Price coordination can be very harmful for consumers. Yet, even if a cartel is proved to exist, and successful in enforcement, how do we estimate damages or price overcharges to consumers? We build a structural model of the Irish automobile market that avails of a crosssection of new cars and jointly estimate demand and cost primitives. We use these estimates to quantify the role that price coo...

We investigate the relationship between pay, supervision and employee sharing. Our results suggest an inverse relationship between supervision and pay across both sharing and non-sharing firms, although the trade-off is somewhat assuaged within the former. This would appear to contradict instrumental efficiency wage considerations, but could be rationalised within a gift-exchange context. In te...

We investigate the role of incentives set by a parent firm for competition among its subsidiaries. In a Cournot experiment four subsidiaries of the same parent operate in the same market. Parents earn a specific share of the joint profit and can choose how to distribute the remaining surplus (or loss). Results show that parents allocating profits equally among their subsidiaries reach outcomes ...

Instrumental efficiency wage models predict an inverse relationship between wages and supervision with this relationship becoming more pronounced amongst firms that participate in some form of employee sharing. To be sure, our theoretical exposition predicts that an increase in total remuneration will elicit a larger cut in optimal monitoring in ‘sharing’ rather than ‘non sharing’ firms. In thi...

A small printing company in Johannesburg has experienced a steady decline in profits over the past four years, and wishes to reverse this trend. The objective of this study was to assess the implementation of Lean Manufacturing in that context, and to determine the impact it had on the printing company’s profit margin. A process-mapping of the printing organization was performed; this process-m...

It’s the time of the year when an annual editorial is due. Thinking about possible topics, I noticed the extraordinary amount of media advertising going on directed to the public concerning new medical tools. Today radio and television ads directly discuss prescription medications and their potential benefits (never the down side) and finish with the comment, “Ask your doctor.” Obviously, vendo...

Data replication constitutes an important issue in Cloud data management. In this context, a significant number of strategies have been proposed for systems. Most the studies literature classified these into static vs. dynamic or centralised decentralised strategies. paper, we propose new classification It takes account several other criteria, specific to environments: (i) orientation profit, (...

This paper uses Taylor series expansions and the assumption of small risks to derive a co-moment criterion that firms should maximize so that the resulting equilibrium is Pareto optimal. This is done in two models of production under uncertainty: the state-of-nature (SN ) model in which the firms’ outputs depend on states of nature and financial markets are complete with respect to these states...

desertification refers to land degradation phenomenon in arid, semi-arid and dry sub-humid areas, resulting from various factors including climate variation and human activities. for evaluation and mapping of desertification many research have been conducted leading to regional and local models. in this research, among different existing methods imdpa was selected and desertification intensity ...