spectrum auction designs and revenue variations this study examines a sample of 93 national 3g spectrum auctions for the period 2000 2011 to identify the sources of substantial revenue variations an implied reduced form econometric model that recognises the censored nature of the sample relates per capita winning bid per mhz per million populations values to regulator determined auction design characteristics auction competitiveness mobile wireless market conditions and spectrum package attributes identified from tender documents the analysis reveals that among other factors all auction design characteristics independently impact on realized 3g spectrum auction revenues

strengthening the influence of advertised reference prices through information priming the use of advertised reference price promotions such as regularly 119 99 sale price 39 99 is ubiquitous in the marketplace thirty years of research supports the conclusion that advertised reference prices e g 119 99 exert an influence on consumers responses to offer prices e g 39 99 via their assimilative influence on consumers internal reference prices the present research provides an enriched account of this assimilation process specifically three studies show that increasing the overlap in information made accessible by the advertised reference price and information made accessible by the offer price increases the influence of the information primed by the advertised reference price on the construction of the internal reference price consequently the offer price is considered more attractive the identification of this process provides insight into additional variables that moderate the influence of advertised reference prices on downstream deal evaluations implications for theory practice and public policy are discussed

integration of discrepant sales forecasts the influence of plausibility inferences based on an evoked range abstract the authors hypothesize that when managers integrate two projections to form a sales estimate they evoke and use a sales range to judge inappropriately the plausibility of each projection this judged plausibility as well as the margin of error based on the market research company s typical accuracy is used to assign weights to each projection five experiments find strong evidence for this process and demonstrate a resulting bias

combining buy in penalties with commissions at auction houses most auction sellers consign property to auction houses rather than holding the auction themselves in addition to charging sellers a commission on property that sells in the auction many auction houses also specify buy in penalties in auction contracts this is an amount the seller must pay the auction house if the property fails to sell at auction an important managerial question for auction houses is whether and when buy in penalties can increase revenues of the auction house seller or both and what combinations of commission and buy in penalty to use we show that auctions which combine buy in penalties with lower commissions pareto dominate auctions that use only commissions this strategy motivates the seller to set a lower reserve which creates a surplus in auction revenues that can go to one or both parties this strategy is pareto dominant even if the auction house and the seller are uncertain about the number of bidders at the auction or the auction house is uncertain about the seller s own valuation for the property at the time the buy in penalty commission and reserve are contractually set we also discuss the incentive issues raised by this strategy

ethiopia food for work or food for relief abstract this article examines the aims context and experience of food aid projects in ethiopia the major focus is a case study of an ethiopian food for work project the largest in sub saharan africa and favourable conclusions are drawn factors are identified which have made for this apparent success since one factor is local food shortage consideration is also given to the proposition that the concept of relief aid needs a wider definition than heretofore

contextual influences on perceptions of merchant supplied reference prices two contextual variables that have theoretical roots in information processing attribution and social judgment theories were manipulated along with three levels of merchant supplied reference price in a 2 2 3 analysis of variance design results support the hypothesized effects of consistency and distinctiveness as contextual variables that influence internal price standards and purchase evaluations the three price levels resulted in a curvilinear pattern of results for the purchase evaluation and source credibility dependent variables as hypothesized however contrary to assimilation contrast theory the impact of the merchant supplied reference price on estimates of normal and fair prices was monotonic

stimulus context and the formation of consumer ideals when a choice set consists of a distribution of alternatives with correlated benefits and costs consumers often exhibit single peaked preferences they prefer an alternative having moderate costs and benefits theories disagree about how adding additional lower benefit lower cost or higher benefit higher cost alternatives to this choice set will affect relative preferences for the initial set of alternatives prototype theory predicts that adding alternatives should produce assimilation whereas multiattribute range frequency theory predicts that it creates contrast we reconcile these two theories by assuming that single peaked preferences reflect a composition of underlying benefit and cost valuations moreover we claim that the correlational structure of the benefit and cost dimensions in the contextual stimuli determines whether these stimuli will exert an assimilation or contrast effect we show that when benefits and costs are correlated uncorrelated adding alternatives that extend the range of offerings produces assimilation contrast for preference judgments we propose a cost benefit trade off model that incorporates elements of single peaked preference theory and range frequency theory to explain the complex fashion in which contextual stimuli affect consumer ideals

consumer normal price estimation market versus personal standards in reference price models internal reference price is typically estimated from actual market prices given the generally poor price knowledge consumers have exhibited in prior research the question is whether it is reasonable to use actual market prices to estimate consumers internal reference price standards the initial answer provided in this research surprisingly is yes although internal reference prices are measurable and do affect consumer price perception the gains in measuring and using those standards in predicting brand choice for frequently purchased products may not be worth the costs reasons why the surrogate price measure may work and implications for the measurement of internal reference price standards are considered

bidding frenzy speed of competitor reaction and willingness to pay in auctions this research examines how the intensity of the dynamic competitive interaction with other bidders in ascending auctions influences consumers willingness to pay wtp for auctioned products it focuses on one important aspect of this interaction the speed of competitor reaction the key hypothesis is that having one s own bids reciprocated by competing bidders more quickly increases one s wtp in an auction evidence from five experiments demonstrates this effect and pinpoints the essential aspects of the psychological mechanism that underlies it in particular the effect of speed of competitor reaction on bidding behavior 1 is serially mediated by the perception that the auction is more intensely competitive and by a greater desire to win 2 is distinct from the effects of time pressure and of the auction s duration or overall rate of progression 3 is not driven by inferences about the auctioned product s market value 4 is not qualified by the number of competing bidders nor due to any inferences about the latter and 5 hinges on direct competitive interaction with other human bidders

learning from mixed feedback anticipation of the future reduces appreciation of the present consumers can evaluate their past choices by comparing their obtained outcome to other possible outcomes we demonstrate that how people process this comparative feedback depends on whether they use it to prepare for future decisions in particular the anticipation of similar future choices increases consumers sensitivity to comparisons with better alternatives and reduces their liking of the chosen option our findings indicate that forward looking consumers selectively test the hypothesis that their current choice can be improved on and as a result disproportionately attend to the unfavorable comparisons and fail to appreciate the value of their current choice

when rational sellers face nonrational buyers evidence from herding on ebay people often observe others decisions before deciding themselves using ebay data for dvd auctions we explore the consequences of neglecting nonsalient information when making such inferences we show that bidders herd into auctions with more existing bids even if these are a signal of no longer available lower starting prices rather than of higher quality bidders bidding a given dollar amount are less likely to win low starting price auctions and pay more for them when they do win experienced bidders are less likely to bid on low starting price auctions remarkably the seller side of the market is in equilibrium because expected revenues are nearly identical for high and low starting prices

default risk yield spreads and time to maturity this paper extends the default model of yield spreads for bonds by showing that in gen eral they are a complex function of maturity and in particular are not always monotoni cally increasing contrary to what one traditional view suggests our results may help explain the apparently conflicting empirical results found in the literature

optimal bidding in auctions from a game theory perspective abstract the game theoretic perspective in auction bidding has provided a powerful normative framework for the analysis of auctions and it has generated an impressive volume of research contributions tracing this research we review key recent advances which have greatly expanded our understanding of the operation of auctions and produced a more accurate analysis of mechanism design and optimal bidding we follow various experimental studies which have shown that the predictive power of auction theory remains in many cases limited for this reason we concentrate on research themes which enhance the applicability of auction theory leading to more realistic descriptions of bidding behaviors we identify important innovations which expand the environment of auction bidding and carry us beyond rational decision making we conclude providing directions of future research and discussing their implications

the monetization of project and emergency food aid project level efficiency first abstract the level of food aid monetization has increased sharply particularly in africa and especially to cover the transport and non food costs of food aid projects monetization to raise cash is not wrong in principle and increases the efficiency of cash starved projects however the focus on generating counterpart funds has obscured a more important debate about whether and when food is more appropriate than cash at the project level there can be no general predisposition to use either food or cash but guidelines must be applied in each case

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

consumer evaluations of multiple versus single price change this article examines how consumer evaluations of multiple price changes differ from the evaluation of a single price change of an equal amount consistent with r thaler s theory about segregation versus integration of gains and losses we find that multiple price decreases are evaluated more favorably than a single price decrease and multiple price increases are evaluated more unfavorably than a single price increase however these effects are moderated by consumer price uncertainty and relative magnitude of the prices being evaluated because price uncertain consumers consider higher ranges of prices acceptable they are less unfavorable to multiple price increases and more favorable to multiple price decreases than certain consumers moreover when the magnitude of one price is very small relative to other prices consumers preference for multiple price decreases relative to a single price decrease is reduced however this effect is not found when there are price increases

nonstandard bidder behavior in real world auctions empirical work on auctions has found that bidders deviate from standard behavior in important ways we investigate a range of these behaviors including nonrational herding auction fever quasi endowment effect and escalation of commitment our innovations are to more completely control for unobservables by using new data from a field experiment on ebay and by accounting for censoring of bids below the starting price consistent with standard auction theory and in contrast to the predictions of the nonstandard behaviors we find that auction starting price has no effect on bidder willingness to pay in a private values setting we conclude that there is little evidence that these nonstandard behaviors are important in the field

the formation of expected future price a reference price for forward looking consumers among numerous possible reference prices expected future price is important a consumer s expectation of the future price of a brand plays a crucial role in the decision to buy now or later failure to characterize reference price as a forward looking concept a common practice in the reference pricing literature violates premises of neoclassical economic theory and leads to questionable modeling applications explicit measures of future price expectations were obtained and used to test various models of expectations formation providing insight into the effect of expected future price on consumers responses to price promotions and brand choice decisions

the impact of default risk on the prices of options and other derivative securities abstract this paper presents a model for valuing derivative securities when there is default risk the holder of a security is assumed to recover a proportion of its no default value in the event of a default by the counterparty both the probability of default and the size of the proportional recovery are random the paper shows how data on bonds issued by the counterparty can be used to provide information about model parameters

does food aid have disincentive effects on local production a general equilibrium perspective on food aid in ethiopia this paper examined impacts of food aid on domestic food production employing a computable general equilibrium modelling technique and using data from ethiopia the simulation experiments have shown that food aid has unambiguous disincentive effects on domestic food production the removal of food aid caused a modest increase in food prices but this stimulated food production employment and income generation effects of the latter outweighed the adverse effect of the former consequently the removal of food aid led to improvements in aggregate household welfare contrary to some concerns in the food aid literature that any reduction in food aid would hurt the poor the simulation experiments suggested that actually poor rural households and urban wage earners are the ones who benefit most in absence of food aid but entrepreneurs are more likely to encounter a marginal welfare decline we have distinguished between in kind food aid and cash equivalent transfers in order to isolate the disincentives that in kind transfers would make to domestic production from those that are related to household purchasing power problem the expansionary effect of removing food aid becomes significantly larger when it is accompanied by cash equivalent payments because the latter would provide demand side stimulus to agriculture while the removal of in kind transfers would stimulate supply side with the supply and demand side effects reinforcing each other in our modelling framework the only adverse effect would be a modest deterioration in the external current account because the expansionary effects of food aid would cause imports to rise but exports to fall

how auctions work for wine and art interview auctioneers and even to buy a little wine in the meantime i have also had the opportunity with john abowd 1988 to observe and collect data on the auction sale of impressionist and contemporary paintings this paper reports on some of the empirical regularities that i and others have observed in the actual operation of the auction markets for these items in view of the rich and diverse array of theoretical literature on auctions it seems high time economists began to spell out precisely what facts it is meant to explain 2

taxes default risk and yield spreads this paper develops a model of bond prices and yield spreads that incorporates the effect of both taxes and differences in default probabilities the tax loss consequences of default are recognized traditionally tax free municipal bond yields have been viewed as linearly related to taxable yields with a slope coefficient equal to one minus the tax rate and the intercept representing differences in default risk while our model supports the linearity assumption it implies that the slope and intercept are both functions of both the break even tax rate and the default probability ies clientele effects among both municipal and taxable bonds are demonstrated finally the implied marginal tax rates and the implied default probabilities are estimated for different categories of municipal bonds students of financial markets cannot help but be impressed by the number of new financial instruments that have been introduced successfully in recent years the fixed income market has been particularly innovative as bonds carrying a whole host of specific features have been successfully marketed bonds with small or zero coupons variable coupon rates or detachable warrants are three examples from among an expanding list of such features not surprisingly there has developed a large and expanding literature attempting to explain the rate spreads between different fixed income securities this literature has evolved much as one would expect early empirical work was in general not well founded in theory and was not based on an underlying expected return price model later empirical research has tended to be more careful in its specification of factors affecting yield spreads and as a consequence better founded in valuation

municipal bond pricing and the new york city fiscal crisis this paper s findings suggests that the new york city fiscal crisis by itself did not lead to a fundamental change in risk perceptions of investors resulting in higher interest rates in the municipal bond market the monthly prediction errors generated by time series tests were relatively small and none were statistically significant only the signs on the prediction errors for june july and august were consistent with a new york city effect thus if the new york city default had an impact on aggregate interest rates it was at most small and of short duration a great deal of controversy has arisen in recent years over the impact of the new york city default upon the municipal bond market during 1975 municipal borrowing costs rose to historically high levels with most issues carrying their highest interest cost during the summer of 1975 it was during this period that new york city experienced the worst of its 15 year history of financial problems while most observers argue that the problems of new york city represent a special case of fiscal mismanagement many conclude that the high market rates of interest in the municipal bond market were caused by the new york city default research by forbes and peterson 3 and gramlich 5 supports the latter contention in addition others contend that the impact of the default was not just temporary but was felt long after 1975 8 these contentions if true have significant policy implications not only do they suggest that all municipalities suffered immediate as well as long term higher interest cost due to the fiscal irresponsibility of new york city but they are important arguments for the provision of federal aid to prevent the failures of other large municipalities or corporate entities 1 the purpose of this paper is to examine whether the new york city default by itself caused risk perceptions of investors to change resulting in higher interest rates to other municipal borrowers the hypothesis is tested by applying a random coefficients model to aggregate time series interest rate data the major finding of the study is that there is little evidence consistent with the hypothesis that the new york city crisis had a fundamental or long lasting impact on municipal borrowing costs this paper is organized as follows section i describes how the new york city fiscal crisis may have raised municipal borrowing costs

auctions with a buy price the case of reference dependent preferences abstract in an auction with a buy price the seller provides bidders with an option to end the auction early by accepting a transaction at a posted price this paper develops a model of an auction with a buy price in which bidders use the auction s reserve price and buy price to formulate a reference price the model both explains why a revenue maximizing seller would want to augment her auction with a buy price and demonstrates that the seller sets a higher reserve price when she can affect the bidders reference price through the auction s reserve price and buy price than when she can affect the bidders reference price through the auction s reserve price only the comparative statics properties of bidding behavior are in sharp contrast to equilibrium behavior in other models where the existence and size of the auction s buy price have no effect on bidding behavior

on optimal reservation prices in auctions the theory of auction design examines how various factors affect the outcome of an auction most of the existing literature focuses on how varying the amount of information available to each bidder affects the bid taker s expected revenue when all other factors remain constant this paper studies how the bid taker s expected revenue varies with changes in the auction format when such changes affect the number of bidders and in turn the bidders maximum value for the object being sold specifically we examine how varying the reservation price or screening level affects the bid taker s expected revenue though its effect on the number of bidders for two simple examples the losses associated with a reduced number of bidders outweighs any benefits that nontrivial reservation prices might have had in models with an exogonously set number of bidders

selecting optimal selling format of a product in b2c online auctions with boundedly rational customers abstract the advancement of internet technology has enabled new formats for selling products in the b2c online auctions at present on the major online auction sites there exist three popular selling formats namely the posted price pure auction and buy price auction formats it is an important decision problem for a firm to select the most profitable format to sell its products through the internet the customer behavior is of course a crucial element of the decision process to the best of our knowledge most models available today assume that customers are perfectly rational to better understand the decision process in this paper we incorporate the concept of bounded rationality into consideration we first present a behavior choice function to characterize the behavior of the customers with bounded rationality then corresponding to each selling format we construct a revenue model based on the bounded rationality for analysis finally we conduct some elaborate computational experiments to investigate the performance of each revenue model for developing new managerial insights our computational results clearly demonstrate how the bounded rationality of customer behavior affects the choice of a preferable selling format for a b2c firm in an online auction

anchoring in payment evaluating a judgmental heuristic in field experimental settings abstractanchoring the biasing of estimates toward a previously considered value is a long standing and oft studied phenomenon in consumer research however most anchoring work has been in the lab and the results from field work have been mixed here the authors use real transactions from an empirically investigated and commercially employed pricing scheme pay what you want to better understand how anchors influence payments sixteen field studies n 21 997 and four hypothetical studies n 3 174 reveal four main points 1 although anchoring replicates both with and without financial consequences studies 1 2 the percentile rank gap between anchors in the distribution of payments is a much stronger predictor of anchoring emerging than merely the absolute gap between the anchors on a number line studies 3 5 2 low anchors influence payments more than high anchors studies 6a b 3 findings from the literature that should enhance anchoring effects anchor precision descriptive and inj

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

term structure effects on default risk premia and the relationship of default risky tax exempt yields to risk free taxable yields a note abstract the behavior of the default risk premium on bonds has caught the attention of many researchers some researchers have analyzed how default risk premia may vary with maturity it has been suggested that default risk premia are independent of maturity however recent research by rodriguez 1988 shows this to not hold for nonpar taxable bonds this research shows that the shape of the underlying term structure affects default risk premia for even par bonds in a systematic way furthermore the maturity dependent variation in equilibrium tax rates has a strong impact upon default risk premia behavior where equilibrium tax rates are derived from comparisons of taxable and tax exempt bonds the inclusion of the shape of the underlying term structure also has very important implications for the relation between taxexempt yields and taxable yields the slope and intercept terms of the relation between taxexempt and taxable yields are clearly dependent upon maturity a fact which has not been recognized before

was the tax exempt bond market inefficient or were future expected tax rates negative this paper shows that the sharp narrowing with maturity of the spread between taxable and tax exempt yields leaves room for tax arbitrage at times tax exempt forward rates have exceeded taxable forward rates at such times only expectations of higher taxes on treasury than on municipal bonds would eliminate profit opportunities the authors develop the idea of forward tax rates and compute forward tax rates for 1955 through 1984 they also outline tax arbitrage mechanisms involving private forward sale of long municipal bonds or the use of the municipal bond futures contract and show the potential profits the municipal yield curve has been upward sloping for the entire postwar period even at times when taxable yield curves were humped or downward sloping thus the spread in yields between taxable and tax free bonds narrows dramatically with increasing maturity this paper focuses on the term structure of the spread in yields between taxable and tax exempt bonds we show that the sharp narrowing of the spread with maturity leaves room for some apparently unexploited tax arbitrage at times the narrowing has been so dramatic that taxexempt forward rates have exceeded taxable forward rates in other words only expectations of negative future tax rates on treasury interest or the expectations of a reversal in the relative taxability of treasury and municipal bonds would eliminate profit opportunities this situation makes little sense if the markets are well arbitraged three theories of the relationship between the yields on taxable and taxexempt bonds have attracted attention 2 miller 8 asserts that the corporate tax rate determines the yield spread between taxable and tax exempt debt in 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

the effect of discount frequency and depth on consumer price judgments the intensity of price discounting by retailers and manufacturers raises important questions about consumer price judgments in the extreme discounting can take the form of frequent but shallow discounts or deep but infrequent discounts the research reported here explores the effects of these strategies on consumer estimation of price levels for competing stores and brands in an initial experiment in which subjects made brand choices over time a depth effect was observed that contrasted with the frequency effect found in previous research subsequent experiments identified the conditions under which depth vs frequency characteristics of price data dominate consumers price estimation judgments frequency information is more influential when sets of interstore or interbrand comparative prices exhibit complex and overlapping distributions hence creating processing difficulty in contrast a depth bias occurs when prices have a simpler dichotomous distribution these results place pragmatically meaningful limitations on the influence of frequency information and illustrate the importance of context in determining consumer price judgments in a promotional environment

the changing role of commercial banks in the municipal securities market the tax treatment of commercial banks as investors in municipal securities changed dramatically with the loss of interest expense deductibility for municipal carrying costs under the tax reform act of 1986 competing theories of relative yield determination suggest that the lost deductions and recent reductions in corporate and personal tax rates should have different effects on the ratio of municipal to taxable yields this study examines the empirical implications of these tax changes using time series for the period 1966 1992 results suggest that the yield ratio varied inversely with relative bank purchases of municipals through mid year 1986 after 1986 however increased bank municipal purchases no longer directly lowered relative municipal yields the yield ratio also varied inversely with changes in personal tax rates throughout the sample period and increased after 1986 when banks lost 100 percent of their interest deduction for municipal carrying costs changes in corporate tax rates apparently play little role in shaping relative yields copyright 1995 by ohio state university press

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

a consumer perspective on price matching refund policies effect on price perceptions and search behavior although price matching refund policies are common in many retail environments the impact of such policies on consumers has largely been ignored this article reports the results of three studies that examine price matching policies from a consumer perspective study 1 shows that consumers perceive price matching policies as signals of low store prices and that the presence of a refund increases the likelihood of discontinuing price search contrary to the predictions based on signaling theory in information economics studies 2 and 3 show that when search costs are low the number of stores searched increases in the presence versus absence of a price matching policy when search costs are high consumers appear to accept the price matching signal at face value and search less in the presence of a refund the article concludes by discussing the theoretical implications of the findings and suggesting directions for future research

municipal debt and marginal tax rates is there a tax premium in asset prices we study the marginal tax rate incorporated into short term municipal rates using municipal swap market data using an affine model we identify the marginal tax rate and the credit liquidity spread in 1 week tax exempt rates as well as their associated risk premia the marginal tax rate averages 38 0 and is related to stock bond and commodity returns the tax risk premium is negative consistent with the strong countercyclical nature of after tax fixed income cash flows these results demonstrate that tax risk is a systematic asset pricing factor and help resolve the muni bond puzzle

a future food aid regime implications of final act of the uruguay round conclusion of the uruguay round the signing and ratification of the final act and the setting up of the world trade organisation wto provide a major opportunity for establishing a new food aid regime within a liberalising global economy the uruguay round will be only one of a number of factors affecting world food production trade prices and aid and the final act falls far short of the full liberalisation of trade originally envisaged other factors which were not addressed directly during the uruguay round negotiations including the emergence of regional trading blocks in europe north america and south east asia the underlying forces of technological change that will continue to increase food production and rising population growth and commercial demand in developing countries as incomes increase are likely to have significant effects on food supply demand and price relationships but will the uruguay round provide the swing factor with other forces more or less cancelling each other out page 1994 furthermore gains brought about by the uruguay round in the agricultural sector may be offset by losses in other sectors and vice versa islam and valdes 1990 nevertheless a major change has been brought about by the uruguay round in the way food markets are viewed in the rules under which countries must operate their national food policies and the opportunities for effective use of food aid

the effect of semantic cues on consumer perceptions of reference price ads this article examines the differential effects of two types of semantic cues 1 cues connoting that an advertised price discount exhibits low consistency over time and 2 cues connoting that an advertised discount is highly distinctive vis a vis competitors results suggest that for manipulations of external reference prices with offering price held constant semantic cues that connote high distinctiveness are more effective in influencing consumers price related evaluations when the external reference price is otherwise implausibly high than are semantic cues that connote low consistency for manipulations of offering prices with external reference price held constant however semantic cues connoting high distinctiveness exert more relative influence on price related cognitions when offering prices are high

enhancing nutrition a new tool for ex ante comparison of commodity based vouchers and food transfers summary this article presents a new analytical tool for ex ante comparison of the cost effectiveness of two transfer modalities in pursuing specific nutritional objectives it does so by introducing a metric to score the nutrient value of a food basket the nutrient value score nvs and explains how this metric can be combined with full supply chain analysis and costing to generate a new tool the omega value the use of the omega value allows policy makers who design a program with nutrition objectives to compare direct food transfers and commodity based food vouchers in terms of both cost efficiency and cost effectiveness 2013 elsevier ltd all rights reserved

the resiliency of the high yield bond market the ltv default this paper investigates the resiliency of the new issue high yield bond market by examining the changes in implied default rates of such bonds before and after the largest high yield bond default i e the ltv bankruptcy specifically the paper compares implied default probabilities of high yield bonds during the post ltv period calculated from actual new issue yields with instrumental default probabilities calculated on the assumption that the default had not occurred a comparison of these probabilities reveals that the market s perception of default on the hjgh risk segment of the bond market increased significantly after the ltv bankruptcy however the effect was transitory lasting only six months thus the market was resilient to a major default in recent years high yield debt has become a significant segment of the corporate bond market the main source of the growth has come from new issues of high yield corporate bonds rather than an increase in fallen angels 1 the driving force behind this new breed of high yield debt growth has been its use as a means to tap the capital markets to finance increasingly common leveraged buyouts hostile takeovers and major corporate restructurings the market acceptance of high yield bonds was further enhanced by empirical evidence that net returns on a diversified portfolio of low grade bonds exceeded those on highgrade bonds while the volatility of their monthly returns was no greater 2 the frenzied pace of growth in the high yield debt market however has been accompanied by increasing concerns from various quarters 3 critics have char

cash versus direct food relief abstract the usual method of providing relief to a famine region is to import food and distribute it to the needy direct food relief if there are markets for food in the region however a relief agency could just as easily distribute money to the needy and let them purchase food in the market cash relief this alternative has been much discussed in the famine literature recently the purpose of this paper is to clarify the conditions under which cash relief will be more or less effective than direct food relief by analyzing the relative effectiveness of the two policies in a formal model

reference prices and deception in newspaper advertising consumers were exposed to newspaper advertisements for four products and one of five different price representations regular price alone sale price alone regular price with manufacturer s suggested list price mslp sale price with regular price or sale price with mslp perceptions of the ordinary prices of the products were not affected by the presence or type of reference price but the subjects did have lower estimates of ordinary prices in the sale context the accuracy of consumer perceptions of ordinary prices was not related to the recency of subject shopping experience for the products as measured in the study

consumer perceptions of comparative price advertisements the authors analyze the issue of comparative price advertising from a behavioral perspective because public policy recognizes that comparative pricing may lead to consumer misperceptions the auth

auctions and bidding a primer maybe the contractor was right to think bid jobs are different but it is more likely that he suffered from too simple a view of what is involved in preparing a competitive bid our analysis will show that even an experienced estimator working in familiar terrain can lose money if he doesn t understand the subtleties of competitive bidding the phenomenon experienced by the painting contractor known as the winner s curse is just one of the surprising and puzzling conclusions that have been turned up by modern research into auctions another is the theoretical proposition supported also by some experimental evidence that for example a sealed bid treasury bill auction in which each buyer pays a price equal to the highest rejected bid would yield more revenue to the treasury than the current procedure in which the winning bidder pays the seemingly higher amount equal to his own bid there are also subtle results that demonstrate the equivalence of such apparently different institutions as the standard sealed bid auction in which the auctioneer seller sells the goods to the highest bidder for a price equal to his bid and the dutch auction in which the auctioneer seller begins by asking a high price and gradually lowers the price until

an empirical analysis of internal and external reference prices using scanner data single source yogurt data are used to examine whether both internal and external reference prices affect purchase decisions internal reference prices are memory resident prices based on actual fair or other price concepts external reference prices are observed stimuli such as regular prices that stores may display along with a sale price for comparability discrete choice models with variables representing the two types of reference prices are estimated and both types of variables are found to have significant effects on purchase probabilities this suggests that consumers may use multiple reference points in evaluating price in purchase decisions in addition a model using an indicator of a sale price discount explains purchase probabilities as well as one that models the actual discount which suggests that consumers may be reacting to the indication of savings rather than to the amount of the discount

issues in valuing food aid the cash or in kind controversy abstract this paper focuses on developing a conceptual model to analyze the impacts of in kind transfers or payments of food for aid in particular attention is focused on the specific issue for food for work programs and the different methods of valuing these benefits there are three general methods used to value in kind payments 1 value at government costs 2 market value and 3 cash equivalent value no single method for estimating in kind values is uniquely appropriate and depends on the data availability and the end uses of the results the analytical approach is the standard economic model of utility maximization using indifference curves subject to a budget constraint adjusted to evaluate the effects of income in kind the analytical framework is then adopted to discuss some implications drawn from a recent ffwp evaluation conducted in ethiopia

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

buyer behavior under the best offer mechanism a theoretical model and empirical evidence from ebay motors abstract we use data from ebay best offer listings to analyze haggling over prices in transactions with one seller and a series of potential buyers for a limited supply product we characterize this transaction mechanism as a sequential move game to investigate buyer behavior our model suggests that a buyer s offer price increases in relations to the number of buyers who have previously made an offer on the item and the buy it now price chosen by the seller on the other hand the offer price decreases for items which have been listed on ebay for a longer period of time we empirically test our theoretical predictions using data on the sales of toyota camry cars on ebay motors the empirical evidence is consistent with our model

chapter 11 pricing models in marketing publisher summary this chapter brings together a set of diverse efforts in the recent literature on the modeling of price decisions and related questions in marketing there has been an impressive growth in the array of topics investigated in the literature various trends in the development of pricing models are evident from the foregoing review first one trend has been to develop theoretical models to describe observed pricing strategies in the marketplace and to derive conditions under which certain strategies are optimal this trend is clearly evident when one considers the area of dynamic pricing models another trend is an attempt to develop pricing models in which certain aspects of consumer behavior e g asymmetric response to price increases versus price decreases are incorporated this development is quite recent and does offer a large potential a third dominant direction is the use of game theoretic models for developing equilibrium pricing strategies

effects of seller supplied prices on buyers product evaluations reference prices in an internet auction context a field experiment investigated the impact of two external reference points under the seller s control on the final price of an auction when an item s seller specified a high external reference price a reserve price the final bid was greater than when the seller specified a low external reference price a minimum bid when the seller provided both high and low reference prices the reserve influenced the final bid more the low reference price led to a lower outcome compared to when the seller did not communicate any reference price the number of bidders influenced outcomes in the absence of seller supplied reference prices

anchoring effects on consumers willingness to pay and willingness to accept we examine the susceptibility of consumers willingness to pay wtp and willingness to accept wta judgments to influence by arbitrary anchors the results of four studies suggest that although circumstantial differences between buying and selling decisions can lead to systematic differences in susceptibility to anchoring effects the principles governing the impact of anchoring on wtp and wta judgments are essentially the same in particular robust anchoring effects are observed when the anchor relates to the focal source of uncertainty further wtp and wta judgments are most susceptible to anchoring and endowment effects under uncertainty about the desire to trade the implications of this research for our understanding of anchoring and endowment effects are discussed

modeling competitive bidding a critical essay in analyzing bidding modeling matters this paper is a critical analysis of the models available to aid competitive bidding decision making bidding strategy and auction design in real transactions after an introductory overview this paper describes the contexts in which auctions arise reviews the mainstream theory of single isolated auctions and discusses the important work involved in enrichment of this theory in doing so it indicates results that have been obtained and the sort of changes in analytical approach that are needed to tackle other critical enrichments the paper summarizes briefly what is known about the direct use of models by bidders and auction designers a general theme of this paper is that enriched models are needed to bring bidding theory closer to direct applicability in decision making

default risk cannot explain the muni puzzle evidence from municipal bonds that are secured by u s treasury obligations fama 1977 and miller 1977 predict that one minus the corporate tax rate will equate after tax yields from comparable taxable and tax exempt bonds empirical evidence shows that long term tax exempt yields are higher than theory predicts two popular explanations for this empirical puzzle are that relative to taxable bonds municipal bonds bear more default risk and include costly call options i study u s government secured municipal bond yields which are effectively default free and nonmalleable these municipal yields display the same tendency to be too high i conclude that differential default risk and call options do not explain the municipal bond puzzle article published by oxford university press on behalf of the society for financial studies in its journal the review of financial studies

promotional bundles and consumers price judgments when the best things in life are not free a series of experiments examined the amount that consumers were willing to pay for products bundled together in a promotion describing one of the disparate products in the bundle as free decreased the price consumers were willing to pay for each product when sold individually however a freebie offer did not influence the overall price for the bundle of disparate products a finding robust across two different settings and populations the differential effect of freebies is explained by varying judgment difficulty with the price being easier to arrive at for just a single product than for the combination consistent with this explanation factors that influence judgment difficulty the salience of the company s motive for offering the freebie and time pressure to make a judgment moderated the effects of a free offer on the amount consumers were willing to pay

the effects of relative and referent thinking on tourism product design abstract this study adopts three field experiments to analyze the influence of relative and referent thinking in online tourism auctions of bed and breakfast b b accommodations on consumer bidding behavior in study one the starting bid price equals or is lower than the reference price relative and referent thinking are applied to evaluate the products to see whether consumers prefer monetary or non monetary sales promotions and if they are willing to pay a higher end price in study two moderate extreme deviation appears between the start bidding price and reference price non monetary monetary sales promotions are favored and so higher end price would be paid in study three consumers tended to pay a higher end price due to the symbolic meaning of luxury b b for example greater wealth and social status and did not have a preference for monetary sales promotions the findings could help future researchers when designing tourist products for online auction strategies

how buyers perceive savings in a bundle price an examination of a bundle s transaction value although bundling the selling of two or more products and or services at a single price has a history of economic research marketing oriented investigations have appeared only recently this pap

distortion of price discount perceptions the right digit effect we use four experiments to examine consumers processing of comparative regular and sale price information in advertisements consistent with our hypothesized right digit effect we find that when consumers view regular and sale prices with identical left digits they perceive larger price discounts when the right digits are small i e less than 5 than when they are large i e greater than 5 as a result they may attribute greater value and increased purchase likelihood to higher priced lower discounted items we examine alternate processing explanations for this right digit effect as well as the moderating impact of price presentation format

reserve prices in auctions as reference points we consider second price and first price auctions in the symmetric independentprivate values framework we modify the standard model by theassumption that the bidders have reference based utility where the reserveprice minimum bid plays the role of the reference point in contrast to theusual result the seller s optimal reserve price is increasing in the number ofbidders even if an individual bidder perceives only a very small utility losswhen he has to pay more than the reserve price the impact on the optimalreserve price can be strong when there are many bidders

conscious and nonconscious comparisons with price anchors effects on willingness to pay for related and unrelated products abstract exposing consumers to extreme prices can influence the price they are willing to pay for both related and unrelated products drawing on previous theories of anchoring and adjustment and selective accessibility of judgment relevant knowledge the authors provide an account of both asymmetries in the impact of price anchors across product categories and contingencies in the occurrence of these asymmetries four studies show the deliberate consideration of price anchors that can play a key role in whether the effect of the anchors will generalize across product categories specifically an explicit comparison of a product to a price anchor increases the accessibility of features that represent a product available at this price in turn these thoughts influence the price that consumers are willing to pay for these products in the absence of this deliberation however anchors influence both related and unrelated products provided no other cognitive activity occurs in the interim

the effect of plausible and exaggerated reference prices on consumer perceptions and price search this article examines whether advertisers regular price claims affect consumer perceptions and price search behavior experiments involving simulated shopping via personal computers indicate that compared to an ad with no reference price an ad with a plausible reference price raised subjects estimates of the advertiser s regular price and the perceived offer value an exaggerated reference price had generally the same positive effects on perception as a plausible reference price even for the more skeptical subjects further when subjects were presented with an advertised sale price above the lowest expected price the exaggerated reference price increased the percentage of subjects who purchased the product from the advertiser without checking other stores prices

pricing black scholes options with correlated credit risk abstract this paper presents an improved method of pricing vulnerable black scholes options under assumptions which are appropriate in many business situations an analytic pricing formula is derived which allows not only for correlation between the option s underlying asset and the credit risk of the counterparty but also for the option writer to have other liabilities further the proportion of nominal claims paid out in default is endogenous to the model and is based on the terminal value of the assets of the counterparty and the amount of other equally ranking claims numerical examples compare the results of this model with those of other pricing formulas based on alternative assumptions and illustrate how the model can be calibrated using market data

a simple model of the taxable and tax exempt yield curves i examine the anomalous behavior of the taxable and tax exempt yield curves long municipal yields appear too high relative to the equivalent after tax yield that can be earned in treasury or corporate bonds i discuss existing explanations of the problem and propose a simple model that relates the yields of taxable bonds to the yield curve for par tax exempts the ratio of the tax exempt yield to the taxable yield increases with maturity in the model so it is consistent with observed phenomena such as inverted yield curves for taxables and contemporaneous rising yield curves for tax exempts statistical and descriptive comparisons between the yields predicted by the model and observed yields on par bonds that the model has some promise in explaining the apparent anomalies in the behaviors of the two yield curves article published by oxford university press on behalf of the society for financial studies in its journal the review of financial studies

the cross price effect on willingness to pay estimates in open ended contingent valuation abstract previous literature has shown that potential buyers use a reference price or product to form their opinion about the value of a new product therefore the pricing decision is an interactive process we investigate the two generalizations of the cross price effect the neighborhood price effect and the asymmetric price effect on consumer willingness to pay wtp for multiple similar products in an open ended contingent valuation context results show that the cross price effect on wtp is prominent with the neighborhood price effect holding in contingent valuation no conclusions are reached about the asymmetric price effect

reframing the discount as a comparison against the sale price does it make the discount more attractive abstractsales induced through price promotions depend heavily on discount depth so firms create mechanisms to influence perceptions of discount depth typically consumers compute discount depth as the difference between the sale price and the original price with this difference compared against the original price but thus far no research has examined the effect of reframing this difference by comparing the discount depth against the sale price multiple studies including a field study across four grocery stores show that framing the discount depth by comparing it against the sale price increases consumers discount depth perceptions and thus increases purchase intentions as evidence of the underlying process the authors identify boundary conditions related to both individual differences numeracy and managerially relevant factors discount depth size in addition to contributing to research on price promotions behavioral pricing and numeric processing the article offers implications for both