Competitive Product Advantages

Cost advantages may be either internal or external. Internal economics of scope, scale, or experience, and external economies of focus or logistical inte¬gration, enable a company to produce some products at a lower cost than the competition. The coordination of pricing with suppliers, although not actually economizing resources, can improve the efficiency of pricing by avoiding the incrementalization of a supplier's nonincremental fixed costs and profit. Any of these strategies can generate cost advantages that are, at least in the short run, sustainable. Even cost advantages that are not sustainable, however, can generate temporary savings that are often the key to building more sustainable cost or product advantages later. Even when a product's physical attributes are not readily differentiable, opportunities to develop product advantages remain. The augmented product that customers buy is more than the particular product or service exchanged. It includes all sorts of ancillary services and intangible relationships that make buying the same product from one company less difficult, less risky, or more pleasant than buying from a competitor. Superior augmentation of the same basic product can add substantial value in the eyes of consumers, leading them to pay willingly what are often considerable price premiums.decision, investments , cost.

Changing Comparative Advantages

This paper inspects how comparative advantages have changed in the last 30 years. Using trade data on 197 countries over the period 1976- 2004, it provides evidence that comparative advantages are not static, but change over time. More interestingly, it shows the rise in relevance of institutional comparative advantage. Finally, it shows that this results does not hold for some countries (BRIC).DYNREG

Evolutionary advantages of adaptive rewarding

Our wellbeing depends as much on our personal success, as it does on the success of our society. The realization of this fact makes cooperation a very much needed trait. Experiments have shown that rewards can elevate our readiness to cooperate, but since giving a reward inevitably entails paying a cost for it, the emergence and stability of such behavior remain elusive. Here we show that allowing for the act of rewarding to self-organize in dependence on the success of cooperation creates several evolutionary advantages that instill new ways through which collaborative efforts are promoted. Ranging from indirect territorial battle to the spontaneous emergence and destruction of coexistence, phase diagrams and the underlying spatial patterns reveal fascinatingly reach social dynamics that explains why this costly behavior has evolved and persevered. Comparisons with adaptive punishment, however, uncover an Achilles heel of adaptive rewarding that is due to over-aggression, which in turn hinders optimal utilization of network reciprocity. This may explain why, despite of its success, rewarding is not as firmly weaved into our societal organization as punishment.Comment: 14 pages, 8 figures; accepted for publication in New Journal of Physic

The Advantages of Odd Exclusions

Every novel constitutes an interestingly complex set of linguistic experiments demonstrating some of the possibilities of its language to and by the exclusion of all the rest. Extreme cases may demonstrate these possibilities more clearly, and at least in English, no novel seems more arbitrarily extreme than Gadsby, which Ernest Vincent Wright apparently wrote in 1936-1937, with the E typebar of his typewriter tied down with string because, he said in his introduction, someone had told him he could not write coherent grammatical English without using its most common letter