The Dynamics of Brand Equity: A Hedonic Regression Approach to the Laser Printer Market

The authors develop a dynamic approach to measuring the evolution of comparative brand premium, an important component of brand equity. A comparative brand premium is defined as the pairwise price difference between two products being identical in every respect but brand. The model is based on hedonic regressions and grounded in economic theory. In constrast to existing approaches, the authors explicitly take into account and model the dynamics of the brand premia. By exploiting the premia’s intertemporal dependence structure, the Bayesian estimation method produces more accurate estimators of the time paths of the brand premia than other methods. In addition, the authors present a novel yet straightforward way to construct confidence bands that cover the entire time series of brand premia with high probability. The data required for estimation are readily available, cheap, and observable on the market under investigation. The authors apply the dynamic hedonic regression to a large and detailed data set about laser printers gathered on a monthly basis over a four-year period. It transpires that, in general, the estimated brand premia change only gradually from period to period. Nevertheless the method can diagnose sudden downturns of a comparative brand premium. The authors’ dynamic hedonic regression approach facilitates the practical evaluation of brand management.brand equity, price premium, hedonic regression, Bayesian estimation, dynamic linear model

Low Cost Attitude Sensors for Spacecraft

A short overview is presented on low cost attitude sensors developed by Applied Research Corporation. More or less existing technology has been used, but major emphasis was directed to considerably reduce the cost of these units without compromising their quality and reliability. Horizon and sun aspect sensors have been developed and manufactured. They were successfully flown on the space shuttle Atlantis (STS 34, October 18, 1989). We have further manufactured 10 horizon sensors and 15 sun aspect sensors and delivered them to Goddard (Wallops) Space Flight Center for future use on sounding rockets. The angular errors are about ±0.1 to 0.2 for the horizon and sun aspect sensors. Their mass is about 0.3 to 0.8 kg and their power requirement about 0.1 to 1.5 W. We have recently won a contract with Goddard to develop a low cost star tracker with an angular error of about ±5 sec of arc. Our plan is to produce a protoflight unit of such a sensor in about 24 months. Some details of the results obtained from the shuttle flight and some system details will be presented

Anatomy of regional price differentials: Evidence from micro price data

Over the last three decades the supply of economic statistics has vastly improved. Unfortunately, statistics on regional price levels (sub-national purchasing power parities) have been exempt from this positive trend, even though they are indispensable for meaningful spatial comparisons of regional output, income, wages, productivity, standards of living, and poverty. To improve the situation, our paper demonstrates that a highly disaggregated and reliable regional price index can be compiled from data that already exist. We use the micro price data that have been collected for Germany's Consumer Price Index in May 2016. For the computation we introduce a multi-stage version of the Country- Product-Dummy method. The unique quality of our price data set allows us to depart from previous spatial price comparisons and to compare only exactly identical products. We find that the price levels of the 402 counties and cities of Germany are largely driven by the cost of housing and to a much lesser degree by the prices of goods and services. The overall price level in the most expensive region, Munich, is about 27 percent higher than in the cheapest region. Our results also reveal strong spatial autocorrelation

Bias and Inefficiency in Quality-Adjusted Hedonic Regression Analysis

Numerous quality-adjusted hedonic price-trend studies based on computer prices have provided support to widely held suspicions that officially released price indices are not accurately measuring the price declines occurring in many information technology (IT) products. If verifiable, then general price inflation is being overestimated and, consequently, real GDP is being underestimated. Existing evidence, however, is inconclusive. First, empirical findings for IT-products other than computers are extremely rare and, secondly, estimation bias is inherent in the hedonic regression technique most commonly employed. This paper presents an unbiased method together with an estimated quality-adjusted price trend for laser printers (1993-2004)

Oblivion: Mitigating Privacy Leaks by Controlling the Discoverability of Online Information

Search engines are the prevalently used tools to collect information about individuals on the Internet. Search results typically comprise a variety of sources that contain personal information -- either intentionally released by the person herself, or unintentionally leaked or published by third parties, often with detrimental effects on the individual's privacy. To grant individuals the ability to regain control over their disseminated personal information, the European Court of Justice recently ruled that EU citizens have a right to be forgotten in the sense that indexing systems, must offer them technical means to request removal of links from search results that point to sources violating their data protection rights. As of now, these technical means consist of a web form that requires a user to manually identify all relevant links upfront and to insert them into the web form, followed by a manual evaluation by employees of the indexing system to assess if the request is eligible and lawful. We propose a universal framework Oblivion to support the automation of the right to be forgotten in a scalable, provable and privacy-preserving manner. First, Oblivion enables a user to automatically find and tag her disseminated personal information using natural language processing and image recognition techniques and file a request in a privacy-preserving manner. Second, Oblivion provides indexing systems with an automated and provable eligibility mechanism, asserting that the author of a request is indeed affected by an online resource. The automated ligibility proof ensures censorship-resistance so that only legitimately affected individuals can request the removal of corresponding links from search results. We have conducted comprehensive evaluations, showing that Oblivion is capable of handling 278 removal requests per second, and is hence suitable for large-scale deployment

Effekte und Mechanismen von Aufmerksamkeitstraining zur Modifikation des Attentional Bias bei Angst - Determination am Beispiel der Sozialen Phobie -

Der Attentional Bias bei Angst erfährt aktuell große Beachtung und wird als Ansatzpunkt für die Behandlung insbesondere der Sozialen Phobie diskutiert. Computerbasierte Trainings zur Modifikation dieser Art von Aufmerksamkeitsverzerrungen wurden vielfach erprobt mit anfänglich sehr vielversprechenden, mittlerweile jedoch insgesamt inkonsistenten Ergebnissen. Wirkmechanismen bleiben dabei weitestgehend unklar. Die vorliegende Arbeit trägt Befunde zur Effektivität von Aufmerksamkeitstrainings allgemein und als internetbasierter Behandlungsansatz bei Sozialer Phobie im Speziellen zusammen und geht der Frage nach einflussnehmenden Faktoren sowie zugrundeliegenden Mechanismen nach. Es zeigt sich, dass von unterschiedlichen Komponenten des Attentional Bias ausgegangen werden kann, die durch regulative Prozesse wie z.B. Aufmerksamkeitskontrolle beeinflusst werden. Der Zusammenhang zu Symptomen der Angst ist dabei nicht hinreichend nachgewiesen. Es ergeben sich jedoch Hinweise auf eine Interaktion des Attentional Bias mit anderen kognitiven Prozessen, die einen Beitrag zur Erklärung der Symptomatik leisten könnten. Zukünftige Forschung sollte spezifischere Hypothesen, abgeleitet von Modellen des Attentional Bias, testen, um die Wirkung von Aufmerksamkeitsverzerrungen besser verstehen und nachfolgend differenziertere Trainings entwickeln zu können. Bislang ist die Datenlage nicht als überzeugende Basis für die Implementierung von computerbasierten Aufmerksamkeitstrainings als Behandlungsansatz zu betrachten

Hedonic Price Measurement: The CCC Method

Abstract An accurate measurement of general price inflation is an essential prerequisite for sound economic analysis and prudent policy-making. Numerous hedonic regression studies (predominately focusing on computers) have suggested that due to significant product quality changes over time, driven onward by technical progress, national statistical agencies are not compiling and releasing unbiased price-trend estimates. This paper argues, however, that the estimation method commonly applied in hedonic studies is an unsatisfactory one. Therefore, an alternative estimation procedure is introduced. Utilizing this novel technique, a quality-adjusted twelve-year pricetrend for laser printers (1992 to 2003) is estimated and compared with the officially published price-trend