The Impact of Newspapers on Consumer Confidence: Does Spin Bias Exist?

It is sometimes argued that news reports in the media suffer from biased reporting. Mullainathan and Shleifer (2002) argue that there are two types of media bias. One bias, called ideology, reflects a news outlet’s desire to affect reader opinions in a particular direction. The second bias, referred to as spin, reflects the outlet’s attempt to simply create a memorable story. Competition between outlets can eliminate the effect of ideological bias, but increases the incentive to spin stories. We examine whether we find some evidence of spin in Dutch newspaper reporting on the state of the economy. If newspapers are indeed able to create memorable stories this should, according to our hypothesis, affect the opinion of readers with respect to the state of the economy. Sentiments about the actual state of the economy could be magnified by spin. As a result, consumer confidence – a variable that routinely measures the opinion on the state of the economy – can be expected to be affected not only by economic fundamentals, but also by the way these fundamentals are reported. We construct a variable that reflects the way consumers perceive economic news reported in newspapers. We find that this variable indeed has a significant impact on consumer confidence, which is short-lived.

De marketingoriëntatie van bedrijven in Noord-Nederland

Dit rapport beschrijft de resultaten van een onderzoek naar de marketinggerichtheid van ondernemingen in Noord-Nederland. Door middel van een vragenlijst die eind 2012 is ingevuld door 337 bedrijven en organisaties is inzicht verkregen in de mate van aandacht die Noord-Nederlandse ondernemingen schenken aan zaken als klantgerichtheid, merkreputatie, concurrentie, sociale media en innovatie. Het blijkt dat circa de helft van de bedrijven geen aparte functie marketing heeft ingevuld. Tevens blijken grote ondernemingen aan vrijwel alle marketingdimensies meer aandacht te schenken dan kleinere bedrijven. Verder zijn verschillen waarneembaar tussen het type organisatie en de aanwezigheid van een marketingfunctionaris. Productiebedrijven hebben in meerderheid een marketeer in dienst, terwijl in de retailsector slechts 38% zo’n functionaris heeft. Een opvallende uitkomst omdat retailers juist meer marktgericht zeggen te zijn. Omdat in Noord-Nederland relatief veel MKB vertegenwoordigd is, lijkt de aandacht voor marketing bij Noord-Nederlandse bedrijven dan ook relatief laag

INNNL.biz goes online:北荷兰商务网

Visualisatie van het netwerk: INNNL.biz De International Business School werkte aan het deelproject International Network Northern Netherlands. Samen met een aantal partners is een website ontwikkeld waar noordelijke professionals hun netwerk kunnen delen en visualiseren. Daarnaast werd onderzoek verricht naar regionale economische ontwikkeling via clusters

Consideration sets, intentions and the inclusion of "Don't know" in a two-stage model for voter choice

We present a statistical model for voter choice that incorporates a consideration set stage and final vote intention stage. The first stageinvolves a multivariate probit model for the vector of probabilities that a candidate or a party gets considered. The second stage of the model is a multinomial probit model for the actual choice. In both stages we use asexplanatory variables data on voter choice at the previous election, as well as socio-demographic respondent characteristics. Importantly, our modelexplicitly accounts for the three types of "missing data" encountered in polling. First, we include a no-vote option in the final vote intention stage. Second, the "do not know" response is assumed to arise from too little difference in the utility between the two most preferred options in the consideration set. Third, the "do not want to say" response is modelled as a missing observation on the most preferred alternative in the consideration set. Thus, we consider the missing data generating mechanism to be non-ignorable and build a model based on utility maximization to describe the voting intentions of these respondents. We illustrate the merits of the model as we have information on a sample of about 5000 individuals from the Netherlands for who we know how they voted last time (if at all), which parties they would consider for the upcoming election,and what their voting intention is. A unique feature of the data set is that information is available on actual individual voting behavior, measured at the day of election. We find that the inclusion of the consideration set stage in the model enables the user to make more precise inferences on the competitive structure in the political domain and to get better out-of-sample forecasts.Bayesian method;Choice model;Election data;Polling;Probit model

Marketing orientation and strategies in the Netherlands

This paper introduces a general, formal treatment of dynamic constraints, i.e., constraints on the state changes that are allowed in a given state space. Such dynamic constraints can be seen as representations of "real world" constraints in a managerial context. The notions of transition, reversible and irreversible transition, and transition relation will be introduced. The link with Kripke models (for modal logics) is also made explicit. Several (subtle) examples of dynamic constraints will be given. Some important classes of dynamic constraints in a database context will be identified, e.g. various forms of cumulativity, non-decreasing values, constraints on initial and final values, life cycles, changing life cycles, and transition and constant dependencies. Several properties of these dependencies will be treated. For instance, it turns out that functional dependencies can be considered as "degenerated" transition dependencies. Also, the distinction between primary keys and alternate keys is reexamined, from a dynamic point of view.