Consumer focus groups in France, England, Sweden and Denmark were used to obtain insights into the decision-making involved in the choice of fresh pork and attitudes towards today's pig production systems. Many positive perceptions of pork meat were evoked. Negative images of the production systems in use today were expressed, but rationalised in terms of consumer demands, market competition an...

Why do private firms invest in innovation? Surely the answer to this question is related to the benefits that firms obtain from improving their technology or production processes. In particular, the rate of innovation has been traditionally linked to the capacity of firms to generate profits from these innovations. These profits, in turn, are used by firms to finance their investments in techno...

There is a pressing need for Chinese liquor producers to use information systems in managing production process and improving production efficiency for meeting fiercely increasing market competition. Unlike liquor production in other countries, Chinese liquor production replies on experience and manual operations greatly, which has very low-level automation and informatization. This paper takes...

How does competition in a firm's product market affect the behavior of its stock? We examine this question in a noisy rational expectations economy in which firms operate under monopolistic competition. Production is subject to productivity shocks and requires capital, raised on a perfectly competitive equity market. Investors observe firms' past profits and collect private information about th...

When competing firms target information towards specific consumers through direct marketing activities, complete segmentation of markets can result. We analyze a two-stage duopoly where, prior to price competition, each firm targets information to specific consumers and only consumers informed by a firm can buy from it. This has the effect of endogenously determining market segments in a model ...

This paper studies the interaction between product market competition and takeover activity. We develop a dynamic model in which profit-maximizing production decisions of all firms in an industry as well as the timing and terms of a merger between two firms are jointly determined. We show that there exists an asymmetric equilibrium in production policies with endogenous synergy gains, in which ...

We consider a competitive version of the traditional aggregate production planning model with capacity constraints. In the general case, multiple products are produced by a few competing producers (oligopoly) with limited capacities. Production quantities, prices and consequently profits depend on production and allocation decisions of each producer. In addition, there is competition for the ra...

This paper explores the relationship between the intensity of competition in product markets and firms’ incentives to lower their production costs by illegal means. Our framework combines a Salop circle with a crime model à la Becker, allowing us to differentiate between several measures for the intensity of competition. We establish that more firms in the industry (i.e., lower entry costs) red...