relative versus absolute income joy of winning and gender brain imaging evidence in this paper we study the role of absolute versus relative income using functional magnetic resonance imaging fmri while being scanned in two adjacent mri scanners pairs of subjects had to simultaneously perform a simple estimation task that entailed monetary rewards for correct answers we show that a variation in the comparison subject s payment affects blood oxygenation level dependent bold responses in the ventral striatum this brain region is engaged in the prediction and registration of primary rewards such as food delivery as well as more abstract forms of rewards like money in particular we show that activation in the ventral striatum increases in absolute income and for a given level of absolute income decreases in lower relative income using a male and a female sample allows us to study whether the perception of relative and absolute incomes is gender specific we find that the effects of absolute and relative incomes are strong and relatively similar for both genders finally we analyze the importance of joy of winning i e the impact of outperforming another subject our results suggest that the mere fact of outperforming the other subject positively affects reward related brain areas

corporate led sustainable development and energy poverty alleviation at the bottom of the pyramid the case of the cleancook in nigeria summary corporations are increasingly viewed as key actors in poverty alleviation bottom of the pyramid bop advocates suggest that multinational corporations mncs can simultaneously alleviate poverty and make profits by selling scaled down products to the poor our paper investigates this claim using the case of the cleancook stove and fuel technology introduced in nigeria by an mnc working through a nonprofit organization and local business actors supply and demand side analyses show that the cleancook is least likely to reach the energy poor bop households originally targeted the evidence suggests that serving the bop requires greater differentiation than can be achieved with profit driven business models

fuelwood policies for the 1990s abstract the paper provides a review of policy issues and options associated with the role of biomass as an energy resource it seeks to demonstrate how such policies can be set in the context of local circumstances the analysis focuses on the relationship of fuelwood problems to other development issues recognizing that these problems are primarily a consequence of the interaction of environmental and economic forces at a local level a series of fundamental policy reforms are an essential pre condition to finding local answers to fuelwood problems these policy reforms are the main focus of this paper

types and patterns an experimental east west german comparison of cooperation and solidarity abstract in a study of public good and solidarity experiments conducted in eastern and western germany we found in both games that eastern subjects behave in a significantly more selfish manner than do western subjects besides that we found that many qualitative results of both data sets are similar since our experiments were conducted in two parts of one nation we present an unusually well controlled cross cultural study by avoiding difficulties that usually arise in multinational settings we conclude that cooperation and solidarity behavior seem to depend strongly on different culture specific norms resulting from opposing economic and social histories in the two parts of germany

the impact of forecasting methods on the bullwhip effect abstract this paper considers the impact of forecasting methods on the bullwhip effect for a simple replenishment system in which a first order autoregressive process describes the customer demand and an order up to inventory policy characterizes the replenishment decision a bullwhip effect measure is derived for the optimal forecasting procedure that minimizes the mean squared forecasting error for the specified demand process similar measures are obtained for the moving average and exponential smoothing methods the findings indicate that different forecasting methods lead to bullwhip effect measures with distinct properties in relation to lead time and underlying parameters of the demand process moreover a simple rule is established to help managers select a forecasting method that yields the lowest inventory cost

avoiding the bullwhip effect using damped trend forecasting and the order up to replenishment policy we study the damped trend forecasting method and its bullwhip generating behaviour when used within the order up to out replenishment policy using z transform transfer functions we determine complete stability criteria for the damped trend forecasting method we show that this forecasting mechanism is stable for a much larger proportion of the parametrical space than is generally acknowledged in the literature we provide a new proof to the known fact that the naive exponential smoothing and holts method forecasting when used inside the out policy will always generate bullwhip for every possible demand process for any lead time further we demonstrate the damped trend out system behaves differently sometimes it will generate bullwhip and sometimes it will not bullwhip avoidance occurs when demand is dominated by low frequency harmonics in some instances in other instances bullwhip avoidance happens when demand is dominated by high frequency harmonics we derive sufficient conditions for when bullwhip will definitely be generated and necessary conditions for when bullwhip may be avoided we verify our analytical findings with a numerical investigation

staunching emigration from east germany age and the determinants of migration following the unification of germany in 1990 eastern wages and unemployment both rose rapidly i demonstrate that rising wages reduced eastern emigration greatly while rising unemployment had little effect this reflects the behavior of the young who are very sensitive to source region wages and relatively insensitive to source unemployment i show that most of the effect of source unemployment comes from the contemporaneous effect on those laid off who are more likely to be older i find that compared to stayers young emigrants are much more skilled older emigrants are slightly more skilled and commuters are not more skilled as measured by education and pre move wages my conclusions are based on a comparison of results from aggregate inter state migration data and individual data from the eastern sample of the german socio economic panel for 1990 2000 jel j61 p23

social organization status and savings behavior abstract we develop a model of status seeking in the presence of incomplete information and derive its implications for aggregate savings status seeking endogenously takes the form of conspicuous consumption its impact on savings depends on the scheduling of the contests for status over the life cycle if individuals engage in conspicuous consumption when old aggregate savings are increased we also study the role of social segmentation while social segmentation reduces the inequality across status seekers and fuels social rivalry under complete information we show that under incomplete information social segmentation weakens the incentive to strive for greater status

conspicuous consumption and political regimes evidence from east and west germany abstract this paper investigates the influence of political regimes on the relative importance of conspicuous consumption we use the division of germany into the communist gdr and the democratic frg and its reunification in 1990 as a natural experiment relying on household data that are representative for germany our empirical results strongly indicate that conspicuous consumption is relatively more important in east germany significantly although we find some convergence a considerable gap in conspicuous consumption expenditures remains even 18 years after the german reunification

application of multi steps forecasting for restraining the bullwhip effect and improving inventory performance under autoregressive demand recent research suggests that the bullwhip effect or increasing variability of inventory replenishment orders as one moves up a supply chain illustrates inventory management inefficiencies this paper quantifies the bullwhip effect in the case of serially correlated external demand if autoregressive models are applied to obtain multiple steps demand forecasts a materials requirements planning mrp based inventory management approach is proposed to reduce the order variance simulation modeling is used to investigate the impact of the forecasting method selection on the bullwhip effect and inventory performance for the most downstream supply chain unit the mrp based approach is shown to reduce magnitude of the bullwhip effect while providing the inventory performance comparable to that of a traditional order up approach the application of autoregressive models compares favorably to other forecasting methods considered according to both the bullwhip effect and inventory performance criteria

a measure of bullwhip effect in supply chains with a mixed autoregressive moving average demand process abstract in this paper we quantify the impact of the bullwhip effect the phenomenon in which information on demand is distorted as moving up a supply chain for a simple two stage supply chain with one supplier and one retailer assuming that the retailer employs a base stock inventory policy and that the demand forecast is performed via a mixed autoregressive moving average model arma 1 1 we investigate the effects of the autoregressive coefficient the moving average parameter and the lead time on the bullwhip effect

conspicuous consumption and race evidence from south africa abstract a century ago thorstein veblen introduced socially contingent consumption into the economic literature this paper complements the scarce empirical literature by testing his conjecture on south african household data and finds that black and coloured households spend relatively more on visible consumption than comparable white households following the approach of charles et al 2009 this paper explores whether the differences in visible expenditures can be explained with a signaling model of status seeking moreover it is assessed to which extent positional concerns motivate conspicuous consumption although the socially contingent share in visible consumption increases with income different incentives to consume conspicuously seem to explain that at every level of income black households spend relatively more on visible consumption than comparable white households in contrast to the findings of charles et al 2009 where differential spending on conspicuous consumption can be found also within each group separately the model s core hypothesis fails to hold within the group of white south africans

information distortion in a supply chain the bullwhip effect this article originally appeared in management science april 1997 volume 43 number 4 pp 546 558 published by the institute of management sciences consider a series of companies in a supply chain each of whom orders from its immediate upstream member in this setting inbound orders from a downstream member serve as a valuable informational input to upstream production and inventory decisions this paper claims that the information transferred in the form of orders tends to be distorted and can misguide upstream members in their inventory and production decisions in particular the variance of orders may be larger than that of sales and distortion tends to increase as one moves upstream a phenomenon termed bullwhip effect this paper analyzes four sources of the bullwhip effect demand signal processing rationing game order batching and price variations actions that can be taken to mitigate the detrimental impact of this distortion are also discussed

the role of forecasting on bullwhip effect for e scm applications abstract the bullwhip effect represents the information distortion in customer demand between orders to supplier and sales to the buyer demand forecasting is one of the main causes of the bullwhip effect the purpose of this study is to analyze the impact of exponential smoothing forecasts on the bullwhip effect for electronic supply chain management e scm applications a simulation model is developed to experiment the different scenarios of selecting right parameters for the exponential smoothing forecasting technique it is found that longer lead times and poor selection of forecasting model parameters lead to strong bullwhip effect in e scm in contrast increased seasonality helps to reduce the bullwhip effect the most significant managerial implication of this study lies in the need to reduce lead times along the e supply chain to mitigate the bullwhip effect while high seasonality would reduce the forecast accuracy it has a positive influence on the reduction of bullwhip effect e scm managers are therefore strongly suggested to utilize exponential smoothing by selecting lower values for and and a mid value for to keep the bullwhip ratio low while at the same time to increase forecast accuracy

an arima supply chain model this paper presents a multistage supply chain model that is based on autoregressive integrated moving average arima time series models given an arima model of consumer demand and the lead times at each stage it is shown that the orders and inventories at each stage are also arima and closed form expressions for these models are given the paper also discusses the causes of the bullwhip effect a phenomenon in which variation in demand produces larger variations in upstream orders and inventory this discussion reveals how different modeling can lead to different insights because they make different assumptions about the cause of the bullwhip effect these observations are used to develop managerial insights about reducing the bullwhip effect

is more always better a survey on positional concerns abstract we use survey data to provide some empirical information about concerns regarding relative standing respondents chose between a world where they have more of a good than others and one where everyone s endowment of the good is higher but the respondent has less than others questions asked about education attractiveness and intelligence for one s child and oneself income vacation time approval and disapproval from a supervisor and papers to write half of the respondents preferred to have 50 less real income but high relative income concerns about position were strongest for attractiveness and supervisor s praise and weakest for vacation time

on bullwhip in a family of order up to policies with arma 2 2 demand and arbitrary lead times a number of papers have recently appeared that investigate the bullwhip effect the variance amplification of ordering decisions in the supply chain produced by the order up to replenishment policy an adapted policy with a proportional inventory position feedback controller has shown improved bullwhip behaviour the dynamic behaviour of this so called proportional order up to policy has been investigated for arbitrary lead times and several demand models such as i i d demand and autoregressive moving average ar 1 and arma 1 1 models it has been shown that for a correct choice of the feedback parameter the bullwhip effect can always be avoided however less attractive properties of this policy have also become clear herein we investigate the behaviour of the proportional order up to policy for arma 2 2 demand with arbitrary lead times in order to compensate for possible weaknesses of the proportional out policy we propose another replenishment rule that accounts for the characteristics of the demand in a superior manner the characteristics of both policies are compared for several parameter settings of the arma 2 2 model finally the consequences of our full state feedback order up to policy are discussed

research on bullwhip effect in energy efficient air conditioning supply chain abstract this paper investigates the energy efficient air conditioning supply chain which is composed of one supplier midea and two retailers i e suning and gome with a view of market share we measure the impact of retail prices variability in the two echelon supply chain on the bullwhip effect suning and gome are assumed to possess the autonomy of choosing prices and separately acquire various market shares according to which the relationship between the two prices is simply quantified the order up to inventory policy and the moving average forecasting method are respectively employed by the two retailers furthermore we cast light on how factors like price market share lead time and autoregressive coefficient affect bullwhip effect the results indicate that it s inadvisable to conduct large fluctuation on price besides demand dates that are more historical may actually reduce the bullwhip effect we also find that the bullwhip effect will be bigger when the competition becomes fiercer and there s a necessity for retailers to take measures to reduce the influence of competitors prices

an empirical investigation on causes and effects of the bullwhip effect evidence from the personal care sector abstract this paper analyses the empirical demand data for fast moving consumer goods to measure the bullwhip effect the data consist of the sell in from a large manufacturer to the retailers and the sell out from a retailer to the consumers our findings show that the bullwhip effect can be substantial indeed in more than 50 of the cases the demand upstream sell in is twice as variable as the demand downstream sell out however in other cases it can be negligible and in one case the demand upstream is slightly less variable than the demand downstream so while the bullwhip effect can be very large it need not be so finally we attempted to delve into the dynamics that generate a significant bullwhip effect and discovered that among the various causes that create the bullwhip effect discussed by lee et al 1997a price fluctuations and forward buys driven by sales targets play a decisive role we show that the flatter the final consumer demand sell out the more room there is for the retailers to forward buy in order to take advantage of the deals offered by the manufacturer s sales force toward the end of the sales period on the contrary the more variable the final consumer demand the less willing the retailer is to make a risky inventory investment and thus the more the retailer s orders closely follow consumer demand this result at the product family level is very consistent with the results that cachon et al 2007 obtained at the company industry level

an empirically simulated investigation of the impact of demand forecasting on the bullwhip effect evidence from u s auto industry this study empirically examines the impacts of three major aspects of demand forecasting on the magnitude of the bullwhip effect three research questions are addressed to investigate the association between 1 forecast accuracy 2 aggregate forecasting and 3 responsive forecasting and the bullwhip effect using forecasted demand generated from popular time series forecasting models and real life demand data the study investigates the relationship between the forecasted results and the consequential bullwhip effect the findings show that the forecasting methods used lead to the variation of the bullwhip effect moreover the lead time reduction and the stable demand forecast are beneficial to reduce the bullwhip effect however our empirical results differ from previous findings in two ways i improving forecast accuracy does not necessarily reduce the bullwhip effect and ii aggregate forecasting does not always reduce the bullwhip effect

impact of market demand mis specification on a two level supply chain this paper investigates the impact of mis specifying the market demand process on a serially linked two level supply chain box jenkins models are used to represent both the true and a mis specified market demand processes it is shown that the impact of mis specification on cost is minor if the supply chain tries to minimise the market demand forecast errors furthermore our analysis suggests that mis specification does not always result in additional costs a managerial insight is revealed poor forecast accuracy is not always bad for the total supply chain costs in other words employing more accurate forecasting methods may actually result in higher total supply chain costs

should public policy respond to positional externalities abstract a nice suit is one that compares favorably with those worn by others in the same local environment more generally a positional good is one whose utility depends strongly on how it compares with others in the same category 1 a positional externality occurs when new purchases alter the relevant context within which an existing positional good is evaluated 2 for example if some job candidates begin wearing expensive custom tailored suits a side effect of their action is that other candidates become less likely to make favorable impressions on interviewers from any individual job seeker s point of view the best response might be to match the higher expenditures of others lest her chances of landing the job fall but this outcome may be inefficient since when all spend more each candidate s probability of success remains unchanged all may agree that some form of collective restraint on expenditure would be useful in such cases however it is often impractical to negotiate private solutions do positional externalities then become legitimate objects of public policy concern in attempting to answer this question i employ the classical libertarian criterion put forth by john stuart mill 3 who wrote the state may not legitimately constrain any citizen s freedom of action except to prevent harm to others i argue that many positional externalities appear to meet mill s test causing not just negative feelings but also large and tangible economic costs to others who are ill equipped to avoid them i also discuss an unintrusive policy remedy for positional externalities one modeled after the use of effluent charges to curb environmental pollution the paper is organized as follows section 1 notes the deep similarity between the conditions that give rise to positional arms races and those that give rise to conventional military arms races section 2 follows with a review of evidence concerning the strength of concerns about relative position section 3 describes some of the tangible economic costs that people experience as a result of positional externalities arising from such concerns section 4 takes up the question of whether collective action directed against positional externalities is consistent with respect for individual rights section 5 describes how a progressive consumption tax could neutralize many of the most costly effects of positional externalities

still different after all these years solidarity behavior in east and west germany abstract using data from laboratory experiments we find that east germans show consistently less solidarity than west germans there has been no convergence in the 20 years after the reunification while it has recently been estimated that political values converge 20 to 40 years after the reunification alesina and fuchs schundeln 2007 we conclude from our findings that social behavior changes more slowly than political values we hypothesize that this is due to complementarities involved in individual social behavior and the necessity to coordinate on social norms on the society level

nigeria s household energy sector issues and supply demand frontiers abstract this paper deals with the energy situation in the household sector of the nigerian economy a review of the pattern of energy consumption in 1989 elucidates several critical characteristics of the sector the sector accounts for about 65 of total final energy consumption in the country in 1989 with fuelwood providing about 81 four cardinal issues to be addressed in the sector are highlighted the paper also presents the result of a useful energy demand forecast for the sector over the period 1989 2014 which shows that useful energy requirements will grow rapidly as a result of both economic and population growth this is then used in an approach of supply demand balancing to establish supply frontiers for final energy carriers under three scenarios finally the issues in the sector are examined against the background of the results of the analysis

on bullwhip in supply chains historical review present practice and expected future impact abstract demand amplification or bullwhip as it is now called is not a new phenomenon since evidence of its existence has been recorded at least as far back as the start of the 20th century and is well known to economists yet industry worldwide still has to cope with bullwhip measured not just in terms of the 2 1 amplification which is frequently quoted but sometimes it is as high as 20 1 from end to end in the supply chain this can be very costly in terms of capacity on costs and stock out costs on the upswing and stockholding and obsolescence costs on the downswing in this paper we have identified 10 published causes of bullwhip all of which are capable of elimination by re engineering the supply chain we offer evidence on the present health of a family of supply chains and pinpoint much good practice this is in anticipation that such excellence will become normative in the near future as the learning experience gathers momentum and provided that human factors are properly addressed

who compares to whom the anatomy of income comparisons in europe this article provides unprecedented direct evidence from large scale survey data on both the intensity how much and direction to whom of income comparisons income comparisons are considered to be at least somewhat important by three quarters of europeans they are associated with both lower levels of subjective well being and a greater demand for income redistribution the rich compare less and are happier than average when they do which latter is consistent with relative income theory with respect to the direction of comparisons colleagues are the most frequently cited reference group those who compare to colleagues are happier than those who compare to other benchmarks

in search of intra industry bullwhips abstract previous research e g cachon et al 2007 has examined the prevalence and magnitude of the bullwhip effect across industries measuring the bullwhip as the ratio of the variance in the stream of orders placed relative to the variance in orders received in some cases surrogates are used for the order measures our contribution is to use the decomposition framework of jin et al 2016a to look intra industry examining whether the bullwhip is created in shipping manufacturing or ordering and exploring whether this varies across industries our analysis is based on monthly industry level u s census bureau data we find and begin to explain significant differences across industries regarding the source of the bullwhip be it in shipping manufacturing and or ordering we also examine how the bullwhip is impacted by the duration and end point of the time aggregation interval our results suggest that some managers may want to shift their reporting period

mitigating the bullwhip effect by ordering policies and forecasting methods abstract the bullwhip effect in which order variability increases as one moves up the supply chain has been observed in a range of industries modeled by several authors and various remedies suggested this paper provides a simulation of the effect of improved forecasting methods and finds that holt s and brown s methods substantially mitigate the bullwhip effect across a range of performance metrics the end result is to identify ordering policies that perform particularly well in combination with these forecasting methods and indicate how they can be implemented in practice

a signaling explanation for charity this article examines a novel but plausible motive for charitable giving charitable donations which are observable can signal wealth or income the signaling equilibrium of charitable donations has attractive properties donations increase proportionally with population size governmental funding for public goods affects private charity only through an income effect crowding out need not be complete income redistribution is generically nonneutral increasing the spread between the poorest and richest person in a community tends to increase private donations our theory are based on the assumption that people are willing to make charitable donations even if they will not increase provision of the public good the data on charitable giving support the hypothesis that donors donate at least partly for signaling purposes rather than only to aid the recipient or to obtain satisfactions unrelated to status though charitable organizations usually report donations within categories thus not allowing perfect revelation for analytical tractability we shall consider an equilibrium with perfect revelation and a continuum of types as characterized in george j mailath 1987 and norman j ireland 1994

bullwhip effect measurement and its implications the bullwhip effect or demand information distortion has been a subject of both theoretical and empirical studies in the operations management literature in this paper we develop a simple set of formulas that describe the traditional bullwhip measure as a combined outcome of several important drivers such as finite capacity batch ordering and seasonality our modeling framework is descriptive in nature as it features certain plausible approximations that are commonly employed in practical inventory systems the results are nonetheless compelling and can be used to explain various conflicting observations in previous empirical studies building on the theoretical framework we discuss the managerial implications of the bullwhip measurement we show that the measurement can be completely noninformative about the underlying supply chain cost performance if it is not linked to the operational details such as decision intervals and leadtimes specifically we show that an aggregated measurement over relatively long time periods can mask the operational level bullwhip in addition we show that masking also exists under product or location aggregation in some illustrative cases

reign in hell or serve in heaven a cross country journey into the relative vs absolute perceptions of wellbeing abstract questionnaires exploring the relativist vs absolutist perception of wellbeing are administered to 3883 students in eight different countries four low income countries bolivia brazil kenya and laos 1924 respondents and four high income countries italy sweden switzerland and the uk 1959 respondents our data reveal that wellbeing is perceived mainly in relative terms with the strength of relativism being higher for respondents in high income countries however when the satisfaction of some basic needs is at stake the absolutist concern becomes powerful personal characteristics such as gender and background of studies have a significant role in determining respondents perception of wellbeing finally additional insights emerge from our study interpersonal comparisons take place by looking both upward and downward along the income scale not only income ranking but also the magnitude of reference incomes plays a role and the perception of wellbeing is more elastic to absolute rather than relative income

measuring and avoiding the bullwhip effect a control theoretic approach an important contributory factor to the bullwhip effect i e the variance amplification of order quantities observed in supply chains is the replenishment rule used by supply chain members first the bullwhip effect induced by the use of different forecasting methods in order up to replenishment policies is analysed variance amplification is quantified and we prove that the bullwhip effect is guaranteed in the order up to model irrespective of the forecasting method used thus when production is inflexible and significant costs are incurred by frequently switching production quantities up and down order up to policies may no longer be desirable or even achievable in the second part of the paper a general decision rule is introduced that avoids variance amplification and succeeds in generating smooth ordering patterns even when demand has to be forecasted the methodology is based on control systems engineering and allows important insights to be gained about the dynamic behaviour of replenishment rules