covariation assessment by consumers two experiments were conducted to investigate the effect of prior beliefs and information format on consumers assessment of the relationship between price and quality for four frequently purchased grocery products in these studies consumers were shown sets of data each of which presented ranks of 10 brands of a product category on price and quality contrary to prior research on illusory correlation consumers estimates of covariation were relatively accurate and unaffected by the availability of relevant prior beliefs about the nature of the relationship between price and quality for grocery products in general or by format manipulations that varied the ease or difficulty of processing the data these findings are discussed in terms of the effect of detailed instructions the availability of simple heuristics for processing rank ordered data differences between social and consumer perceptions and the stages of consumer information processing most likely to be affected by prior beliefs

when 2 2 is not the same as 1 3 variations in price sensitivity across components of partitioned prices abstract firms often use a pricing strategy in which the total price of a product and or service is partitioned into two or more mandatory components whereas previous research has compared partitioned with nonpartitioned pricing this article examines how partitioning the total price differently across the components affects consumer preferences in four studies the authors show that consumers reactions to price partitioning are moderated by the perceived consumption benefit of the components specifically consumers are more sensitive to the price of components that provide low consumption benefits than to the price of components that provide relatively high consumption benefits consequently when evaluating different partitions of the same total price consumers prefer partitions in which the price of the low benefit component is lower and the price of the high benefit component is higher

the dominant technique in joint production systems there was very little discussion of sraffa s theory of joint production during the first ten years after the publication of production of commodities by means of commodities sraffa 1960 because attempts to understand his theory of single product systems and the critique of the dominant theory of capital absorbed all attention thereafter the theory of joint production came increasingly into focus one reason little understood at first was that for the first time sraffa s approach provided economists working in the classical tradition with the possibility of defining prices of production in the presence of multiple product industries when i wrote my mr sraffa on joint production in 1970 luigi pasinetti drew my attention to the famous passage in jevons 1871 1957 in which he invokes joint production to prove that a classical cost of production theory as he understood it could not explain the relative prices of by products a little later sraffa s solution to the explanation of relative prices was used by steedman to criticise marx s form of the labour theory of value steedman 1975

hysteresis bands on returns holding period and transaction costs abstract in the presence of transactions costs no matter how small arbitrage activity does not necessarily render equal all riskless rates of return when two such rates follow stochastic processes it is not optimal immediately to arbitrage out any discrepancy that arises between them the reason is that immediate arbitrage would induce a definite expenditure of transactions costs whereas without arbitrage intervention there exists some perhaps sufficient probability that these two interest rates will come back together without any costs having been incurred hence one can surmise that at equilibrium the financial market will permit the coexistence of two riskless rates that are not equal to each other for analogous reasons randomly fluctuating expected rates of return on risky assets will be allowed to differ even after correction for risk leading to important violations of the capital asset pricing model the combination of randomness in expected rates of return and proportional transactions costs is a serious blow to existing frictionless pricing models

the so called transformation problem revisited a brief comment this comment deals with lipietz s presentation of a solution which had been proposed to the transformation problem lipietz s account can be criticized in two respects first his attempt to integrate the familiar morishima type approach with the newer one is based on a confusion between the conceptual and factual determination of the value of labor power second his demonstration of the mathematical conditions for the validity of the new interpretation rests on an inappropriate conceptualization of the price and quantity mechanisms associated with capitalist competition moreover his results could not be applied to a more general framework which took account for example of joint production

the mercantile form of value and its place in marx s theory of the commodity this paper reinterprets marx s theory of the form of value in the context of his theory of the commodity building on the unresolved tension between marx s concept of value and the specific character of the labour constituting itself as value in his theory of commodity production it is argued that marx s is actually a theory of the mercantile form of value thus it becomes evident that the process of realisation of material production in commodity production and the process giving rise to money are the same and that they are only the material manifestation of the process of realisation of private and independent work as social labour this characterises commodity production as the unity in difference of a material and a social moment showing that marx s mercantile form of value is the conceptualisation of adam smith s invisible hand the paper also argues that marx s is not the theory of a money commodity copyright 2012 oup

am i getting a good deal reference dependentdecision making when the reference price is uncertain models of consumer decision making commonly incorporate reference dependent preferences in these models the reference point is typically assumed to be known by the consumer however research on price recall and the reference formation process reveals that the reference price is often uncertain at the time of purchase reference price uncertainty creates ambiguity for the consumer about whether they are getting a good or bad deal this paper develops a model of consumer choice in the presence of reference dependent preferences when the reference price is uncertain data from two empirical studies that vary the product category and order of the elicitation of reference prices show that the new model generally outperforms conventional discrete choice models that either ignore reference prices or treat reference prices as certain the new model provides insights into the effect of reducing reference price uncertainty on consumer choice and reveals that high uncertainty smoothes the kink in the demand curve that is present in traditional reference price demand models

maturity structure of public debt and expected bond returns abstract the relevancy of changes in maturity structure is tested using a disaggregated measure of the maturity composition of government debt tests based on predictions from the market efficiency and rational expectations theories find evidence that maturity composition occasionally helps to predict future excess returns the maturity composition is also found to be correlated with the term premium and future changes in the short rate the evidence supports the claim that bonds with all the same characteristics except maturity are not perfect substitutes

new labour and work time regulation a marxian analysis of the uk economy this paper examines the impact of work time regulation introduced by the uk s new labour governments 1997 to 2010 in doing so we return to marx s hypotheses regarding the length of the working day these include the arguments that class conflict over the length of the working day is inherently distributional in a surplus value sense and that workers often display a preference for reduced hours even with a proportionate reduction in pay our quantitative marxist methodology provides a way of assessing the pattern of surplus value before and during the period of office of the new labour governments and the distributional effects of regulation the impact of such regulations on workers preferences are examined through an investigation of british household panel survey data although many have been sceptical concerning the record of the last labour governments policies such as the working time regulations 1998 and the work life balance campaign 2000 are found to have been noteworthy innovations in the labour market this is all the more important given recent moves by the successor government to weaken work time regulation our results suggest the impact of these policy initiatives was broadly favourable though the effect on men and women was different

made by mistake when mistakes increase product preference mistakes are often undesirable and frequently result in negative inferences about the person or company that made the mistake consequently research suggests that information about mistakes is rarely shared with consumers however we find that consumers actually prefer products that were made by mistake to otherwise identical products that were made intentionally this preference arises because consumers perceive that a product made by mistake is more improbable relative to a product made intentionally and thus view the product as more unique we find converging evidence for this preference in a field study six experiments and ebay auction sales importantly this preference holds regardless of whether the mistake enhances or detracts from the product however in domains where consumers do not value uniqueness e g utilitarian goods the preference is eliminated

year end tax induced sales and stock market seasonality the paper relates two phenomena in the stock market the high return during the month of january and the apparent existence of widespread sales of stocks for tax purposes towards the end of the fiscal year the findings suggest that due to the taxinduced sales the price of many stocks over the last 35 years was temporarily depressed in december but recovered in the following january this price recovery is a major contributor to the high returns observed in january the tax effect is present in firms of all sizes but much more pronounced for small firms the analysis also indicates that a more precise identification of the tax switch candidates may prove that the taxinduced sales are in fact the sole contributor to the high january s returns the issue of seasonality in the stock market has attracted the attention of researchers for some time rozeff and kinney 13 present evidence of seasonality in the market index with the months of january and july having a peak return the seasonal movements in the average return in the market could not be fully accounted for by a corresponding seasonal pattern in the market risk they offer three explanations to this phenomenon tax induced sales release of accounting information and seasonal demand for cash the first explanation has received some support from recent research dyl 4 studied the effects of capital gain taxes on trading volumes of common stocks and concluded that capital gain taxes affect investors year end portfolio decisions and that this effect is in turn reflected in the trading volumes of common stocks in december p 174 mcenally 10 and branch 2 studied the effects of the tax induced trading on securities return and found that depressed stocks at the end of the year are likely to bounce back immediately after year end the existence of a pronounced seasonal behavior in the market might suggest some form of market inefficiency a strategy under which stocks are bought towards the end of the year and sold at the beginning of the following year might yield an abnormal return despite the seasonal behavior of stock returns it would be indeed surprising if this regularity which has not gone unnoticed by the financial community could be exploited to bring a risk adjusted excess return the objective of this paper is to examine jointly the two phenomena tax

competitive price and quality under asymmetric information we present an analysis of equilibrium in markets with asymmetrically informed consumers some consumers know both price and quality of all sellers whereas others know neither but may search among sellers the equilibrium correlation between price and quality generally increases with the level of information in the market and can be negative when this level is sufficiently small a meta analysis of the available empirical studies strongly supports the model s predictions

errors in recorded security prices and the turn of the year effect errors in recorded security prices are a source of misspecification in the market model if recorded price errors are sufficiently nonrandom they result in biased returns and in biased and inconsistent estimates of market model regression coefficients this paper argues that tax induced flow supply pressures cause end of the year recorded price errors to be nonrandom enough to create the appearance of anomalous turn of the year stock return behavior empirical tests of returns and market model regression coefficients during the turn of the year period cannot reject this errors in variables explanation of the turn ofthe year effect the turn of the year toy effect or january effect refers to the anomal ous behavior of stock returns during the last five trading days in december and the first five trading days in january this anomaly is of particular interest to financial researchers because it appears to be a small firm effect and the source of the majority of size related anomalies see keim 1985 reinganum 1981 and roll 1983a 1983b the interest in the toy effect is justified because of its implications concerning the validity of the capital asset pricing model capm and market efficiency in this paper we show that there is a price related effect operating during the toy period first we show that the magnitude of the toy return is inversely related to price when we control for price most of the size related toy effect found by reinganum 1983 and roll 1983a disappears second the data indicate that all firms have unusually high returns during the toy period compared with their returns during the rest of the year third we find seasonal shifts in the market model betas associated with the toy period furthermore we test the hypothesis that the toy effect is an errors in variables problem due to the use of the one eighth pricing convention in recording security prices and the accommodation of tax induced flow pressures by liquidity traders such as market

distributive shares in the us economy 1964 2001 specifying the labour theory of value in a way that distinguishes both productive from unproductive labour and production workers from supervisory workers this paper considers distributive shares in the us economy between 1964 and 2001 trends in productive and unproductive labour are explored in full time equivalents hours and money after 1979 there was a large shift of money value not matched by a shift in either hours or employment from the wages paid to productive labour to those paid to supervisory labour since the wage share in money value added of non supervisory labour in unproductive sectors was approximately constant the 1980s and 1990s also saw the profits share squeezed by the rising wage share of supervisory workers some implications of this are explored in the construction of a class rather than a factor approach to distributive shares

defensive marketing strategies this paper analyzes how a firm should adjust its marketing expenditures and its price to defend its position in an existing market from attack by a competitive new product our focus is to provide usable managerial recommendations on the strategy of response in particular we show that if products can be represented by their position in a multiattribute space consumers are heterogeneous and maximize utility and awareness advertising and distribution can be summarized by response functions then for the profit maximizing firm it is optimal to decrease awareness advertising it is optimal to decrease the distribution budget unless the new product can be kept out of the market a price increase may be optimal and even under the optimal strategy profits decrease as a result of the competitive new product furthermore if the consumer tastes are uniformly distributed across the spectrum a price decrease increases defensive profits it is optimal at the margin to improve product quality in the direction of the defending product s strength and it is optimal at the margin to reposition by advertising in the same direction in addition we provide practical procedures to estimate 1 the distribution of consumer tastes and 2 the position of the new product in perceptual space from sales data and knowledge of the percent of consumers who are aware of the new product and find it available competitive diagnostics such as the angle of attack are introduced to help the defending manager this article was originally published in marketing science volume 2 issue 4 pages 319 360 in 1983

quality price advertising and published quality ratings economic literature contains several sometimes contradictory hypotheses concerning the relationships among quality price and advertising we investigate the impact of published quality ratings on these relationships and find that quality and advertising are much more likely to be positively related in the presence of quality ratings

coupon value a signal for price in this article the author proposes that consumers use the value of a coupon to estimate price study 1 shows that the higher the percentage discount the higher the perceived price study 2 demon

the turn of the year in canada a number of investigators have reported that january stock returns in the u s exceed returns for other months of the year this paper documents a similar finding for canadian stocks over the period 1951 1980 however canada did not introduce a capital gains tax until 1973 and the paper reports that january returns in canada exceed returns for other months of the year before and after this date thus these data do not support the tax loss selling pressure hypothesis as the entire explanation for the turnof the year effect in stock returns nor by implication do they support the tax lossselling pressure hypothesis as the complete explanation for the small firm effect in u s stocks returns recently keim 9 has reported that returns on nyse and ase firms with small market values exceed by significant margins returns on firms with large market values this result was previously reported by banz 1 and reinganum 11 but keim s analysis shows that most of the excess return for small firms is concentrated in january indeed it is concentrated in the first two weeks in january roll 13 also documents this phenomenon and investigates a number of possible explanations for it 2 after rejecting several possible nonexploitable explanations roll is left with year end tax loss selling pressure of the sort discussed by branch 2 dyl 5 and givoly and ovadia 6 as the most likely explanation of this result according to the tax loss selling pressure hypothesis toward the end of the year stockholders sell stocks that have declined in price during the year investors do this to take advantage of the opportunity to write off capital losses against ordinary income in computing their federal income taxes the year end sell off exerts downward pressure on stock prices as soon as the tax and calendar year ends the selling pressure is relieved and stock prices quickly rebound to their equilibrium levels roll 13 presents some evidence consistent with this hypothesis specifically he finds a negative correlation between stock returns in january and returns over the previous 12 months that is stocks that decrease in value during the year tend to be big gainers in january roll also finds that

the quality double whammy this research focuses on how consumers perceive the quality level of a complex stimulus in our case a service encounter and how this perception affects consumers overall assessment of the quality level of the firm as such it should be of interest to consumer behavior theorists as well as to those involved in marketing management issues we start our presentation by developing a normative bayesian data integration and updating model somewhat similar to that put forth by rust et al 1999 the major constructs of interest in this model are the person s belief about the overall service quality level of a firm and what will happen on the next service encounter two major results following from this baseline normative model are that the updated means of these two beliefs are identical to the dynamic updating equations put forth by boulding et al 1993 and that an underlying assumption of this model is that consumers form unbiased perceptions of the complex stimulus next based on substantial empirical evidence from the behavioral literature we incorporate into this baseline model a process by which consumers form nonrandom perceptions specifically we postulate that a person s perception of a complex service encounter is a blend of the objective dimensions of the service encounter and the person s prior overall belief about the quality level of the firm the relative weights placed on these two factors are determined at least in part by the experience level of the customer and the complexity of the service encounter we then use this expanded model to compare and test different models of service quality and provide deeper insights into the process by which consumers form perceptions of both the service transaction and the overall service quality level of a firm we test this model using data from two different experiments in each experiment we manipulate the service provided and the person s initial will and should expectations using both obtrusive and unobtrusive measures of the underlying constructs of our model we employ multiple tests to determine the veracity of our expanded model relative to the baseline model these tests support the expanded model specification as found previously and as predicted by a bayesian updating process consumers prior beliefs influence their cumulative overall opinion of service quality e g anderson and sullivan 1993 bolton and drew 1991 boulding et al 1993 rust et al 1999 perhaps more importantly these prior beliefs also influence their perceptions of the data themselves which in turn affect their new updated overall opinion these two different influences of prior beliefs on cumulative evaluations of quality constitute the double whammy referred to in the title this double whammy effect has major managerial significance specifically we see from our model development that all activities of a firm will be perceived in light of a person s prior beliefs and that these priors will be double counted relative to our baseline model thus any marketing action taken by a firm will be perceived more positively or negatively depending on the person s prior belief about the quality level of the firm as such our model provides a formal explanation for the notion of brand equity as differential leverage in marketing activities as proposed by keller 1993

understanding the marxian notion of exploitation a summary of the so called transformation problem between marxian values and competitive prices the ending in the second part of the article the author examines the so called problem of transformation first he analyze certain contradiction faced by marx in the third volume of capital in studying the question of how to transform the cost into the price then he turns to the problem of inverse transformation and argues that marx procedure works only in a single case equal organic composition of capital the third part of the article bibliography provides an overview of the work on the analysis of marx s theory

the transformation problem solved the so called general transformation problem is introduced and it is shown that any actual economy of multiproduct firms with joint production and technical change is traceable to a corresponding labor theory of value economy of labor values and unrewarded labor as profits conversely the labor theory of value economies are transformable into the economies of prices and profits and profits by means of prices of labor can be distributed at will including the celebrated case of equalized profit rates even negative profits in some or all units all economies are therefore labor theory of value economies distorted by prices the author claims to have solved the transformation problem and that his work validates the labor theory of value in the spirit of david ricardo and karl marx but without marx s tools copyright 1989 by oxford university press

axe the tax taxes are disliked more than equivalent costs abstract tax collection is critical for the proper functioning of society however many people strongly dislike paying taxes although this distaste could be rational on economic grounds the authors show that this attitude extends beyond simply disliking the costs incurred and affects behavior in counternormative ways they demonstrate the phenomenon of tax aversion a desire to avoid taxes per se that exceeds the rational economic motivation to avoid a monetary cost across five experiments the authors provide evidence that people have a stronger preference to avoid tax related costs than to avoid equal sized or larger monetary costs unrelated to taxes tax aversion affects consumer preferences in a variety of domains including standard store purchases financial investments and job selection furthermore this tendency is most prevalent among people who identify with political parties that generally favor less taxation finally encouraging participants who identify with antitax parties to cons

long term market overreaction the effect of low priced stocks conrad and kaul 1993 report that most of de bondt and thaler s 1985 long term overreaction findings can be attributed to a combination of bid ask effects when monthly cumulative average returns cars are used and price rather than prior returns in direct tests we find little difference in test period returns whether cars or buy and hold returns are used and that price has little predictive ability in cross sectional regressions the difference in findings between this study and conrad and kaul s is primarily due to their statistical methodology they confound cross sectional patterns and aggregate time series mean reversion and introduce a survivor bias their procedures increase the influence of price at the expense of prior returns

misspecification of capital asset pricing this study documents empirical anomalies which suggest that either the simple one period capital asset pricing model capm is misspecified or that capital markets are inefficient in particular portfolios based on firm size or earnings price e p ratios experience average returns systematically different from those predicted by the capm furthermore the abnormal returns persist for at least two years this persistence reduces the likelihood that these results are being generated by a market inefficiency rather the evidence seems to indicate that the equilibrium pricing model is misspecified however the data also reveals that an e p effect does not emerge after returns are controlled for the firm size effect the firm size effect largely subsumes the e p effect thus while the e p anomaly and value anomaly exist when each variable is considered separately the two anomalies seem to be related to the same set of missing factors and these factors appear to be more closely associated with firm size than e p ratios

the turn of the year effect and tax loss selling by institutional investors prior studies attribute the turn of the year effect whereby small capitalization stocks earn unusually high returns in early january to tax loss selling by individual investors and window dressing by institutional investors my results suggest that a significant portion of the effect on turn of the year returns that prior studies attribute to window dressing is actually attributable to tax loss selling by institutional investors among small capitalization stocks i find that institutional investors with strong tax incentives and weak window dressing incentives realize significantly more losses in the fourth quarter than in the first three quarters of the calendar year and that their fourth quarter realized losses have a significant impact on turn of the year returns a one percentage point change in these institutional investors fourth quarter realized losses scaled by a firm s market capitalization results in an increase of 47 basis points in the firm s average daily return over the first three trading days of january which represents a 46 percent change for the mean firm

reexamining latitude of price acceptability and price thresholds predicting basic consumer reaction to price behavioral pricing research has shown consumers to have lower and upper price thresholds represented by an inverted u shaped price acceptability function we propose another basic reaction to price namely lower price is better represented by a decreasing acceptability function without a lower price threshold a set of variables is hypothesized to predict consumer reaction to price price consciousness price quality relation and product involvement are shown to influence the shape of the price acceptability function a procedure and model to scale price acceptability and obtain acceptability functions are introduced and applied the cumulative results suggest reliable acceptability scales along with evidence for convergent and construct validity

ethical products less strong how explicit and implicit reliance on the lay theory affects consumption behaviors many consumers implicitly associate sustainability with lower product strength this so called ethical less strong intuition elsi poses a major threat for the success of sustainable products this article explores this pervasive lay theory and examines whether it is a key barrier for sustainable consumption patterns even more importantly little is known about the underlying mechanisms that might operate differently at the implicit and explicit levels of the consumer s decision making to fill this gap three studies examine how the implicit judgments that consumers activate automatically shape their consumption behaviors in concert with their more controlled explicit beliefs about sustainable products the main study investigates the elsi s imprint on actual shopping patterns and disentangles the implicit and explicit mechanisms of the lay theory this paper also asks how this negative influence can be attenuated by examining whether the consumer s interest in sustainable consumption reduces reliance on the elsi two follow up studies confirm the robustness from different methodological and practical perspectives implications for companies and policy makers are derived

a re in statement of the labour theory of value this paper surveys and argues for an account of labor values and prices in the marxian tradition that is not subject to the usual criticisms concerning their conceptual coherence and empirical relevance this reformulation first suggested independently of each other by g dumeenil and d k foley provides a powerful account that overturns almost a century of misconceived orthodoxy in doing so it enables a theoretically coherent account of the value of labor power and an empirical account of the fundamental categories of capitalism copyright 1994 by oxford university press

can tax loss selling explain the january effect a note the january effect remains an unexplained phenomenon in financial economics that the month of january has consistently shown higher mean stock returns than other months has been documented by several researchers beginning with rozeff and kinney 19 additional research by keim 14 showed that approximately half the annual size effect is attributable to abnormal returns in january 1 roll 18 confirmed keim s results as has subsequent research such as lakonishok and smidt 15 2 the most often advanced explanation for the january effect is tax motivated transactions 3 first proposed in 1942 by wachtel 21 the tax loss selling hypothesis is frequently advocated in the popular press as a major influence on stock price behavior essentially this hypothesis states that investors seek to reduce their taxes by realizing losses at year end thereby depressing stock prices stocks return to equilibrium levels after year end providing abnormally high returns in january despite the popularity of the tax loss selling hypothesis it is difficult to justify upon serious reflection justification requires acceptance of the proposition that speculators are prevented from purchasing tax loss candidates before year end with the intention to sell them after year end no theoretical justification has been presented for the hypothesis instead using both theoretical and empirical approaches constantinides 5 argues that such action cannot explain the january effect if the market is efficient 4 his results imply that empirical studies supporting the tax loss selling hypothesis provide evidence of market inefficiency as for the empirical evidence branch 3 dyl 8 roll 18 reinganum 17 and givoly and ovadia 10 have provided support for the tax loss selling hypothesis 5 recently schultz 20 tested the tax explanation by examining the

an empirical analysis of latitude of price acceptance in consumer package goods scanner panel data analyses for sweetened and unsweetened drink categories with four brands in each support the presence of a region of price insensitivity around a reference price the analyses also suggest that consumers with higher average reference price have a wider latitude of price acceptance consumers with a higher frequency of purchase i e shorter average interpurchase time interval are found to have a narrower latitude of price acceptance because they are more aware of the range of price distributions finally consumers with a higher average brand loyalty have a wider latitude of price acceptance demonstrating greater tolerance of price fluctuations

seasonality in canadian stock prices a test of the tax loss selling hypothesis a popular hypothesis to explain the anomalous january returns of common stocks is based on the argument that there is considerable tax loss selling by investors toward the end of the year the purpose of this study is to test the tax loss selling hypothesis with data on canadian stocks although the introduction of capital gains tax in canada seems to have affected the behavior of stock returns the findings do not support the proposition that taxinduced trading is the sole cause ofthe seasonality in stock returns in canada i introduction over the past several years a number of studies have shown that the returns on common stocks in general and the stocks of small companies in particular tend to be abnormally high during the month of january keim 10 demonstrated quite clearly that a very high percentage of the abnormal positive returns gener ated on stocks with low market capitalizations occurs during january with the returns during the first five trading days of the year accounting for most of the anomalous behavior his results were recently confirmed by roll 14 who re ported that around 37 percent of the annual differences in the returns on the equally weighted and value weighted indices of nyse and amex stocks is ac counted for by what happens in the five trading days from the last trading day in december through the fourth trading day in january a popular hypothesis to explain the so called january effect in stock re turns is based on the argument that there is considerable end of the year tax lossselling by investors originally proposed by wachtel 19 it asserts that inves tors try to realize losses towards the end of the year to reduce their taxes thereby putting downward pressure on stock prices according to the hypothesis once

choice experiments are not conducted in a vacuum the effects of external price information on choice behavior abstract consumers carry a wealth of external knowledge and experience into a study that may affect choices in even the most well crafted experiment we derive a conceptual model showing how the level and variability of price perceptions outside the task at hand might affect choice behavior and we conduct an experiment to test the model by manipulating information provided to respondents in a way to alter the outside the experiment perceptions mixed logit error component models show that reference dependent models best describe the choice data and we find that consumer choice is significantly affected by the experiment manipulations the predictions of the model are borne out in the data as expected price sensitivity is generally higher for price changes above a price reference point than below also as predicted exogenously increasing external reference prices and exogenously reducing the variability in references prices both serve to increase the probability of making a purchase and reduce the probability of choosing none these results have important implications for the design and practice of choice experiments as they show that consumer choice is affected by perceptions of the level and variability of prices outside the experiment more generally the results highlight the need to understand the formation and distribution of reference prices when predicting consumer choice

seasonality in stock price mean reversion evidence from the u s and the u k the evidence of slowly mean reverting components in stock prices has been controversial the hypothesis of stock price mean reversion is tested using a regression model that yields the highest asymptotic power among a class of regression tests although the evidence that the equally weighted index of stocks exhibits meanreversion is significant in the period 1926 1988 this phenomenon is entirely concentrated in january in the post war period both the equally weighted and the value weighted indices exhibit seasonal mean reversion in january a similar phenomenon is also observed for the equally weighted index of stocks traded on the london stock exchange in a recent paper fama and french 1988 report that 25 45 percent of the variation of 3 to 5 year stock returns is predictable from past returns and pose a serious challenge to the long held view that stock prices follow a random walk in a subsequent paper poterba and summers 1988 use variance ratio tests on the stock price data from the u s and 17 other countries and conclude that the results consistently suggest the presence of transitory components in stock prices however kim nelson and startz 1988 and richardson 1989 criticize the earlier papers on statistical grounds and suggest on the basis of simulation evidence that the results of fama and french and poterba and summers do not violate the random walk model the conflicting opinions expressed in these papers clearly highlight the controversy surrounding the interpretation of the seemingly large point estimates of long term serial correlation in stock returns the economic interpretation of the estimates in these tests is difficult because they have low precision and hence more efficient tests are required

evidence on tax motivated securities trading behavior tax loss selling by investors in common stocks near the end of calendar years has been proposed as an explanation for the turn of the year effect in stock returns past analyses of this hypothesis have relied on inferential data we provide here some direct data from a compilation of over 80 000 actual common stock investment round trips by a sample of 3000 individual investors we find strong evidence of a concentration of loss taking trades late in the year and milder evidence of a concentration just prior to the dates when investments become eligible for long term tax treatment the question as to whether and in what manner the impostion of a tax on realized capital gains affects the securities trading behavior of investors who are subject to the tax has been a longstanding topic of research in the financial ecomonics literature the original attention devoted to the matter was motivated primarily by a concern about resource allocation and federal tax revenue consequences and was directed toward the phenomenon of what has been termed the lock in effect of a gains tax that issue has remained an important public policy one and continues today as part of the ongoing debate about appropriate strategies for reducing the federal budget deficit particular additional interest in the topic has emerged in recent years however because securities transactions undertaken systematically for tax reasons have also been proposed as part of the explanation for certain observed anomalies in historical common stock returns most prominently the well documented turn of the year effect our purpose here is to provide some new evidence that decisions by investors as to the timing of the realization of capital gains and losses from their common stock investments are significantly affected by tax considerations this evidence indicates that a difference in the tax rates applicable to realizations classified as short and long term influences the timing of individual investors trades and further that there is a clear tendency for trades by individuals which give rise to losses to be concentrated near the end of calendar which for them are also tax years while we cannot conclude that

if you tourist behave irrationally i ll find you abstract when departures from rational behavior can potentially be expected modeling should allow for their identification and their quantification in this regard prices in tourism might have effects that may not be as apparent as economic theory predicts this article incorporates the sticker shock formulation into the mixed logit model without imposing consistency with consumer theory to accommodate any possible positive or negative price effects by allowing the parameters of price and sticker shock term to take any value negative or positive we detect abnormal behaviors in the tourist demand not only is the negative relationship between price and demand inverted for some people but also some tourists might be willing to accept higher than expected prices the non well behaved groups shares are estimated

the role of market efficiency intuitions in consumer choice a case of compensatory inferences abstract the authors examine consumer inferences about product attributes that are unobservable at the time of the decision extant research predicts that in the absence of an explicit correlation between product attributes consumers will infer that the brand that is superior on the observable attributes is also superior on the unobservable attributes the authors propose an alternative inference strategy that makes the counterintuitive prediction that the apparently superior brand is inferior on the unobservable attributes the authors refer to these inferences as compensatory inferences and assert that they are associated with consumers intuitive theories about the competitive nature of a market in a series of four experiments the authors examine the occurrence of compensatory inferences and compare them with other inference strategies

value price and exploitation the logic of the transformation problem this paper tries to clarify the logical structure of the relationship between labor values and prices from an axiomatic perspective the famous transformation problem is interpreted as an impossibility result for a specific interpretation of value theory based on specific assumptions and definitions a comprehensive review of recent literature is provided which shows that there are various theoretically relevant and logically consistent alternative interpretations based on different assumptions and definitions

logit demand estimation under competitive pricing behavior an equilibrium framework discrete choice models of demand have typically been estimated assuming that prices are exogenous since unobservable to the researcher product attributes such as coupon availability may impact consumer utility as well as price setting by firms we treat prices as endogenous specifically prices are assumed to be the equilibrium outcomes of nash competition among manufacturers and retailers to empirically validate the assumptions we estimate logit demand systems jointly with equilibrium pricing equations for two product categories using retail scanner data and cost data on factor prices in each category we find statistical evidence of price endogeneity we also find that the estimates of the price response parameter and the brand specific constants are generally biased downward when the endogeneity of prices is ignored our framework provides explicit estimates of the value created by a brand i e the difference between consumers willingness to pay for a brand and its cost of production we develop theoretical propositions about the relationship between value creation and competitive advantage for logit demand systems and use our empirical results to illustrate how firms use alternative value creation strategies to accomplish competitive advantage

notes and comments new solution or re in statement a reply the formalisations of the labour theory of value that culminated in morishima 1973 pasinetti 1977 and steedman 1977 merely served to show that the labour theory of value had no operational significance in the explanation of observable phenomena the standard interpretation of the marxian account of labour values monetary prices and the relation between them has technology and labour input requirements determining labour values the same technology and labour input requirements plus a specification of the wage determining relative prices and a normalisation condition determining price levels but this approach leads precisely nowhere the only meaningful relation between labour values and prices is through the proposition that a positive rate of exploitation is a neces sary and sufficient condition for a positive rate of profit a proposition that can evidently be reversed and whose empirical implications are meagre in the extreme and issues of joint production and choice of technique problematise the whole approach all of this is well known

class and exploitation in general convex cone economies abstract in this paper we examine what appropriate formulations for labor exploitation are in order to explain the emergence of class and exploitation status in capitalist economies given the well known controversy pertaining to plausible formulations for labor exploitation in joint production economies we propose an axiom axiom for labor exploitation le which every appropriate formulation of labor exploitation should satisfy using this axiom the necessary and sufficient condition for plausible formulations of labor exploitation is characterized to verify class exploitation correspondence principle cecp roemer 1982 according to this cecp no longer holds in general convex cone economies if the well known formulations of labor exploitation such as morishima 1974 and roemer 1982 chapter 5 are applied therefore we propose two new definitions of labor exploitation each of which verifies cecp

sampling data for covariation assessment the effect of prior beliefs on search patterns two experiments were conducted to investigate the effect of prior beliefs on consumers information search strategies in estimating covariation relationships consumers were asked to sample four sets of products to determine whether price was related or unrelated to quality for each one those consumers who believed that price and quality are positively related elected to sample higher priced products than consumers who believed that there is little relationship between price and quality this effect was observed across products sources of prior beliefs own experience or experimenter manipulated and costs of search high search costs however also affected the average price of products picked for the search task the range of prices sampled study 1 and the number of products chosen to decide whether price and quality were related study 2 these findings are discussed in terms of the process of covariation judgment persistence and consumer information search

aggregate capital productivity in the us economy 1964 2001 in the decomposition of the us macroeconomic pre tax rate of profit as the product of profit share and capital productivity this paper considers the role of capital productivity over the period 1964 2001 the primary finding is that prior to 1982 capital productivity fell because capital deepening proceeded faster than labour productivity growth whereas from 1982 to 1997 the opposite occured if prior to 1982 the us economy was characterised by marx biased technical progress what requires explanation is why labour productivity continued to grow after 1982 in the absence of sufficient capital deepening the paper explores various hypotheses contrasts neoclassical and classical notions of technical change and investigates the robustness of its results to the productive unproductive distinction and to accounting for changes in capacity utilisation

tax loss selling and the january effect evidence from municipal bond closed end funds this paper provides direct evidence supporting the tax loss selling hypothesis as an explanation of the january effect examining turn of the year return and volume patterns for municipal bond closed end funds which are held mostly by tax sensitive individual investors we document a january effect for these funds but not for their underlying assets we provide evidence that this effect can be largely explained by tax loss selling activities at the previous year end moreover we find that funds associated with brokerage firms display more tax loss selling behavior suggesting that tax counseling plays a role among the numerous stock return anomalies probably none has generated more interest than that of the turn of the year or january effect the phenomenon in which small capitalization stocks realize unusually high returns in early january 1 the literature offers a number of hypotheses to explain this phenomenon including the tax loss selling hypothesis the window dressing hypothesis the insider trading information release hypothesis and the seasonality of the risk return relation hypothesis given existing evidence in some support for the first two hypotheses the debate continues with respect to which of these the tax loss selling of individual investors or the window dressing of

the influence of prior beliefs frequency cues and magnitude cues on consumers perceptions of comparative price data a widespread practice in grocery store advertising is to compare the advertised store s prices to a competitor s prices on multiple items an important but largely unexplored issue is how this information is processed and used in conjunction with prior beliefs to influence price perceptions in our initial studies we manipulated prior beliefs and two data based cues frequency of price advantage and magnitude of price advantage to determine their relative influence on consumer price perceptions results indicate that prior beliefs affected price perceptions but that the frequency cue exerted a dominating influence several follow up studies demonstrate the robustness of this phenomenon across a variety of presentational and instructional conditions

a unified approach to testing for serial correlation in stock returns this article provides a unified approach for testing serial correlation in stock returns the authors describe a general class of statistics that are linear combinations of consistent estimators of autocorrelations as special cases they show that this class captures many of the statistics studied in the recent finance and macroeconomics literature using this result the authors then provide a common perspective on the asymptotic distribution and power of these statistics copyright 1994 by university of chicago press

institutions and individuals at the turn of the year this article evaluates the tax loss selling hypothesis against the window dressing hypothesis as explanations for turn of the year anomalies we examine differences between securities dominated by individual investors versus those dominated by institutional investors and find that the effect is more pervasive in the former controlling for capitalization we find that in early january late december stocks with greater individual investor interest outperform underperform stocks with greater institutional investor interest these results hold for both stocks that previously appreciated in value and stocks that previously depreciated in value the results are most consistent with the tax loss selling hypothesis as an explanation for the turn of the year effect

realization and accumulation in a marxian model of the circuit of capital abstract a mathematical model of marx s circuit of capital is presented whose elements the composition of capital the rate of surplus value the rate of capitalization of surplus value and production sales and financial time lags are measurable from the accounts of capitalist firms the model is solved for exponential paths a solution with a positive rate of accumulation generally exists on paths with positive rates of accumulation and positive time lags in the recommital of realized value to production an expansion of credit is required to permit the sale of commodities a model of demand pull inflation is incorporated in the framework

correlates of price acceptability the cognitive tradeoff between price and product quality is used as a basis for hypothesizing interrelationships between two individual difference variables and two price related responses results of a correlational study support the hypothesis of an inverse relationship between price consciousness and product involvement and the hypotheses that price consciousness and product involvement have opposite implications for several price related constructs results also indicate a positive relationship between price acceptability level and the width of the latitude of price acceptance

volume and turn of the year behavior abstract this paper studies the trading characteristics of listed companies by size and year end behavior there were no transactions on nearly 25 of the days for the smallest decile even at the turn of year which is an active trading period for small companies as a result of low levels of trading and the regulations governing exchange specialists transaction prices and quotations of small listed companies may require several days to fully reflect equilibrium price changes the data confirm the existence of a year end seasonal pattern in rates of return for small companies and suggest that there may be a seasonal pattern for large companies as well

playing the turn of the year effect with index futures the turn of the year effect is a well documented stock market phenomenon in which low capitalization small stocks receive relatively higher returns than high capitalization big stocks on the last trading day of december and the first 8 trading days of january the difference in returns during this period is of the order of 10 strategies for buying and selling these small stocks may be profitable but may also incur large transaction costs that eliminate most or all of the projected gains in this paper we show a preferable way to invest in order to exploit this anomaly use a futures spread that is long in the small stocks and short in the big stocks the optimal investment which uses a modification of the capital growth criterion is large and has a substantial expected gain with minimal risk we have used this analysis successfully in managing investment accounts

fooled by heteroscedastic randomness local consistency breeds extremity in price based quality inferences in some product categories low priced brands are consistently of low quality but high priced brands can be anything from terrible to excellent in other product categories high priced brands are consistently of high quality but quality of low priced brands varies widely three experiments demonstrate that such heteroscedasticity leads to more extreme price based quality predictions this finding suggests that quality inferences do not only stem from what consumers have learned about the average level of quality at different price points through exemplar memory or rule abstraction instead quality predictions are also based on learning about the covariation between price and quality that is consumers inappropriately conflate the conditional mean of quality with the predictability of quality we discuss implications for theories of quantitative cue learning and selective information processing for pricing strategies and luxury branding and for our understanding of the emergence and persistence of erroneous beliefs and stereotypes beyond the consumer realm

seasonal and size anomalies in the japanese stock market little attention has been paid by the academic community in the united states to the japanese stock market and its structure japan has the second largest economy in the western world and the tokyo stock exchange tse is second only to the new york stock exchange nyse in terms of aggregate market values and sales volume analysis of the japanese stock market is useful given its relative importance but in addition examination of the japanese market may offer insights into controversies surrounding u s markets this study focuses on two such current controversies the january and size anomalies

notes and comments a re in statement of the labour theory of value a comment the aim of this paper is to show that the main conclusions in mohun s 1994 paper rest on an implicit assumption the composition of net output has to remain constant when this is removed some paradoxical results are obtained copyright 2000 by oxford university press

how inferences about missing attributes decrease the tendency to defer choice and increase purchase probability most purchases involve choices among options with incomplete attribute information in such situations consumers often have the option not to choose any of the alternatives to avoid uncertainty alternatively consumers can make inferences about the missing attributes these inferences may occur spontaneously or they may be strategically prompted in five studies it is shown that both explicitly and implicitly prompting consumers to make inferences about the missing attributes reduces the tendency to select the no choice option and increases the likelihood of making a purchase decision in parallel consumers who generate spontaneous inferences are also less likely to defer their choices