Price Discrimination and the Long Boom

This paper considers the possibility that an important role of computerization and information technology in strengthening the long boom of the 1990’s may have been to lower price-cost margins principally by facilitating price discrimination and “versioning, or that this may be a convenient way to model this contribution. Such practices intensify pric e competition and force firms to exploit scale economies more fully. Simulations of a simple model suggest that these effects account for two percentage points of extra gdp or between one third and nearly all of conventional estimates of the extra production by the end of the 1990’s.

Merger Wars: Bidding for Complementary Assets

We examine the bidding competition for a set of complementary assets arising between two firms who also compete in a differentiated product market. The bidding contest takes the form of an acquisition battle for a third firm initially holding the assets. Depending on the nature of product competition between the bidding firms, either both bidding firms are made worse off by the availability of these assets or, paradoxically, the firm winning the bidding contest is less profitable than is the firm losing it. Our analysis is relevant to the many recent mergers in telecommunications, finance, and transportation, e.g., Viacom’s purchase of CBS.mergers, product differentiation, bidding

Merger Theory and Evidence: The Baby-Food Case Reconsidered

The Federal Trade Commission’s successful challenge to the proposed merger of Heinz and Beech-Nut baby food operations in 2001 remains a controversial case that raises concern over the role of cost efficiencies in merger analysis. Although the FTC argued that the merger would result in an increased likelihood of coordinated effects, we develop an alternative explanation for why the merger was likely to harm consumers even in the absence of such cooperation. We show that a conventional model of vertical product differentiation is able to replicate the premerger market data. Vertical product differentiation assumes that consumers agree on the relative quality of different products, which seems to describe the baby food market. When the model is then used to determine potential post-merger outcomes, we find that only using the most favorable assumptions for Heinz, would the claimed cost-efficiencies have been passed on to consumers. Under any more conservative and realistic scenarios, consumer prices rise substantially. The analysis supports the decision to oppose the merger. It also raises some doubt about the merit of cost efficiencies as a merger defense when an industry is characterized by vertical product differentiation.

Targeted Transfers, Investment Spillovers, and the Tax Environment

We examine the informational role of targeted tax transfers used by local governments to attract corporate investment projects. The transfer may potentially be used to solve an information externality in which subsequent investments that follow the initial project may fail to occur even though they are profitable. The targeted transfer may be used to signal the profitability of such ancillary investments and thereby attract them. We show that this signaling role implies that an environment of either generally high corporate tax rates or low gains from secondary investments paradoxically yields an equilibrium in which the necessary government subsidy is lower.taxes, transfers, externalities

Summer of Code: Assisting Distance-Learning Students with Open-Ended Programming Tasks

A significant difficulty in teaching programming lies in the transition from novice to intermediate programmer, characterised by the assimilation and use of schemas of standard programming approaches. A significant factor assisting this transition is practice with tasks which develop this schema use. We describe the Summer of Code, a two-week activity for part-time, distance-learning students which gave them some additional programming practice. We analysed their submissions, forum postings, and results of a terminal survey. We found learners were keen to share and discuss their solutions and persevered with individual problems and the challenge overall. 93% respondents rated the activity 3 or better on a 5-point Likert scale (n=58). However, a quarter of participants, mainly those who described themselves as average or poor programmers, felt less confident in their abilities after the activity, though half of these students liked the activity overall. 54% of all participants said the greatest challenge was developing a general approach to the problems, such as selecting appropriate data structures. This is corroborated by forum comments, where students greatly appreciated “think aloud” presentations by faculty tackling the problems. These results strongly suggest that students would benefit from more open-ended practice, where they have to select and design their own solutions to a range of problems

Product Differentiation, Cost-Reducing Mergers, and Consumer Welfare

Cost synergies are an explicitly recognized justification for a two-firm merger and empirical techniques are now widely used to assess the impact of cost-reducing mergers on prices and welfare in the postmerger market. We show that if the merger occurs in a vertically product differentiated market then the merger will lead to a reduction in product offerings that limits the usefulness of pre-merger empirical estimates. Indeed, we further show that in such markets, two-firm merges will lead to higher prices regardless of the merger’s cost-savings. We show that our results may obtain even when we allow for post-merger entry.mergers, cost synergies, vertical product differentiation

Testing the Waters: Local Users, Sea Level Rise, and the Productive Usability of Interactive Geovisualizations

This paper explores the potential for technical communicators to employ usability research with risk-based interactive geovisualization technologies as a method of cultivating critical rhetorics of risk communication for local communities. Through integrating theories from usability studies and risk communication, I offer some new directions for thinking about the productive usability of online, participatory technologies that promote citizen engagement in science. I argue that the key tenets of productive usability afford technical communicators the opportunity to build localized knowledge of risk in real, local users, which in turn improves the capacity for a community and its stakeholders to more effectively communicate risk

Visual Argument Reconsidered: \u27Objective\u27 Theory and a Classical Rhetorical Approach

Visual argument is a relatively new discipline within the field of visual rhetorics. Consequently, visual rhetoricians have presented new theories of visual argumentation without fully considering the possibilities of existing textual methodologies as explanatory tools—especially classical rhetorical devices. This thesis presents a methodology for examining and creating visual arguments based on the concepts of topoi and figures of speech. I contend that these classical rhetorical devises embody an “objective” understanding of visual communication that shows one way of bridging the empiricism/rationalism debate in epistemology. By demonstrating that knowledge comes from the necessary interplay of perception and conception, I attempt to show that topoi and figures create visual arguments by means of conceptualization based on information gathered from an objective reality—a process that mimics the act of cognition and, therefore, provides a wide-reaching communicative methodology