dynamics of dyadic competitive interaction in this study of firms entries into and exits from each other s markets we link research on multipoint competition to the emerging action oriented dyadic approach to interfirm rivalry by specifying market interdependencies between pairs of firms that condition their potential for rivalry over time our dynamic analysis of competitive interactions between pairs of commuter airlines in california reveals the idiosyncratic and asymmetric market microstructures that characterize dyadic competitive relationships and helps explain why firms grapple vigorously with some of their competitors while being passive toward others we show that there is an inverted u shaped relationship between firms rates of entry into and exit from each other s markets and the level of multimarket contact in competitor dyads we also show how this basic curvilinear effect varies from dyad to dyad as a function of relative levels of multimarket contact with competitors in other dyads and the relative sizes of competitors in a focal dyad copyright 1999 john wiley sons ltd

status and outlook for thailand s low carbon electricity development thailand is facing an urgency to enhance its energy security and capacity to cope with global warming impacts as demands on fossil fuel consumption keep rising this paper reviewed the latest situation on renewable powers and developmental strategies toward low carbon electricity generation in thailand government recently has spent tremendous financial and legislative supports to promote the uses of indigenous renewable energy resources and fuel diversification while contributing in reduction of global greenhouse gas major policy challenge is on which types of renewable energy should be more pronounced to ensure sustainable future of the country regions in thailand present different potentials for renewable supply on biomass municipal wastes hydropower and wind to maximize renewable energy development in each area location is matter currently energy derived biomass is widely utilized within the country however if droughts happen more often and severe it will not only affect food security but also energy security life cycle of biomass energy production may cause other social issues on land and chemical uses meanwhile deployment of wind and solar energy has been slow and needs to speed up to the large extent in comparison with energy proportion from biomass nuclear power has already been included in the thai power development plan 2010 pdp 2010 however public acceptance is a major issue setting up strategic renewable energy zone to support power producer according to pre determined potential location may assist development direction furthermore government has to strongly subsidize research and development to lower technology cost and promote private investment on renewable energy industry in the future revision of electricity price is needed to allow fair competition between non renewable and renewable energy once subsidy programs are ended environmental tax according to fuel types could help government progressing toward low carbon electricity stimulating renewable energy development and utilization at local community is a key for thai sufficiency economy

do women have more shame than men an experiment on self assessment and the shame of overestimating oneself we analyze how subjects self assessment depends on whether its accuracy is observable to others we find that women downgrade their self assessment given observability while men do not this holds true when the self assessment concerns a task with individual as well as competitive incentives women avoid the shame they may have if others observe that they overestimated themselves men however do not seem to be similarly shame averse this gender difference may be due to different societal expectations while we find that men are expected to be overconfident women are not the negative effect on women s self assessment is eliminated when performance is only imperfectly observable shame aversion may explain recent findings that women shy away from competition demanding jobs and wage negotiations as entering these situations demonstrates confidence in one s ability

understanding corporate coherence theory and evidence abstract multiproduct firms are perceived to be coherent in their scope yet there is no strong theoretical foundations to explain coherence in modern industrial organization theory this paper shows that as u s manufacturing firms grow more diverse they maintain a constant level of coherence between neighboring activities this finding runs counter to the idea that firms with many activities are generally more incoherent a framework is then presented which appeals to the nature of enterprise learning path dependencies and the nature of the selection environment to explain the ubiquity of coherent diversifiers

asset stock accumulation and sustainability of competitive advantage given incomplete factor markets appropriate time paths of flow variables must be chosen to build required stocks of assets that is critical resources are accumulated rather than acquired in strategic factor markets barney barney j 1986 strategic factor markets expectations luck and business strategy management sci october 1231 1241 sustainability of a firm s asset position hinges on how easily assets can be substituted or imitated imitability is linked to the characteristics of the asset accumulation process time compression diseconomies asset mass efficiencies inter connectedness asset erosion and causal ambiguity

overconfidence and social signalling evidence from both psychology and economics indicates that individuals give statements that appear to overestimate their ability compared to that of others we test three theories that predict such relative overconfidence the first theory argues that overconfidence can be generated by bayesian updating from a common prior and truthful statements if individuals do not know their true type the second theory suggests that self image concerns asymmetrically affect the choice to receive new information about one s abilities and this asymmetry can produce overconfidence the third theory is that overconfidence is induced by the desire to send positive signals to others about one s own skill this suggests either a bias in judgement strategic lying or both we formulate this theory precisely using a large data set of relative ability judgements about two cognitive tests we reject the restrictions imposed by the bayesian model and also reject a key prediction of the self image models that individuals with optimistic beliefs will be less likely to search for further information about their skill because this information might shatter their self image we provide evidence that personality traits strongly affect relative ability judgements in a pattern that is consistent with the third theory of social signalling our results together suggest that overconfidence in statements is more likely to be induced by social concerns than by either of the other two factors copyright 2013 oxford university press

market regulation and multimarket rivalry multimarket contact between duopolists in an x and y market is modelled with a trigger strategy we show that mildly restrictive price cap regulation in the x market decreases y market quantities but restrictive caps in the x market have a positive impact on y market outputs behavior in laboratory markets confirms these propositions regulation that lowers x market prices by a small amount results in a statistically significant reduction in y outputs when the regulated x market price is reduced to the cournot nash level y market outputs rise to a point statistically indistinguishable from the unregulated quantities

the function of authority in transaction cost economics abstract this paper questions the transaction cost characterization of observed authority relations as efficient governance structures various inadequacies in the transaction cost account of work organization and the limits of firm size are traced to its neglect of the possibility that authority may be abused opportunistically this exemplifies a more general propensity in the transaction cost literature that of explaining economic organization in functionalist terms with little attention to the causal mechanisms through which efficient governance structures might actually arise three such mechanisms are considered but none is found to provide an adequate rationale for the imputation of efficiency to observed structures

distributional preferences and competitive behavior we study experimentally the relationship between distributional preferences and competitive behavior we find that spiteful subjects react strongest to competitive pressure and win in a tournament significantly more often than efficiency minded and inequality averse subjects however when given the choice between a tournament and a piece rate scheme efficiency minded subjects choose the tournament most often while spiteful and inequality averse subjects avoid it when controlling for distributional preferences risk attitudes and past performance the gender gap in the willingness to compete is no longer significant indicating that gender related variables explain why twice as many men as women self select into competition

biomass energy in bangladesh current status and prospects bangladesh has been experiencing several problems over the past few decades these include over population energy crisis and global warming etc adequate amount of power generation in a sustainable way is an important issue for rapidly increasing population and economic development renewable energy can play an effective role to meet energy demand since it is an agrarian country biomass is one of the potential renewable energy sources in bangladesh agricultural crop residues animal manure and municipal solid waste are the major sources of biomass energy in the country this paper presents the scope potential and technologies related to the use of biomass resources the study also discusses the biomass projects undertaken by the government and non government organizations plans and strategies to promote biomass technologies in bangladesh

does transaction misalignment matter for firm survival at all stages of the industry life cycle research on industry life cycles suggests that competitive pressures are more severe during the shakeout stage which could be associated with the emergence of a dominant design than at other stages transaction cost theory on the other hand assumes generally competitive markets and does not address the industry life cycle it therefore implies that transaction cost economizing is a superior firm strategy regardless of the stage of the life cycle this paper seeks to reconcile these two streams of research by investigating whether aligning transactions with governance modes in accordance with transaction cost prescriptions has a differential effect on firm survival in preshakeout versus shakeout stages of the industry life cycle analyzing data from the early u s auto industry 1917 1933 we find that while transaction misalignment did not have a significant impact on firm survival during the preshakeout stage or during the period as a whole it did have a significantly larger negative impact on survival during the shakeout stage than during the preshakeout stage we also find that the negative effects of misalignment on survival were significantly weaker for larger firms during the shakeout stage this suggests that applications of transaction cost theory which assume uniformly severe selection pressures across the industry life cycle and uniform effects of misalignment across firms of different sizes could be misleading it also suggests that theories of the industry life cycle could usefully take transaction costs into account along with production costs in their analyses of competition over the life cycle

determinants of incentive intensity in group based rewards the incentive intensity of rewards the individual marginal gains in pay triggered by increased performance has been linked to higher effort and the attraction of talent determinants of incentive

do women shy away from competition do men compete too much we examine whether men and women of the same ability differ in their selection into a competitive environment participants in a laboratory experiment solve a real task first under a noncompetitive piece rate and then a competitive tournament incentive scheme although there are no gender differences in performance men select the tournament twice as much as women when choosing their compensation scheme for the next performance while 73 percent of the men select the tournament only 35 percent of the women make this choice this gender gap in tournament entry is not explained by performance and factors such as risk and feedback aversion only playa negligible role instead the tournament entry gap is driven by men being more overconfident and by gender differences in preferences for performing in a competition the result is that women shy away from competition and men embrace it

hypercompetition in a multimarket environment the role of strategic similarity and multimarket contact in competitive de escalation the effect of intra industry heterogeneity on hypercompetitive escalation and de escalation in a multimarket environment is examined the authors study two critical dimensions of intra industry heterogeneity strategic similarity which captures similarity in competitive orientation and multimarket contact which captures the degree of overlap between rivals in the multiple markets of the industry theory predicts that both variables influence the intensity of rivalry and competitive disruption the predictions in the literature about the effect of strategic similarity on the intensity of rivalry are mixed while strategic group theory proposes that strategic similarity may lead to lower rivalry other theories focusing on product differentiation the resource based view of the firm and hypercompetitive escalation predict that strategic similarity may actually increase rivalry those diametrically opposed propositions are captured as alternative hypotheses of the effect of strategic similarity with r

sustainable rural electrification using rice husk biomass energy a case study of cambodia abstract the role of energy in overall social and economical developments is well recognized however most energy providers are reluctant to venture in rural regions of developing countries these regions are generally characterized by low income populations minimum access to electricity rare access to financial services or loans in this paper we present the potential of rice husk for rural electrification in cambodia rice husk is locally abundant at almost no cost with a production over 9 3 million tons paddy rice in 2014 for a total population of about 15 million people the conversion of rice husk into electricity through gasification or thermally generated electricity is a well known technology rice husk can contribute in a sustainable manner to grant access to electricity to cambodian rural population and is more reliable and competitive with reference to other renewable energy sources of electricity the present investigation focuses on the study of self sustaining energy service model to provide grid quality power to rural populations without the need of subsidies in cambodia many rice mills are operating in rural and semi urban areas some of these mills are now using rice husk for electricity production for industries and rural households generally for lighting at low cost we believe that the power systems focusing on both power requirements for the industry such rice mills and power requirements for the people living in the neighboring villages rural areas at affordable tariff could become the most appropriate solution for the sustainable rural electrification along with the potential of rice husk for rural electrification in cambodia we present a financially viable business model to provide the grid quality power to rural population without grant or subsidy

the provision of incentives in firms i ncentives are the essence of economics despite many wide ranging claims about their supposed importance there has been little empirical assessment of incentive provision for workers the purpose of this paper is to critically overview existing work on the provision of incentives since the interests of workers and their employers are not always aligned a large theoretical literature has emphasized how firms design compensation contracts to induce employees to operate in the firm s interest this literature has reached into many areas of compensation and has pointed to a multitude of different mechanisms that can be used to induce workers to act in the interests of their employers these include piece rates options discretionary bonuses promotions profit sharing efficiency wages deferred compensation and so on my objective here is to evaluate this literature in the light of a growing empirical literature on compensation where possible i will address the literature from two perspectives first an underlying assumption of this literature is that individuals respond to contracts that reward performance accordingly i consider whether agents behave in this way and whether these responses are always in the firm s interest second i address whether firms write contracts with these responses in mind in other words do contracts look like the predictions of the theory incentives are provided to workers

a review on the development and commercialization of biomass gasification technologies in china with the fast economic growth the energy demand in china has increased two fold in the past three decades various energy resources have been exploited and utilized and biomass is one of the energy resources that is abundant and has been widely used in china for a long time biomass gasification is an efficient and advanced technology for extracting the energy from biomass and has received increasing attention in the energy market in this paper the development of biomass gasification for various energy applications in china is reviewed and their prospects are discussed among the different biomass gasification technologies biomass gasification and power generation is found to be the most promising biomass gasification technology that has great potential to be further developed in china

the salesperson as outside agent or employee a transaction cost analysis this descriptive study explores the reasons for integration of the personal selling function i e the use of employee direct salespeople rather than manufacturers representatives reps a hypothesized model is developed based on both transaction cost analysis and the sales force management literature data from 13 electronic component manufacturers covering 159 u s sales districts are used to estimate a logistic model of the probability of going direct in a given district results are shown to be stable across specification and estimation methods and to fit the data well the transaction cost model is generally supported the principal finding is that the greater the difficulty of evaluating a salesperson s performance the more likely the firm to substitute surveillance for commission as a control mechanism i e to use a direct sales force among other findings direct sales forces are also associated with complex hard to learn product lines and with districts that demand considerable nonselling activities several factors prove unrelated including company size the amount of travel a district requires and the importance of key accounts this article was originally published in marketing science volume 4 issue 3 pages 234 254 in 1985

global policy of rural electrification energy poverty and lack of electricity in the rural area exacerbate the poverty of the developing countries the sustainable renewable technologies can be considered as efficient tools to reduce energy poverty whenever they are conducted based on an appropriate policy electricity can improve the human s lifestyle by increasing the level of health education welfare and technology currently sub sahara africa with only 14 2 of rural electrification has the first rank in the world with lowest access to electricity in that region around 585 million citizens has almost no access to electricity the present study focuses on the general global policies to electrify the rural areas in this regard variety of plans and programs conducted by governmental and private institutes are investigated in the year 2011 the international energy agency iea has developed three global strategies based on the world energy market that defines the overall world energy approach in the present work different technologies for rural electrification are taken into account in two major categories of grid connected and off grid systems furthermore based on sustainable development with emphasis on environmental consideration the feasibility of electrification by using different types of renewable energies such as solar biomass hydro wind and wave have been studied despite reliability of grid connection results indicate that renewable energy sources are the best choice especially in areas far from grid connections challenges between financial institutes and executive agencies result in resource management and technology development in order to overcome existing barriers and issues

orchestrating impartiality the impact of blind auditions on female musicians a change in the audition procedures of symphony orchestras adoption of blind auditions with a screen to conceal the candidate s identity from the jury provides a test for sex biased hiring using data from actual auditions in an individual fixed effects framework we find that the screen increases the probability a woman will be advanced and hired although some of our estimates have large standard errors and there is one persistent effect in the opposite direction the weight of the evidence suggests that the blind audition procedure fostered impartiality in hiring and increased the proportion women in symphony orchestras

international coherence and mne performance we introduce the concept of international coherence ic to describe the degree of relatedness in a multinational enterprise mne we propose that ic hinges on the interplay of the relatedness between any two mne units and the linkages that tie them together linkages can be thought of as the often costly pipes that allow the content that is resources and information that define relatedness to flow we argue that greater ic increases the potential of an mne to generate economies by facilitating resource sharing and diffusion as well as learning and knowledge creation among mne units while controlling corresponding bureaucratic costs in turn this will lead to superior mne performance we also hypothesize that firms facing high levels of competition will have greater incentives to capitalize on ic to test our hypotheses we first estimate the relatedness between units by the revealed unit relatedness using data on nearly a half a million global investments by all public mnes worldwide we then use this information and data on 960 us mne units locations to estimate ic and find support for our hypotheses our results indicate the potential for ic as an important new facet of multinationality

sales at risk a test of the mutual forbearance theory of conglomerate behavior in seeking to understand the implications of the large amount of diversification and conglomeration that has occurred in the united states since the mid 1960s some economists have revived the mutual forbearance hypothesis first presented by edwards 1955 several papers have attempted to formalize or test this hypothesis which states that multimarket contacts mmcs among firms have the potential for facilitating collusion in one or more of the markets where these contacts occur using 1976 data from the federal trade commission s line of business study an earlier paper feinberg 1982 developed a framework for evaluating mmcs and inthis paper tests the mutual forbearance theory of conglomerate behavior at both company and industry levels using 1976 data from the federal trade commission s line of business program this theory states that companies meeting rivals in more than one market will be able to facilitate collusion in one or all of those markets at the company level the evidence supports the theory showing salesat risk a measure of the importance of multimarket contacts to increase price cost margins in the moderate range of concentration where collusion is feasible but difficult to achieve without mutual forbearance the industry level results are weaker casting some doubt on the hypothesis associate professor of economics pennsylvania state university this paper was begun while i was a consultant to the line of business program at the federal trade commission the manager of the line of business program has certified that he has reviewed and approved the disclosure avoidance procedures used by the staff of the line of business program to insure that the data included in this paper do not identify individual company line of business data views expressed here are my own and not necessarily those of the federal trade commission i would like to thank william long george pascoe david ravenscraft melvin reder and an anonymous referee for their help on this project 1 these studies often refer to terms other than mutual forbearance e g spheres of influence extended interdependence they include adams 1974 reynolds 1976 heggestad and rhoades 1978 areeda and turner 1979 strickland 1980 feinberg 1982 1984 scott 1982 and feinberg and sherman 1985

how costly is diversity affirmative action in light of gender differences in competitiveness affirmative action is often criticized for causing reverse discrimination and lowering the qualifications of those hired under the policy however the magnitude of such adverse effects depends on whether the best suited candidate is hired absent the policy indeed affirmative action may compensate for the distortion discrimination imposes on the selection of candidates this paper asks whether affirmative action can have a similar corrective impact when qualified individuals fail to apply for a job we evaluate the effect of introducing a gender quota in an environment where high performing women fail to enter competitions they can win we show that guaranteeing women equal representation among winners increases their entry the response exceeds that predicted by the change in probability of winning and is in part driven by women being more willing to compete against other women the consequences are substantial as the boost in supply essentially eliminates the anticipated costs of the policy this paper was accepted by uri gneezy behavioral economics

can the survivor principle survive diversification the survivor principle holds that the competitive process weeds out inefficient firms so that hypotheses about efficient behavior can be tested by observing what firms actually do this principle underlies a large body of empirical work in strategy economics and management but do competitive markets really select for efficient behavior is the survivor principle reliable we evaluate the survivor principle in the context of corporate diversification asking if survivor based measures of interindustry relatedness are good predictors of firms decisions to exit particular lines of business controlling for other firm and industry characteristics that affect firms portfolio choices we find strong robust evidence that survivor based relatedness is an important determinant of exit this empirical regularity is consistent with an efficiency rationale for firm level diversification though we cannot rule out alternative explanations based on firms desire for legitimacy by imitation and attempts to temper

the validity of profits structure studies with particular reference to the ftc s line of business data the simple proposition that consumerdamaging collusion is more likely to occur when there are fewer competitors has given rise not only to legal restrictions of economic activity thought to restrict output but also to an enormous amount of empirical work attempting to relate market concentration to the exercise of monopoly power most such studies measured market structure by an index of concentration for example four firm concentration or herfindahl and performance by accounting profit for example net profit divided by assets or price cost margins sales less direct costs divided by sales from the positive statistically significant correlations often found between greater concentration and profit with other factors presumably accounted for some researchers conclude that increases in concentration are anticompetitive and that concentration therefore is bad the concentration profits studies have been criticized essentially on two grounds one is that the positive relationship is not indicative of collusive behavior in particular oliver williamson 1968 john mcgee 1971 harold demsetz 1973 1974 and sam peltzman 1977 point out that higher profits could result from efficiencies experienced by large firms which resulted both in greater market shares and high levels of concentration analytical arguments show that higher profits logically follow as much from lower costs that are associated with higher levels of concentration as from collusion determined higher prices some empirical evidence that supports this belief is presented by demsetz peltzman and bradley gale and ben branch 1982 however their findings have been contested on the grounds that the data used are biased or inadequate or that the researchers have not demonstrated that the observed higher profits greater concentration relationship was caused by lower costs 2 the second criticism is that available data provide an inadequate basis for such conclusions the concentration numbers are based usually on industries defined by the commerce department s standard industrial classifications sic the sic definitions tend to be supply production rather than demand determined include nonhomogeneous products and exclude sales of similar products that are included in different sic groups or are imported the profit data are taken from accounting reports that provide poor measures of economic values weiss 1974 describes many of these problems however he does not believe that these shortcomings invalidate the studies as weiss 1979 concludes

comparing drivers barriers and opportunities of business models for renewable energies a review abstract this article systematically reviews the emerging field of research on business models for renewable energies differentiating between developing and industrialized countries the key findings on developing countries are as follows first there is a lack of quantitative data second opportunities are driven primarily by unfulfilled basic needs and micro finance whereas corruption and weak electricity grids are the main barriers and third business models should be replicable the key findings on industrialized countries are as follows first opportunities are driven primarily by climate change mitigation and energy efficiency improvements second stuck thought patterns and high costs of energy storage are important barriers and third cooperation is a key in future business models to handle increasing complexity this review reveals implications for researchers and policy makers promising avenues for future research are the analysis of intermodal business models and opportunities concerning energy self supply and renewable district heating policy makers are advised to design legal frameworks that account for the global nature of the renewable energy challenge and are simultaneously adapted to regional disparities

living by the golden rule multimarket contact in the u s airline industry this paper examines empirically the effects of multimarket contact on pricing in the u s airline industry the analysis of the time series and cross sectional variability of airline fares in the 1000 largest domestic city pair routes reveals the presence of statistically significant and quantitatively important multimarket effects fares are higher in city pair markets served by carriers with extensive interroute contacts these findings are consistent with the claims of industry experts that airlines live by the golden rule i e that they refrain from initiating aggressive pricing actions in a given route for fear of what their competitors might do in other jointly contested routes during his testimony mr steven b elkins senior director of marketing systems development for northwest airlines cited an example in which northwest lowered fares on night flights that were flying with empty seats in a number of routes from minneapolis and upper midwest cities to various west coast cities he said that continental airlines swiftly responded by cutting prices in important northwest markets mr elkins s memo advises northwest pricing analysts we will live by the golden rule in his testimony he explained that the golden rule in that context was that i did not want my pricing analyst initiating actions in another carrier s market like chicago for fear of what that other carrier might do to retaliate wall street journal october 9 1990 p b1

the aversion to lying abstract we experimentally investigate the effect of cheap talk in a bargaining game with one sided asymmetric information a seller has private information about her skill and is provided an opportunity to communicate this information to a buyer through a written message four different treatments are compared one without communication one with free form communication and two treatments with pre specified communication in the form of promises of varying strength our results suggest that individuals have an aversion towards lying about private information and that the aversion to lying increases with the size of the lie and the strength of the promise freely formulated messages lead to the fewest lies and the most efficient outcomes