trade ins and introductory offers in a monopoly we model the commonly used marketing practices of offering discounts to either repeat buyers trade ins or new buyers introductory offers of a quasi durable good we analyze these practices in terms of their potential for intertemporal and third degree price discrimination in our two period model the monopolist sets a first period price that segments the second period market optimally into holders and nonholders of the good in the second period different prices are quoted to the two market segments we present three versions of the model with varying assumptions on consumers rationality

optimal dynamic pricing for expanding networks this paper analyzes the dynamic pricing decision of a monopolist marketing a new product or service whose consumption value increases with the expansion of the network of adopters we characterize an optimal pricing strategy which maximizes the present value of the monopolist s profits subject to the dynamics of the demand for network access these dynamics depend among other factors on the current price and consumer anticipations about future network growth we examine the effects of changes in the growth anticipations and the discount rate on the optimal equilibrium access price and network size it is shown that higher growth anticipations and a lower discount rate result in a lower equilibrium price and a larger network

regional differences in job satisfaction job satisfaction is significantly higher in wales than in london and the south east the rest of england and scotland this is despite the fact that among these four regions earnings are lowest in wales using data from the british household panel survey bhps we investigate the determinants of job satisfaction and attempt to explain why workers in wales are happier in their work than workers in other parts of the uk we find that workers in wales appear to be less concerned about pay than workers in other regions we suggest that because lower earnings tend to be associated with higher levels of unemployment and inactivity being in work may be regarded more favourably in more economically depressed regions we also suggest the climate of industrial relations as perceived by workers is better in wales than elsewhere

anticipation free rider problems and adaptation to trade unions re examining the curious case of dissatisfied union members this paper documents evidence that rejects the paradox of dissatisfied union members using eleven waves of the bhps it studies the past contemporaneous and future effects of union membership on job satisfaction by separating union free riders from other nonmembers in the fixed effects equations i find significant anticipation effects to unionism for prospective members and covered nonmembers of both genders workers go on to report on average a significant net increase in overall job satisfaction at the year unionization occurs nonetheless adaptation to unionism is complete within the first few years of joining a unionized firm one hypothesis for this is that workers adapt their reported satisfaction over time to support their union bargaining efforts which would be consistent with the explanation given by freeman and medoff 1984 of union s role in fanning the flame of discontent to the management during contract negotiations

job satisfaction trade unions and exit voice revisited many studies have found that unionized workers express less job satisfaction than nonunion workers the exit voice explanation of this phenomenon is that dissatisfied nonunion workers tend to qui

returns to seniority in union and nonunion jobs a new look at the evidence in cross sectional data the positive association between seniority and earnings is typically much stronger for nonunion workers than for union workers a finding that seems inconsistent with the generalization that seniority is more important in the union sector than in the nonunion sector the authors of this paper show that standard estimates of the return to seniority are likely to be biased upward due to unmeasured worker heterogeneity job heterogeneity or both and they argue that this bias is likely to be larger in the nonunion sector than in the union sector when they correct for this problem in analyzing data on male blue collar workers for the years 1968 80 they find a larger return to seniority in the union sector than in the nonunion sector

a note on expanding networks and monopoly pricing we obtain explicitly the optimal path of prices for a monopolist operating in a network industry during a finite number of periods we describe this optimal path as a function of network intensity and horizon length and show that the prices are increasing in time and that for very low network intensity or very high horizon length the monopolist will offer the good at zero price in the initial period

monopoly pricing with network externalities abstract how should a monopolist price a durable good or a new technology that is subject to network externalities in particular should the monopolist set a low introductory price to attract a critical mass of adopters in this paper we provide intuition as to when and why introductory pricing might occur in the presence of network externalities incomplete information about demand or asymmetric information about costs is necessary for introductory pricing to occur in equilibrium when consumers are small

is job insecurity on the rise evidence from canadian perception data this paper examines the unexplored issue of worker insecurity perception in canada specifically we explore for changes in worker perceptions of job security using canadian gallup data for the 1977 2006 period we find that the high levels of perceived insecurity of the early to mid 1990s were only cyclical in nature not evidence of structural change we also explore for differences across socio economic groups and find that university educated workers full time workers and white collar workers all felt relatively more secure about present and future job prospects interestingly union members tend to be more concerned about job security than non union ce memoire examine le probleme inexplore de la perception de la precarite de l emploi au canada specifiquement on explore les changements dans les perceptions de precarite d emploi des travailleurs a l aide de donnees gallup pour la periode 1977 2006 il appert que les hauts niveaux de precarite percue du debut au milieu des annees 90 etaient de nature cyclique et non pas le resultat d un changement structurel on examine aussi les differences entre groupes socio economiques et on decouvre que les travailleurs avec une formation universitaire les travailleurs a temps plein et les collets blancs se sentaient relativement plus en securite quant aux perspectives d emploi presentes et futures il est interessant de noter que les travailleurs syndiques sont davantage inquiets quant a la precarite de l emploi que les non syndiques

works councils wages and job satisfaction we investigate the effects of works councils on employees wages and job satisfaction in general and for subgroups with respect to sex and occupational status making use of a german representative sample of employees we find that employees who move to a firm with a works council report increases in job satisfaction but do not receive particular wage increases especially the job satisfaction of female employees is affected by a change in works council status however we do not find support for the hypothesis that the introduction of a works council itself increases wages or job satisfaction for the employees staying at the firm

the relationship between unions and job satisfaction this paper examines the assoication between canadian unions and their member attitudes data on job satisfaction indicate that unionized workers in canada are less happy with the quality of their jobs than non union workers the former however are more satisfied with their financial compensation and job security than non members

establishment size job satisfaction and the structure of work this paper empirically investigates a the relationship between establishment size and the degree of flexibility in the work environment and b the extent to which establishment size differences in workers satisfaction with their jobs can be accounted for by differences in their work environment the main findings are that large establishments do organize production in a less flexible fashion than do smaller establishments and that observed lower levels of job satisfaction in larger establishments net of wage and fringe benefit effects can largely be explained by the inflexibility in the work environment

the effect of unionism on fringe benefits this study analyzes the impact of unionism on fringes paid to production workers using data on individual establishments it compares fringe expenditures in establishments having the same level of compensation per hour and finds that unionism raises the share of compensation allotted to fringes particularly to pensions vacation pay and life accident and health insurance in addition since unionism also raises the straight time wage rate itself a prime determinant of expenditures on fringes unionism has a very sizeable impact on total fringe expenditures as well as on the fringe share of compensation the union fringe effect exceeds in percentage terms the union wage effect and is sufficiently large to suggest that standard union wage studies understate the union effect on total compensation the study also compares the fringe expenditures of production and non production workers within the same establishment controlling for within establishment pay policies the findings suggest that the pres

employers discriminatory behavior and the estimation of wage discrimination this paper considers the linkage of empirical estimates of wage discrimination between two groups introduced by oaxaca 1973 to a theoretical model of employers discriminatory behavior it is shown that conditional on different assumptions about employers discriminatory tastes oaxaca s estimators of wage discrimination can be derived that the approach is more generally useful is demonstrated by deriving an alternative estimator of wage discrimination based on the assumption that within each type of labor e g unskilled skilled the utility function capturing employers discriminatory tastes is homogeneous of degree zero with respect to labor inputs from each of the two groups the estimators are compared empirically in an application to male female wage differentials

dynamic nonlinear pricing in networks with interdependent demand we consider the pricing decision for a new product whose consumption value increases as the network of adopters expands this demand interdependence is a characteristic feature of telecommunications networks the paper analyzes the case of a single supplier offering the product to a heterogeneous population consumers decide on network access and consumption quantity the pricing decision consists of choosing a pricing schedule over the dimensions of quantity and time that maximizes the present value of a weighted sum of total surplus and producer profits subject to the dynamics of market growth we find that the decision can be decoupled into two nested optimization problems a given some market size what should the optimal nonlinear price schedule be and b how should the price schedule be changed optimally over time this separation enables us to solve the pricing problem explicit consideration of the dynamics the discounting of future surpluses and the extent of market growth anticipation affect not only the price and network size trajectories but also their steady state equilibrium values

an analysis of the determinants of job satisfaction when individuals baseline satisfaction levels may differ a growing literature seeks to explain differences in individuals self reported satisfaction with their jobs the evidence so far has mainly been based on cross sectional data and when panel data have been used individual unobserved heterogeneity has been modelled as an ordered probit model with random effects this article makes use of longitudinal data for denmark taken from the waves 1995 1999 of the european community household panel and estimates fixed effects ordered logit models using the estimation methods proposed by ferrer i carbonel and frijters 2004 and das and van soest 1999 for comparison and testing purposes a random effects ordered probit is also estimated estimations are carried out separately on the samples of men and women for individuals overall satisfaction with the jobs they hold we find that using the fixed effects approach that clearly rejects the random effects specification considerably reduces the number of key explanatory variables the impact of central economic factors is the same as in previous studies though moreover the determinants of job satisfaction differ considerably between the genders in particular once individual fixed effects are allowed for

the decline of unionization in the united states what can be learned from recent experience the dramatic decline in unionization over the last decade is investigated in the context of a supply demand model of union status determination using data from surveys of workers conducted in 1977 and 1984 along with data from the national labor relations board on representation elections it is concluded that the decline in unionization since 1977 is accounted for largely by 1 an increase in employer resistance to unionization probably due to increased product market competitiveness and 2 a decrease in demand for union representation by nonunion workers due to an increase in the satisfaction of nonunion workers with their jobs and a decline in nonunion workers beliefs that unions are able to improve wages and working conditions

measuring presidential power despite an increased need to measure presidential power and the increased use of such measurements in empirical studies there has been little examination of the relative merits of alternative methods of measuring presidential power this study reviews the measures currently in use and identifies the measure developed by shugart and carey 1992 as the most useful the study also suggests improvements to the shugart and carey method to improve its applicability to semipresidential regimes scoring of austria finland france and the six central and east european states with popularly elected presidents demonstrates the usefulness of these revisions for establishing clearer boundaries for this regime type which is a necessary step toward empirical testing of the relationship between semipresidentialism and democratic consolidation

job satisfaction in the low wage service sector the stylized facts associated with workers satisfaction are tested using a distinctive data set using principal components analysis five distinct measures of workers satisfaction and the factors that determine each one are examined the data set covering three low wage service sectors enables control for workplace characteristics to be made it is shown that characteristics previously identified as important by the job satisfaction literature in fact have differing effects according to the type of satisfaction being considered then is examined which of the satisfaction components has the greatest impact on overall satisfaction satisfaction with short term rewards and long term prospects are found to be far more influential in determining overall satisfaction than contentment with social relationships or work intensity

the upside of pessimism biased beliefs and the paradox of the contented female worker both sexes display inaccuracies in estimating their labour market prospects but in different directions consistent with the literature on sex differences in psychological bias females are less optimistic than men and on average tend to be overly pessimistic optimism measured as an upwardly biased perception of the labour market returns distribution increases the likelihood of disappointment with realized performance a substantial proportion of the female job satisfaction advantage appears to be associated with both overly pessimistic female expectations and overly optimistic male expectations the implications of female pessimism on both job search and gender earnings differentials is also discussed

on the decomposition of wage differentials the often used method for decomposing wage differentials into human capital and discrimination components is reformulated so that both t he disadvantage or cost discrimination it imposes on a black or minority wage earner and the advantage or benefit it bestows on a white or majority wage earner can be estimated copyright 1988 by mit press