1,897 research outputs found
Destructive Creation
"Destructive Creation" is the deliberate introduction of new, perhaps improved generations of durable goods that destroy, directly or indirectly, the usage value of units previously sold inducing consumers to repeat their purchase. This paper discusses this practice by a single seller in an infinite-horizon, discrete time model with heterogeneous consumers. Despite the lack of commitment power over future prices and introduction policies, this practice restores partially or totally market power even though consumers anticipate opportunistic behavior. However, the monopoly resorts "too much" to this mechanism from an ex-ante, profit maximizing perspective. High prices in earlier periods allow the seller to commit to defer innovation and therefore to maintain buyers' confidence over "durability". The paper characterizes the equilibrium properties of the resulting innovation cycles such as existence, uniqueness and asymptotic stability and discusses potential regulatory remedies in those instances where destructive creation generates economic inefficiencies. This theory applies, among others, to markets characterized by network externalities, compatibility issues, standard setting, social consumption and signal provision and may help explain many restrictive aftermarket practices as well as excessive add-on pricing without relying on any leverage hypothesis.durable goods; aftermarkets; planned obsolescence;
The Image as a Communication Tool for Virtual Museums. Narration and the Enjoyment of Cultural Heritage
The challenge of contemporary museums is to make content accessible to a wider audience; in this way information related to the good becomes more communicative and usable in order to enhance its uniqueness. Accessibility goes through an innovative communication of content: the Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) that are increasingly part of people’s daily lives. Communication in most cases occurs visually, so ICTs are increasingly focusing on a rethinking of this expressive form; images become a better support for high-quality data transfer
Pricing payment cards
In a payment card association such as Visa, each time a consumer pays by card, the bank of the merchant (acquirer) pays an interchange fee (IF) to the bank of the cardholder (issuer) to carry out the transaction. This paper studies the determinants of socially and privately optimal IFs in a card scheme where services are provided by a monopoly issuer and perfectly competitive acquirers to heterogeneous consumers and merchants. Different from the literature, we distinguish card membership from card usage decisions (and fees). In doing so, we reveal the implications of an asymmetry between consumers and merchants: the card usage decision at a point of sale is delegated to cardholders since merchants are not allowed to turn down cards once they are affiliated with a card network. We show that this asymmetry is sufficient to induce the card association to set a higher IF than the socially optimal IF, and thus to distort the structure of user fees by leading to too low card usage fees at the expense of too high merchant fees. Hence, cap regulations on IFs can improve the welfare. These qualitative results are robust to imperfect issuer competition, imperfect acquirer competition, and to other factors affecting final demands, such as elastic consumer participation or strategic card acceptance to attract consumers. JEL Classification: G21, L11, L42, L31, L51, K21interchange fees, Merchant fees, Payment card associations
Zum Einsatz von Musik, Klängen, Tönen und Geräuschen in "Die Ehe der Maria Braun" von Rainer Werner Fassbinder und Peer Raben
DIE EHE DER MARIA BRAUN im Jahr 1978 - mit diesem Film erreichte Fassbinder als Regisseur das Ziel seines Lebens: ein deutsches Melodram zu drehen, mit dem er ein groĂźes Publikum begeisterte
Destructive creation
Destructive Creation is the deliberate introduction of new, perhaps improved generations of durable goods that destroy, directly or indirectly, the usage value of units previously sold inducing consumers to repeat their purchase. This paper discusses this practice by a single seller in an infinite-horizon, discrete time model with heterogeneous consumers. Despite the lack of commitment power over future prices and introduction policies, this practice restores partially or totally market power even though consumers anticipate opportunistic behavior. However, the monopoly resorts too much to this mechanism from an ex-ante, profit maximizing perspective. High prices in earlier periods allow the seller to commit to defer innovation and therefore to maintain buyers' confidence over durability. The paper characterizes the equilibrium properties of the resulting innovation cycles such as existence, uniqueness and asymptotic stability and discusses potential regulatory remedies in those instances where destructive creation generates economic inefficiencies. This theory applies, among others, to markets characterized by network externalities, compatibility issues, standard setting, social consumption and signal provision and may help explain many restrictive aftermarket practices as well as excessive add-on pricing without relying on any leverage hypothesis
SHARED LEARNING AND SUSTAINABILITY COMMIT-MENT. THE GREEN OFFICE OF THE UNIVERSITY OF BOLOGNA
The commitment of universities to sustainable development requires students’ involvement and participation, as they are the major actors in the necessary process of change in our complex and interconnected world. Taking the case of the Green Office of the University of Bologna into consideration, this study analyses how students participation can not only stimulate the debate about the issue of sustainability at universities but can also lead to possible solutions
Letter from the Editor
Editor-in-Chief Anthony Calvano writes to introduce Volume 6 of the Notre Dame Journal of International and Comparative Law
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