inducing liquidity in thin financial markets through combined value trading mechanisms asset pricing theory hypothesizes that investors are only interested in portfolios individual securities are evaluated only in terms of their contribution to portfolio risk and return yet standard financial market design is that of parallel unconnected markets whereby investors cannot submit orders in one market conditional on events in others when markets are thin this exposes them to substantial execution risk fear of ending up with unbalanced portfolios after trading may even keep investors from submitting orders further eroding liquidity and the ability of markets to equilibrate the suggested solution is a portfolio trading mechanism referred to as combined value trading cvt investors are allowed to submit orders for packages of securities and the system matches trades and computes prices by optimally combining portfolio orders in an open book we study the performance of the cvt mechanism experimentally and compare it to the performance of parallel unconnected double auctions in experiments with similar parametrization and either a similar number of subjects or substantially thicker markets we present evidence that our portfolio trading mechanism facilitates equilibration to the extent that the thicker markets do inspection of order submission and trade activity reveals that subjects manage to exploit the direct linkages between markets enabled by the cvt system

analysis of new product diffusion using a four segment trial repeat model a four segment trial repeat model is developed to model sales of a frequently purchased product in the early stage of the product s life cycle the model can be calibrated using aggregate data alone two versions of the model one emphasizing the competitive aspect of marketing communications and another emphasizing the informative aspect are estimated from data on 21 newly launched pharmaceutical products the model provides valuable diagnostics such as an early estimate of the long run market share of the new product a decomposition of total sales into trial sales due to marketing activities trial sales due to word of mouth and repeat sales the changing composition of the trial market and repeat market over time and the time when the trial market is expected to be saturated in addition the effectiveness of the entrant s marketing efforts word of mouth communication and buyers trial experience are analyzed with the model a cross sectional analysis based on the empirical estimation results of our model reveals interesting insights into product introduction strategies we find that 1 the effectiveness of the firms communication activities on trial is related mainly to product quality attributes and market growth whereas that of word of mouth is associated with product class characteristics and market competitiveness and 2 the effect of product trial on repeat purchases is related mainly to product quality attributes and various market characteristics such as size growth competitiveness and familiarity

has regulatory reform had any impact on bank efficiency in indonesia a two stage analysis abstractmore than a decade following the severe economic crisis 1997 indonesia has undergone major regulatory changes in its banking industry this article examines the impact of these regulatory changes on the relative technical efficiency te of the indonesian banking industry employing data envelopment analysis dea and censored tobit regression model additionally the bootstrap approach of simar and wilson is employed to provide statistical properties to the dea efficiency score the findings show that the industry on average is inefficient over the period of analysis also state owned and foreign owned banks are found to be more efficient than any other group of banks finally the impact of regulatory reforms is generally positive and statistically significant

pricing frills and customer ratings this paper explores whether and how a firm should adapt its strategy in view of consumer use of prior customer ratings specifically we consider optimal pricing and whether the firm should offer an unexpected frill to early customers to enhance their product experiences we show that if price history is unobserved by consumers a forward looking firm should always modify its strategy from single period optimal one but it may be optimal to do so by lowering price by lowering price and offering frills or by raising price and offering frills depending on the market growth rate specifically the last strategy becomes optimal when market growth rate is high enough the results are similar when the price history is observed by consumers except that no deviation from single period profit maximization choices is optimal when market growth is low enough we also analyze whether the firm should prefer that the price information be stated in or left out of consumer reviews in addition in considering the effects of consumer heterogeneity we conclude that the optimal firm s effort to affect ratings is higher when the idiosyncratic part of consumer uncertainty is larger

how durable should durable products be made under different scenarios of technological advance abstract this paper addresses the question of how durable or reliable manufacturers of durable goods should make their products essentially consumers are likely willing to pay more for a more durable product yet increased durability depresses replacement demand we gain insight into this trade off by developing analytical models of the interplay between consumers and a monopolist manufacturer of durable goods we start this research from the base model that assumes symmetric information between the manufacturer and consumers and no technological advance we then extend it to more general models in which these assumptions are relaxed interesting managerial insights are obtained which explain well some realistic cases observed in practice 1 when the technology advances at a given non negative rate it is always optimal for the manufacturer to motivate consumers to replace the existing durable goods by using a buy back offer before the end of the life of the product 2 faster technological advance does not always bring quicker product replacements under some circumstances it might be optimal for manufacturers to extend the replacement cycle of the product and increase its durability when the technology advances more quickly and 3 when the rate of the technological advance is uncertain and is not directly observable by consumers consumers are willing to pay more than when the technological advance rate is known and constant

the effect of payoff feedback and information pooling on reasoning errors evidence from experimental markets avast literature shows that individuals frequently violate normative principles in reasoning in this paper we report the results of four studies designed to determine if information dissemination in competitive auctions can reduce or even eliminate logical errors in the wason selection task our results show that payoff feedback and exposure to the information flow drive the aggregate behavior toward the normative solution we also found evidence of spillover effects from informed to uninformed traders in one sided combinatorial auctions as well as positive transfer effects from competitive to individual settings

a comparative study of efficiency in european banking this paper investigates whether there has been an improvement in and convergence of productive efficiency across european banking markets since the creation of the single internal market using efficiency measures derived from dea estimation the determinants of european bank efficiency are evaluated using the tobit regression model approach the established literature on modelling the determinants of bank efficiency is then extended by recognizing the problem of the inherent dependency of dea efficiency scores when used in regression analysis to overcome the dependency problem a bootstrapping technique is applied overall the results suggest that since the eu s single market programme there has been a small improvement in bank efficiency levels although there is little evidence to suggest that these have converged the results also suggest that inference on the determinants of bank efficiency drawn from non bootstrapped regression analysis may be biased and misleading

the role of firm size in bilateral bargaining a study of the cable television industry we examine the effect of buyer merger on bilateral negotiations between a supplier and n buyers merger may have bargaining effects in addition to the usual efficiency effects the effect of merger on the buyers bargaining position depends on the curvature of the supplier s gross surplus function merger enhances worsens the buyers bargaining position if the function is concave convex based on a panel of advertising revenue in the cable television industry our estimates indicate that the gross surplus function for suppliers of program services is convex this result suggests that cable operators integrate horizontally to realize efficiency gains rather than to enhance their bargaining position vis a vis program suppliers

the nonparametric risk adjusted efficiency measurement an application to taiwan s major rural financial intermediaries in this article a nonparametric approach is used to incorporate risk into the measurement of technical efficiencies of the major financial intermediaries in rural taiwan risk is treated as a joint but undesirable output given the fact that various regulatory actions may prevent its free disposability three risk indicators nonperforming loans allowance for loan losses and risky assets are employed alternatively in the empirical work results suggest that all three risk constraints are binding regulations on controlling risky assets and loan loss reserves are effective but more burdensome than those on controlling loan quality

a theory for market growth or decline market growth is fundamental to marketing frank bass s seminal diffusion theory explains growth in new product markets we develop an analogous theory for established markets exhibiting sporadic growth or intermittent declines our theory suggests that market participants repeatedly take successful and unsuccessful actions that cause them to change or to mutate in myriad and often unpredictable ways the environment sorts these mutations determining winners and losers abundant mutations often cause different market participants to become winners displacing past winners abundant mutations also often cause market growth because the natural selection mechanism leaves more surviving favorable mutations so one nonobvious falsifiable implication of our theory is that displacement precedes growth and stability precedes decline another is that risk taking diversity of opinions and experimentation should precede growth we develop a metric for measuring displacement using multiple publicly available data sets one including sales for top firms for 55 years and another including sales for all automobile models for 25 years we find that our metric provides a practical way to measure the rate of mutation and confirm our theory s predictions our easily replicated tests show that our displacement metric can predict intermittent market growth or decline in very different contexts without the need for exogenous idiosyncratic explanations moreover other alternative covariates trends lagged growth new product entry macroeconomic indicators etc are unable to predict growth or decline

a dynamic service quality cost model with word of mouth advertising abstract a dynamic cost model is developed which describes the evolution of demand for a service from its beginning transient phase to its long term equilibrium the model includes parameters which relate to word of mouth advertising this advertising causes transitions between unaware positively aware and negatively aware states of consumers and thus affects service demand model simulations reveal some generally useful guidelines for service providers 1 it is unwise to expand service operations excessively during the early phases of the service offering in order to handle strong demand the model shows that the demand typically peaks at this early stage before settling down to an equilibrium rate 2 because of customer sensitivity to service quality cost reductions that deteriorate service quality are likely to be a poor policy and 3 it is a good strategy to adopt a high service quality from the beginning rather than to improve it later this is because the impact of good service on the customer base is more rapid in the startup phase than in the long term equilibrium phase

advertising strategies for new product diffusion in emerging markets propositions and analysis abstract we develop advertising strategies for a firm which has a new product for which demand exists in an emerging market however the primary channels for distribution of the firm s product do not exist because either the market has not been opened up or the firm has not entered the market therefore the consumers use the secondary channels in other markets the current research seeks to answer questions such as i is it beneficial to advertise for the product before the market opens ii what should be the difference in advertising before and after the market opens iii what is the effect of various parameters such as the likelihood of product adoption for the primary and secondary channels market potential and coefficient of innovation and imitation on the optimal advertising policies the above problem is relevant for the situation faced by japanese electronics goods manufacturers before they entered the indian market or a company which has regional presence in one part of a country say urban and gets access to another part later e g rural the problem is modeled as an optimal control problem relevant propositions are developed for optimal normative advertising policy numerical examples are provided to illustrate key policy results

super efficiency evaluations based on potential slack abstract super efficiency evaluations are introduced along the lines of the potential improvements approach in journal of productivity analysis 12 1999 233 both a reference selection and a related super efficiency index are defined the new potential slack super efficiency index is compared to a farrell based super efficiency index as in management science 39 1993 1261 with respect to convex envelopment technologies

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

a bayesian model to forecast new product performance in domestic and international markets this paper attempts to shed light on the following research questions when a firm introduces a new product or service how can it effectively use the different information sources available to generate reliable new product performance forecasts how can the firm account for varying information availability at different stages of the new product launch and generate forecasts at each stage we address these questions in the context of the sequential launches of motion pictures in international markets players in the motion picture industry require forecasts at different stages of the movie launch process to aid decision making and the information sets available to generate such forecasts vary at different stages despite the importance of such forecasts the industry struggles to understand and predict sales of new movies in domestic and overseas markets we develop a bayesian modeling framework that predicts first week viewership for new movies in both domestic and several international markets we focus on the first week because industry players involved in international markets studios distributors and exhibitors are most interested in these predictions we draw on existing literature on forecasting performance of new movies to formulate our model specifically we model the number of viewers of a movie in a given week using a poisson count data model the number of screens distribution strategy movie attributes such as genre and presence absence of stars are among the factors modeled to influence viewership we employ a hierarchical bayes formulation of the poisson model that allows the determinants of viewership to vary across countries we adopt the bayesian approach for two reasons first it provides a convenient framework to model varying assumptions of information availability specifically it allows us to make forecasts by combining different sources of information such as domestic and international market specific data second this methodology provides us with the entire distribution of the new movie s performance forecast such a predictive distribution is more informative than a point estimate and provides a measure of the uncertainty in the forecasts we propose a bayesian prediction procedure that provides viewership forecasts at different stages of the new movie release process the methodology provides forecasts under a number of information availability scenarios thus forecasts can be obtained with just information from a historical database containing data on previous new product launches in several international markets as more information becomes available the forecasting methodology allows us to combine historical information with data on the performance of the new product in the domestic market and thereby to make forecasts with less uncertainty and greater accuracy our results indicate that for all the countries in the data set the number of screens on which a movie is released is the most important influence on viewership furthermore we find that local distribution improves movie sales internationally in contrast to the domestic market we also find evidence of similar genre preferences in geographically disparate countries we find that the proposed model provides accurate forecasts at the movie country level further the model outperforms all the extant models in the marketing literature that could potentially be used for making these forecasts a comparison of root mean square and mean absolute errors for movies in a hold out sample shows that the model that combines information available from the different sources generates the lowest errors a bayesian predictive model selection criterion corroborates the superior performance of this model we demonstrate that the bayesian model can be combined with industry rules of thumb to generate cumulative box office forecasts in summary this research demonstrates a bayesian modeling framework that allows the use of different information sources to make new product forecasts in domestic and international markets our results underscore the theme that each movie is unique as is each country and viewership results from an interaction of the product and the market hence the motion picture industry should use both product specific and market specific information to make new movie performance forecasts

note ranking dmus with infeasible super efficiency dea models it has been suggested in the data envelopment analysis dea literature that it is impossible to obtain a full ranking of decision making units dmus when infeasible subproblems arise in the so called super efficiency dea models under different returns to scale rts assumptions other than constant returns to scale crs andconsequently the application of the super efficiency dea models under different rts conditions other than crs should be restricted the implications of the infeasibility in super efficiency dea models with respect to the efficiency ranking of the dmus is explored based on the analysis we show that it is still possible to obtain the full ranking of the entire observation set when infeasibilities arise in super efficiency dea models

modeling multiattribute utility risk and belief dynamics for new consumer durable brand choice this paper proposes a brand choice model to aid in the prelaunch management of a new consumer durable entry in an existing category the model contributes to theory by integrating the critical phenomena of multiattribute preference risk and dynamics in an individual level expected utility framework the integration is based on established theoretical constructs in utility bayesian decision analysis and discrete choice theory measurement and estimation procedures are presented an application is described and the managerial relevance of this work as a planning and forecasting tool is examined

predicting the competitive relationships of industrial production between taiwan and china using lotka volterra model abstractthis work is the first to apply lotka volterra model combined with genetic algorithm ga to predict the production relationships of high tech industry among different areas previous studies analysed the trade interdependency among various countries but few studies have highlighted the quantitative evidence of production relationships thus this study utilizes motherboard shipment volumes to predict the competitive relationships of industrial production on both sides of the taiwan strait specifically this work uses simultaneous non linear least square regression in combination with gas for numerical parameter optimization of the proposed lotka volterra model the results of parameter estimation reveal that shipment growth in china substantially promotes that in taiwan whereas the shipment growth in taiwan curtails that in china the standard deviation of the estimated parameters from the 3000 iterated simulations is small confirming the reliability and stability of our parameter estimations

a new product growth for model consumer durables this article originally appeared in management science january 1969 volume 15 number 5 pp 215 227 published by the institute of management sciences a growth model for the timing of initial purchase of new products is developed and tested empirically against data for eleven consumer durables the basic assumption of the model is that the timing of a consumer s initial purchase is related to the number of previous buyers a behavioral rationale for the model is offered in terms of innovative and imitative behavior the model yields good predictions of the sales peak and the timing of the peak when applied to historical data a long range forecast is developed for the sales of color television sets

efficiency and risk in taiwan banking sbm super dea estimation in this study we adopt the two data envelopment analysis dea methods including banker charnes cooper bcc and slacks based measure sbm super efficiency to investigate whether a bank s technical efficiency index s results incorporating account risk and not incorporating account risk differ significantly the information is obtained from 43 taiwanese banks for the period 1998 to 2002 we also employ the nonradial and slacks based malmquist total factor productivity tfp index to measure the impact of productivity change on the panel data our empirical results from the dea approach are summarized as follows 1 loan quality factors have an impact on a bank s efficiency in general the bank with a higher degree of problem loans drops down its efficiency by incorporating account risk however the bank with a lower degree of problem loans increases its efficiency by incorporating account risk 2 super efficiency provides a good framework for ranking efficient units 3 based on the nonradial an

do institutions promote rationality an experimental study of the three door anomaly the three door problem is an example of a systematic violation of a key rationality postulate that has attracted much attention in this seemingly simple individual decision task most people initially fail to apply correctly bayes law and to make the payoff maximizing choice previous experimental studies have shown that individual learning reduces the incidence of irrational choices somewhat but is far from eliminating it we experimentally study the roles of communication and competition as institutions to mitigate the choice anomaly we show that the three door anomaly can be entirely eliminated by these institutions

platform based mobile payments adoption in emerging and developed countries role of country level heterogeneity and network effects platform based payment services such as mobile wallets mwallet provide a unique value proposition to both customers and firms over other digital payment methods interestingly the story of platform based mobile payments adoption is unfolding differently across countries with some emerging countries china and india outperforming developed countries using extant literature in international business international marketing industry reports and qualitative interviews we present a conceptual framework for mobile payments adoption at an aggregate level for customers and retailers we present a set of hypotheses and derive the explanations using the literature on network effects and institutional theory we test our framework on a diverse set of 30 countries and confirm the presence of network effects and the differential impact of perceived value inertia and culture on the adoption level of innovators and imitators importantly we find a significant level of within and between country heterogeneity for mobile payment adoption which provides further evidence for leapfrogging by emerging countries in the context of the mass adoption of mobile payments these findings have significant implications for theory and practice in multinational organizations

introduction strategy for new products with positive and negative word of mouth existing innovation diffusion models assume that individual experience with the product is always communicated positively through word of mouth for certain innovations however this assumption is tenuous since communicators of the product experience may transfer favorable unfavorable or indifferent messages through word of mouth this paper examines a diffusion model for products in which negative information plays a dominant role discusses its implications for optimal advertising timing policy and presents an application to forecast attendance for the movie gandhi in the dallas area

the dominance of inefficiencies over scale and product mix economies in banking abstract this study measures and analyzes inefficiencies for all u s banks in 1984 inefficiencies are measured relative to a thick frontier cost function and are found to dominate measured scale and product mix economies most inefficiencies are operational in nature involving the overuse of physical inputs rather than financial involving overpayment of interest also technical inefficiencies proportionate overuse of all inputs dominate allocative inefficiencies improper mix of inputs these results suggest that competitive pressures in banking from deregulation will be focused primarily on banks that do not control costs rather than on those of a particular size or product mix

estimation of financial agent based models with simulated maximum likelihood abstract this paper proposes a general computational framework for empirical estimation of financial agent based models for which criterion functions have unknown analytical form for this purpose we adapt a recently developed nonparametric simulated maximum likelihood estimation based on kernel methods in combination with the model developed by brock and hommes 1998 which is one of the most widely analysed heterogeneous agent models in the literature we extensively test the properties and behaviour of the estimation framework as well as its ability to recover parameters consistently and efficiently using simulations key empirical findings indicate the statistical insignificance of the switching coefficient but markedly significant belief parameters that define heterogeneous trading regimes with a predominance of trend following over contrarian strategies in addition we document a slight proportional dominance of fundamentalists over trend following chartists in major world markets

a study of bank efficiency taking into account risk preferences abstract i use the stochastic cost frontier approach to investigate efficiency of banks operating in the third federal reserve district accounting for the quality and riskiness of bank output in addition to the mean and mode of the conditional distribution of the one sided error term i calculate confidence intervals for the inefficiency measures based on the conditional distribution the results indicate that third district banks are operating at cost efficient output levels and product mixes but are not efficiently using their inputs the second part of the article relates the inefficiency measures to several correlates

rational expectations and the aggregation of diverse information in laboratory security markets the idea that markets might aggregate and disseminate information and also resolve conflicts is central to the literature on decentralization hurwicz 1972 and rational expectations lucas 1972 we report on three series of experiments all of which were predicted to have performed identically by the theory of rational expectations in two of the three series one in which participants trade a complete set of arrow debreu securities and a second in which all participants have identical preferences double auction trading leads to efficient aggregation of diverse information and rational expectations equilibrium failure of the third series to exhibit such convergence demonstrates the importance of market institutions and trading instruments in achievement of equilibrium

are scale economies in banking elusive or illusive evidence obtained by incorporating capital structure and risk taking into models of bank production abstract this paper explores how to incorporate banks capital structure and risk taking into models of production in doing so the paper bridges the gulf between 1 the banking literature that studies moral hazard effects of bank regulation without considering the underlying microeconomics of production and 2 the literature that uses dual profit and cost functions to study the microeconomics of bank production without explicitly considering how banks production decisions influence their riskiness various production models that differ in how they account for capital structure and in the objectives they impute to bank managers cost minimization versus value maximization are estimated using u s data on highest level bank holding companies modeling the bank s objective as value maximization conveniently incorporates both market priced risk and expected cash flow into managers ranking and choice of production plans estimated scale economies are found to depend critically on how banks capital structure and risk taking are modeled in particular when equity capital in addition to debt is included in the production model and cost is computed from the value maximizing expansion path rather than the cost minimizing path banks are found to have large scale economies that increase with size moreover better diversification is associated with larger scale economies while increased risk taking and inefficient risk taking are associated with smaller scale economies

endogenizing market institutions an experimental approach abstract we study experimental two sided markets in which the information structure is endogenous when submitting an offer a trader decides which other traders will be informed about the offer this setup allows both a decentralized bargaining market chamberlin j polit econ 56 1948 95 and a double auction market smith j polit econ 70 1962 111 as special cases the results show that offers are typically directed to all traders of the other side of the market but to none of the traders of the same side of the market even though traders receive much less information the resulting market institution leads to the same outcomes in terms of prices and efficiency as a double auction market in two additional treatments we examine the robustness of these results first it is found that the market institution adapts predictably but not necessarily efficiently to the imposition of transaction costs second we find that the preference of sellers to conceal offers from competitors is strict at the same time sellers benefit collectively when they reveal offers to each other

strategic pricing of new pharmaceuticals this paper provides empirical evidence on the leading factors affecting the prices of new pharmaceuticals both at introduction and after 4 6 and 8 years most important is the extent of therapeutic advance embodied in a new product for drugs which represent important therapeutic gains launch prices can be two or three times those of existing drugs used for the same purposes while drugs that largely duplicate the actions of currently available products are typically priced at comparable levels in addition the number of branded substitutes has a substantial negative effect on launch prices which reflects the importance of competitive pressures duplicate products thereby play an important economic role in pharmaceutical markets

hopf bifurcation in an advertising diffusion model abstract the paper presents a two state diffusion model for repeat purchasing it recognizes 1 the interaction between customers and potential buyers and 2 the dorfman steiner result for constant elasticities which says that a monopolist will advertise until the ratio of dollar advertising to dollar sales is constant using stability analysis conditions are derived under which the variables show oscillatory behaviour in particular the occurrence of limit cycles is shown by means of hopf bifurcation theory the message of the paper is that the combination of widely accepted assumptions and rules of marketing behaviour may produce persistent fluctuations in sales and advertising over time

ftt power a global model of the power sector with induced technological change and natural resource depletion abstract this work introduces a model of future technology transformations for the power sector ftt power a representation of global power systems based on market competition induced technological change itc and natural resource use and depletion it is the first component of a family of sectoral bottom up models of technology designed for integration into the global macroeconometric model e3mg itc occurs as a result of technological learning produced by cumulative investment and leads to highly nonlinear irreversible and path dependent technological transitions the model uses a dynamic coupled set of logistic differential equations as opposed to traditional bottom up energy models based on systems optimisation such differential equations offer an appropriate treatment of the times and structure of change involved in sectoral technology transformations as well as a much reduced computational load resource use and depletion are represented by local cost supply curves which give rise to different regional energy landscapes the model is explored for a single global region using two simple scenarios a baseline and a mitigation case where the price of carbon is gradually increased while a constant price of carbon leads to a stagnant system mitigation produces successive technology transitions leading towards the gradual decarbonisation of the global power sector

irrationality and beliefs in a laboratory asset market is it me or is it you abstract this paper reports on an experiment designed to examine individual and market outcomes with a mixture of rational and non rational traders using values elicited via auctions we measure a specific form of irrationality the tendency to overweight high payoff low probability events or probability judgment error subjects are classified by their tendency to exhibit errors as well as their beliefs regarding whether others will make errors subjects then participate in a series of double auction markets the results indicate that both probability judgment error and beliefs about other subjects susceptibility to probability judgment error have significant impact on individual and market outcomes

moviemod an implementable decision support system for prerelease market evaluation of motion pictures in spite of the high financial stakes involved in marketing new motion pictures marketing science models have not been applied to the prerelease market evaluation of motion pictures the motion picture industry poses some unique challenges for example the consumer adoption process for movies is very sensitive to word of mouth interactions which are difficult to measure and predict before the movie has been released in this article we undertake the challenge to develop and implement moviemod a prerelease market evaluation model for the motion picture industry moviemod is designed to generate box office forecasts and to support marketing decisions for a new movie after the movie has been produced or when it is available in a rough cut but before it has been released unlike other forecasting models for motion pictures the calibration of moviemod does not require any actual sales data also the data collection time for a product with a limited lifetime such as a movie should not take too long for moviemod it takes only three hours in a consumer clinic to collect the data needed for the prediction of box office sales and the evaluation of alternative marketing plans the model is based on a behavioral representation of the consumer adoption process for movies as a macroflow process the heart of moviemod is an interactive markov chain model describing the macro flow process according to this model at any point in time with respect to the movie under study a consumer can be found in one of the following behavioral states undecided considerer rejecter positive spreader negative spreader and inactive the progression of consumers through the behavioral states depends on a set of movie specific factors that are related to the marketing mix as well as on a set of more general behavioral factors that characterize the movie going behavior in the population of interest this interactive markov chain model allows us to account for word of mouth interactions among potential adopters and several types of word of mouth spreaders in the population marketing variables that influence the transitions among the states are movie theme acceptability promotion strategy distribution strategy and the movie experience the model is calibrated in a consumer clinic experiment respondents fill out a questionnaire with general items related to their movie going and movie communication behavior they are exposed to different sets of information stimuli they are actually shown the movie and finally they fill outpostmovie evaluations including word of mouth intentions these measures are used to estimate the word of mouth parameters and other behavioral factors as well as the movie specific parameters of the model moviemod produces forecasts of the awareness adoption intention and cumulative penetration for a new movie within the population of interest for a given base marketing plan it also provides diagnostic information on the likely impact of alternative marketing plans on the commercial performance of a new movie we describe two applications of moviemod one is a pilot study conducted without studio cooperation in the united states and the other is a full fledged implementation conducted with cooperation of the movie s distributor and exhibitor in the netherlands the implementations suggest that moviemod produces reasonably accurate forecasts of box office performance more importantly the model offers the opportunity to simulate the effects of alternative marketing plans in the dutch application the effects of extra advertising extra magazine articles extra tv commercials and higher trailer intensity compared to the base marketing plan of the distributor were analyzed we demonstrate the value of these decision support capabilities of moviemod in assisting managers to identify a final plan that resulted in an almost 50 increase in the test movie s revenue performance compared to the marketing plan initially contemplated management implemented this recommended plan which resulted in box office sales that were within 5 of the moviemod prediction moviemod was also tested against several benchmark models and its prediction was better in all cases an evaluation of moviemod jointly by the dutch exhibitor and the distributor showed that both parties were positive about and appreciated its performance as a decision support tool in particular the distributor who has more stakes in the domestic performance of its movies showed a great interest in using moviemod for subsequent evaluations of new movies prior to their release based on such evaluations and the initial validation results moviemod can fruitfully and inexpensively be used to provide researchers and managers with a deeper understanding of the factors that drive audience response to new motion pictures and it can be instrumental in developing other decision support systems that can improve the odds of commercial success of new experiential products

latent homophily or social influence an empirical analysis of purchase within a social network consumers who are close to one another in a social network often make similar purchase decisions this similarity can result from latent homophily or social influence as well as common exogenous factors latent homophily means consumers who are connected to one another are likely to have similar characteristics and product preferences social influence refers to the ability of one consumer to directly influence another consumer s decision based upon their communication we present an empirical study of purchases of caller ring back tones using data from an asian mobile network that predicts consumers purchase timing and choice decisions we simultaneously measure latent homophily and social influence while also accounting for exogenous factors identification is achieved due to our dynamic panel data structure and the availability of detailed communication data we find strong influence effects and latent homophily effects in both the purchase timing and product choice decisions of consumers this paper was accepted by sandra slaughter information systems

innovation diffusion uncertainty advertising and pricing policies we develop and analyze a normative and structurally stochastic model of innovation diffusion by depicting the market at an aggregate level model dynamics are defined through the flow pattern of individuals that move from the innovation unaware stage to the innovation aware and ultimately to the adopter stages the stochastic evolution of this stage wise transition unfolds according to tractable stochastic processes and is influenced by such factors as price word of mouth and advertisement efforts in this environment techniques of contingent claims analysis and stochastic control theory are employed to obtain optimal pricing or advertising policies that maximize the value of the innovation to account for their optimal adjustment over time these policies are modeled as positive real valued adapted processes given this setting policy adjustments over time i e advertising or pricing are viewed as a value additive sequence of nested real options we present closed form analytic results regarding the optimal policies simulations provide a numeric insight to the models behavior

dynamics of pricing in the video game console market skimming or penetration abstract nintendo lost its dominant position in the video game industry during the console war between its nintendo 64 and sony s playstation however nintendo could have made several different strategic decisions to change the outcome this article develops a structural model and investigates these alternative strategies through policy simulations in particular the author provides a framework to study firms optimal pricing strategies under network effects consumer heterogeneity and oligopolistic competition consumer heterogeneity provides an incentive for a durable goods manufacturer to price skim while network effects lead to an opposite motive for penetration pricing the proposed framework incorporates these two competing motives under oligopolistic competition the author estimates a demand system that allows for indirect network effects and consumer heterogeneity and then numerically solves for the markov perfect equilibrium in firms dynamic pricing game policy simulations indicate that ni

financial liberalization and bank efficiency a comparative analysis of india and pakistan this paper provides a comparative analysis of the evolution of the technical efficiency of commercial banks in india and pakistan during 1988 1998 a period characterized by far reaching changes in the banking industry brought about by financial liberalization data envelopment analysis is applied to two alternative input output specifications to measure technical efficiency and to decompose technical efficiency into its two components pure technical efficiency and scale efficiency the consistency of the estimated efficiency scores are checked by examining their relationship with three traditional non frontier measures of bank performance in addition the relationship between bank size and technical efficiency is examined it is found that the overall technical efficiency of the banking industry of both countries improved gradually over the years especially after 1995 unlike public sector banks in india public sector banks in pakistan witnessed improvement in scale efficiency only it is also found that banks are relatively more efficient in generating earning assets than in generating income this is attributed to the presence of high non performing loans in addition it is found that the gap between the pure technical efficiency of different size groups has declined over the years

mixing behavior in cross country diffusion diffusion models represent one of the key successes in marketing science we understand a great deal about what influences and shapes within country diffusion patterns however we understand far less about what influences and shapes cross country or inter country diffusion patterns clearly for firms operating in a truly global environment understanding to what extent prior adoption in one country affects current and consequently future adoption in another country can be an important consideration further understanding how the pattern of interaction across countries impacts the diffusion process can have profound implications for product launch strategies for new durable products in this paper we address the extent to which prior adoption of a new product in one country affects adoption in other countries in particular we investigate the importance of the pattern of interaction what we call mixing across countries in the context of a new product diffusion model more specifically mixing refers to the pattern of communication within and across countries for example do italians communicate only with other italians or do they influence consumers in other countries understanding and empirically estimating how these mixing patterns across countries influence the subsequent diffusion process is the central research objective of this paper while previous research in marketing addressing cross country diffusion has assumed very specific forms of cross country interaction the present study develops and estimates a flexible form of mixing that allows for the simultaneous estimation of mixing patterns across multiple countries in particular we examine the effect of mixing behavior across populations on new product adoption viewing mixing as occurring across a continuum with segregation no mixing at one end and random mixing at the other intermediate forms of mixing lie along this continuum and are called bernoulli mixing in order to produce generalizable results we obtained sales data on four product categories in the european community ec nations vcrs from 1977 1990 microwave ovens 1975 1990 compact disc players 1984 1993 and home computers 1981 1991 for each product data were collected for 10 ec nations great britain germany france italy spain belgium denmark netherlands sweden and austria a diffusion model that incorporates cross country prior adoption cross country mixing patterns and individual country covariates was estimated simultaneously across the 10 countries for each of the four products on the basis of the empirical results we conclude that mixing behavior across segments is an important consideration in new product diffusion specifically the observed pattern of mixing and the strength of cross segment influences are important considerations in allocating the marketing mix during product introduction stages the practical implication of mixing behavior is that if one wishes to understand diffusion in belgium for example it is important to not only know the diffusion parameters in belgium but also those in other ec nations accordingly these results should be of interest to managers responsible for coordinating new product launches across countries and to researchers interested in investigating cross country diffusion issues as an example of the strategic implications of the results we note that under bernoulli mixing future country launches will benefit not only from prior adoption in countries with high overall contact rates but in particular from countries with high rates of contact with other countries although there is some variance across products in general germany france italy and spain are the most gregarious as measured by the rate of contact the results suggest that a strategy of first focusing on germany france italy and spain will maximize adoption in subsequent countries each of these countries tends to have a higher percentage of its contacts with individuals internal to its borders as well as with other countries this suggests that these countries would have relatively quick adoption internally while having a strong influence externally further for countries such as denmark netherlands austria and sweden a higher percentage of their contacts are derived from outside their borders thus seeding the diffusion process by introducing first in germany france italy and spain would benefit later adoption in countries such as denmark netherlands austria and sweden although the strength of the individual country influence varies from product to product this result is generally consistent across the four products

analyzing manufacturers impact on green products market diffusion the case of electric vehicles abstract electric vehicles are often seen as a promising way for rationalizing the use of fossil energy in the automotive sector so far however their market success and thus their impact on reducing fossil fuel consumption are rather limited in this article the automotive market simulator amasi is applied to analyze the leverage of manufacturers to support the market diffusion of electric vehicles this is done by parameterizing the model for the german car market and simulating different product portfolio options regarding the timing of the introduction and the elimination of vehicle models an aggregated industry as well as an individual manufacturer s perspective is taken into account the results indicate that manufacturers portfolio decisions have a strong influence on the market development of electric vehicles and can be used to gain a competitive advantage thus manufacturers should proactively strive to shape the electric vehicle market instead of adopting a waiting position for policymakers these findings imply that instruments to steer manufacturers behavior are just as important as those targeted at consumers the paper broadens the discussion on the levers for the market diffusion of electric vehicles by providing a simulator to analyze manufacturers portfolio decisions in a competitive setting and by illustrating the necessity to include portfolio decisions when designing mechanisms to foster the market diffusion of electric vehicles

the impact of liberalization on the productive efficiency of indian commercial banks abstract we examine the productive efficiency of 70 indian commercial banks during the early stages 1986 1991 of the ongoing period of liberalization we use data envelopment analysis to calculate radial technical efficiency scores we then use stochastic frontier analysis to attribute variation in the calculated efficiency scores to three sources a temporal component an ownership component and a random noise component we find publicly owned indian banks to have been the most efficient followed by foreign owned banks and privately owned indian banks we also find a temporal improvement in the performance of foreign owned banks virtually no trend in the performance of privately owned indian banks and a temporal decline in the performance of publicly owned indian banks we attempt to explain these patterns in terms of the government s evolving regulatory policies

social contagion and income heterogeneity in new product diffusion a meta analytic test standard diffusion models capture social contagion only coarsely and do not allow one to operationalize different contagion mechanisms moreover there is increasing skepticism about the importance of contagion and as has long been known s shaped diffusion curves can also result from heterogeneity in the propensity to adopt we present hypotheses about conditions under which specific contagion mechanisms and income heterogeneity are more pronounced and test these hypotheses using a meta analysis of the q p ratio in applications of the bass diffusion model the ratio is positively associated with the gini index of income inequality in a country supporting the heterogeneity in thresholds interpretation the ratio also varies as predicted by the gamma shifted gompertz diffusion model but the evidence vanishes after controlling for national culture as to contagion the q p ratio varies with the four hofstede dimensions of national culture for three of them in a direction consistent with the social contagion interpretation furthermore products with competing standards have a higher q p ratio which is again consistent with the social contagion interpretation finally we find effects of national culture only for products without competing standards suggesting that technological effects and culturally moderated social contagion effects might not operate independently from each other

sequential market entries and competition modelling in multi innovation diffusions abstract the diffusion of innovations for simultaneous processes cannot take into account and properly explain systematic perturbations due to competition substitution effects if they are examined one by one a first aspect in simultaneous competing diffusions is the distinction between simultaneous market entries synchronic competition and sequential entries diachronic competition in the latter case the beginning of competition may upset the first entrant s diffusion a second important aspect in multiple competition is represented by the choice to model the word of mouth effect either at the category level balanced model or at the brand level separating the within brand effect from the cross brand one unbalanced model in this paper balanced models are studied and we propose a model that allows for a change in the parameter values of the first entrant as soon as the second one enters the market the resulting differential system has a closed form solution that enables through sales data an empirical validation of the assumptions underlying the model structure improving the forecasting accuracy an application to pharmaceutical drug competition is discussed

technical change organizational form and the structure of bank production of those technological characteristics related to the nature of competition among firms in an industry or market scale economies and technical change are especially important economies of scale are said to exist when an equiproportional increase in all inputs results in a greater than proportional increase in output or equivalently when an increase in output at constant input prices leads to a less than proportional increase in total costs thus average costs decline as output expands depending upon the extent to which costs decline as output increases regulation of the firms in the industry may be necessary l the literature analyzing scale economies in commercial banking is voluminous the early studies on scale economies in banking include those by benston 1965 1972 greenbaum 1967 murphy 1972 and bell and murphy 1968 more recent studies include those by benston hanweck and humphrey 1982 and clark 1984 2 this literature has established that mild scale economies exist in bank

technical scale and allocative efficiencies in u s banking an empirical investigation a nonparametric frontier approach is used to calculate the overall technical pure technical allocative and scale efficiencies for a sample of 322 independent banks the sample was drawn from the federal deposit insurance corporation tapes on the reports of condition and reports of income call reports for the year 1986 the results indicated a low level of overall efficiency the main source of inefficiency was technical in nature rather than allocative separate efficiency frontiers were constructed to test the effect of branching however the distributions of efficiency measures for branching and non branching banks were not found to be different

internet based virtual stock markets for business forecasting the application of internet based virtual stock markets vsms is an additional approach that can be used to predict short and medium term market developments the basic concept involves bringing a group of participants together via the internet and allowing them to trade shares of virtual stocks these stocks represent a bet on the outcome of future market situations and their value depends on the realization of these market situations in this process a vsm elicits and aggregates the assessments of its participants concerning future market developments the aim of this article is to evaluate the potential use and the different design possibilities as well as the forecast accuracy and performance of vsms compared to expert predictions for their application to business forecasting after introducing the basic idea of using vsms for business forecasting we discuss the different design possibilities for such vsms in three real world applications we analyze the feasibility and forecast accuracy of vsms compare the performance of vsms to expert predictions and propose a new validity test for vsm forecasts finally we draw conclusions and provide suggestions for future research

a non radial malmquist productivity index with an illustrative application to chinese major industries abstract data envelopment analysis dea measures the relative efficiency of peer units when multiple outputs and inputs are present dea based malmquist productivity index measures the technical and productivity changes over time the current study extends the malmquist productivity index into a non radial index where the decision maker s preference over performance improvement can be incorporated the non radial malmquist productivity index eliminates possible inefficiency represented by the non zero slacks the method is applied to measure the productivity change of three chinese major industries textiles chemicals and metallurgicals during four five year plan periods the paper shows how dea based malmquist productivity index can be employed to evaluate the technology and productivity changes resulted from the economic development plans the paper also shows the importance of using the non radial malmquist productivity index

a novel bass type model for product life cycle quantification using aggregate market data abstract product life cycle plc is a widely accepted concept that has been given significant attention in operations management and marketing literature however its quantification remains a major challenge this study aims to develop a unique and original analytical model for quantifying plcs using aggregate market data the bass diffusion model is used to forecast consumers first purchases of the product next the novelty loyalty based consumer utility nlbcu theory which has a confirmed neuropsychological basis is used to model repeat or replacement purchases the unique contribution of this work is that it synthesizes the prevailing innovation diffusion theory and the nlbcu theory to provide a distinct dynamic and endogenous perspective on consumer purchasing behavior across the entire plc the model s advantages include its simple mathematical formulation its minimal use of data and its harmony with the predominating ideas of the innovation diffusion literature through simulation studies and empirical investigations the descriptive power and data fitting performance of the model are demonstrated

efficiency of experimental security markets with insider information an application of rational expectations models the study reports on the ability of competing models of market information integration and dissemination to explain the behavior of simple laboratory markets for a one priced security returns to the security depended upon a randomly drawn state of nature some agents insiders whose identity was unknown to other agents knew the state before the markets opened with replication of market conditions the predictions of a fully revealing rational expectations model are relatively accurate prices adjusted immediately to near rational expectations prices profits of insiders were virtually indistinguishable from non insiders and efficiency levels converged to near 100 percent

firm efficiency and the regulatory closure of s ls an empirical investigation this paper uses a two step methodology to examine the relationship between firm inefficiency and the regulatory closure of savings and loans s ls in the first step using multiproduct translog stochastic cost frontiers the authors estimate inefficiency scores separately for mutual and stock s ls operating in the southwest in 1988 they use the inefficiency scores in second step logit models to identify determinants of regulatory closure for both mutual and stock s ls the authors find a significant positive relationship between firm inefficiency and regulatory closure they also find a greater probability of closure for s ls in economically depressed states copyright 1993 by mit press

silverscreener a modeling approach to movie screens management managing the allocation of shelf space for new products is a problem of significant importance for retailers the problem is particularly complex for exhibitors the retailers in the motion picture supply chain because they face dynamic challenges given the short life cycles of movies the changing level of demand over time the scarcity of shelf space and the complex revenue sharing contract between the exhibitor and the distributor in the face of this complexity the aim of current research is to provide a structure for analyzing management problems of exhibitors in the movie industry using a mathematical programming approach and a fast but readily accessible algorithm we propose a decision support model silverscreener whose aim is to help exhibitors make effective and timely decisions regarding theater screens management the major objective is to help select and schedule movies for a multiple screens theater over a fixed planning horizon in such a way that the exhibitor s cumulative profit is maximized by treating the multiple screens as parallel machines and the movies as jobs we provide an analogy of the current problem to the parallel machine scheduling problem we formulate the resulting problem as an integer program we depart from the typical parallel machine scheduling problems by introducing the time indexed formulation that is particularly useful for solving the current problem an important distinction between the current problem and typical machine scheduling problems is that the present approach allows for the choice of which movies to play typically in machine scheduling all jobs have to be scheduled we provide various analyses of normative versus actual decision making based on publicly available data the developed model is readily implementable and appears to lead to improved profitability in different comparative cases through sensitivity analysis we demonstrate that the above results are robust to variations in various parameters of the problem the main findings and insights from the normative policy suggest the following 1 based on silverscreener s recommendations the exhibitor can achieve substantially higher cumulative profit 2 the improvement over actual decisions in terms of profitability appears to result from a combination of better selection and scheduling of the movies 3 the general structure of the exhibitor s normative decision is choose fewer right movies and run them longer we propose a two tier integrated application of the model to show how the model can be applied to realistic decisionmaking the first tier involves development of a movie selection plan to help the manager plan an entire season and bid for movies before the start of that season an ex ante revenue prediction scheme is developed based intuitively on a matching of the forthcoming movies with similar movies played in this theater previously if the forthcoming season s scheduling plan can be visualized as a two dimensional week by screen matrix then that matrix contains only empty cells before the first tier after a bid plan is developed the exhibitor can fill some of those empty cells the remaining empty cells represent slots which can be decided during the season by either extending movies the exhibitor booked before the season or by scheduling other movies which may become available later in the season this motivates the second tier adaptive scheduling approach of the integrated approach the second tier helps the exhibitor in weekly decision making during the season this application involves rolling and updating data from one time window to another the approaches followed in the two tiers of the integrated application are quite general in that they can incorporate a sophisticated demand prediction model managerial judgments or a combination of both we also propose an alternative behavioral decision rule heuristic which exemplifies relationship dilemmas in the movie industry this heuristic shows that the exhibitors need to be selective in their choice of movies and may suffer a substantial loss in profitability if they place too much emphasis on accommodating distributors

evaluating the cost efficiency of the italian banking system what can be learned from the joint application of parametric and non parametric techniques abstract research on bank efficiency has developed in two separate streams econometric studies and data envelopment analysis a linear programming technique these two branches of literature have developed quickly but separately in this paper these two approaches have been tested on a common panel of 270 italian banks and this has suggested the following i econometric and linear programming results do not differ dramatically when based on the same data and conceptual framework ii when differences arise they can be explained by going back to the intrinsic features of the models moreover some findings on italian banks may be of interest also to the international reader i efficiency scores show a high variance ii the banking system is split in two between northern and southern banks iii there is a direct rather than inverse relationship between productive efficiency and asset quality iv the efficiency of italian banks did not increase over the period 1988 1992

fujifilm kodak duopolistic competition in japan and the united states this article analyzes the duopolistic competition of fujifilm and kodak according to the product life cycle and game theoretic exchange of hostage hypothesis of international trade and investment it shows how each firm used its home team and first mover advantages to compete with the other it shows that fujifilm s strategic use of marketing logistics and innovative products reduced kodak s market share in japan and elsewhere this article has implications for the global competition of multinationals policies and for market competition and trade policies of the u s japan and other countries

the short term price effect of a tourist tax through a dynamic demand model the case of the balearic islands abstract tourist taxes have become an important source of revenue for many tourist destinations taxes on accommodation are upheld by their proponents as a way of shifting the local tax burden on to non residents while the travel industry claims that these levies do significant damage to their level of competitiveness the objective of this paper is to identify the market s sensitivity to price changes in travel related services or groups of services assuming that one of the main factors that influences travel decisions is the information on the destination that consumers receive in order to include this effect the study applies a combination of a diffusion model and a traditional economic utility theory model to tourists visiting the balearic islands spain from the united kingdom germany france and the netherlands

measuring marketing mix effects in the 32 64 bit video game console market we investigate the short and long run effects of prices and software availability on the category level diffusion of 32 64 bit video game consoles in the usa we adopt an estimation framework that allows for a flexible intrinsic growth pattern for the hardware consoles and uses instrumental variables to control for the potential endogeneity of prices we find significant long term effects of prices and software availability on sales we find that using a non parametric hazard specification is important imposing parametric forms results in elasticities that are up to 30 smaller we use these results to derive implications for marketing policies over the life cycle of the industry copyright 2009 john wiley sons ltd

contrasting rational and psychological analyses of political choice we contrast the rational theory of choice in the form of expected utility theory with descriptive psychological analysis in the form of prospect theory using problems involving the choice between political candidates and public referendum issues the results showed that the assumptions underlying the classical theory of risky choice are systematically violated in the manner predicted by prospect theory in particular our respondents exhibited risk aversion in the domain of gains risk seeking in the domain of losses and a greater sensitivity to losses than to gains this is consistent with the advantage of the incumbent under normal conditions and the potential advantage of the challenger in bad times the results further show how a shift in the reference point could lead to reversals of preferences in the evaluation of political and economic options contrary to the assumption of invariance finally we contrast the normative and descriptive analyses of uncertainty in choice and address the rationality of voting

optimal price skimming by a monopolist facing rational consumers this paper considers the intertemporal pricing problem for a monopolist marketing a new product the key feature differentiating this paper from the extant management science literature on intertemporal pricing is the assumption that consumers are intertemporal utility maximizers a subgame perfect nash equilibrium pricing policy is characterized and shown to involve intertemporal price discrimination we compare this policy to the optimal policy for a monopolist facing myopic consumers and find that for any given state prices are always lower with rational consumers than with myopic consumers for plausible parameter values the assumption of consumer rationality can be shown to lead to large differences in optimal prices moreover if a monopolist facing rational consumers implements the optimal myopic consumer pricing policy profits can be significantly less than if the monopolist follows the equilibrium pricing policy for rational consumers

optimal entry timing in markets with social influence firms routinely face the challenging decision of whether to enter a new market where a firm s strong presence in an existing market has a positive influence the leverage effect on product adoption in the new market but the reciprocal social influence on the existing market is negative the backlash effect in this paper we show that a firm s optimal entry strategy in this situation cannot be characterized by the familiar now or never or now or at maturity strategies proposed in the literature we show that a strong leverage effect does not necessarily provide the justification for a firm to enter a new market and neither should a strong backlash effect necessarily deter a firm from embracing a new market the optimal strategy is predicated on a judicious trade off between the three factors of leverage backlash and patience thus an astute manager can always find the opportune time to enter the new market if she takes into account the dynamic and recursive nature of cross market interaction effects where leverage enhances the backlash but backlash weakens the leverage in a nonlinear dynamic fashion we illustrate that firms stand to benefit from explicit considerations of these effects in deciding whether and when to enter a new market furthermore we explore how the optimal time of entry into the new market relates to the time of peak sales for the existing market demonstrating that depending on the interactive effects of leverage and backlash entry could be optimal either before or after peak sales in the existing market

combinatorial auction design combinatorial auctions have two features that greatly affect their design computational complexity of winner determination and opportunities for cooperation among competitors dealing with these forces trade offs between desirable auction properties such as allocative efficiency revenue maximization low transaction costs fairness failure freeness and scalability computational complexity can be dealt with algorithmically by relegating the computational burden to bidders by maintaining fairness in the face of computational limitations by limiting biddable combinations and by limiting the use of combinatorial bids combinatorial auction designs include single round first price sealed bidding vickrey clarke groves vcg mechanisms uniform and market clearing price auctions and iterative combinatorial auctions combinatorial auction designs must deal with exposure problems threshold problems ways to keep the bidding moving at a reasonable pace avoiding and resolving ties and controlling complexity

labor supply of new york city cabdrivers one day at a time life cycle models of labor supply predict a positive relationship between hours supplied and transitory changes in wages because such changes have virtually no effect on life cycle wealth previous attempts to test this hypothesis empirically with time series data have not been supportive estimated elasticities are typically negative or nonsignificant such analyses however are vulnerable to measurement error and other estimation problems we use data on daily observations of wages and hours for new york city cab drivers to estimate the supply response to transitory fluctuations in wages cab drivers decide daily how many hours to supply and face wages that are positively correlated within days but largely uncorrelated between days using these data our central finding is that wage elasticities are persistently negative from 5 to 1 in three different samples even after correcting for measurement error using instrumental variables these negative wage elasticities challenge the notion that cab drivers trade off labor and leisure at different points in time and question the empirical adequacy of life cycle formulations of labor supply

consumer choice process for experience goods an econometric model and analysis in this research the authors develop and execute an econometric framework to model and analyze the consumer choice process for experience products formally the authors develop a multistage model

contagion of wishful thinking in markets prior research provides only weak and controversial evidence that people overestimate the likelihood of desirable events wishful thinking but strong evidence that people bet more heavily on those events wishful betting two experiments show that wishful betting contaminates beliefs in laboratory financial markets because wishful betters appear to possess more favorable information than they actually do as a consequence market interaction exacerbates rather than mitigates wishful thinking this phenomenon contagion of wishful thinking could be problematic in many settings where people infer others beliefs from their behavior

a market entry timing model for new techniques a central issue in new product development and planning is the market timing entry decision an entry too early may risk pushing an under developed product into the marketplace with possible negative results however a product technology may sacrifice sales if entry is delayed too long a market diffusion model is developed that incorporates negative word of mouth associated with new product failure resulting from premature introduction our analysis suggests that when introducing a new technology significant penalties may be associated with mistiming introduction the analysis was applied to a problem facing the photovoltaic program of the department of energy a proposal to construct a 100 home demonstration program for photovoltaics pv in the southwest was being evaluated the analysis of this case showed that an argument can be made to delay the demonstration program for several years and that significant risks in terms of lowered ultimate market penetration exist when starting this pv demonstration program prematurely

technical efficiency and scale efficiency in the italian banking sector a non parametric approach measures of technical and scale efficiencies are derived in the italian banking industries by implementing non parametric data envelopment analysis on a cross section of 174 italian banks taken in 1991 the methodology of the parametric and non parametric approaches to measure efficiency are discussed the existence of both technical and allocative efficiency is established this result is robust to modifications in the specification of inputs and outputs suggested by the intermediation approach and by the asset approach in implementing both the intermediation and the asset approach the traditional specification of inputs is modified to allow an explicit role for financial capital in addition regression analysis is used on a bank specific measure of inefficiency to investigate determinants of banks efficiency efficiency is best explained by productive specialization size and to a lesser extent by location