CREATIVE PRICING IN MARKETS FOR INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY

Technological changes over the past two decades have made it easier to distribute and to copy intellectual property. Creators and owners of intellectual property have responded to these changes with a variety of creative pricing strategies. The paper reviews some of these pricing innovations. Two broad categories of innovations are explored: those that facilitate price discrimination and those that exploit complementarities between di¤erent types of creative works.pricing, intellectual property

Impact of Airbnb on customers' behaviour in the UK hotel industry

Airbnb is one of the sectors of the sharing economy that is disrupting the hotel industries. In order to find approaches for hotels to mitigate the threat from Airbnb, this research will focus on the major elements influencing customers to choose Airbnb and the issues for the future of the hotel industry. Previous studies have looked at how Airbnb influences customer behaviour, and the impact of Airbnb on the hotel industry, but so far no study has been conducted focusing on the impact of Airbnb on the UK hotel industry. Therefore the purpose of this research is to evaluate the impact of Airbnb on customers’ behaviour within the UK hotel industry in order to determine how the hotel sectors can mitigate the threats posed by Airbnb. This paper highlights managerial and industrial implications

Conference Summary: Financial Globalization and Financial Instability

The Bank of Canada’s annual conference, held in October 2010, brought together leading researchers from universities and central banks around the world. Divided into six sessions plus a keynote address and a panel discussion, the conference covered such topics as the effects of financial globalization on risk, liquidity, and asset prices; the causes of crises and their effects; and appropriate regulatory responses.

The Economics of Geographical Indications: GIs Modelled As Club Assets

Geographical Indications (GIs) for products (Basmati rice, Champagne sparkling wine, Antigua coffee, etc.) were regulated at the international level in 1995 (WTO TRIPS Agreement, Part II, Section 3). This paper sets a general framework of analysis for GI-labeled goods, based on the modeling of a GI as a club asset (partial excludability and no rivalry in benefits to the firms that lawfully label their products with the GI). A model of club reputation is developed which includes Shapiro (1982) and Winfree & McCluskey (2005) as special cases. Reputation is assumed to be traceable through the GI label; quality is endogenously determined at the firm level, with reputation as the state variable. In contrast with previous research, it is shown that the TRIPS legal construct around GIs is potentially compatible with an equilibrium involving a self-fulfilling level of quality (and reputation) that is above the minimum, under the condition that the GI club has a reduced membership of firms. However, the establishment of a minimum level of quality is still the first best policy to improve firm profits. It is also shown that under bottom-up firm-driven processes of club formation (maximization of firm profits), firm levels of quality and profits are higher, and levels of club membership are lower, than under top-down State-driven processes (maximization of club profits). When quality is taken as exogenous, the model evolves into a static partial equilibrium framework, where the GI is subject to potential dilution phenomena due to membership crowding and oversupply. GI-related expenses, output, membership, and club finance are all determined simultaneously. It is shown that under partial rivalry in benefits, both output and membership are reduced, in an equilibrium that approaches the cartel equilibrium. State subsidization is shown to lead to potential inefficiencies stemming from price and incentive distortions. The geographical confinement of output is shown to impact factor prices and quantities. Finally, issues concerning potential monopsonistic concerns and the replication of GIs are briefly sketched.

The politics of inflation management

An unanticipated and almost wholly unexpected coincidence of economic events occurred in Britain in July 2002. Taken together, these raise serious questions about the stated rationale that has guided the conduct of British macroeconomic policy for at least a generation. Yet they remained entirely unremarked upon in the financial and broadsheet press

Learning Process and Contract Adaptation with Quality Uncertainty: Some Paradoxes in Retailer-Producer Relationships

The optimal level of formalisation of contracts and their dynamic is at stake in the economic literature on the optimum design of ex post renegotiation with third party enforcement. Another theoretical interpretation is that contract adaptations may also reflect mutual learning process between contractors. Why transactors write explicit contract that they know cannot be court enforced? The central idea is that explicit contract terms makes it clearer to the transactors what has been agreed upon, thus are decreasing the cost of private enforcement sanctions (Klein, 1996). Empirical evidences are provided by the diachronic analysis of the full set of tri-partite contracts between one of the top-ten french large retailer and its beef suppliers before and after the BSE crisis (period 1993-1999). The analysis emphasizes also the role of this increased codification of supply contracts with a progressive change in the internal retailer's organization, i.e. increased centralization of decision and supervision mechanisms. Contract design and organizational choices are then strongly interrelated.Contract design, Hold-up problems, beef sector, Self-Enforcement, Agribusiness,

Organization and Strategy of Farmer Specialized Cooperatives in China

A description and analysis of China's Farmer Specialized Cooperatives is presented. Data is presented regarding the historical development of farmer cooperatives in China, the membership composition of a sample of 66 farmer cooperatives in the Zhejiang province, and the various attributes (governance, quality control system, and strategy) of a watermelon cooperative in this province. Many cooperatives are being transformed in organizations with a market orientation. These cooperatives exhibit substantial heterogeneity, in terms of farmers being member and skewness in the distribution of control rights. Human asset specificity in terms of establishing and maintaining relations and access to markets seems to be more important than physical asset specificity in accounting for governance structure choice in the current institutional setting.Farmer Cooperative, China, Governance Structure, Business Strategy, Agribusiness, Q13,

DERIVING FEEDER CATTLE PRICING CONTRACTS FROM FED CATTLE PRICE GRIDS: SIMULATION RESULTS OF RISK-SHARING CONTRACTS

Post-slaughter quality-based pricing of cattle is increasingly common. This quality, however, is dependent upon unobservable quality characteristics of the feeder cattle used as inputs. Through stochastic simulation we construct incentive compatible quality risk-sharing contracts based upon final grid-quality schedules that facilitate input quality sorting in the feeder cattle market.Marketing,

The Economics of Collective Brands

We consider the consequences of a shared brand name such as geographical names used to identify high quality products, for the incentives of otherwise autonomous firms to invest in quality. We contend that such collective brand labels improve communication between sellers and consumers, when the scale of production is too small for individual firms to establish reputations on a stand alone basis. This has two opposing effects on member firms’ incentives to invest in quality. On the one hand, it increases investment incentives by increasing the visibility and transparency of individual member firms, which increases the return from investment in quality. On the other hand, it creates an incentive to free ride on the group’s reputation, which can lead to less investment in quality. We identify parmater values under which collective branding delivers higher quality than is achievable by stand alone firms.

Credit bureaus between risk-management, creditworthiness assessment and prudential supervision

"This text may be downloaded for personal research purposes only. Any additional reproduction for other purposes, whether in hard copy or electronically, requires the consent of the author. If cited or quoted, reference should be made to the full name of the author, the title, the working paper or other series, the year, and the publisher."This paper discusses the role and operations of consumer Credit Bureaus in the European Union in the context of the economic theories, policies and law within which they work. Across Europe there is no common practice of sharing the credit data of consumers which can be used for several purposes. Mostly, they are used by the lending industry as a practice of creditworthiness assessment or as a risk-management tool to underwrite borrowing decisions or price risk. However, the type, breath, and depth of information differ greatly from country to country. In some Member States, consumer data are part of a broader information centralisation system for the prudential supervision of banks and the financial system as a whole. Despite EU rules on credit to consumers for the creation of the internal market, the underlying consumer data infrastructure remains fragmented at national level, failing to achieve univocal, common, or defined policy objectives under a harmonised legal framework. Likewise, the establishment of the Banking Union and the prudential supervision of the Euro area demand standardisation and convergence of the data used to measure debt levels, arrears, and delinquencies. The many functions and usages of credit data suggest that the policy goals to be achieved should inform the legal and institutional framework of Credit Bureaus, as well as the design and use of the databases. This is also because fundamental rights and consumer protection concerns arise from the sharing of credit data and their expanding use