Michel Hockx. A snowy morning : eight Chinese poets on the road to modernity

This article reviews the book A Snowy Morning: Eight Chinese Poets on the Road to Modernity , written by Michel Hockx

GENERIC COMMODITY PROMOTION AND PRODUCT DIFFERENTIATION

This paper considers whether generic promotion lowers the differentiation among competing brands as claimed in the 1997 Supreme Court case (Wileman et al. v. Glickman). Commodity promotion is modeled as a multi-stage game where products are vertically differentiated. Analytical results show that if the benefits of generic advertising from increased demand are outweighed by the costs from lower product differentiation then high-quality producers will not benefit from generic promotion but producers of lower-quality goods may.generic advertising, product differentiation, spatial model, Marketing,

Quality and Competition: An Empirical Analysis across Industries

This paper empirically explores the link between quality and concentration in a cross-section of manufactured goods. Using concentration data and product quality indicators, an ordered probit estimation explores the impact of concentration on quality that is defined as an index of quality characteristics. The results demonstrate that market concentration and quality are positively correlated across different industries. When industry concentration increases, the likelihood of the product being higher quality increases and the likelihood of observing a lower quality decrease

Geographical Indications and The Trade Related Intellectual Property Rights Agreement (TRIPS): A Case Study of Basmati Rice Exports

The controversy over the granting of patenting rights to three new strains of Basmati rice by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office is used as a case study to analyze the impact of incomplete protection of intellectual property. Results suggest that the introduction of a competing product that may infringe on India’s geographical indicator has lowered the product differentiation of Indian Basmati rice in key export markets

A Theory for Why Large Farms need Small Farms

The political economy literature related to agricultural policy provides a number of conjectures corresponding to farm size, but provides no theoretical model of the political utility of small farms. Framed in the context of regulation, we demonstrate how large farms may use small farms to influence their regulatory burden. Producing in the presence of externalities, farms can be regulated to eliminate the damage. We compare a socially optimal regulation with the choice that would be taken by a large farm if it could influence the regulatory decision using the small farm as political cover. Compared to the socially optimal choice, there are cases where the large farm would choose regulation and reduced competition while in others would choose to fight the regulation to save its smaller rival. If the externality and the regulatory burden are very large, the large farm prefers more competition if that leads to less regulation. In this case, lobbying to “save small farms” is in the best interest of the large farm

A Note on First-Price Sealed-Bid Cattle Auctions in the Presence of Captive Supplies

The authors present an analytical model of a ϐirst-price sealed-bid cattle auction in which a spot and coordinated markets are interconnected. The model reveals that the conventional wisdom that market coordination negatively affects the bid price in the spot market is an oversimpliϐication. The relationships between key market variables impact bids and bid shading in complex ways. While captive supplies can lead to lower spot prices, the price reductions do not necessarily stem from an increase in market power due to contracting. The model emphasizes the importance of several variables for future empirical studies

The Constitutionality of Generic Advertising Checkoff Programs

Until recently, the legal status of generic advertising programs seemed questionable. After an initial victory for generic advertising proponents in 1997 in Glickman v. Wileman Brothers & Elliott, Inc. (521 U.S. 457 (1997)), the U.S. Supreme Court ruled four years later in United States v. United Foods, Inc. (533 U.S. 405 (2001)) that the federally-mandated mushroom advertising program was not part of a larger regulatory scheme (as was present in the 1997 case), and was, therefore, unconstitutional as compelled private speech. To many, the marketing of mushrooms under the checkoff statute at the heart of the United Foods case seemed no different from the way in which other commodities promoted through checkoff programs, like beef and pork, were marketed. After the United Foods case, it seemed only a matter of time before all mandatory checkoff programs would be ruled unconstitutional as well

Has Specialization Put a Limit on How Far Cattle Contracting Can Go?

I N 1776 Scottish philosopher Adam Smith published An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, or as it is better known, The Wealth of Nations. In many mundane ways, Smith merely chronicled the burgeoning European industries he was observing; but, in doing so, he helped spread a revolutionary thinking about how factories could take advantage of specialization. Smith’s discussion of a visit to a pin factory has been re-told so often that many people probably know the story without knowing the source. The story goes like this: If you were to make a pin, how would you do it? Well, you need to cut some steel, pound and twist it into a wire, cut the wire, straighten it, sharpen one end, afix a tiny ball to the other, and once, say, 100 were ready, box them up for delivery. Smith records 18 distinct tasks involved in making a pin and opines that an untrained 18th century worker Has Specialization Put a Limit on How Far Cattle Contracting Can Go? John M. Crespi and Tina L. Saitone [email protected]; [email protected] could at best fashion one pin per day. Specialized training increases the output to a dozen per worker so that a factory of 100 workers might produce 1200 pins. However, in the modern pin factory he visited, instead of training one person to do everything, workers were each trained for just one of the 18 distinct tasks, and the factory produced 48,000 pins per day. From automobiles to computers to packinghouses, specialization increases output while lowering cost per unit. This revolution in specialization also leads to increased demand for inputs. As output increases, more and more inputs must be secured, whether those inputs are steel or soybeans, plastic or pigs. But what happens in industries that compete for those inputs? They often become concentrate

ARE ASSESSMENTS FOR GENERIC ADVERTISING OPTIMAL IF PRODUCTS ARE DIFFERENTIATED?

An analytical framework where consumers display preferences for various qualities of an agricultural commodity is used to investigate the producer welfare effects of generic advertising assessments. Depending upon the degree of product differentiation present in the final goods, some producers are shown to benefit more than others from the use of an equivalent assessment on all producers. This paper delineates those cases where producer assessments should be equal and where assessments should be different to insure an equitable benefit.Marketing,

SOME ECONOMIC IMPLICATIONS OF PUBLIC LABELING

This article discusses economic issues related to public labeling. The main contributions in both the empirical and theoretical literatures are presented in order to motivate responses to the questions, when should a regulator promote public labeling, and what are the limits to and the possible market distortions from public labeling? Although the issues are complicated, there is already much economic guidance that can be given to inform the policy debate over food labeling.Agribusiness,