Chiushingura, or the Loyal League; a Japanese Romance

Leeway for the Loyal

This paper examines the factors underlying task discretion from an economist’s perspective. It argues that the key axis for understanding discretion is the trade-off between the positive effects of discretion on potential output per employee and the negative effects of greater leeway on work effort. In empirical analysis using matched employer-employee data it is shown that discretion is strong...

Are Loyal Store Brand Users Less Store Loyal?

Do store brands help differentiate a store to attract store loyal consumers? Or do they attract price sensitive cherry pickers who are not store loyal? To answer these questions empirically, the authors construct appropriate metrics of store brand loyalty and store loyalty, that do not impose mathematical relationships between the two variables—a problem with recent works in this area. Using da...

Superconsumer, a postmodern romance

“Postmodernism” is a key word today, wielded by philosophers, cultural theorists, artists, people in the media, and intellectuals in general. When most people talk about postmodernism, they envisage the revolutionary imagery of our life and times— information revolution, hyperglobalisation, and consumerist culture—and they herewith feel the risks, anxieties, and ills associated with life in the...

The Romance of Tuberculosis

The Online Romance Scam: A Serious Cybercrime

The Online Romance Scam is a relatively new form of fraud that became apparent in about 2008. In this crime, criminals pretend to initiate a relationship through online dating sites then defraud their victims of large sums of money. This paper presents some descriptive statistics about knowledge and victimization of the online dating romance scam in Great Britain. Our study found that despite i...