on multiplicity of consistent conjectures in free entry oligopoly abstract if we allow free entry into oligopoly we should take into account the fact that the number of firms is variable therefore we should include it in the arguments of the conjectural variation functions and consider a conjectural variation for the change in the number of firms we will show that for such conjectural variation functions there exist multiple consistent conjectures equilibria in free entry oligopoly

the impact of bse on the demand for beef and other meats in great britain indices of media coverage of bse are incorporated in a dynamic aids model of meat demand the publicity which bse has received is found to have had significant effects on the allocation of consumer expenditure among the meats a short run impact has been identified which accounts in large part for the discernible drop in the market share of beef in the early 1990s and more important there also appears to be a significant long run impact of bse which by the end of 1993 has reduced the beef market share by 4 5

consumer preferences before and after a food safety scare an experimental analysis of the 2010 egg recall in august 2010 more than half a billion eggs were recalled in the u s because of a salmonella outbreak this study examines the effect of the recall with a unique pair of auction experiments investigating willingness to pay wtp for conventional and organic eggs one conducted shortly before and one right after the recall with the same participants in addition to the before and after bids participants bid again after a negative information or balanced information treatment about the event accompanying surveys showed consumers had a high level of awareness of the recall but less knowledge of specific details and viewed information on egg farm conditions as very important in their wtp while there were no significant before and after differences wtp for organic eggs significantly increased in the negative information treatment and balanced information had a positive effect on consumer wtp for conventional eggs

food scandals media attention and habit persistence among desensitised meat consumers abstract consumer reactions to food scandals and their resulting economic implication are well documented however studies have typically neglected the roles that consumption habits and media usage behaviours may play in explaining household s response to food safety incidences in this study we develop a model of heterogeneous media usage intensity information impacts and decay over time to estimate household s behavioural responses to the 2011 german dioxin scandal we are specifically interested in determining the degree of heterogeneity in household s short term adjustments demand patterns versus persisting long term consumption habits of meat products chicken and pork directly affected by the incident the empirical analysis employs detailed household level retail scanner and media usage data collected by the gfk consumer scan panel for a total of 16 023 households over a period of 104 calendar weeks results of dynamic correlated random effect tobit models indicate an important role of unobserved heterogeneity in explaining household responses during the food scandal we find strong empirical evidence supporting our hypothesis that short term marginal adjustments in demand and propensity to buy affected products triggered by the negative impact of household media exposure were over compensated by habit persistence the question of how consumption patterns evolve over time in the presence of food scandals is expected to be of interest for both policy makers and the food industry the potential biases in the projection of economic impacts resulting from simplifying assumptions of household s response patterns to a proliferating numbers of food safety incidences has implications for risk management and public policy

some models for estimating technical and scale inefficiencies in data envelopment analysis in management contexts mathematical programming is usually used to evaluate a collection of possible alternative courses of action en route to selecting one which is best in this capacity mathematical programming serves as a planning aid to management data envelopment analysis reverses this role and employs mathematical programming to obtain ex post facto evaluations of the relative efficiency of management accomplishments however they may have been planned or executed mathematical programming is thereby extended for use as a tool for control and evaluation of past accomplishments as well as a tool to aid in planning future activities the ccr ratio form introduced by charnes cooper and rhodes as part of their data envelopment analysis approach comprehends both technical and scale inefficiencies via the optimal value of the ratio form as obtained directly from the data without requiring a priori specification of weights and or explicit delineation of assumed functional forms of relations between inputs and outputs a separation into technical and scale efficiencies is accomplished by the methods developed in this paper without altering the latter conditions for use of dea directly on observational data technical inefficiencies are identified with failures to achieve best possible output levels and or usage of excessive amounts of inputs methods for identifying and correcting the magnitudes of these inefficiencies as supplied in prior work are illustrated in the present paper a new separate variable is introduced which makes it possible to determine whether operations were conducted in regions of increasing constant or decreasing returns to scale in multiple input and multiple output situations the results are discussed and related not only to classical single output economics but also to more modern versions of economics which are identified with contestable market theories

analysis of attendees expenditure patterns to recurring annual events examining the joint effects of repeat attendance and travel distance abstract this study examines the changes in expenditure patterns of attendees to recurring annual events with specific emphasis on the effects of repeat attendance and travel distance this study utilizes a unique dataset accumulated from six consecutive years at a recurring annual event hosted in miami united states by using the almost ideal demand system aids we estimate price elasticities and cross price elasticities among tourist expenditure categories while jointly examining the effects from the trip characteristics of repeat attendance and travel distance from the econometric analysis we find expenditure own price and cross price elasticities that conform to the literature and confirm the strong inter relationship among the respective categories of the overall travel budget in addition our results confirm a significant difference in expenditure patterns between first time and repeat attendees as well as between long haul and short haul travelers

units of measurement and the stone index in demand system estimation the stone index typically used in estimating linear almost ideal demand systems is not invariant to changes in units of measurement which may seriously affect the approximation properties of the model a modification to the stone index or use of a regular price index instead are both desirable practices in estimating linear ai models

consumer acceptance valuation of and attitudes towards genetically modified food review and implications for food policy abstract an increasing set of evidence has been reported on how consumers could potentially react to the introduction of genetically modified food studies typically contain some empirical evidence and some theoretical explanations of the data however to date limited effort has been posed on systematically reviewing the existing evidence and its implications for policy this paper contributes to the literature by bringing together the published evidence on the behavioural frameworks and evidence on the process leading to the public acceptance of genetically modified gm food and organisms gmos in doing so we employ a set of clearly defined search tools and a limited number of comprehensive key words the study attempts to gather an understanding of the published findings on the determinants of the valuation of gm food both in terms of willingness to accept and the willing to pay a premium for non gm food trust with information sources on the safety and public health and ultimate attitudes underpinning such evidence furthermore in the light of such evidence we formulate some policy strategies to deal with public uncertainly regarding to gmos and especially gm food

a structural time series approach to modelling multiple and resurgent meat scares in italy this paper exploits a structural time series approach to model the time pattern of multiple and resurgent food scares and their direct and cross product impacts on consumer response a structural time series almost ideal demand system sts aids is embedded in a vector error correction framework to allow for dynamic effects vec sts aids italian aggregate household data on meat demand is used to assess the time varying impact of a resurgent bse crisis 1996 and 2000 and the 1999 dioxin crisis the vec sts aids model monitors the short run impacts and performs satisfactorily in terms of residuals diagnostics overcoming the major problems encountered by the customary vector error correction approach

multiple market contact between savings and loans note when firms diversify into new product or geographic markets via entry or merger they may encounter firms with whom they are already competing an important question for study is whether multiple market contact between firms affects their behavior although most traditional theory assumes that behavior of firms in a market is determined by factors in that market alone edwards 1955 advanced the mutual forbearance or linked oligopoly hypothesis starting from the premise that dominant firms in a market are likely to meet one another in other markets edwards hypothesized that a multimarket firm may not take aggressive actions against a competitor in one market if it fears retaliatory actions by that competitor in another market the crux of the hypothesis is that as the number of contact points between dominant firms of a given market increases the less competitive that market will be regardless of the market s level of concentration although edwards suggested that multimarket contact might reduce competition others including solomon 1970 who studied geographic banking markets and scott 1982 who investigated the diversification of manufacturing firms across different lines of business recognized that contact might increase competition neither edwards solomon nor scott presented a formal model however game theoretic models have been constructed that can be used to study the effects of diversification investigators of the chain store paradox e g kreps and wilson 1982 have shown that in a very simple environment rational strategies in one market cannot be influenced by behavior in a second indepen

reputation and imperfect information abstract a common observation in the informal literature of economics and elsewhere is that is multistage games players may seek early in the game to acquire a reputation for being tough or benevolent or something else but this phenomenon is not observed in some formal game theoretic analyses of finite games such as selten s finitely repeated chain store game or in the finitely repeated prisoners dilemma we reexamine selten s model adding to it a small amount of imperfect or incomplete information about players payoffs and we find that this addition is sufficient to give rise to the reputation effect that one intuitively expects

consumer welfare and gm food labeling a simulation using an adjusted kumaraswamy distribution genetically modified gm food products and their labeling have become a major policy issue with impassioned public debates we explore the impact of different labeling regimes on consumer attitudes towards gm products and consumer welfare our experimental results illustrate that these consumer attitudes do not follow the uniform distribution as has often been assumed in the literature but instead fit an adjusted kumaraswamy distribution if a uniform distribution is assumed the advantage of mandatory labeling would be exaggerated using an adjusted kumaraswamy distribution our simulation results demonstrate that voluntary labeling is superior to mandatory labeling with the higher separation cost while mandatory labeling is not necessarily better with lower separation cost therefore the governments of china and other countries with similar consumer characteristics should consider voluntary labeling for gm food while encouraging innovations that reduce the price of gm food as well as controlling the opportunistic behavior of its producers so as to enhance the advantage of voluntary labeling

effects and value of verifiable information in a controversial market evidence from lab auctions of genetically modified food food products containing genetically modified gm ingredients have entered the market over the past decade the biotech industry and environmental groups have disseminated conflicting private information about gm foods this paper develops a unique methodology for valuing independent third party information in such a setting and applies this method to consumers willingness to pay for food products that might be gm data are collected from real consumers in an auction market setting with randomized information and labeling treatments the average value of third party information per lab participant is small but the public good value across u s consumers is shown to be quite large jel c91 d12 d82

who do consumers trust for information the case of genetically modified foods to be effective groups that disseminate information need the trust of consumers when multiple groups provide conflicting information on a new product or process like gm foods consumers place different levels of trust in the various sources we present a model of the contributions of personal and social capital of a consumer and test a multinominal logit model of relative trust in five different sources of information on genetic modification using a unique data set among our findings is that an increase in consumer s education lowers the probability of trusting information from government private industry organizations consumer and environmental groups or other sources relative to information from an independent third party source and conservative religious affiliation reduces the odds of a consumer trusting private industry organization and increases the odds of trusting nobody relative to an independent third party source

food safety the media and the information market availability of information has increased rapidly over the past decades yet information on food safety is still considered problematic economists have extensively researched the effects of imperfect information however little attention has been paid to the institutional organization of the supply of information and the incentive schemes in the information market this paper analyzes how and when information is supplied by media organizations and what the implications are we first develop a theoretical framework and afterwards provide empirical evidence from media coverage of two recent food safety crises in europe

advertising information and product quality the case of butter this study examines the roles of cholesterol information and advertising in explaining consumption trends for fats and oils focusing on butter results suggest increased consumer awareness of the health effects of blood cholesterol has contributed to the secular decline in butter consumption in canada although consumers responses to negative information appear to outweigh their responses to positive information the industry advertising campaign launched in 1978 by the dairy bureau of canada has had a positive effect on butter demand

can china s meat imports be sustainable a case study of mad cow disease rising demand and constrained domestic production have challenged the meat consumption in china to fill the gap between domestic demand and supply china imports an increasing volume of meat produ

multiple goals and ownership structure effects on the performance of spanish savings banks abstract spanish savings banks sbs are financial institutions with a wide mission that includes different stakeholders goals profit maximization is only one among several goals and the widespread use of cost or profit efficiency as the only comparative performance measure may prove to be insufficient in this context to overcome this problem we build an aggregate performance index for organizations with multiple goals furthermore we show how the ownership structure of sbs influences their economic behavior in two basic ways 1 the performance level and 2 their goal priorities in particular we distinguish two types of ownership structures in our application namely organizations controlled by public administrations and those controlled by insiders i e managers and workers our results indicate that each type has different priorities and differ in their performance indexes more specifically the empirical analysis shows that insider controlled sbs favor goals related to profit maximization and the universal access to financial services and furthermore they perform better in contrast contributing to regional development becomes the most favored goal when public administrations have a majority in the bank

demand for beef and chicken products separability and structural change several studies have indicated that the recent shift from beef to poultry in consumption is not entirely caused by changes in rela tive prices or income braschler chavas dahlgran hudson and vertin moschini and meilke frank thurman most studies of structural change have focused on red meat consumption only thurman has looked closely at the poultry market and no one has considered poultry products yet the mix of chicken products marketed changed dramat ically during the last twenty years and should have influenced aggregate meat demand the share of broiler slaughter marketed as whole birds declined from 74 in 1965 to 28 in 1985 while cut up parts and processed chick en products increased from 26 to 72 whole birds are inferior goods and cut up parts and processed chicken are normal goods haidacher et al the shift in chicken prod uct mix away from whole birds should have increased the preference for total chicken in this article two related questions are ad dressed first do consumers allocate expendi tures among meats by animal origin or by product type second does disaggregation of meat into products in a meat demand model give insight into the causes of structural

pareto optimal trade in an uncertain world gmos and the precautionary principle optimal trade policy in an uncertain world is examined decision maker attitudes toward uncertainty are represented in terms of the gilboa schmeidler 1989 maximin expected utility mmeu model the central result is that in a two country general equilibrium setting with both trading partners possessing an mmeu preference structure pareto optimality can require one trading partner to absorb all uncertainty in the economy if its set of priors is a subset of its trading partners an immediate corollary is that autarky is pareto optimal if the trading partner with the more inclusive set of priors either chooses or is endowed with a nonstochastic technology

consistent linkages across markets abstract consistent conjectures are derived within and across markets in a two market duopoly when marginal costs are not constant intermarket linkages arise which can have an adverse impact on competition this is the first formal derivation of such linkages in a static model with full information

rational conjectures in the theory of oligopoly abstract the paper employs the notion of rational conjectural equilibrium to remove the arbitrary nature of conjectures about rivals reactions which characterises the traditional non cooperative theory of oligopoly a general definition of these equilibria is given and the concept is then applied to a simple duopoly model the standard models of perfect competition monopoly limit price dominant firms are shown to emerge as special cases of rational conjectural equilibria

summits riots and media attention the political economy of information on trade and globalisation supply of information has increased rapidly through the growth of commercial media and technological innovations yet economists still blame anti globalists demonstrations and public opposition to trade liberalisation on poor information this paper analyses how the structure of the media industry affects the distribution of information on trade policy and globalisation we present an empirical analysis of belgian media reporting on trade policy and globalisation over the 1999 2002 period supports these hypotheses and finds strong negative bias in media coverage moreover we find that media coverage of trade policy and globalisation is highly concentrated around summit meetings of political leaders media attention in the popular press is heavily influenced by riots and demonstrations at summits the paper points at important implications for public information on trade policy and globalisation and for economists

novelty preferences and fashion when goods are unsettling abstract there is a whole class of goods those semi durable and durable conveniences for which efficiency and functionality seem not to be the main characteristics of appeal but rather the variability they display in their design properties and in their connections with other goods these goods have not been much dealt with in economics yet these are the goods whose new variants households seem to consume in numbers to which consumers become addicted and in which fashions appear and disappear in this paper i offer a framework for understanding these phenomena without having to resort to one or another form of irrationality on the part of consumers the rationality i suggest however has to include also the cognitive and affective problems that arise when novelty appears

consumer prices the consumer price index and the cost of living after presenting major findings and recommendations the cpi commission reiterates the estimate of a 1 1 percentage point per annum upward bias it rejects the contention that the bls already makes substantial corrections for quality change that quality improvements and new products accrue only to the rich and that procedures to make more extensive quality adjustments valuations of new products and adjustments for commodity and outlet substitution are impractical the bias in the cpi can be sharply reduced as the authors detail in this paper coauthors are ellen r dulberger robert j gordon zvi griliches and dale w jorgenson

cigarette demand health scares and education in turkey the purpose of this paper is to examine the demand characteristics of cigarettes in turkey aggregate time series date for the 1960 88 period are used in estimation income and price elasticities of cigarette demand are obtained the effect of health warning is estimated to reduce cigarette consumption by about 8 since the inception of warnings in 1982 imports of cigarettes have been allowed since 1984 in addition to advertising of cigarettes in the non electronic media the effect of health warnings are found to be stronger than the opposing effect of advertising the results also suggest that public education about adverse health effects of smoking may be more effective in reducing consumption and less regressive on consumer incomes than raising the price of cigarettes

what is it about organic milk an experimental analysis auction experiments were used to examine demand relationships and willingness to pay wtp for organic rbst free no antibiotics used and conventional milk elasticities showed strong substitute and complement relationships between organic rbst free and no antibiotics varieties the sum of the latter two s premiums were not significantly different than the organic premium suggesting diminishing marginal utility for added attributes results from a two stage heteroskedastic tobit model demonstrated that wtp premiums for the varieties differ significantly by demographics and beliefs regarding the conventional version these suggest market segments for rbst free and no antibiotics versions could succeed alongside organic benefiting consumers and producers copyright 2007 oxford university press

a fresh meat almost ideal demand system incorporating negative tv press and advertising impact abstract this paper investigates fresh meat consumption in belgium during 1995 1998 through the specification of a three equation almost ideal demand system aids incorporating a media index of tv coverage and advertising expenditures as explanatory variables estimated parameters and elasticity coefficients are plausible and consistent with demand theory own price elasticities are relatively low indicating a low fresh meat demand sensitivity to price changes over this period which was dominated by mass media reports about the potential health risks associated with meat consumption the scope of the paper extends beyond the estimation of elasticity coefficients and includes the specification of a media index and simulations that provide insights into the impact of negative press relative to advertising efforts specifically the impact of television publicity is shown to have been particularly negative on beef veal expenditures in favour of pork mixture this finding corroborates expectations since mass media issues mainly pertained to bse mad cow disease and hormone residues during the investigated period with relatively little effort being undertaken and with its current strategy fresh meat advertising is found to have only a minor impact compared with negative press

a split sample revealed and stated preference demand model to examine homogenous subgroup consumer behavior responses to information and food safety technology treatments the combination and joint estimation of revealed and stated preference rp sp data approach to examining consumer preferences to relevant policy based measures typically fail to account for heterogeneity in the data by considering behavior of the average individual however in policy based analyses where the research is often driven by understanding how different individuals react to different or similar scenarios a preferred approach would be to analyze preferences of homogenous population subgroups we accomplish this by developing a split sample rp sp analysis that examines whether homogenous subgroups of the population based on individual health and behavioral characteristics respond differently to health risk information and new food safety technology the ongoing efforts by the us food and drug administration fda to reduce illness and death associated with consuming raw gulf of mexico oysters provide an ideal platform for the analysis as the health risks only relate to a very specific consumer subgroup results from split sample demand models indicate that educational information treatments cause vulnerable at risk consumers to reduce their oyster demand implying that a more structured approach to disseminating the brochures to the at risk population could have the desired result of reducing annual illness levels also findings across all subgroups provide strong empirical evidence that the new fda policy requiring processing technology to be used in oyster production will have a detrimental effect on the oyster industry

news and volatility of food prices financial markets exhibit an asymmetric news effect with unexpected low prices generating more price volatility than news of high prices the present study examines us food markets for such asymmetric news effects analysis of 25 years of monthly data for 45 retail food items shows that price news destabilizes about a third of the markets with unexpected price increases more destabilizing

consistent conjecture and free entry oligopoly a general analysis abstract this paper shows that in an oligopoly model that allows free entry only competitive conjecture is consistent for any demand and cost functions and for any conjectural variation function that depends on the firm s own output and the outputs of the other firms

conjectures rationality and duopoly theory abstract the main results of this paper are twofold first we show that any sustainable pair of production programs can be obtained as a locally rational conjectural equilibrium for appropriately chosen linear conjectural functions for the duopolists then we show that constant conjectural variations duopoly models could in a sense be made rational if the value of the conjectural variation is considered not as a constant but rather as a specific value taken at the equilibrium

food safety issues and the bse scare some lessons from the french case abstract the bovine spongiform encephalopathy bse scare began after the uk minister of health admitted a possible link between the bse prion and the creutzfeldt jakob disease contaminating humans the paper outlines a survey conducted in the area of rennes to analyse consumer behaviour after the bse crisis a contingent scenario was proposed to determine the willingness to pay wtp for beef which should not transmit cjd using a mix of the referendum method and the bidding process the variables considered as main determinants of the wtp have been selected the study concludes with the interests and limits of the method used and the implications of the bse scare on food policy in fact the mad cow disease raises the problem of loss of public confidence and the means to restore it consumers are waiting for a greater transparency or traceability and according to the survey would accept to pay for it

food scare crises and developing countries the impact of avian influenza on vertical price transmission in the egyptian poultry sector abstract a bivariate smooth transition vector error correction model is applied to monthly poultry price data to analyze the effects that avian influenza has had on price transmission along the egyptian poultry marketing chain in order to reflect consumer awareness of the crisis an avian influenza food scare information index is developed and used within the model as a transition variable our results suggest that price adjustments to deviations from the market equilibrium parity depend on the magnitude of the avian influenza crisis further these adjustments are found to have very different implications for market equilibrium during the crisis retailers use their market power to increase marketing margins in contrast wholesaler margins are found to decline results also suggest that food safety information indices contribute to understanding the economic effects of food scare crises in developing countries

does food safety information impact u s meat demand a theoretical model of consumer response to publicized food safety information on meat demand is developed with an empirical application to u s meat consumption evidence is found for the existence of pre committed levels of consumption seasonal factors time trends and contemporaneous own and cross commodity food safety concerns the average demand response to food safety concerns is small especially in comparison to price effects and to previous estimates of health related issues this small average effect masks periods of significantly larger responses corresponding with prominent food safety events but these larger impacts are short lived with no apparent food safety lagged effects on food safety concerns in the united states have dramatically increased in the past decade with regard to incidences of contaminated meat products concerns have arisen because contaminated meat products can result in serious risk to the well being and health of consumers contamination comes from a myriad of sources including but not limited to outbreaks of listeria monocytogenes escherichia coli e coli and salmonella centers for disease control and prevention food safety problems are not isolated to the united states as other unsafe contaminates in meats have emerged across the world including highly publicized outbreaks of bovine spongiform encephalopathy bse in europe the potential impacts of publicized food safety events on consumer s demand for meat products in the united states include own effects on the demand for the contaminated meat involved as well as cross effects impacting the demand for other meats the objective of this article is to investigate whether publicized food safety concerns surrounding beef pork and poultry chicken and turkey have impacted meat consumption food safety indices are constructed separately for beef pork and poultry

saving money vs investing money do energy ratings influence consumer demand for energy efficient goods abstract the article analyses economic barriers leading to the energy efficiency gap in the market for energy using products by observing several million transactions in the uk over two years the empirical exercise estimates aids models for refrigerators washing machines tvs and light bulbs results indicate that market barriers are crucial in the demand for energy efficient options and consumer response to changes in appliance prices total expenditures and energy prices depends on the possibility of behavioural adjustments in consumption in contrast with the induced innovation hypothesis current electricity prices can fail to induce innovation because of their short term impact on disposable income while consumers invest in energy efficiency when expecting electricity prices to rise in the future

optimal tariffs in consistent conjectural variations equilibrium abstract this paper analyzes the determination of the optimal tariff under the assumption of consistent conjectural variations ccv a general characterization of the ccv equilibrium is given we show that i there are in general a multiplicity of each equilibria and ii under certain restrictions the cournot equilibrium which is based on the assumption of no retaliation can also be a ccv equilibrium by contrast free trade is never a ccv equilibrium finally the ccv equilibrium is solved explicitly in a simple example

media coverage of biotech foods and influence on consumer choice in the last two decades few issues in the global agrifood sector have attracted as much media attention as biotechnology thousands of brief and in depth articles have been written focusing on diverse issues from the spectacle of ecological disasters to the promise of feeding a burgeoning world population among those accounts of alleged health risks could influence consumer perceptions and behavior directly indeed reporters across the globe have continued to draw parallels between biotechnology and other known food hazards such as mad cow disease and chemical contaminants such as dioxin they have also continued to raise the possibility of unknown long term health effects essentially framing biotechnology as a food safety risk marks and kalaitzandonakes marks et al there is evidence that this broad and often negative media coverage of biotechnology has raised public awareness influenced public perceptions and altered the public agenda on biotech foods in europe and elsewhere bauer durant bauer and gaskell this is not surprising as over 90 of consumers receive information about agrifood biotechnology primarily through the popular press and television hoban and kendall despite the apparent influence of media coverage on public perceptions however the question of whether such coverage has also affected consumer purchasing behavior has not been answered the answer to this question is broadly relevant with less than 2 of the u s population now engaged in agricultural production the average food consumer has diminishing personal experience and knowledge of agriculture

gmo standards endogenous policy and the market for information the paper develops a composite index of gmo standards restrictiveness for 60 countries assigning objective scores to six different regulatory dimensions using this index and its components we empirically investigate the political and economic determinants of gmo regulations for 55 countries controlling for spatial autocorrelation results show that many of the determinants highlighted in the theoretical literature such as the structure of the agricultural sector and the institutional environment are important determinants of the restrictiveness of the gmo regulation as a key result there emerges a prominent role of the market for information showing that the structure of domestic mass media public vs private is an important driver of gmo standards

political economy of the media and consumer perceptions of biotechnology although households are flooded with information through dozens of tv channels plenty of newspapers journals and radio the public is said to be poorly informed on many important issues for example european consumers oppose genetically modified gm foods despite scientists and official institutions claiming those products are safe these reactions are blamed on consumers being poorly informed there is an extensive literature on imperfect information see akerlof stiglitz an important implicit assumption in this literature is that such information problems may be solved by providing more information the problem is that information provision is assumed to be neutral however in reality most information is not provided by institutions whose objective is to foster the public good but by organizations who have an internal incentive to select certain information and certain forms of information over other information it is either provided by private sources with their own profitmaximizing objectives or by public sources that may have the formal goal of providing objective information but administrators and governments may have incentives to bias the information this issue is particularly relevant for consumers risk perceptions about gm foods over 90 of consumers receive information about food and biotechnology primarily through the popular press and television hoban and kendall extensive media coverage of possible risks can lead to decreased demand for example johnson shows how media coverage of product contamination by

relying on the information of interested parties we investigate the conventional wisdom that competition among interested parties attempting to influence a decisionmaker by providing verifiable information elicits all relevant information we find that if the decisionmaker is strategically sophisticated and well informed about the relevant variables and about the preferences of the interested party or parties competition may be unnecessary to achieve this result if the decisionmaker is unsophisticated or not well informed competition is not generally sufficient if the interested parties interests are sufficiently opposed however or if the decisionmaker is seeking to advance the parties welfare then competition can reduce or even eliminate the decisionmaker s need for prior knowledge about the relevant variables and for strategic sophistication in other settings only the combination of competition among information providers and a sophisticated skepticism is sufficient to allow effective decisionmaking

an interactive approach to improve estimates of value efficiency in data envelopment analysis abstract management science 45 1 1999 103 115 presents an approach for incorporating preference information in data envelopment analysis dea in their paper they develop value efficiency an extension of the concept of efficiency in dea the paper presented an approach to estimate lower bounds for the value efficiency scores efficiency measures that reflect the decision maker s dm s preferences in this paper we develop some related concepts and present two refinements 1 some bounds on the value efficiency scores that may be obtained without any dm involvement and 2 a way of precisely measuring value efficiency scores with minimal dm involvement the approach can also be used to explore whether certain underlying assumptions are met

the impact of food scares on price adjustment in the uk beef market abstract this paper considers the impact of food scares predominately concerns relating to bse on uk beef prices at retail wholesale and producer levels over the 1990s acknowledging the co movement that exists between prices in the meat marketing chain we use a co integrating framework the results of which show the importance of publicity regarding the safety of food in the transmission of beef prices in the uk the food publicity index that we use has a marked negative impact on the prices at all levels a result that is consistent with the effect of an inward shift in the demand function moreover the extent of price decline varies between the marketing stages entailing that the price spreads rise in response to an increase in the negative publicity about food safety while not a formal test of market power these observations are consistent with recent theoretical results demonstrating that market power exacerbates price changes in the upstream sectors for a given change in the retail demand function the implication of these varying price changes is that the food safety concerns also cause the marketing margins between the stages to widen the uk s competition commission has recently investigated the abuse of market power in the food sector inspired largely by this specific issue