An Empirical Analysis of Bundling and Tying: Over-the-Counter Pain Relief and Cold Medicines

We apply and extend the cost-based approach to bundling and tying under competition developed in Evans and Salinger (2004a) to over-the-counter pain relievers and cold medicines. We document that consumers pay much less for tablets with multiple ingredients than they would to buy tablets with each ingredient separately. We then decompose the sources of these savings into marginal cost savings and a component that reflects fixed costs of product offerings. The analysis both documents substantial economies of bundling and illustrates the sort of cost analysis that is necessary for understanding tying.

Curing Sinus Headaches and Tying Law: An Empirical Analysis of Bundling Decongestants and Pain Relievers

We apply and extend the cost-based approach to bundling and tying under competition developed in Evans and Salinger (2004) to over-the-counter pain relievers and cold medicines. We document that consumers pay much less for tablets with multiple ingredients than they would if they bought tablets with each ingredient separately. We then decompose the sources of these savings into marginal cost savings and a component that reflects fixed costs of product offerings. The analysis both documents substantial economies of bundling and illustrates the sort of cost analysis that is necessary for understanding tying.

Distributed-Pair Programming can work well and is not just Distributed Pair-Programming

Background: Distributed Pair Programming can be performed via screensharing or via a distributed IDE. The latter offers the freedom of concurrent editing (which may be helpful or damaging) and has even more awareness deficits than screen sharing. Objective: Characterize how competent distributed pair programmers may handle this additional freedom and these additional awareness deficits and characterize the impacts on the pair programming process. Method: A revelatory case study, based on direct observation of a single, highly competent distributed pair of industrial software developers during a 3-day collaboration. We use recordings of these sessions and conceptualize the phenomena seen. Results: 1. Skilled pairs may bridge the awareness deficits without visible obstruction of the overall process. 2. Skilled pairs may use the additional editing freedom in a useful limited fashion, resulting in potentially better fluency of the process than local pair programming. Conclusion: When applied skillfully in an appropriate context, distributed-pair programming can (not will!) work at least as well as local pair programming

Scaling behavior in economics: I. Empirical results for company growth

We address the question of the growth of firm size. To this end, we analyze the Compustat data base comprising all publicly-traded United States manufacturing firms within the years 1974-1993. We find that the distribution of firm sizes remains stable for the 20 years we study, i.e., the mean value and standard deviation remain approximately constant. We study the distribution of sizes of the ``new'' companies in each year and find it to be well approximated by a log-normal. We find (i) the distribution of the logarithm of the growth rates, for a fixed growth period of one year, and for companies with approximately the same size $S$ displays an exponential form, and (ii) the fluctuations in the growth rates -- measured by the width of this distribution $\sigma_1$ -- scale as a power law with $S$, $\sigma_1\sim S^{-\beta}$. We find that the exponent $\beta$ takes the same value, within the error bars, for several measures of the size of a company. In particular, we obtain: $\beta=0.20\pm0.03$ for sales, $\beta=0.18\pm0.03$ for number of employees, $\beta=0.18\pm0.03$ for assets, $\beta=0.18\pm0.03$ for cost of goods sold, and $\beta=0.20\pm0.03$ for property, plant, & equipment.Comment: 16 pages LateX, RevTeX 3, 10 figures, to appear J. Phys. I France (April 1997

Scaling behavior in economics: II. Modeling of company growth

In the preceding paper we presented empirical results describing the growth of publicly-traded United States manufacturing firms within the years 1974--1993. Our results suggest that the data can be described by a scaling approach. Here, we propose models that may lead to some insight into these phenomena. First, we study a model in which the growth rate of a company is affected by a tendency to retain an ``optimal'' size. That model leads to an exponential distribution of the logarithm of the growth rate in agreement with the empirical results. Then, we study a hierarchical tree-like model of a company that enables us to relate the two parameters of the model to the exponent $\beta$, which describes the dependence of the standard deviation of the distribution of growth rates on size. We find that $\beta = -\ln \Pi / \ln z$, where $z$ defines the mean branching ratio of the hierarchical tree and $\Pi$ is the probability that the lower levels follow the policy of higher levels in the hierarchy. We also study the distribution of growth rates of this hierarchical model. We find that the distribution is consistent with the exponential form found empirically.Comment: 19 pages LateX, RevTeX 3, 6 figures, to appear J. Phys. I France (April 1997

Transcription enhancement of a digitised multi-lingual pamphlet collection: a case study and guide for similar projects

UCL Library Services holds an extensive collection of over 9,000 Jewish pamphlets, many of these extremely rare. Over the past five years, UCL has embarked on a project to widen access to this collection through an extensive programme of cataloguing, conservation and digitisation. With the cataloguing complete and the most fragile items conserved, the focus is now on making these texts available to global audiences via UCL Digital Collections website. The pamphlets were ranked for rarity, significance and fragility and the highest-scoring selected for digitisation. Unique identifiers allocated at the point of cataloguing were used to track individual pamphlets through the stages of the project. This guide details the text-enhancement methods used, highlighting particular issues relating to Hebrew scripts and early-printed texts. Initial attempts to enable images of these pamphlets to be searched digitally relied on the Optical Character Recognition (OCR) embedded within the software used to create the PDF files. Whilst satisfactory for texts chiefly in Roman script, it provided no reliable means to search the extensive corpus of texts in Hebrew. Generous advice offered by the National Library of Israel led to our adoption of ABBYY FineReader software as a means of enhancing the transcriptions embedded within the PDF files. Following image capture, JPEG files were used to create multi-page PDF files of each pamphlet. Pre-processing in ABBYY FineReader consisted of: setting the language and colour mode; detecting page orientation; selecting and refining areas of the text to be read; reading the text to produce a transcription. The resultant files were stored in folders according to language of text. The software highlighted spelling errors and doubtful readings. A verification tool allowed transcribers to correct these as required. However, some erroneous or doubtful readings were nevertheless genuine words and not highlighted; it was therefore essential to proofread the text, particularly for early-printed scripts. Transcribers maintained logs of common errors; additionally, problems with Hebrew vocalisations, cursive and Gothic scripts were noted. During initial quality checks of the transcriptions, many text searches were unsuccessful due to previously unidentified spacings occurring within words. This was generally linked to the font size being too small. Maintaining logs of font sizes used led to the adoption of a minimum of Arial 8 or Times New Roman 10 in transcribed text. The methodology was revised to include the preliminary quality-checking of one page. We concluded that it was difficult to develop a standardised procedure applicable to all texts given the variance in language, script and typography. However, we concluded that the font Arial gave the most successful accuracy ratings for Hebrew script, minimum text size 17, minimum title size 25. ABBYY file preparation took a minimum of 1.5 hours per pamphlet; transcription correction took an average of 10.4 minutes per page; the final quality check took 30 minutes per pamphlet. On average, the work on each pamphlet took a minimum of 6 hours to complete. As a result of the project, average accuracy ratings improved from 60% to 89%, the greatest improvement being for pre-1800 and Hebrew script publications. We are therefore inclined to focus future transcription-enhancement activity on these types of publication for the remainder of our Jewish Pamphlet Collections

A Straight Path: Studies in Medieval Philosophy and Culture; Essays in Honor of Arthur Hyman

R. James Long is a co-editor as well as a contributing author, Richard Fishacre\u27s Way to God pp. 174-82. Book description: Collected to honor the scholarship of Arthur Hyman over the past thirty years, the twenty-three articles of this volume are original contributions by established scholars of medieval philosophy. . . --Journal of the History of Philosophyhttps://digitalcommons.fairfield.edu/philosophy-books/1001/thumbnail.jp