All-pay war

We study a model of war in which the outcome is uncertain not because of luck on the battlefield (as in standard models), but because the involved countries lack information about their opponent. In our model their production and military technologies are common knowledge, but their resources are private information. Each country decides how to allocate its resources to production and warfare. The country with the stronger military wins and receives aggregate production. In equilibrium the country with a comparative advantage in warfare allocates all resources to warfare for low resource levels and follows a non-decreasing concave strategy thereafter. The opponent allocates a constant fraction of its resources to warfare for low resource levels and follows an increasing non-linear strategy thereafter. From an ex ante perspective the country with a comparative advantage in warfare is likely to win the war unless its military technology is much weaker than the opponent’s.Conflict; war; all-pay auction; private information

Business Models and Innovation Obstacles in Iran: A New Framework

Employing appropriate and up to date Business models in Organizations is so important due to the fact that it is the strategy which shows the main logic of a corporation in creating values in organiza-tions. It is important to the extent that not employing an appropriate and up to date business model will prevent the organizations fulfilling their aims, even if they employ high technology or diverse resources. In fact, economical value of a technology is unknown until corporations employ an appro-priate form of business model. It can be said that, those corporations employing more appropriate business models for a technology achieve more value than the corporations discovering that technolo-gy. A good business model is the basis of each successful organization, no difference the investment is new or it's an already established one. Due to the importance of this issue, in this study, we try to identify the main reasons for not being up to date or not developing business models in organizations. We do this by reflecting upon the results of credible and up to date researches in the area of different business models and obstacles or challenges facing different organizations. In line with what was said above, we employed library research, extracting updating obstacles in business models, ques-tionnaire and field research for data collection process. Determining reliability and validity of the questionnaire, we distributed it among 198 corporations of management counseling in Tehran prov-ince. This research follows positivism paradigm and is practical, quantitative, and inductive. The results lead to the discovery of 35 cases of the main reasons of not being up to date and developed in using business models. As there was no basis for categorizing variables and formerly defined catego-ries, in order to maximize the correlation between variables and factors, calculating the factorial ratio and determining the intended factors, we employed factorial design. Using this statistical technique, the variables were categorized in 4 kinds of obstacles: strategic, information, management, and sys-tem. At the end these are ranked using fuzzy Topsis technique. The results of ranking show the im-portance order of obstacles as follows: Informational factors, Systematic factors, managerial factors & strategic factors. Research paper Reference to this paper should be made as follows: Salamzadeh, Y. Rezai, M. (2017). “Business Models and Innovation Obstacles in Iran: A New Framework”, Journal of Entrepreneurship, Business and Economics, Vol. 5, No. 1, pp. 108–139

Marketing Innovation through Price

The factors that influence pricing strategy change over the life of a product concept. The market defined by a product concept passes through four phases: development, growth, maturity, and decline. Briefly, the changes in the strategic environment over those phases are as follows: Market development. Buyers are price insensitive because they knowledge of the product’s benefits. Both production and not a threat since the potential gains from market development exceed those from competitive rivalry. Pricing strategy signals the product’s value to potential buyers, but buyer education remains the key to sales growth. Market growth. Buyers are increasingly informed about product attributes either from personal experience or from communication with innovators. Consequently, they are increasingly responsive to lower princes. If diffusion strongly affects later sales, price reductions ca substantially increase the rate of market growth and the product’s long-run profitability. Moreover, cost economies accompanying growth usually enable one to cut price while still maintaining profit margins. Although competition expansion, generally precluding the advent of price competition. Price-cutting to drive out competitors may occur, however. Cost advantages associated with sales volume are substantial if current market share is expected to determine which competing technology becomes the industry standard, or if capacity outstrips sales growth.market, strategy, price, competition

Journal Staff

Essay I explores brain machine interface (BMI) technologies. These make direct communication between the brain and a machine possible by means of electrical stimuli. This essay reviews the existing and emerging technologies in this field and offers an inquiry into the ethical problems that are likely to emerge. Essay II, co-written with professor Sven-Ove Hansson, presents a novel procedure to engage the public in deliberations on the potential impacts of technology.  This procedure, convergence seminar, is a form of scenario-based discussion that is founded on the idea of hypothetical retrospection. The theoretical background and the results of the five seminars are presented. Essay III discusses moral bioenhancement, an instance of human enhancement that alters a person’s dispositions, emotions or behavior. Moral bioenhancement could be carried out in three different ways. The first strategy is behavioral enhancement. The second strategy, favored by prominent defenders of moral enhancement, is emotional enhancement. The third strategy is the enhancement of moral dispositions, such as empathy and inequity aversion. I argue that we ought to implement a combination of the second and third strategies. Essay IV considers the possibility and potential desirability of sensory enhancement. It is proposed that existing sensory modalities in vertebrate animals are proof of concept of what is biologically possible to create in humans. Three considerations on the normative aspects of sensory enhancement are also presented in this essay. Essay V rejects disease prioritarianism, the idea that the healthcare system ought to prioritize the treatment of diseases. Instead, an approach that focuses on what medicine can accomplish is proposed. Essay VI argues that from the idea that species have an intrinsic value and that humanity has a collective responsibility to protect animal species from extinction, the conclusion that we ought to recreate species follows. Essay VII argues that unknown existential risks have not been properly addressed. It proposes a heuristic for doing so, and a concrete strategy. This strategy consists in building refuges that could withstand a large number of catastrophic events.  QC 20141204</p

Boomerangs and creativity

The aim of this paper is to describe the country brand for Australia released by the Australian Federal Government in May 2010, ‘Brand Australia’. At the time of writing this paper, only the logo was available, and further details of the strategy (activities, targets, partners) were to be announced at a later date. This paper is focused on the available elements of the new Australian strategy; its antecedents in destination branding; the process conducted by the Australian Trade Commission (Austrade) in developing the new brand; the primary and secondary resource studies used by the Building Brand Australia program; policy aims; and the messages delivered by the brand’s new visual resources. The research method is based on website analysis and interviews. In addition to interviews with specific key respondents linked to the brand strategy, several interviews were conducted with researchers connected to tourism and cultural studies as an exercise in ‘thinking together’ about a phenomenon that is new, but also framed in a cultural sphere that is ‘exotic’ to the author. The main findings of this research can be summarized as follows: Australia enjoys the advantage of an outstanding perceived image, largely built on ‘soft’ portrayal items; Brand Australia focuses its core message in a couple of weak items (creativity and technology), probably considered strategic and undervalued by international audiences; the new program is not particularly worried about certain other weak issues (culture and environment); the new logo includes only a few elements (of the boomerang and the Australian map), mixing controversial and innocuous wellknown icons

Text Mining-Based Patent Analysis of Blockchain Technology Applications

This study focuses on the emergence of blockchain-related technologies regarding patenting activity. Blockchain technology has gained the attention of the general public. It has intensified in recent years, making it a fascinating subject of study for a patent analysis to scrutinize the evolution of this technology. However, research using the patent landscape to study the evolution of blockchain technologies is scarce. This article follows a unique methodology and comprehensive search strategy based on patent mapping and text mining to identify and categorize Blockchain patent documents extracted from the United States Patent and Trademark Office and the World Intellectual Property Organization databases. This methodology and dataset can be used for patent landscaping exercises or bibliometric analysis