substitute goods auctions and equilibrium this paper identifies two notions of substitutes for auction and equilibrium analysis weak substitutes the usual price theory notion guarantees monotonicity of t tonnement processes and convergence of clock auctions to a pseudo equilibrium but only strong substitutes which treats each unit traded as a distinct good with its own price guarantees that every pseudo equilibrium is a walrasian equilibrium that the vickrey outcome is in the core and that the law of aggregate demand is satisfied when goods are divisible weak substitutes along with concavity guarantees all of the above properties except for the law of aggregate demand

manufacturing demand for business services in a core and peripheral region does flexible production imply vertical disintegration of business services o farrell p n moffat l a r and hitchens d m w n 1993 manufacturing demand for business services in a core and peripheral region does flexible production imply vertical disintegration of business services reg studies 27 385 400 this paper analyses the demand by manufactures in scotland and south east england for key strategic business services during the past three years the source of supply of the services used and the location of external suppliers for scottish and english manufacturers our evidence suggests that expansion of demand is the primary cause of increasing business service output and not restructuring strategies as predicted by the flexible firm model both externalization and internalization of business services are occurring simultaneously the net balance is consistent with a marginal trend towards vertical integration in manufacturing and a stronger one in business services o farrell p n moffat l a r et hitchens d m w n 1993 la demande de l industrie pour l

optimal central banker contracts and common agency a comment we explore a setting where the central bank is offered an incentive scheme by an interest group in addition to the contract designed by the government we prove that the inflation bias can be eliminated when principals do not cooperate and have different output or inflation objectives these conclusions contrast with those of chortareas and miller public choice 121 131 155 2004 the reason is that our analysis takes into account the participation constraints of the central bank we also show that if principals cooperate the inflation bias is eliminated when their output target is different but not when they disagree over the inflation objective

rogoff s conservative central banker restored we show that delegation of monetary policy to a weight conservative central banker can be desirable although the government can also use an inflation contract an employment target an inflation target or any combination of these to control the central banker the key feature of our model is a stochastic inflation bias arising when wage setters receive some information about a supply shock prior to signing nominal wage contracts weight conservatism is found to be desirable if fully state contingent delegation is not possible and the stochastic inflation bias cannot be eliminated by optimal choice of the delegation parameters

the lechatelier principle the lechatelier principle in the form introduced into economics by paul a samuelson asserts that at a point of long run equilibrium the derivative of long run compensated demand with respect to own price is larger in magnitude than the derivative of short run compensated demand the authors introduce an extended lechatelier principle that applies also to large price changes and to uncompensated demand as well as to a wide range of concave and nonconcave maximization problems outside the scope of demand theory this extension also clarifies the intuitive basis of the principle copyright 1996 by american economic association

the use and impact of business advice by smes in britain an empirical assessment using logit and ordered logit models this study assesses the effect of differences in types of client on the use and impact of business advice by smes in britain using new survey evidence from the cambridge esrc centre for business research survey of 1997 the survey covering over 2500 respondents is the largest and most definitive assessment available in britain moreover the survey allows an assessment of the full range of providers of external advice the private sector business associations and various public sector bodies as well as the fields of advice using multivariate logit models it is found that size of firm rate of growth and innovation appear to be the main variables influencing the likelihood of firms seeking external advice both from different sources and from different fields other variables which are investigated include age profitability skill levels manufacturer services and exporter nonexporter ordered logit models of the impact of the advice demonstrate that there are significant differences between client

comparing optima do simplifying assumptions affect conclusions consider a family of maximization models in which the optimum trades off beneficial and costly effects then comparative statics derived under many kinds of simplifying assumptions about the benefits technology are also true for general convex and nonconvex technologies for example any comparative statics conclusion about investment by a risk averse decision maker under uncertainty that holds when expected returns are described by a general linear function also holds for an arbitrary nonlinear expected return function

inflation contracts and inflation targets under uncertainty why we might need conservative central bankers this paper compares the relative effectiveness of inflation contracts and inflation targets in the presence of uncertainty regarding the central bank s preferences and the underlying output target the model explains why discretion may be superior to a delegation solution we also show that there might be the need to combine inflation targets and contracts with the appointment of a rogoff type conservative central banker if contracts and targets cannot be made state contingent and that less flexible inflation targets may be appropriate with uncertain central bank preferences

the influence of location on the use by smes of external advice and collaboration this paper provides an analysis of the influence of location on the extent of use and impact of external advice and collaboration on small and medium sized enterprises smes in britain the analysis indicates that for private sector advisers accountants consultants etc and collaboration with suppliers and customers the intensity of use does not vary significantly with location in most cases only the input of business friends and relatives is strongly locationally constrained indicating the importance of personal trust processes operating in a different way from other influences eu structural fund status of an area also has few major effects on use of private sector advice however the impact of external advice and the extent of local collaboration between similar firms are influenced by location with impact generally increasing with the size of business concentration density and closeness to a business centre i e there are positive effects of urban location and agglomeration economies for public sector support agencies such as the small business service business link tecs lecs enterprise agencies and also chambers of commerce the reverse is generally true levels of use are locationally influenced but impact is not use tends to increase in eu assisted areas and in areas with lower levels of business concentration this applies to most local agents but for regional development agencies there is an additionally strong effect of highest focus of use and impact in the most rural and peripheral areas thus public agents appear generally to be most used and have greatest relevance to smes in more peripheral areas where they fill gaps in the market created by agglomeration effects

pricing and the news vendor problem a review with extensions in the newsvendor problem a decision maker facing random demand for a perishable product decides how much of it to stock for a single selling period this simple problem with its intuitively appealing solution is a crucial building block of stochastic inventory theory which comprises a vast literature focusing on operational efficiency typically in this literature market parameters such as demand and selling price are exogenous however incorporating these factors into the mode l can provide an excellent vehicle for examining how operational problems interact with marketing issues to influence decision making at the firm level in this paper we examine an extension of the newsvendor problem in which stocking quantity and selling price are set simultaneously we provide a comprehensive review that synthesizes existing results for the single period problem and develop additional results to enrich the existing knowledge base we also review and develop insight into a dynamic inventory extension of this problem and motivate the applicability of such models

game theory for central bankers a report to the governor of the bank of england you asked me to review this book for you and try to digest what lessons it might hold for you i can well understand why you delegated this exercise to me you were no doubt already aware that alex cukierman ac is an eminent theoretician who has been applying currently fashionable game theoretic modeling techniques to the study of monetary policy and you may have had some concerns whether you would find the book user friendly in the rest of this review following both your instructions and my own inclinations i shall concentrate primarily upon the lessons and light that his work provides for monetary issues in general and for the conduct of central banking in particular neither you nor i have either the interest or the mathematical competence to assess how far this book represents an advance in the application or technical procedures of game theory as such in that respect the author will no doubt regard this as only a partial and one sided review of his work nevertheless ac hopes that you and other practitioners will read at least some part of the book and he has gone to considerable lengths to try to structure the book into modules of differing levels of technical difficulty and abstraction so that you will read the easy bits thus

serial correlation in demand backlogging and production volatility this paper explores the idea that stockout avoidance motives together with serial correlation in demand and or the backlogging of excess demand is sufficient to induce firms to behave so that the variance of production exceeds the variance of sales the authors show that the idea holds under a wide range of circumstances facing firms including additive as well as multiplicative demand uncertainty a general form of serial correlation in demand whether inventory and shortage costs apply and whether payment occurs at order or delivery the results greatly enhance the empirical relevance of the idea copyright 1996 by economics department of the university of pennsylvania and the osaka university institute of social and economic research association

understanding the inventory cycle abstract careful examination of aggregate data from the u s and other oecd countries reveals that production and inventory behavior exhibit paradoxical features 1 inventory investment is strongly countercyclical at very high frequencies e g 2 3 quarters per cycle it is procyclical only at relatively low cyclical frequencies such as the business cycle frequencies e g 8 40 quarters per cycle 2 production is less volatile than sales around the high frequencies it is more volatile than sales only around business cycle or lower frequencies 3 unlike capital investment or gdp the bulk of the variance of inventory investment is concentrated around high frequencies rather than around business cycle frequencies these features of production and inventory behavior at the low and high frequencies provide a litmus test for inventory theories this paper shows that the stockout avoidance theory kahn j 1987 inventories and the volatility of production american economic review 77 667 679 has much better potential than other competing theories for explaining the seemingly paradoxical features of inventory fluctuations observed at different cyclical frequencies my analysis suggests that demand shocks are the main source of the business cycle

taming the bullwhip effect whilst watching customer service in a single supply chain echelon we study a generalised order up to policy that has highly desirable properties in terms of order and inventory variance and customer service levels it generates we quantify exactly the variance amplification in replenishment orders i e the bullwhip effect and the variance of inventory levels over time for i i d and the weakly stationary auto regressive ar moving average ma and auto regressive moving average arma demand processes we demonstrate that high customer service as measured by fill rate and smooth replenishments need not increase inventory cost substantially we observe that in some instances of the arma demand pattern this comes at the expense of a relatively small increase in safety stock whilst in other instances inventory levels can actually be reduced

taking stock a critical assessment of recent research on inventories empirical and theoretical aspects of inventory behavior became hot topics in the 1950s and early 1960s no one seemed to notice the tension that was developing between the emerging macroeconomic and microeconomic views of inventories macroeconomists routinely thought of inventories as a destabilizing factor yet the prevailing micro theory viewed inventories as a stabilizing factor it was a fascinating question that was barely explored instead somewhat inexplicably interest in inventories dried up as if inventories were of minor economic significance and little intrinsic interest by the early 1980s then economists once again knew something they had known in the 1950s that inventory investment is of first order importance in business cycles but they were also beginning to realize that the standard production smoothing buffer stock model of inventories was in deep trouble this paper focuses on developments since that realization

scope economies market information and make or buy decision under asymmetric information abstract this paper presents a make or buy m b model in which a firm say firm 1 may produce in house or outsource a product to the unique vendor the monopolist in the outsourcing market demand for the finished product is stochastic and price sensitive and firm 1 s information forecast about the base market demand and corresponding precision are known when the m b decision is faced firm 1 is risk neutral and owns a constant return to scale technology while the vendor is risk averse and enjoys the advantage of scope economies a traditional solution is provided under perfect information under asymmetric information we demonstrate that when outsourcing is realized both parties expected profits increase with firm 1 s forecast accuracy only if the forecasted market demand is higher than the base demand i e good news outsourcing strictly dominates in house production if the yield of the vendor s production input is sufficiently low or its economies of scope are remarkably attractive furthermore it is optimal for firm 1 to hide information at first and decide whether or not to share information only after the vendor s supply price is announced however the vendor s profit is constrained by the trade off between the coordination effort for impelling firm 1 to share information and the advantages of its monopoly on outsourcing market low production costs as well as scope economies

accounting for output fluctuations in manufacturing there is a substantial body of evidence to the effect that output is more volatile than sales among manufacturing industries numerous explanations have been advanced to account for this excess output volatility some examples are pro cyclical inventory movements induced by a stockout avoidance motive cost and technology shocks and decreasing marginal costs this article assesses the contribution of these different motives to output volatility for six different manufacturing industries linear quadratic models are estimated for each of the industries and then dynamic simulations are employed to determine the volatility of output when one or more of the factors are removed from the model technology shocks provide the most significant contribution to output volatility the stockout avoidance motive is also important cost shocks provide a very small contribution and marginal production costs are increasing at the margin and thus stabilize output it is also shown that output volatility declines when curre

cyclic pricing by a durable goods monopolist in the model of this paper a monopoly seller of a durable good holds periodic sales as a means of price discrimination a new cohort of consumers enters the market in each period interested in purchasing the good either immediately or after a delay within each cohort consumers vary in their tastes for the good under broad conditions the seller will vary the price over time in most periods he will charge a price just low enough to sell immediately to consumers with a high willingness to pay periodically however he will drop the price far enough to sell to an accumulated group of consumers with a low willingness to pay

selling online versus live a seller choosing between auctioning online and live faces a tradeoff lower transaction costs online against more rents left with the bidders we model this tradeoff and apply the theory to auctions of art the crucial parameter for whether the seller does better online than live is not the expected price but the valuation uncertainty

corporate reorganization and the geography of services evidence from the motor vehicle aftermarket in the west midlands region of the uk marshall j n 1989 corporate reorganization and the geography of services evidence from the motor vehicle aftermarket in the west midlands region of the uk reg studies 23 139 150 research suggests that a corporate complex of administrative managerial and technical staff in the hinterland of capital cities underpins the spatial centralization of service activities in the economy there have been important changes in corporate structures during the last decade firms have reduced their in house provision of some services resorting to external contractors instead divisional and middle management activities have been rationalized and more autonomy delegated to lower levels in the corporate hierarchy using new technology firms have also expanded the range and quality of services provided in house this paper explores the geographical implications of these and other changes in business organization a case study of the motor vehicle aftermarket in the west midlands region of the uk suggests that sim

majority voting with single crossing preferences we clarify and extend a number of sufficient conditions for the existence of a majority voting equilibrium on one dimensional choice domains these conditions variously stated in the previous literature all impose order restrictions on voter preferences for instance monotone marginal rates of substitution which we show to imply or be equivalent to a general ordinal version of the single crossing condition this simple property is economically intuitive and easily checked in applications this ease of application is demonstrated through an examination of voting models of redistributive income taxation and trade union bargaining behaviour

mechanisms for achieving monetary stability inflation targeting versus the erm first we modify the barro gordon model so that a credibility stabilization trade off will remain even when a performance contract of the type envisaged by walsh 1995 is imposed on the central bank governor we do this by modeling a real interest rate bias along with the inflation bias then we discuss how various inflation penalties might actually be imposed on a central bank and ask whether inflation targeting supported by one or another of the penalties is likely to bring a better resolution to the credibility stabilization trade off than the erm

some empirical evidence on the production level and production cost smoothing models of inventory investment the production smoothing model of inventories has long been the basic paradigm within which empirical research on inventories has been conducted the basic hypothesis embedded in this model is that inventories of finished goods serve primarily to smooth production levels in the face of fluctuating demand and convex cost functions however once we allow for shocks to technology and the costs of producing output firms will also use inventories to shift production from periods in which production costs are relatively high to periods in which production costs are relatively low in this sense inventories can serve to smooth production costs rather production levels in this paper we examine the empirical plausibility of the production level and production cost smoothing models of inventories our basic strategy is to derive and contrast a set of unconditional moment restrictions implied by these models in a way that minimizes the role of auxiliary assumptions regarding market structure and industry demand we find overwhelming evidence against the production level smoothing model and very little evidence against the production cost smoothing mode1 we conclude that the variance of production exceeds the variance of sales in most manufacturing industries because the production cost smoothing role of inventories is quantitatively more important than the production level smoothing role of inventories this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item

dynamic monotonicity and comparative statics for real options abstract we analyze the relationship between complementarities and monotonicity in dynamic programs while complementarities supermodularity and nondecreasing differences are sufficient for monotonic statics in stochastic dynamic programs they are only robustly necessary in a limited way under heavy discounting monotonicity of the decision rule doesnotin general imply monotonicity of the optimal path in fact optimal paths in such models may exhibit extremely complex behavior for convex adjustment costs many real option models have monotone decision rules while for fixed costs they typically do not we also strengthen a well known characterization of complementarities due to milgrom and shannon 19 journal of economic literatureclassification numbers c61 d92 e22

central banks at war war is expensive troops must be equipped and weapons must be procured when the enormous borrowing requirements of war make the sovereigns credibility problem more difficult central banks enhance a government s ability to borrow by being the sole direct purchaser of government debt the central bank increases the effective punishment that can be imposed on the government for defaulting on the marginal lender this increases lenders confidence that the government will be punished in case of default making lenders willing to purchase the debt at a lower rate of interest the sovereign dependent on the low borrowing costs offered by the central bank has an incentive to retain the bank data covering the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries reveal that possessing a central bank lowers the sovereign s borrowing costs particularly during times of war

the production and inventory behavior of the american automobile industry understanding inventory movements is central to an understanding of business cycles this paper presents an empirical study of the behavior of inventories in the automobile industry it finds that inventory behavior is well explained by the assumption of intertemporal optimization with rational expectations the underlying cost structure appears to have substantial costs of changing production as well as substantial costs of being away from target inventory thelatter being a function of current sales given this cost structure whether inventory behavior is stabilizing or destabilizing depends on the characteristics of the demand process in the automobile industry inventory behavior is destabilizing the variance of production is larger than the variance of sales

the impact of pricing policy on sales variability in a supermarket retail context abstract the bullwhip effect is recognized to be a significant cost driver in supply chains one of the measures proposed frequently to counter bullwhip effect is price stability through everyday low pricing edlp however this study suggests that with an auto regressive ar1 demand process the use of constant instead of dynamic pricing may result in lower profitability and higher demand volatility an optimal price and stocking level policy is developed with normally distributed demand in this study and the model is tested using parameters from a supermarket scanner data set to determine the impact of two pricing policies the hypothesis that low prior period demand leads to discounted pricing is also tested and partially supported

inflation targets and contracts with uncertain central banker preferences within a standard model of monetary delegation the authors show that the optimal linear inflation contract performs strictly better than the optimal inflation target when there is uncertainty about the central banker s preferences the optimal combination of a contract and a target performs best and eliminates the inflation bias and any variability not associated with supply shocks however variability due to shocks is enhanced by uncertain central banker preferences quadratic contracts are shown to overcome this problem partly but the advantages of delegation may still be dominated by the excess variability due to shocks hence the credibility stabilization tradeoff is restored

when does an inflation target yield the second best it is shown that an inflation target does not establish the second best if the central bank is independent and the government collects seigniorage revenues to eliminate excessive inflation and ensure that stabilization is efficient society should combine an optimal inflation target with a central bank that attaches less weight to inflation stabilization than the public does

category management and coordination in retail assortment planning in the presence of basket shopping consumers this paper studies the assortment planning problem with multiple merchandise categories and basket shopping consumers i e consumers who desire to purchase from multiple categories we present a duopoly model in which retailers choose prices and variety level in each category and consumers make their store choice between retail stores and a no purchase alternative based on their utilities from each category the common practice of category management cm is an example of a decentralized regime for controlling assortment because each category manager is responsible for maximizing his or her assigned category s profit alternatively a retailer can make category decisions across the store with a centralized regime we show that cm never finds the optimal solution and provides both less variety and higher prices than optimal in a numerical study we demonstrate that profit loss due to cm can be significant finally we propose a decentralized regime that uses basket profits a new metric rather than accounting profits basket profits are easily evaluated using point of sale data and the proposed method produces near optimal solutions

value of information in capacitated supply chains we incorporate information flow between a supplier and a retailer in a two echelon model that captures the capacitated setting of a typical supply chain we consider three situations 1 a traditional model where there is no information to the supplier prior to a demand to him except for past data 2 the supplier knows the s s policy used by the retailer as well as the end item demand distribution and 3 the supplier has full information about the state of the retailer order up to policies continue to be optimal for models with information flow for the finite horizon the infinite horizon discounted and the infinite horizon average cost cases study of these three models enables us to understand the relationships between capacity inventory and information at the supplier level as well as how they are affected by the retailer s s s values and end item demand distribution we estimate the savings at the supplier due to information flow and study when information is most beneficial

outsourcing r d and the pattern of intra metropolitan location the electronics industries of madrid the relationship between intra metropolitan location research and development r d and the outsourcing of production is analysed to determine differences in and the supportive character of intra metropolitan areas for high technology production madrid s electronics industries have shown a remarkable resilience in the face of extensive economic restructuring and the change in trade regimes that has accompanied continental integration much of the strength of the electronics sector may have been due to the metropolitan area s support for outsourcing and the creative specialisation that it facilitated the distribution of manufacturing establishments their local sourcing characteristics industrial district or agglomeration effects and the role of r d are evaluated to determine the intra metropolitan context of production extensive statistical analyses of the relationship between r d and productive performance with various indicators of capital costs revenues and scale are undertaken with estab

changing use of external business advice and government supports by smes in the 1990s bennett r j and robson p j a 2003 changing use of external business advice and government supports by smes in the 1990s reg studies 37 795 811 this paper uses cross sectional surveys of 1991 and 1997 a panel survey of firms surviving between 1991 and 1997 and comparison with a further cross sectional survey in 1999 to compare the levels of use by smes of external business advice the resource based theory of the firm indicates that smes seek advice in order to increase their competitive capacity over time increasing competition between smes is expected to lead to increasing use of advice however the paper demonstrates that only modest changes over time have occurred in aggregate use of external advice by smes and these are not statistically significant this suggests that earlier growth in external business advice services may now have plateaued there are some significant changes of use by source increasing for advertising personnel and recruitment new technology and computer servic

joint production quasi fixed factors of production and investment in finished goods inventories inventory investment has long been an important area of inquiry for empirical work in macroeconomics this is due in large measure to the fact that inventory investment is a major source of fluctuations in aggregate output empirical work on inventories however has been dominated by the use of simple univariate flexible accelerators 1 the major objective of this paper is to propose and test a multivariate flexible accelerator model for inventory investment the model is tested with data on finished goods inventories from the manufacturing sector of the u s economy there are two reasons for undertaking such a task first at a theoretical level a univariate flexible accelerator model asserts that investment in say finished goods inventories is proportional to the gap between the desired and actual stocks of finished goods such a model presumes that decisions by firms on finished goods inventories are made independently of decisions on other stocks but theory suggests that when firms make simultaneous decisions on a variety of stocks which includes not only finished goods but also goods in process inventories the size of the work force etc decisions on finished goods will interact with decisions on

information distortion in a supply chain the bullwhip effect this article originally appeared in management science april 1997 volume 43 number 4 pp 546 558 published by the institute of management sciences consider a series of companies in a supply chain each of whom orders from its immediate upstream member in this setting inbound orders from a downstream member serve as a valuable informational input to upstream production and inventory decisions this paper claims that the information transferred in the form of orders tends to be distorted and can misguide upstream members in their inventory and production decisions in particular the variance of orders may be larger than that of sales and distortion tends to increase as one moves upstream a phenomenon termed bullwhip effect this paper analyzes four sources of the bullwhip effect demand signal processing rationing game order batching and price variations actions that can be taken to mitigate the detrimental impact of this distortion are also discussed

the competitiveness of business service firms a matched comparison between scotland and the south east of england o farrell p n hitchens d m w n and moffat l a r 1992 the competitiveness of business service firms a matched comparison between scotland and the south east of england reg studies 26 519 533 in this paper we present a comparative analysis of the competitiveness and performance of matched pairs of business service companies in scotland and south east england several dimensions of performance are investigated for five industries market research management consultancy product design graphic design and advertising value added per person is one quarter higher in the english offices and they achieved a much greater degree of export orientation one fifth of sales than the scottish firms at 4 possible demand and supply side causes of such differences are reviewed and potential policy responses considered o farrell p n hitchens d m w n et moffatt l a r 1992 la competitivite des prestataires des services aux entreprises l ecosse par comparaison avec l angleterre du sud est

distinguished lecture on economics in government what central bankers could learn from academics and vice versa academic writing about monetary policy has been useful to practical central bankers but more of certain aspects of the economists way of thinking could profitably be imported on the other hand academics could improve their analysis and make it more useful to policymakers if they would pay more attention to certain real world aspects of monetary policy the author draws on his experience at the federal reserve board to point out a number of specific lessons for each side

voting under ignorance of job skills of unemployed the overtaxation bias abstract usual models on voting over basic income flat tax schedules rest on the assumption that voters know the whole distribution of skills even if at equilibrium some individuals do not work if individuals productivity remains unknown until they work it may be more convincing to assume that voters have only beliefs about the distribution of skills and that a learning process takes place in this paper at each period individuals vote according to their beliefs which are updated when getting new information from the job market the voting process converges towards some steady state equilibrium that depends on both the true distribution of skills and the initial beliefs the equilibrium tax rate is higher than or equal to the tax rate achieved in the perfect information framework an illustration is provided on french data if voters are over pessimistic as to the potential productivity of unemployed people majority voting may lock the economy in an informational trap with a high tax rate and a high level of inactivity

the bullwhip effect progress trends and directions the bullwhip effect refers to the phenomenon where order variability increases as the orders move upstream in the supply chain this paper provides a review of the bullwhip literature which adopts empirical experimental and analytical methodologies early econometric evidence of bullwhip is highlighted findings from empirical and experimental research are compared with analytical and simulation results assumptions and approximations for modelling the bullwhip effect in terms of demand forecast delay replenishment policy and coordination strategy are considered we identify recent research trends and future research directions concerned with supply chain structure product type price competition and sustainability

different paths to the modern state in europe the interaction between warfare economic structure and political regime theoretical work on taxation and state building borrows heavily from early modern european experience while a number of european states increased centralized tax revenues during this period for others revenues stagnated or even declined and these variations have motivated alternative arguments for the determinants of fiscal and state capacity this study reviews the arguments concerning the three determinants that have received most attention namely warfare economic structure and political regime and tests them by making use of a new and comprehensive tax revenue dataset our main finding is that these three determinants worked in interaction with each other specifically when under pressure of war it was representative regimes in more urbanized commercial economies and authoritarian regimes in more rural agrarian economies that tended to better aggregate domestic interests towards state building

nonconvex costs and the behavior of inventories this paper explores one possible explanation for the apparent excess volatility of production relative to sales nonconvexities in the technology facing firms it is shown that if firms operate in a region of declining marginal costs then small shifts in demand can cause production to jump substantially estimates for six production to stock industries as well as the automobile industry suggest that all these industries behave as if they were operating in the region of nonconvex costs the results have important implications not only for inventory investment but also for the cyclical behavior of productivity and prices

the resurgence of inventory research what have we learned abstract recent empirical and theoretical research on business inventories is surveyed and critically evaluated while most inventory research has had macroeconomic motivations we focus on its microtheoretic basis and on potential conflicts between theory and evidence the paper asks two principal questions first how can inventories which are allegedly used by firms to stabilize production nonetheless be a destabilizing factor at the macroeconomic level second why if firms are following the production smoothing model is production more variable than sales in many industries we suggest that the so called s s model may help answer both questions

a dynamic joint replenishment policy with auto correlated demand we consider a joint replenishment problem where the product demands are auto correlated but independent of each other a dynamic periodic review policy is developed and its parameters are determined by a heuristic which aims at minimizing the total inventory cost which includes the holding cost the set up cost and the shortage cost the heuristic updates the review interval and the target inventory level of every product at each review point based on the current inventory status and the past demand data a simulation model is developed to compare the performance of this proposed policy with an existing periodic review policy the results show that the proposed policy has consistently achieved significant saving in all the different experimental scenarios

market information and firm performance the value of new information depends on how accurate the information is but it may also depend on the characteristics of the firm and the nature of the industry it operates in we develop a game theoretic model to understand how firm and industry characteristics moderate the effect of market information on firm profits our results suggest that information is more valuable when product substitutability is higher suggesting that information is of greater value in more competitive industries our results also suggest that although industry size does not affect the value of information information is more valuable for larger firms we find that except under some conditions more precise market information has a greater impact on profits in a stackelberg mode of conduct than in a bertrand nash mode

conditions of reverse bullwhip effect in pricing under joint decision of replenishment and pricing abstract a reverse bullwhip effect in pricing rbp occurs when an amplification of price variability takes place moving from the upstream suppliers to the downstream customers in a supply chain in this study we investigate rbp conditions for supply chains where joint replenishment and pricing decisions are made commencing with a single stage supply chain in which a retailer faces a random and price sensitive demand we extend the results to a multi stage supply chain using a leader follower game theoretical framework we discuss rbp conditions for supply chains where newsvendor and continuous review inventory policies are employed and present numerical examples for commonly used demand functions

combined pricing and inventory control under uncertainty this paper addresses the simultaneous determination of pricing and inventory replenishment strategies in the face of demand uncertainty more specifically we analyze the following single item periodic review model demands in consecutive periods are independent but their distributions depend on the item s price in accordance with general stochastic demand functions the price charged in any given period can be specified dynamically as a function of the state of the system a replenishment order may be placed at the beginning of some or all of the periods stockouts are fully backlogged we address both finite and infinite horizon models with the objective of maximizing total expected discounted profit or its time average value assuming that prices can either be adjusted arbitrarily upward or downward or that they can only be decreased we characterize the structure of an optimal combined pricing and inventory strategy for all of the above types of models we also develop an efficient value iteration method to compute these optimal strategies finally we report on an extensive numerical study that characterizes various qualitative properties of the optimal strategies and corresponding optimal profit values

the distinction between inventory holding and stockout costs implications for target invemtories asymmetric adjustment and the effect of aggregation on production smoothing this paper shows that differences between the costs of holding inventories and the costs of incurring stockouts provide a convenient theoretical distinction between production to stock and production to order industries furthermore differences in holding and stockout costs can cause a firm to replenish inventories following a positive demand surprise at a different speed than it reduces stocks following unexpectedly low sales this asymmetric adjustment lessens the tendency for firm specific production shocks to cancel out in aggregation and can cause industry output to be more variable than industry sales even when representative firms exhibit production smoothing behavior copyright 1994 by economics department of the university of pennsylvania and the osaka university institute of social and economic research association

dual approaches to the analysis of risk aversion we present a dual formulation of choice under uncertainty based on a few simple assumptions about preferences it is shown that the additive separability restriction on preferences key to expected utility theory can be dropped with little loss of analytic power for a broad class of choice problems dual risk premiums are characterized and it is shown that placing various invariance restrictions on them leads naturally to generalizations of the concepts of cara crra and lrt familiar from expected utility theory each of these generalizations conforms to a notion of homotheticity

is the walsh contract really optimal the purpose of this paper is to show thatthe linear penalization to inflation foundin walsh 1995 is not the government soptimal choice when the fixed part of thetransfer scheme is any given constant and thepayment to the central bank represents acost for the government

vertical contracts in a supply chain and the bullwhip effect this paper shows that decentralized supply chains in which upstream firms use linear wholesale prices may experience lower upstream production and downstream sales volatility than vertically inte

optimal central bank conservativeness in an open economy this paper develops a graphical method to determinethe optimal degree of central bank conservativeness inan open economy unlike rogoff 1985a the upper andlower bounds of the interval containing the optimaldegree of conservativeness are expressed in terms ofthe structural parameters of the model it is shownthat optimal central bank conservativeness is higher the higher the natural rate of unemployment thegreater the benefits of unanticipated inflation theless inflation averse society the smaller thevariance of productivity shocks the smaller realexchange rate variability and the smaller the opennessof the economy these propositions are tested fornineteen industrial countries for the period1960 1993 in testing the model we employ a latentvariables method lisrel in order to distinguishbetween actual and optimal monetary regimes

a novel time varying bullwhip effect metric an application to promotional sales abstract bullwhip effect is a problem of paramount importance that reduces competitiveness of supply chains around the world a significant effort is being devoted by both practitioners and academics to understand its causes and to reduce its pernicious consequences nevertheless limited research has been carried out to analyse potential metrics to measure it that typically are summarized in the coefficient of variation ratio of different echelons demand this work proposes a new metric based on a time varying extension of the aforementioned bullwhip effect metric by employing recursive estimation algorithms expressed in the state space framework to provide at each single time period a real time bullwhip effect estimate in order to illustrate the results a case study based on a serially linked supply chain of two echelons from the chemical industry is analysed particularly this metric is employed to analyse the effect of promotional campaigns on the bullwhip effect on a real time fashion the results show that effectively the bullwhip effect is not constant along time but interestingly it is reduced during the promotional periods and it is bigger before and after the promotion takes place

small firms business services growth and regional development in the united kingdom some empirical findings keeble d bryson j and wood p 1991 small firms business services growth and regional development in the united kingdom some empirical findings reg studies 25 439 457 since 1980 the united kingdom has experienced very rapid growth in firms and employment in information intensive business services this paper documents the nature and extent of this growth with particular reference to small and new firms in management consultancy and market research and reviews its locational impact numbers of business service firms most of which are small independent companies have grown much faster than consumer service firms despite a significant death rate many small businesses in these sectors have grown rapidly as have very large firms business service growth has contributed powerfully to the uk s north south divide being focused on london and the outer south east possible causes of these trends and key future research issues are reviewed keeble d bryson j et wood p 1991 petites entreprise

globalization of production and innovation how outsourcing is reshaping an advanced manufacturing area cusmano l mancusi m l and morrison a globalization of production and innovation how outsourcing is reshaping an advanced manufacturing area regional studies this paper investigates the determinants and the spatial and functional dimensions of firms outsourcing based on a large survey of manufacturing firms in lombardy italy the analysis shows that outsourcing is remarkably wide across sectors and has a clear regional dimension concerning highly skilled firms at most offshoring is still a minor fraction of the deverticalization process largely related to wider strategies of internationalization by foreign group subsidiaries at intermediate stages of the value chain the evidence suggests the regional system is inserting onto global knowledge networks but also points at the risk of branch plant effects in high technology segments cusmano l mancusi m l et morrison a la mondialisation de la production et de l innovation comment l approvisionnement a l exterieur reorganise une zone ind

supply chains material linkage and regional development the importance of economic linkage to regional development has been implicit in the variety of approaches that have been taken to analysing the development process despite this no mechanism exists which allows a general assessment of regional supply networks the paper provides one approach to this type of evaluation in uk regions focusing on the north west of england and taking uk input output tables as the basis of analysis sectoral linkages with supply potential are identified and their magnitude estimated the paper reveals both the scope for extending material linkages and generating employment in this region of the uk as well as confirming the important role played by manufacturing industries in intermediate supply chains

business service specialization and regional economic change perry m 1990 business service specialization and regional economic change reg studies 24 195 209 business services are experiencing rapid employment growth but there is uncertainty over the interpretation of this trend three surveys assess changes in the demand and supply of business services in the auckland region new zealand 1983 8 the data indicate that employment growth is real in that it is not caused by a transfer of activities that were formerly retained within other industries most manufacturing firms have adopted a pragmatic purchasing policy externalizing and internalizing services on an individual basis with increased internalization dominant for data processing and accountancy services a survey of business service suppliers indicates the greater importance of service exports demand from other services and product innovation as the basis for growth perry m 1990 la specialisation des services aux entrepri ses et l evolution regionale economique reg studies 24 195 209 les

monotone comparative statics under uncertainty this paper analyzes monotone comparative statics predictions in several classes of stochastic optimization problems the main results characterize necessary and sufficient conditions for comparative statics predictions to hold based on properties of primitive functions that is utility functions and probability distributions the results apply when the primitives satisfy one of the following two properties i a single crossing property which arises in applications such as portfolio investment problems and auctions or ii log supermodularity which arises in the analysis of demand functions affiliated random variables stochastic orders and orders over risk aversion

the geography of technological change in the information economy hepworth m 1986 the geography of technological change in the information economy reg studies 20 407 424 innovations in information technology are transforming urban and regional systems through their impacts on production and distribution processes case studies of canadian multi locational firms are used to examine this spatio economic transformation in the context of the new information based service economy by focusing on computer networks as spatial systems of information technology it is shown that these innovations can lead to centralized and decentralized patterns of direct production and office activity new insights are also developed into the telecommunications transportation trade off and the key role of telecommunications in regional development

theoretical models of sales promotions contributions limitations and a future research agenda our objective in this paper is to review theoretical models of sales promotions we highlight the key contributions of these models discuss their limitations and outline an agenda for future research managerial questions examined in these models include some very fundamental issues such as why firms resort to the use of sales promotions in mature markets and why the use of sales promotions has increased dramatically during the last two decades also included in this review are models that address firm level strategic issues such as the allocation of dollars between advertising and sales promotions and the relative emphasis on trade promotions vis a vis consumer promotions we also review theoretical models that explain how consumers respond to price promotions and what type of sales promotion tools may be superior to others in a particular market the review concludes with a possible agenda for future research

can the production smoothing model of inventory behavior be saved the production smoothing model of inventory behavior has a long and venerable history and theoretical foundations that seem very strong yet certain overwhelming facts seem not only to defy explanation within the production smoothing framework but actually to argue that the basic idea of production smoothing is all wrong most prominent among these is the fact that the variance of detrended production exceeds the variance of detrended sales this paper first documents the stylized facts then it derives the production smoothing model rigorously and explains how the model can be amended to make it consistent with the facts finally it reviews the theoretical and empirical evidence and tries to draw some tentative conclusions

the walsh contract for central bankers proves optimal after all a recent paper argues that the walsh linear inflation contract does not prove optimal when the government concerns itself about the cost of the central bank contract candel sanchez campoy minarro 2004 this result relies on assuming that the participation constraint does not represent an effective constraint on the central banker s decision we show that the walsh linear inflation contract does produce the optimal outcome even when the government cares about the cost of the contract assuming that the participation constraint holds

optimal linear contracts under common agency and uncertain central bank preferences we analyze the effects of imperfectly known central banker s preferences on optimal linear contracts offered by the government and an interest group these effects depend on the type of uncertainty faced by the principals when the central bank s output target is uncertain the results by campoy and negrete public choice 137 197 206 2008 under perfectly known preferences obtain uncertainty about the central banker s degree of conservatism or about its degree of selfishness has a multiplicative impact on the principals instruments in the agent s best response function this may generate an inflation bias independently of the type of contract offered by the interest group