using a poisson count data model the number of screens distribution strategy movie attributes such as genre and presence absence of stars are among the factors modeled to influence viewership we employ a hierarchical bayes formulation of the poisson model that allows the determinants of viewership to vary across countries we adopt the bayesian approach for two reasons first it provides a convenient framework to model varying assumptions of information availability specifically it allows us to make forecasts by combining different sources of information such as domestic and international market specific data second this methodology provides us with the entire distribution of the new movie s performance forecast such a predictive distribution is more informative than a point estimate and provides a measure of the uncertainty in the forecasts we propose a bayesian prediction procedure that provides viewership forecasts at different stages of the new movie release process the methodology provides forecasts under a number of information availability scenarios thus forecasts can be obtained with just information from a historical database containing data on previous new product launches in several international markets as more information becomes available the forecasting methodology allows us to combine historical information with data on the performance of the new product in the domestic market and thereby to make forecasts with less uncertainty and greater accuracy our results indicate that for all the countries in the data set the number of screens on which a movie is released is the most important influence on viewership furthermore we find that local distribution improves movie sales internationally in contrast to the domestic market we also find evidence of similar genre preferences in geographically disparate countries we find that the proposed model provides accurate forecasts at the movie country level further the model outperforms all the extant models in the marketing literature that could potentially be used for making these forecasts a comparison of root mean square and mean absolute errors for movies in a hold out sample shows that the model that combines information available from the different sources generates the lowest errors a bayesian predictive model selection criterion corroborates the superior performance of this model we demonstrate that the bayesian model can be combined with industry rules of thumb to generate cumulative box office forecasts in summary this research demonstrates a bayesian modeling framework that allows the use of different information sources to make new product forecasts in domestic and international markets our results underscore the theme that each movie is unique as is each country and viewership results from an interaction of the product and the market hence the motion picture industry should use both product specific and market specific information to make new movie performance forecasts

confronting the environmental kuznets curve t he environmental kuznets curve posits an inverted u relationship between pollution and economic development kuznets s name was apparently attached to the curve by grossman and krueger 1993 who noted its resemblance to kuznets s inverted u relationship between income inequality and development in the first stage of industrialization pollution in the environmental kuznets curve world grows rapidly because people are more interested in jobs and income than clean air and water communities are too poor to pay for abatement and environmental regulation is correspondingly weak the balance shifts as income rises leading industrial sectors become cleaner people value the environment more highly and regulatory institutions become more effective along the curve pollution levels off in the middle income range and then falls toward pre industrial levels in wealthy societies the environmental kuznets curve model has elicited conflicting reactions from researchers and policymakers applied econometricians have generally accepted the basic tenets of the model and focused on measuring its parameters their regressions typically fitted to cross sectional observations across countries or regions suggest that air and water pollution increase with development until per capita income reaches a range of 5000 to 8000 when income rises beyond that level pollution starts to decline as shown in the conventional ekc line in figure 1 in developing countries some policymakers have interpreted such results as conveying a message about priorities grow first then clean up numerous critics have challenged the conventional environmental kuznets curve both as a representation of what actually happens in the development process and as a policy prescription some pessimistic critics argue that crosssectional evidence for the environmental kuznets curve is nothing more than a

a new product growth for model consumer durables this article originally appeared in management science january 1969 volume 15 number 5 pp 215 227 published by the institute of management sciences a growth model for the timing of initial purchase of new products is developed and tested empirically against data for eleven consumer durables the basic assumption of the model is that the timing of a consumer s initial purchase is related to the number of previous buyers a behavioral rationale for the model is offered in terms of innovative and imitative behavior the model yields good predictions of the sales peak and the timing of the peak when applied to historical data a long range forecast is developed for the sales of color television sets

bose einstein dynamics and adaptive contracting in the motion picture industry audiences discover what films they like and spread the word information feedback produces bose einstein dynamics in the motion picture box office revenue distribution information cascades generate box office hits and flops the revenue distribution evolves recursively over the run as a mixture of the opening and a stochastic competition among films the motion picture run is decentralized adaptive and self organizing semistationary admission prices local information and contingency rich contracts match the film rental price and the supply of theatrical engagements to demand copyright 1996 by royal economic society

innovation imitation and social welfare this paper focuses on the impact of competition by imitation more specifically copying for innovative activity and social welfare in part it is a response to recent empirical work 10 12 that has tried to measure the relationship between innovation and imitation costs these papers include a direct call for theoretical modeling that takes explicit account of such cost relationships and we try to answer this challenge specifically we examine the implications for product quality and social welfare when innovators anticipate that a successful product will be copied by rivals obviously previous empirical research is not the only source of interest in these issues the potential effects of imitation on innovative activity have long been both a theoretical and practical concern in recent years a variety of authors have addressed the appropriability issue raised by imitation and its implications for innovative activity 4 7 2 there has also been work on explicit copying i e photocopying 8 11 in the policy arena the protection of product design and intellectual property rights is the focus of much recent actual and proposed u s legislation and a major issue in the uruguay round of trade talks 1 21 our analysis of this topic differs from that of previous work in a number of important respects first we focus explicitly on product as opposed to process innovations second and perhaps even more important we do not restrict the firm s choice to be to innovate or not to innovate instead we allow the innovator to choose what kind or quality of new good to introduce into the market the higher the quality the higher is the development cost third when the innovating firm decides what kind of new product to market it does so under uncertainty about demand the popularity of the new product is not known until after the innovator has chosen the level of quality and sunk its product development costs fourth at the initial time at which the innovator chooses the quality of product to develop it does so with the knowledge that its innovation if it is popular will be copied by later rival entrants finally in direct response to the empirical work mentioned above we explicitly focus on the ratio of imitation to innovation costs our approach yields a number of insights not the least of which is a more precise identification of the potential gains and losses from imitative competition indeed using a quadratic development cost function we explicitly calculate the impact of copying on social welfare this explicit welfare analysis further distinguishes our analysis from most previous work

embodied pollution in trade estimating the environmental load displacement of industrialised countries abstract the present paper sets out to aid in the development of environmental load displacement indicators developing the notion of the environmental memory of physical flows we estimated embodied pollution in trade of 18 industrialized countries with a the rest of the world and b developing countries from 1976 to 1994 we found that in the last years of analysis total imports of japan usa and western europe have entailed in general larger air pollutant emissions than local exports the balance of embodied emissions in trade beet seems to follow an inverted u shape across time in japan and western europe and an n shape in the us in the period of analysis japanese and european environmental terms of trade with developing countries improved from the japanese and european point of view whereas american environmental terms of trade with developing countries deteriorated over time although there is no statistical trend between income and embodied emissions in imports in a cross section analysis there does seem to be a positive relationship between both variables at a national level the results suggest that despite many shortcomings this type of assessment may shed useful insights on the international aspects of sustainable development

how does foreign direct investment influence energy intensity convergence in china evidence from prefecture level data abstract the huge energy intensity gaps among chinese prefectures make the overall reduction of energy intensity extremely difficult energy intensity convergence eic i e catching up of the high energy intensity prefectures with the low ones is imperative for narrowing these gaps as one of the most important channels for international technology diffusion foreign direct investment fdi has great impact on energy intensity and may be beneficial for the convergence based on pollution haven hypothesis however fdi may result in energy intensity divergence to provide an in depth understanding of the mechanisms of fdi induced convergence divergence this paper employs markov chain approach to examine the impact of fdi on eic for 256 chinese prefectures in the period from 2005 to 2014 moreover we particularly emphasis on the influences of local specific characteristics such as human capital resource endowment and environmental regulation on fdi induced convergence divergence our study on 256 chinese prefectures finds that fdi helps prefectures with higher energy intensity to catch up with lower ones which strengthens eic the impact of fdi on eic varies depending on different local characteristics among all characteristics mentioned above human capital and environmental regulation benefit the convergence driving effect of fdi while this effect is hindered by resource endowment more comprehensive and detailed policies are recommended to address energy intensity gaps in china

vertical and horizontal intra industry trade a cross industry analysis for the united kingdom a large theoretical literature has emerged directed at explaining the presence of intra industry trade iit one of the distinctions which comes out of these models is that between horizontal iit where goods are differentiated by attributes and vertical iit where goods are differentiated by quality in this paper horizontal and vertical iit in u k trade are disentangled using a unit value dispersion criterion and a range of industry characteristics the paper not only points up the relative importance of vertical and horizontal iit in the united kingdom it also demonstrates how a failure to separate them out can impact on the interpretation of empirical results copyright 1995 by royal economic society

research note multinational diffusion models an alternative framework the literature on cross national diffusion models is gaining increased importance today due to the needs of present day managers new product sales growth in a given nation or society is affected by many factors rogers 1995 and of these sociocontagion or word of mouth has been found to be the most important factor that characterizes the diffusion process bass 1969 moore 1995 hence it is interesting and perhaps challenging to analyze what would happen if a new product diffuses in parallel in two neighboring but culturally different countries not only will we expect the diffusion process in the two countries to be different but we will also expect some interaction among them especially if the two societies mingle with each other there are two streams of research in cross national diffusion the first type focuses on exploring the differences between diffusion processes in two countries and finding out whether those differences can be attributed to social and cultural differences between the countries involved examples of this type of research are found in takada and jain 1991 gatignon et al 1989 helsen et al 1993 and kumar et al 1998 these studies did find some relationship between the cultural differences of the countries studied and the differences in the diffusion process the second stream of research focuses on modeling explicitly the interaction between the diffusion processes in two countries the interaction is typically captured through lead lag effect eliashberg and helsen 1996 kalish et al 1995 where the sales process in the lead country i e the country where the product was first introduced is modeled to affect the sales process in the lag country i e the country where the product was introduced a few years later another method to study the interaction among the diffusion processes in two countries was suggested by putsis et al 1997 who used a mixing model to empirically explore the existence of such interactions these studies basically observed that when a new product is introduced early in one country and with a time lag in subsequent countries the consumers in the lag countries learn about the product from the lead country adopters resulting in a faster diffusion rate in the lag countries ganesh and kumar 1996 formulized this effect as the learning effect and subsequently ganesh et al 1997 found this learning effect to be influenced by country specific factors cultural similarity economic similarity and time lag elapsed between the lead and the lag countries and product specific factors continuous vs discontinuous innovation and the presence or absence of a standardized technology a careful analysis of the extant literature on the second stream of research would reveal that neither the learning effect model nor the mixing model can be modified to accommodate the other model our contribution to the literature exactly addresses this point in this paper an alternative framework is proposed that has two unique features first the framework is flexible enough to not only account for the lead country affecting the lag countries and vice versa but also to accommodate the simultaneous interaction among countries in explaining the diffusion processes in the countries concerned using multiple product categories and a variety of new product introduction situations we empirically demonstrate the flexibility and efficiency of our proposed framework we found strong evidence of all types of interactions namely lead lag lag lead and simultaneous which evidence suggests that one cannot afford to omit any of the interactions the second unique feature of our paper is the estimation procedure that we used because statistical estimation of a dynamic process that includes lead lag lag lead and simultaneous types of causality within a single framework is not straightforward we suggest an iterative estimation procedure for the estimation this new procedure not only proved to be flexible in accommodating different types of interaction but also converged rather quickly in all of the cases that we empirically tested noting that the statistical properties of these estimators are not generally available we carried out a simulation exercise that clearly revealed the efficiency of the proposed estimation procedure after analyzing the interaction we went further and showed that the magnitude of the cross national influences is affected by certain country specific and product specific factors the flexibility of the proposed method over the existing methods is demonstrated through obtaining superior forecasts with the proposed method several interesting insights for managers concerned with formulating international marketing strategies are offered

forecasting marketing mix responsiveness for new products abstract before a new product launch marketers need to infer how demand will respond to various levels of marketing mix variables to set an appropriate marketing plan a critical challenge in estimating marketing mix responsiveness from historical data is that the observed decisions were affected by private information possessed by managers about the heterogeneous effects of marketing mix variables on sales the authors refer to this as the slope endogeneity problem such endogeneity differs from the intercept endogeneity problem which has been widely acknowledged in the literature to correct for the slope endogeneity bias the authors develop a conceptually simple control function approach that is amenable to multiple endogenous variables and marketing mix carryover effects the method is applied to forecasting advertising responsiveness in the u s dvd market the results suggest that advertising responsiveness varies substantially across dvd titles and that estimated marketing mix elasticities w

moviemod an implementable decision support system for prerelease market evaluation of motion pictures in spite of the high financial stakes involved in marketing new motion pictures marketing science models have not been applied to the prerelease market evaluation of motion pictures the motion picture industry poses some unique challenges for example the consumer adoption process for movies is very sensitive to word of mouth interactions which are difficult to measure and predict before the movie has been released in this article we undertake the challenge to develop and implement moviemod a prerelease market evaluation model for the motion picture industry moviemod is designed to generate box office forecasts and to support marketing decisions for a new movie after the movie has been produced or when it is available in a rough cut but before it has been released unlike other forecasting models for motion pictures the calibration of moviemod does not require any actual sales data also the data collection time for a product with a limited lifetime such as a movie should not take too long for moviemod it takes only three hours in a consumer clinic to collect the data needed for the prediction of box office sales and the evaluation of alternative marketing plans the model is based on a behavioral representation of the consumer adoption process for movies as a macroflow process the heart of moviemod is an interactive markov chain model describing the macro flow process according to this model at any point in time with respect to the movie under study a consumer can be found in one of the following behavioral states undecided considerer rejecter positive spreader negative spreader and inactive the progression of consumers through the behavioral states depends on a set of movie specific factors that are related to the marketing mix as well as on a set of more general behavioral factors that characterize the movie going behavior in the population of interest this interactive markov chain model allows us to account for word of mouth interactions among potential adopters and several types of word of mouth spreaders in the population marketing variables that influence the transitions among the states are movie theme acceptability promotion strategy distribution strategy and the movie experience the model is calibrated in a consumer clinic experiment respondents fill out a questionnaire with general items related to their movie going and movie communication behavior they are exposed to different sets of information stimuli they are actually shown the movie and finally they fill outpostmovie evaluations including word of mouth intentions these measures are used to estimate the word of mouth parameters and other behavioral factors as well as the movie specific parameters of the model moviemod produces forecasts of the awareness adoption intention and cumulative penetration for a new movie within the population of interest for a given base marketing plan it also provides diagnostic information on the likely impact of alternative marketing plans on the commercial performance of a new movie we describe two applications of moviemod one is a pilot study conducted without studio cooperation in the united states and the other is a full fledged implementation conducted with cooperation of the movie s distributor and exhibitor in the netherlands the implementations suggest that moviemod produces reasonably accurate forecasts of box office performance more importantly the model offers the opportunity to simulate the effects of alternative marketing plans in the dutch application the effects of extra advertising extra magazine articles extra tv commercials and higher trailer intensity compared to the base marketing plan of the distributor were analyzed we demonstrate the value of these decision support capabilities of moviemod in assisting managers to identify a final plan that resulted in an almost 50 increase in the test movie s revenue performance compared to the marketing plan initially contemplated management implemented this recommended plan which resulted in box office sales that were within 5 of the moviemod prediction moviemod was also tested against several benchmark models and its prediction was better in all cases an evaluation of moviemod jointly by the dutch exhibitor and the distributor showed that both parties were positive about and appreciated its performance as a decision support tool in particular the distributor who has more stakes in the domestic performance of its movies showed a great interest in using moviemod for subsequent evaluations of new movies prior to their release based on such evaluations and the initial validation results moviemod can fruitfully and inexpensively be used to provide researchers and managers with a deeper understanding of the factors that drive audience response to new motion pictures and it can be instrumental in developing other decision support systems that can improve the odds of commercial success of new experiential products

does twitter chatter matter online reviews and box office revenues with a rapid rise of text based social media and online word of mouth wom activity millions of people express their thoughts and opinions on a variety of topics considering that nowadays wom is

innovation diffusion in the presence of supply restrictions innovation diffusion models are developed to represent the spread of a new product from its manufacturers to its ultimate users in the marketplace however the growth of a new product can be retarded by supply restrictions such as the unavailability of the product due to limitations on the production capacity or difficulties encountered in setting up distribution systems in the presence of supply restrictions diffusion models must be developed to capture the dynamics of supply restrictions and to allow management to evaluate the impact of such supply restrictions on the growth of a new product in the market place based on the bass innovation diffusion model the objective of this paper is to suggest a parsimonious diffusion model that integrates the demand side dynamics with the supply side restrictions the sensitivity of innovation diffusion patterns in the presence of supply restrictions is examined an application examining the diffusion of new telephones in israel is documented to illustrate the usefulness of the proposed model

mixing behavior in cross country diffusion diffusion models represent one of the key successes in marketing science we understand a great deal about what influences and shapes within country diffusion patterns however we understand far less about what influences and shapes cross country or inter country diffusion patterns clearly for firms operating in a truly global environment understanding to what extent prior adoption in one country affects current and consequently future adoption in another country can be an important consideration further understanding how the pattern of interaction across countries impacts the diffusion process can have profound implications for product launch strategies for new durable products in this paper we address the extent to which prior adoption of a new product in one country affects adoption in other countries in particular we investigate the importance of the pattern of interaction what we call mixing across countries in the context of a new product diffusion model more specifically mixing refers to the pattern of communication within and across countries for example do italians communicate only with other italians or do they influence consumers in other countries understanding and empirically estimating how these mixing patterns across countries influence the subsequent diffusion process is the central research objective of this paper while previous research in marketing addressing cross country diffusion has assumed very specific forms of cross country interaction the present study develops and estimates a flexible form of mixing that allows for the simultaneous estimation of mixing patterns across multiple countries in particular we examine the effect of mixing behavior across populations on new product adoption viewing mixing as occurring across a continuum with segregation no mixing at one end and random mixing at the other intermediate forms of mixing lie along this continuum and are called bernoulli mixing in order to produce generalizable results we obtained sales data on four product categories in the european community ec nations vcrs from 1977 1990 microwave ovens 1975 1990 compact disc players 1984 1993 and home computers 1981 1991 for each product data were collected for 10 ec nations great britain germany france italy spain belgium denmark netherlands sweden and austria a diffusion model that incorporates cross country prior adoption cross country mixing patterns and individual country covariates was estimated simultaneously across the 10 countries for each of the four products on the basis of the empirical results we conclude that mixing behavior across segments is an important consideration in new product diffusion specifically the observed pattern of mixing and the strength of cross segment influences are important considerations in allocating the marketing mix during product introduction stages the practical implication of mixing behavior is that if one wishes to understand diffusion in belgium for example it is important to not only know the diffusion parameters in belgium but also those in other ec nations accordingly these results should be of interest to managers responsible for coordinating new product launches across countries and to researchers interested in investigating cross country diffusion issues as an example of the strategic implications of the results we note that under bernoulli mixing future country launches will benefit not only from prior adoption in countries with high overall contact rates but in particular from countries with high rates of contact with other countries although there is some variance across products in general germany france italy and spain are the most gregarious as measured by the rate of contact the results suggest that a strategy of first focusing on germany france italy and spain will maximize adoption in subsequent countries each of these countries tends to have a higher percentage of its contacts with individuals internal to its borders as well as with other countries this suggests that these countries would have relatively quick adoption internally while having a strong influence externally further for countries such as denmark netherlands austria and sweden a higher percentage of their contacts are derived from outside their borders thus seeding the diffusion process by introducing first in germany france italy and spain would benefit later adoption in countries such as denmark netherlands austria and sweden although the strength of the individual country influence varies from product to product this result is generally consistent across the four products

invited commentary making sense of these million dollar babies rationale behind superstar profit participation contracts the article by eliashberg et al 2006 provides a comprehensive review of current research on the motion picture industry with a special focus on managerially relevant issues on the supply side it walks the readers through the three distinct stages in the movie value chain of production distribution and theatrical exhibition and it points out promising avenues of future research the contractual issues between talents and the stu

social contagion and income heterogeneity in new product diffusion a meta analytic test standard diffusion models capture social contagion only coarsely and do not allow one to operationalize different contagion mechanisms moreover there is increasing skepticism about the importance of contagion and as has long been known s shaped diffusion curves can also result from heterogeneity in the propensity to adopt we present hypotheses about conditions under which specific contagion mechanisms and income heterogeneity are more pronounced and test these hypotheses using a meta analysis of the q p ratio in applications of the bass diffusion model the ratio is positively associated with the gini index of income inequality in a country supporting the heterogeneity in thresholds interpretation the ratio also varies as predicted by the gamma shifted gompertz diffusion model but the evidence vanishes after controlling for national culture as to contagion the q p ratio varies with the four hofstede dimensions of national culture for three of them in a direction consistent with the social contagion interpretation furthermore products with competing standards have a higher q p ratio which is again consistent with the social contagion interpretation finally we find effects of national culture only for products without competing standards suggesting that technological effects and culturally moderated social contagion effects might not operate independently from each other

a trade related pollution trap for economies in transition evidence from china abstract this study argues that economic growth does not necessarily reverse the pollution haven behavior even if one economy shifts from the low income group to the high income one i e the economy in transition the economy in transition can become a convergence of trade related pollution then getting stuck in a pollution trap through investigating the case of china during 2003 2009 this study examines the features and causes of trade related pollution trap supported by the world input output database and the product specific statistics from china customs this study applies the input output analysis to trace the distribution of pollution embodied in china s foreign trade then it constructs a sector country year panel and applies the fixed effect model to examine causes of the pollution trap the results show that china s pollution terms of trade ptt with developing economies increases and exceeds one while the ptt with developed economies keeps larger than one it supports the feature of pollution trap the results also demonstrate that pollution trap is determined by the synergy of environmental regulation inter industry trade and intra industry trade 1 environmental regulations keep china from becoming pollution haven of developed economies rather than relocating pollution intensive production to other developing economies 2 the current intra industry trade of low value added products worsens china s environmental performance 3 the diluting advantage on labor and the accumulating advantage on capital keep china specializing in pollution intensive production overall the pollution trap may alert economies that applies the outward oriented growth model to prepare for sustainability transition our findings imply that going green rather than moving away is essential in response to trade environment effects more stringent regulation should improve the environmental performance of production and encourage the utilization of clean technology the increasing role of intra industry trade requires to upgrade the commodity structure towards one with higher added value

endogeneity in marketing decision models there are many critical concerns including the accounting for endogeneity when one is properly estimating response functions however it is sometimes certainly not always better to leave some variables exogenous when building mathematical models intended to help decision makers the exogenous variables allow the decision maker to better adapt the mathematical model to different situations and to incorporate myriad variables and constraints outside of the model

temporal change of china s pollution terms of trade and its determinants abstract based on the world input output database wiod this study employed a revised pollution terms of trade ptt indicator to investigate the temporal change of china s environmental cost relative to its economic gains from international trade from 1995 to 2009 the results show that china has ptt larger than 1 indicating that china emits more emissions to obtain each unit of value added from exports than its trade partners over the period china s ptt first decreased from 1995 to 2001 and then increased from 2001 to 2009 the further decompositions show that improving technology is the leading driving force to decrease ptt while the change in global trade pattern is the leading force increasing ptt especially after 2001 we further decomposed the temporal change of china s ptt by income group of the trading partners the results show that the change in the global trade pattern is the crucial driving force behind the different changes of ptt by income group

silverscreener a modeling approach to movie screens management managing the allocation of shelf space for new products is a problem of significant importance for retailers the problem is particularly complex for exhibitors the retailers in the motion picture supply chain because they face dynamic challenges given the short life cycles of movies the changing level of demand over time the scarcity of shelf space and the complex revenue sharing contract between the exhibitor and the distributor in the face of this complexity the aim of current research is to provide a structure for analyzing management problems of exhibitors in the movie industry using a mathematical programming approach and a fast but readily accessible algorithm we propose a decision support model silverscreener whose aim is to help exhibitors make effective and timely decisions regarding theater screens management the major objective is to help select and schedule movies for a multiple screens theater over a fixed planning horizon in such a way that the exhibitor s cumulative profit is maximized by treating the multiple screens as parallel machines and the movies as jobs we provide an analogy of the current problem to the parallel machine scheduling problem we formulate the resulting problem as an integer program we depart from the typical parallel machine scheduling problems by introducing the time indexed formulation that is particularly useful for solving the current problem an important distinction between the current problem and typical machine scheduling problems is that the present approach allows for the choice of which movies to play typically in machine scheduling all jobs have to be scheduled we provide various analyses of normative versus actual decision making based on publicly available data the developed model is readily implementable and appears to lead to improved profitability in different comparative cases through sensitivity analysis we demonstrate that the above results are robust to variations in various parameters of the problem the main findings and insights from the normative policy suggest the following 1 based on silverscreener s recommendations the exhibitor can achieve substantially higher cumulative profit 2 the improvement over actual decisions in terms of profitability appears to result from a combination of better selection and scheduling of the movies 3 the general structure of the exhibitor s normative decision is choose fewer right movies and run them longer we propose a two tier integrated application of the model to show how the model can be applied to realistic decisionmaking the first tier involves development of a movie selection plan to help the manager plan an entire season and bid for movies before the start of that season an ex ante revenue prediction scheme is developed based intuitively on a matching of the forthcoming movies with similar movies played in this theater previously if the forthcoming season s scheduling plan can be visualized as a two dimensional week by screen matrix then that matrix contains only empty cells before the first tier after a bid plan is developed the exhibitor can fill some of those empty cells the remaining empty cells represent slots which can be decided during the season by either extending movies the exhibitor booked before the season or by scheduling other movies which may become available later in the season this motivates the second tier adaptive scheduling approach of the integrated approach the second tier helps the exhibitor in weekly decision making during the season this application involves rolling and updating data from one time window to another the approaches followed in the two tiers of the integrated application are quite general in that they can incorporate a sophisticated demand prediction model managerial judgments or a combination of both we also propose an alternative behavioral decision rule heuristic which exemplifies relationship dilemmas in the movie industry this heuristic shows that the exhibitors need to be selective in their choice of movies and may suffer a substantial loss in profitability if they place too much emphasis on accommodating distributors

something to talk about social spillovers in movie consumption we exploit the randomness of weather and the relationship between weather and moviegoing to quantify social spillovers in movie consumption instrumenting for early viewership with plausibly exogenous weather shocks captured in lasso chosen instruments we find that shocks to opening weekend viewership are doubled over the following five weekends our estimated momentum arises almost exclusively at the local level and we find no evidence that it varies with either ex post movie quality or the precision of ex ante information about movie quality suggesting that the observed momentum is driven in part by a preference for shared experience and not only by social learning

the pollution terms of trade and its five components abstract based on two extensions this paper proposes a re appraisal of the concept of the pollution terms of trade ptt introduced by antweiler 1996 first detailed data allows capturing the effect of differences in emission intensities across countries and over time second relying on johnson and noguera 2012 the revised ptt index controls for trade in intermediate goods and is based on value added rather than gross output figures applied to a database for so 2 emission intensities for 62 developed and developing countries over the 1990 2000 period it turns out that the first extension has a larger empirical importance than the second one the global pattern is one in which the major rich economies exhibit a ptt index below one higher pollution intensity in imports than in exports trade imbalances tend to exacerbate this asymmetry allowing rich economies to further offshore their pollution through trade

intra industry trade in intermediate products pollution and internationally increasing returns this paper examines the relationship between intra industry trade in intermediate products pollution and increasing returns we develop a two country model in which production occurs in two stages final and intermediate good production intermediate goods are produced under monopolistic competition and final good production exhibits increasing returns with respect to the number of varieties of intermediates pollution occurs in the production of the final good when polluting intermediates are used we analyze the effects of international trade in intermediate products on pollution output and welfare under an endogenous tax scenario and with two types of pollution functions the results show that because of increasing returns international trade either leads to lower total pollution in each country or lower pollution per unit of output in at least one country in addition intra industry trade causes countries to import the environmental quality of their trading partners

growing growing gone cascades diffusion and turning points in the product life cycle research on the product life cycle plc has focused primarily on the role of diffusion this study takes a broader theoretical perspective on the plc by incorporating informational cascades and developing and testing many new hypotheses based on this theory on average across 30 product categories the authors find that i new consumer durables have a typical pattern of rapid growth of 45 per year over 8 years ii this period of growth is followed by a slowdown when sales decline by 15 and stay below those of the previous peak for 5 years iii slowdown occurs at 34 population penetration and about 50 of ultimate market penetration iv products with large sales increases at takeoff tend to have larger sales declines at slowdown v leisure enhancing products tend to have higher growth rates and shorter growth stages than nonleisure enhancing products time saving products tend to have lower growth rates and longer growth stages than nontime saving products vi lower probability of slowdown is associated with steeper price reductions lower penetration and higher economic growth vii a hazard model can provide reasonable predictions of the slowdown as early as the takeoff the authors discuss the implications of these findings

driving factors of carbon emissions embodied in china us trade a structural decomposition analysis abstract based on the environmental multi regional input output model this study employed structural decomposition analysis to investigate the driving factors of carbon emissions embodied in china us trade over the period of 1995 2009 effective driving factors were classified into six groups and each group included both factors at home and abroad the results show that factors trade structure of intermediate products at home and export market shares of final products at home presented the largest positive impacts to increments in carbon emissions embodied in chinese exports to the us while the majority of negative impacts was generated by changes in energy intensities at home the increment in carbon emissions embodied in us exports to china was mostly contributed by total demands abroad impacts of other driving factors were much smaller at the sectoral level both positive and negative impacts of driving factors were largely limited to a few sectors e g textiles products machinery transport equipment and electrical equipment here positive impacts were mostly contributed by export market shares of final products at home and total demands abroad and negative impacts were mainly contributed by energy intensities at home policy implications deduced from the results were discussed

demand and supply dynamics for sequentially released products in international markets the case of motion pictures we develop an econometric model to study a setting in which a new product is launched first in its domestic market and only at a later stage in foreign markets and where the product s performance demand and availability supply are highly interdependent over time within and across markets integrating literature on international diffusion success breeds success trends and the theatrical motion picture industry the focus of the empirical analysis we develop a dynamic simultanenous equations model of the drivers and interrelationship of the behavior of consumers audiences and retailers exhibitors our findings emphasize the importance of considering the endogeneity and simultaneity of audience and exhibitor behavior and challenge conventional wisdom on the determinants of box office performance which is predominantly based on modeling frameworks that fail to account for the interdependence of performance and availability specifically we find that variables such as movie attributes and advertising expenditures which are usually assumed to influence audiences directly mostly influence revenuesindirectly namely through their impact on exhibitors screen allocations in addition consistent with the idea that the buzz for a movie is perishable we find that the longer is the time lag between releases the weaker is the relationship between domestic and foreign market performance an effect mostly driven by foreign exhibitors screen allocations

modeling multinational diffusion patterns an efficient methodology the objective of this study is to develop an econometric model for the diffusion of innovations at the individual country level but which also allows the parameters of the process to differ systematically across countries the conceptualization rests on behavioral and spatial theories of diffusion and extends the domain to international markets the cross national model of innovation diffusion which is developed highlights substantive differences and similarities among international markets it also provides estimates for the diffusion parameters even for countries where sales data are not available thereby yielding some insights into the nature of the expected diffusion pattern in these countries prior to market entry