macroeconomic equilibrium and reform in a transitional economy we build a general equilibrium macro model of a transitional economy to reflect four stylized facts among these are that central planning has left a legacy of highly concentrated industry and a residue of price controls and rationing an almost classical dichotomy obtains in the model monetary expansion leaves output and employment unchanged despite the existence of unemployment though leisure time declines however the economy displays a high degree of complementarity between the state controlled and private sectors giving rise to keynesian multiplier effects we also analyse the effects of price liberalization and privatization on the properties of the economy

in search of the good samaritan estimating the impact of altruism on voters preferences this paper continues the development of a theoretical foundation for measuring altruistic behaviour with respect to tax versus expenditure preferences in three specific spheres health education and welfare payments particular emphasis is placed on analysing the choice theoretic calculus that underlies individual preferences using this theoretical foundation econometric techniques allow progress to be made in measuring the characteristics of the underlying utility function the empirical work relates to the uk and confirms that both self interest and public interest with a slight emphasis on the latter determine overall preferences the implications of this for the public choice school are then examined

managing advertising and promotion for long run profitability in recent years manufacturers have become increasingly disposed toward the use of sales promotions often at the cost of advertising yet the long term implications of these changes for brand profitability remain unclear in this paper we seek to offer insights into this important issue we consider the questions of i whether it is more desirable to ad vertise or promote ii whether it is better to use frequent shallow promotions or infrequent deep promotions and iii how changes in regular prices affect sales relative to increases in price promotions additional insights regarding brand equity the relative magnitude of short and long term effects and the decomposition of advertising and promotion elasticities across choice and quantity decisions are obtained to address these points we develop a heteroscedastic varying parameter joint probit choice and regression quantity model our approach allows consumers responses to short term marketing activities to change in response to changes in marketing actions over the long term we also accommodate the possibility of competitive reactions to policy changes of a brand the model is estimated for a consumer packaged good category by using over eight years of panel data the resulting parameters enable us to assess the effects of changes in advertising and promotion policies on sales and profits our results show that in the long term advertising has a positive effect on brand equity while promotions have a negative effect furthermore we find price promotion elasticities to be larger than regular price elasticities in the short term but smaller than regular price elasticities when long term effects are considered consistent with previous research we also find that most of the effect of a price cut is manifested in consumers brand choice decisions in the short term but when long term effects are again considered this result no longer holds last we estimate that the long term effects of promotions on sales are negative overall and about two fifths the magnitude of the positive short term effects finally making reasonable cost and margin assumptions we conduct simulations to assess the relative profit impact of long term changes in pricing advertising or promotion policies our results show regular price decreases to have a generally negative effect on the long term profits of brands advertising to be profitable for two of the brands and increases in price promotions to be uniformly unprofitable

income distribution and price controls targeting a social safety net during economic transition abstract during the ongoing post communist economic transitions the relative well being of many people is changing rapidly and governments are not well positioned to accurately measure individual living standards under such circumstances continued price controls over basic consumer goods within the state sector and the associated queuing can form a serviceable device for targeting poor people for subsidies with a fixed price state sector and free price parallel markets rich people might choose to avoid queues and shop in the free markets while poor people would prefer to pay low nominal prices and queue in the state sector the targeting of subsidies through queues therefore can be accomplished even if the government has no information concerning individual income or living standards when the alternative to price controls is a poorly targeted explicit social safety net the resource cost of queues might be more than offset by an improvement in the targeting of subsidies

the long term effect of marketing strategy on brand sales few studies have considered the relative role of the integrated marketing mix advertising price promotion product and place on the long term performance of mature brands instead emphasizing advertising and price promotion thus little guidance is available to firms regarding the relative efficacy of their various marketing expenditures over the long run to investigate this issue the authors apply a multivariate dynamic linear transfer function model to five years of advertising and scanner data for 25 product categories and 70 brands in france the findings indicate that the total short term plus long term sales elasticity is 1 37 for product and 74 for distribution conversely the total elasticities for advertising and discounting are only 13 and 04 respectively this result stands in marked contrast to the previous emphasis in the literature on price promotions and advertising the authors further find that the long term effects of discounting are one third the magnitude of the short term effects the ratio is reversed from other aspects of the mix in which long term effects exceed four times the short term effects underscoring the strategic role of these tools in brand sales

the influence of black markets on a queue rationed centrally planned economy abstract in centrally planned economies in which prices are fixed and the rationing mechanism is waiting line queues we show that an equilibrium of waiting times exists we then introduce a black market in which individuals can trade commodities that they have acquired through the official economy an equilibrium of black market prices and waiting times is shown to exist further the economy with a black market is queue efficient however the introduction of black markets is not necessarily a pareto improvement over an economy without black markets even when we allow winners to compensate losers

a micromodeling approach to investigate the advertising sales relationship the purpose of this paper is to derive a model of advertising effects on the firm s sales a micromodel is postulated and aggregated across individuals and over time to produce a macromodel of the aggregate sales advertising relationship for a single product the micromodel postulated is very simple it incorporates two factors reach of the ads and rate of decay of their effectiveness over time this approach to modeling advertising effects is shown to be fruitful in several respects 1 the coefficients of the aggregate equation are easily interpretable in terms of the reach and decay parameters 2 the model derived is nonlinear yet estimable 3 a special case of the model is very similar to lag models that have been in use 4 the model can be used whatever the unit of time is 5 the carryover effect of advertising as commonly defined is not constant but depends upon the previous spending levels and 6 the model helps illustrate that the duration of advertising may be greatly overstated if aggregate lagged dependent variable models are simplistically interpreted

seasonality and the effect of advertising on price does advertising make markets more or less competitive this paper lays out an econometric strategy for estimating the effect of advertising on prices that exploits seasonal demand and imperfect targeting of consumers we find mostly negligible effects of advertising on prices at monthly frequency among the 35 of 131 product categories with sufficient advertising seasonality to justify second stage estimation only nine have a significant effect and those are typically small this finding is essentially the result of the much greater seasonality in advertising than price

recovering measures of advertising carryover from aggregate data the role of the firm s decision behavior data interval bias the biased estimation of advertising carryover in aggregate data can be viewed as a misinterpretation of the aggregate advertising sales relationship due to missing micro advertising data this paper argues that if the researcher does not explicitly model the firm s advertising decisions he will incorrectly interpolate the missing data and thereby allow the firm s decision behavior to influence inferences about advertising carryover drawing upon a general model of advertising decision behavior the expected aggregate form of the koyck relationship is developed and compared to existing bias correction methodologies although it is difficult to find any parsimonious procedure which is robust with respect to all types of decision behavior allowing lagged advertising to enter the classical koyck equation emerges as a simple method of obtaining a reasonable estimate of advertising carryover in aggregate data

on the persistence of rationing following liberalization a theory for economies in transition abstract many economic theorists and policy makers argue that a rapid liberalization in which prices are allowed to equilibrate supply and demand is critical for a successful transition in the formerly socialist economies yet despite the advantages of market clearing prices many local governments in these economies have kept their prices for basic goods low and induced rationing in the state sector this paper develops a theory explaining why a local government chooses either a low state price that induces rationing or a higher price that clears the market the theory predicts that a necessary condition for a local government representing its constituents interests to set a market clearing price is that the private sector is monopolistic while a market clearing price in the state sector curtails private monopoly power it also implies that the state price is higher than in the rationing regime it is shown that a local government s marginal benefit of restraining private monopoly power is higher than the marginal costs of higher state prices when there is an increase in either state sector costs or private capacity this implies that a local government is more prone to set a market clearing price as its costs increase and as private capacity grows furthermore when there are at least two private firms and the private sector is monopolistic a local government that sets a market clearing price also stabilizes private sector pricing

endogeneity and simultaneity in competitive pricing and advertising a logit demand analysis in this article we use four data sets to provide a benchmark study of the effects of accounting for endogeneity and simultaneity in estimating marketing mix effects in a logit demand framework we compare the results obtained from accounting for endogeneity only to those from accounting for both endogeneity and simultaneity and in the latter case we allow for more general models of firm behavior to examine the consequences of imposing assumptions about the behavior of firms we find that accounting for both endogeneity and simultaneity not only affects the parameter estimates but also results in efficiency gains that affect the statistical significance of the estimates

the political temptations of rationing by insiders long waits for goods services and jobs to become available still exist in and to the east of europe this paper explores the political economy of what has made pervasive rationing an attractive way to cope with shocks in the past the explanation advanced lies not in the creation of shortage rents for the personal profit of corrupt insiders controlling the production and distribution process instead rationing with queuing is viewed as a populist scheme that allows a majority to keep its wages above levels that would clear the labor market while hiding the cost of such a policy increased unemployment

marketing budget allocation across countries the role of international business cycles a key conundrum facing organizations is how to adjust marketing budgets in response to the business cycle while most firms use procyclical spending spending less during economic contractions academic studies often recommend countercyclical spending spending more during contractions which begs the following question what is the right thing to do the spending problem is compounded further when demand is not just driven by one country s business cycle but by the nonsynchronized business cycles of multiple countries as is the case for tourism marketing aiming to attract tourists originating from different countries we derive insights into the best way to allocate marketing budgets across countries under varying economic conditions we show that the allocation decisions are driven by the procyclical versus countercyclical nature of three factors unit sales marketing effectiveness and per unit profit contribution to study how unit sales and marketing effectiveness respond to the business cycle

a meta analysis of marketing communication carryover effects abstractto optimally set marketing communication marcom budgets reliable estimates of short term elasticities and carryover effects are required empirical generalizations from meta analyses of prior field studies can help guide these decisions however the last such meta analysis of marcom carryover effects was performed on koyck model based estimates collected before 1984 and was confined to mass media advertising the authors update and extend extant empirical generalizations via two meta analyses of carryover estimates compiled from studies encompassing personal selling targeted advertising and mass media advertising using diverse model forms until 2015 the first is focused on and utilizes 918 estimates of the carryover proportion of the total effect termed long term share of the total effect and the second focuses on 863 derivable estimates of 90 implied duration intervals the authors find the mean long term shares of the total effect for personal selling 687 and targeted advertisin

goods diversion and repressed inflation notes on the political economy of price liberalization most analyses of parallel markets in centrally planned systems focus on queue rationing as the mechanism whereby state sector goods become available for second economy resale this article takes into account employee diversion of goods as a second channel through which merchandise can move to private markets diversion of goods tends to temper the adverse distributional consequences of price liberalization as repressed inflation increases more goods are diverted out of the state sector and the likelihood that an individual will be made worse off by a transition of free prices is diminished

generalizing what is known about temporal aggregation and advertising carryover this paper provides a theoretical explanation for the inconsistent findings from previous econometric analyses of aggregated data concerning the duration of advertising carryover using this theoretical explanation and the knowledge of a data interval bias the paper reviews and summarizes the empirical work in the area of sales response modeling and then after adjusting for aggregation bias presents support for an empirical generalization that the average advertising duration interval is of brief duration typically between six and nine months

estimating cannibalization rates for pioneering innovations to evaluate the success of a new product managers need to determine how much of its new demand is due to cannibalizing the firm s other products rather than drawing from competition or generating primary demand we introduce a time varying vector error correction model to decompose the base sales of a new product into its constituent sources the model allows managers to estimate cannibalization effects and calculate the new product s net demand which may be considerably less than its total demand we apply our methodology to the introduction of the lexus rx300 using detailed car transaction data this case is especially interesting because the lexus rx300 was the first crossover sport utility vehicle suv implying that its demand could come from both the luxury suv and the luxury sedan categories because lexus was active in both categories there was a double cannibalization potential we show how the contribution of the different demand sources varies over time and discuss the managerial implications for both the focal brand and its competitors

estimating micro relationships from macro data a comparative study of two approximations of the brand loyal model under temporal aggregation the data interval bias issue in econometric studies of the relationship between advertising and sales first was discussed in jmr by clarke in 1976 within the last few years several studies report

how dynamic consumer response competitor response company support and company inertia shape long term marketing effectiveness long term marketing effectiveness is a high priority research topic for managers and emerges from the complex interplay among dynamic reactions of several market players this paper introduces restricted policy simulations to distinguish four dynamic forces consumer response competitor response company inertia and company support a rich marketing dataset allows the analysis of price display feature advertising and product line extensions the first finding is that consumer response differs significantly from the net effectiveness of product line extensions price feature and advertising in particular net sales effects are up to five times stronger and longer lasting than consumer response second this difference is not due to competitor response but to company action for tactical actions price and feature it takes the form of inertia as promotions last for several weeks for strategic actions advertising and product line extensions support by other marketing instruments greatly enhances dynamic consumer response this company action negates the postpromotion dip in consumer response and enhances the long term sales benefits of product line extensions feature and advertising therefore managers are urged to evaluate company decision rules for inertia and support when assessing long term marketing effectiveness

advertising and aggregate consumption a bayesian dsge assessment aggregate data reveal that advertising in the u s absorbs approximately 2 of gdp and has a well defined pattern over the business cycle being strongly procyclical and highly volatile because the purpose of brand advertising is to foster sales we ask whether such spending has an appreciable effect on the pattern of aggregate consumption and through this avenue on economic activity this question is addressed by developing a dynamic general equilibrium model in which households preferences for differentiated goods depend on the intensity of brand advertising which is endogenously determined by profit maximizing firms once the model is estimated to match the u s economy it argues that the presence of advertising in the long run raises aggregate consumption and hours worked eventually fostering economic activity we also find that advertising has a relevant impact on fluctuations in consumption investment and markup over the business cycle all of the abovementioned effects are proven to epend crucially on the degree of competitiveness of advertising at the firm level

promocast a new forecasting method for promotion planning this article describes the implementation of a promotion event forecasting system promocasttm and its performance in several pilot applications and validity studies pilot studies involved retail grocery chains with 95 to 185 stores per trading area the goal was to provide short term tactical forecasts useful for planning promotions from a retailer s perspective thus the forecast system must be able to handle any of the over 150 000 upcs in each store s item master file and must be scalable to produce approximately 800 000 000 forecasts per year across all the retailers served by efficient marketing services inc ems inc this is a much different task than one that confronts a manufacturer even one with abroad product line manufacturers can benefit from custom modeling in a product line or category retailers need a production system that generates forecasts that help promotion planning marketing scientists have typically approache promotion analysis from the manufacturer s perspective one objective of this article is to encourage marketing scientists to rethink promotion analysis from a different perspective from the retailer s point of view the planning unit is the promotion event neither weekly store tracking data norshopping trip data from consumer panels are easily aggregated to reflect total sales during a promotion event we describe the promotion event databases and the statistical model developed using these databases the data are the strategic asset our goal is to help retailers use their data to increase the profitability of promotions we have data on the performance of each upc in each store under a variety of promotion conditions on each store s adeptness at executing various styles of promotions as well as on chain wide historical performance for each upc we use many historical averages from these databases to build a 67 variable regression style model the forecast incorporates a simple bias correction needed when using a log transformed dependent variable the natural log of total unit sales we argue that the historical averages matching the planned ad and display conditions provide a benchmark superior to the widely used base times lift method when aggregated into case units the natural unit for product ordering 69 of the forecasts in our first validation study were within one case compared to 39 within one case using the appropriate historical averages we report the results of two over time validity studies that reflect the value of our model for retailers the limitations and implications of this planning tool for managerial decision making concerning stocking levels are discussed whenever historical data are the strategic asset we face inherent limitations our model does not forecast new products the forecast error increases when an existing product is promoted in a new way over 99 5 of the time we have full data from which to create a forecast however with a database for a typical chain market containing over 20 million promotion events in the 30 month time frame we use 100 000 events have less than ideal data the breadth of the database typically 150 000 ups makes it impractical to incorporate data on competitive offerings we find that regression style modeling is not adept at incorporating information on the 1 200 subcommodities managed in our pilot stores or the 1 000 manufacturers who supply those stores despite these limitations we show the value of using promotion event data how tactical forecasts based on these data can directly impact the bottom line of grocery retailers and how store by store forecasts can help retailers with problems of running out of stock or overstocking

economic crisis in a shortage economy it is not unusual for reforming socialist economies to relax wage controls without hardening budget constraints on enterprises or freeing consumer goods prices this policy can be dangerously destabilizing while higher wages permit workers to purchase more of some goods they also tend to exacerbate shortages and to breed waste and corruption beyond a certain level economywide wage hikes will worsen worker welfare this is true regardless of whether deficit goods are strictly rationed are sold randomly at official prices to queuing workers or are offered to workers by insiders only at black market prices however the form of allocation does influence the levels of output and welfare

the impact of a product harm crisis on marketing effectiveness product harm crises are among a firm s worst nightmares a firm may experience i a loss in baseline sales ii a reduced own effectiveness for its marketing instruments iii an increased cross sensitivity to rival firms marketing mix activities and iv a decreased cross impact of its marketing mix instruments on the sales of competing unaffected brands we find that this quadruple jeopardy materialized in a case study of an australian product harm crisis faced by kraft peanut butter we arrive at this conclusion by using a time varying error correction model that quantifies the consequences of this crisis on base sales and on own and cross brand short and long term effectiveness the proposed modeling approach allows managers to make more informed decisions on how to regain the brands pre crisis performance levels

the benefits of inflation in the economies with price controls and the cash in advance black markets abstract i study the welfare implications of an accelerated growth of nominal money supply in an economy with price controls i proceed by embedding barzel s 1974 classical rationing by waiting arguments in a general equilibrium model with money in an endowment economy studied below binding price controls lead to queuing and the black market money is introduced through a cash in advance cia constraint on the black market purchases in sharp contrast to the common view i show that an increase in the growth rate of the money supply is welfare improving both on impact and in the long run this is because it reduces the steady state waiting line by inducing a substitution towards the inflation tax free leisure i discuss the robustness of this finding the results strongly support the case for a complete elimination of price controls ahead of inflation stabilization

assessing the competitive interaction between private labels and national brands in this article we employ the linear approximate almost ideal demand system la aids and specify price reaction equations derived under the la aids specification we perform intracategory analyses using data on six individual categories as well as a pooled analysis on a sample of 125 categories and 59 geographic markets we find that consumer response to price and promotion decisions demand and firm pricing behavior supply jointly determine observed market prices and market shares further estimates of residual demand elasticities suggest that examination of partial demand elasticities alone may provide an incomplete picture of the ability of brands to raise price copyright 2000 by university of chicago press

former soviet union oil production and gdp decline granger causality and the multi cycle hubbert curve abstract this paper discusses the transition of the former soviet union fsu within the context of a 1987 1996 soviet and fsu oil production decline the conventional explanation of the break up is that economic inefficiencies and the cold war defense build up caused it another possible explanation one that is examined at length here is that declining oil production was a contributing factor the econometric analysis suggests that the fall in soviet and former soviet gdp in the 1980s and 1990s did not granger cause the decline in oil production but the decline in oil production did granger cause the fall in gdp coal and natural gas to gdp relationships show alternative granger causalities that we would expect to see with oil but do not a multi cycle hubbert trend that may be used to forecast future fsu oil production is also shown

the stahl alexeev paradox a note abstract we offer a simple proof of the paradox discovered by stahl and alexeev that the introduction of black markets in a fixed price economy with a rationing mechanism consisting of waiting line queues is not necessarily a pareto improvement we show that the paradoxical result arises from the fact that queue length is endogenous and illustrates the general principle that permitting an additional market may be undesirable in an economy which has other distortions

modelling household purchasing behaviour to analyse beneficial marketing strategies price promotion and generic advertising are two common strategies to increase consumer demand for food products which one is preferred over the other depends largely on the relative importance of