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Interactions between different policy instruments in real markets can lead to a mismatch between stakeholders striving for individual benefits and the attainment of an overall system optimum. These distortion effects are of particular relevance for sector-integrated systems with high prosumer shares. Distributed battery storage systems, in particular, could constitute a pivotal source of flexibility in close to 100% renewable energy systems. However, depending on their operation mode, these battery systems can either serve individual profit maximization or the benefit of the system as a whole. We quantify the resulting differences by means of a linear optimization model of the electricity market, which we stringently link to a stakeholder’s complete cost-of-energy analysis including relevant regulatory price components. We demonstrate that the effects encompass both system cost changes and distributional effects for certain stakeholder groups. We quantify the effects and apply an impact variation analysis to demonstrate that they could be relevant in view of the overall acceptance of the energy system transformation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Profit maximizers have reasons to agree with stakeholder theorists that managers may need to consider different values simultaneously in decision making. However, it remains unclear how maximizing a single value can be reconciled with simultaneously considering different values. A solution can neither be found in substantive normative philosophical theories, nor in postulating the maximization of profit. Managers make sense of the values in a situation by means of the many thick value concepts of ordinary language. Thick evaluation involves the simultaneous consideration of different values: making sense of a value always involves knowing how to engage with it given the other values in the situation. This also goes for profit: maximization is only one way of engaging with the value of profit, and grasping whether maximization is appropriate involves considering other values. We discuss some consequences of our approach for stakeholder theorists and profit maximizers. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article discusses research regarding how companies can optimize a menu of multiformat subscription plans for advertising (ad)-supported mass media platforms as of 2017, and it mentions changes involving media content distribution, as well as profit-maximizing menus, business models, and the U.S. newspaper industry advertising revenue. Business profit management and consumers' willingness to pay (WTP) are examined, along with print and digital advertising.

This paper, based on a novel hybrid techno-economic model for geothermal power plants with endogenized plant lifetime, investigates the economic feasibility of a sustainable exploitation of geothermal resources for electricity generation. To this end, standard terminology and classifications from the literature are reviewed, such as "sustainability", "sustainable operation", "renewability", "recovery", "recharge", and "regeneration". An illustrative conventional, convective high-enthalpy hydrothermal system is contrasted with an enhanced, conductive low-enthalpy petrothermal system. Furthermore, different (mostly geophysical) sustainable operation criteria for the use of geothermal energy are derived from the literature. The conditions for complying with these criteria are compared with the economic criteria of cost minimization (levelized cost of electricity, LCOE) and profit maximization (net present value, NPV), respectively, revealing differences that vary in intensity, particularly depending on the type of reservoir and their respective properties. For the two case studies, LCOE of 2.9 €-ct/kWh and 16.9 €-ct/kWh are found, which are further scrutinized by a detailed sensitivity analysis. The hydrothermal system, in contrast to the petrothermal system investigated, is found to be able to meet several of the sustainability criteria examined (extraction equals recharge, operating lifetime of 100 to 300 years), whereas economically optimal operation leads to excessive overexploitation in both cases, showing a distinct trade-off between profit maximization and sustainable operation that has not been discussed in the literature so far. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a decision model that captures supply-side disruption risks, social risks, and demand-side uncertainty within an integrated global supply chain and corporate social responsibility (CSR) modelling and analysis framework. The global supply chain decision-makers must decide on the level of investment in CSR activities and the choice of trading partners (manufacturer or retailer) given their CSR consciousness and perceived riskiness in order to maximise profit and minimise their overall risk. The model incorporates individual attitudes towards disruption risks among the manufacturers and the retailers, with the demands for the product associated with the retailers being random. The model allows one to investigate the effects of heterogeneous CSR activities in a global supply chain and to compute the resultant equilibrium pattern of product outputs, transactions, product prices, and levels of social responsibility activities. The results show that CSR activities can potentially be used to mitigate global supply chain risk. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In this paper, we consider bidding behavior of producers in wholesale electricity market in Iran. Participating in a day ahead pay-as-bid electricity auctions for Generator Companies with purpose of profit maximization in spite of market regulation constraints is taken into account. Since bidding functions are restricted to be stepwise with maximum of ten steps per unit in each hour, we ask whether increasing steps will improve the Ex Ante profit of firms or not. Finally, in order to evaluate rationalities in bidding behavior of the market participants, our results are compared with outcomes of real bidding data. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

TWDM PON is an emerging access architecture that is capable of offering different categories of services. For example, the operator can provide high-priced failure-proof services to the business users by deploying redundant elements in this network, along with low-priced unprotected service to the residential users. In this article, we analyze the economics of optical networks with a provision of such hybrid services. Specifically, we describe the operator as an economic entity that targets to maximize its earned profit by judiciously choosing the subscribers, the data rate price, the primary and redundant components that need to be deployed in the network to serve both business and residential users. The operator's profit maximization appears to be an MINLP (a mixed integer non-linear problem) that is hard to solve via polynomially complex algorithms. Interestingly, we show that, if users’ demand functions crossover at most finitely many points, one can develop an efficient algorithm to solve this optimization. For homogeneous user demand, we obtain a set of inequations that depicts economic viability of the optical network. Alongside, we also investigate how the system parameters impact different economic outcomes. Our model reveals several insightful results. For example, we exhibit that, by deploying optical fibers and leasing it to the operator at high prices, the government can earn a large revenue. However, this depreciates the number of served consumers. Similar trade-off is also observed between the user number and their welfare. Most part of our article considers a full protection scheme where the operator guarantees $\text{100}\%$ protection against service failures to the corporate users. Later we also extend our analysis to the case where the protection is guaranteed with a certain availability, $\alpha < 1$. In this context, we show how the availability requirements of the corporate users affect the sustainability and economics of the network. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The rapid growth of demand for data in wireless communications has driven the mobile service carriers and the research community to seek both effective technical and alternative solutions to the data demand problem. One particular solution, content pre-staging, tries to push content as close to the mobile device as possible in order to lower demand at peak times. Assuming the interesting case that mobile device storage could be made available as part of the mobile carrier's system capacity either directly by the end user or indirectly by the carrier, this paper investigates the potential economic impacts on the mobile service business and various stakeholders of content pre-staging. We explore the economic implications of content pre-staging by modeling the interplay among the mobile carrier, end users, and the content provider in a game theoretic framework. The carrier designs pricing mechanisms to affect the behaviors of the content provider and end users for the purpose of profit maximization. In particular, two prices are introduced, the price charged to the content provider to pre-stage content on mobile device storage, and the monetary reward to compensate users for the usage of their mobile device storage. Although the individual incentive of the carrier is not necessarily aligned with social incentives, the welfare analysis of content pre-staging shows that the practice improves social welfare by increasing network efficiency. Localizing content increases the overall profitability of mobile service business which is positively related to the relevance of the pre-staged content. The carrier's pricing mechanisms determine the manner in which the increased profitability of the business is shared by various interested parties. While the carrier may design prices strategically to retain a larger share of the increased profitability, content pre-staging can benefit all the three parties in the game, i.e., the carrier gains in saved capacity and new revenue, users gain QoE, content, and financial rewards for sharing mobile device storage, and the content provider gains in increased revenue from increased content access. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This empirical research investigates subscription price variations of scholarly journals in five business subject-specific areas using the semilogarithmic regression model. It has two main purposes. The first is to address the unsettled debate over whether or not and to what extent commercial publishers reap monopoly profits by overcharging academic libraries for scholarly journals they subscribe to. The second is to provide librarians with scholarly journal price estimates and to test publication factors that affect journal prices. The subject-specific approach used in this study provides more accurate estimates for serial budgeting and management. The findings show that in all cases the coefficient of the commercial publisher variable is statistically significant at a very high level (p< .0001). In most cases, the coefficients of other observed variables are also significant, and scholarly journal prices vary significantly among the business subject-specific areas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Employee benefit programs are an integral part of an investment in human capital. They should be tailored to the needs of the mature worker who is staying on the job longer, retiring later, or moving into an "encore" career after retiring from a long-term profession. Businesses that provide benefits that align with the needs of this desirable, highly knowledgeable work-force segment position themselves to become "employer of choice" for the best employees. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper develops a real options framework to analyze the behavior of stock returns in mergers and acquisitions. In this framework, the timing and terms of takeovers are endogenous and result from value-maximizing decisions. The implications of the model for abnormal announcement returns are consistent with the available empirical evidence. In addition, the model generates new predictions regarding the dynamics of firm-level betas for the period surrounding control transactions. Using a sample of 1,086 takeovers of publicly traded U.S. firms between 1985 and 2002, we present new evidence on the dynamics of firm-level betas, which is strongly supportive of the model's predictions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of the present study is to explore the pricing objectives that service companies pursue along with the pricing policies that they adopt in order to price their services. Analyzing data from 170 companies operating in six different services sectors in Greece, the study found that the objectives, which are pursued, are fundamentally qualitative rather than quantitative in their nature with a particular emphasis given on the companies' customers. Regarding the pricing policies, the only policy that was found to be followed by the majority of the companies is the traditional price list perhaps due to the easiness associated with its implementation. Moreover, the pricing objectives were found to be, as we should expect, associated with the pricing policies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Based on an intensive and inductive study of a Fortune 100 corporation, this article describes how dynamic capabilities that reconfigure division resources--that is, architectural innovation--may operate within multibusiness firms. We suggest envisaging corporate divisions as combinations of capabilities and product-market areas of responsibility (charters) that may be recombined in various ways, highlighting the interplay of economic and social imperatives that motivate such recombinations. We detail the microsociological patterns by which such recombinations occur and then theorize about an organizational form, termed 'dynamic community,' in which these processes are embedded. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: Teaching complex economic theories can be made relevant through everyday life experiences and current economic, social, and environmental crises can be used as vehicles for student learning. The purpose of this paper is to help students understand that the economy should be seen as a social system that evolves over time driven by conflictive and contradictory forces and enable them to develop the critical thinking skills needed to make better choices for a more equitable and sustainable future. Design/methodology/approach: The paper reviews the historical role played by neoliberalism on education in general and on the teaching of economics in particular. A historical/critical/action-learning approach discusses five pedagogical teaching methods that have been implemented in undergraduate economics courses and demonstrates how teaching social economics can be made possible by bringing the real world into the classroom and taking the classroom into the real world. Findings: There is an urgent need to rethink the teaching of economics and the economics curriculum from one that stresses self-interest, profit maximization and cost minimization, to one that stresses cooperation, collaboration, fairness, and ethical values rather than economic value, as ways of satisfying society's needs and addressing systemic issues of inequality, power and greed. Bringing teachers and students together in collaborative learning environments, thereby learning from the mistakes of the past and minimizing the impacts of the present so that future generations can also participate, is the much-needed change in how social economics can be taught post-financial crisis. Originality/value: This paper is a response to the special issue on the theme teaching social economics during the global financial crisis. The authors have provided insights into their teaching pedgagogy in the context of this topic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The time- and wavelength-division-multiplexed (TWDM) passive optical network (PON) is a popular choice for future access technology. However, a comprehensive understanding of its economics is still beyond the reach of the current literature. For example, it is not clearly understood which techno-economic factors make this technology sustainable. Similarly, the role of the government in influencing the users' welfare has also remained opaque. In this paper, we uncover these important issues. Portraying the operator as a profit maximizer, we develop a mathematical model that encapsulates both economic and technical aspects of the network. Within this framework, the profit maximization problem of an operator turns out to be a mixed-integer nonlinear program that, in general, is exponentially complex. Fortunately, using a widely accepted assumption on user demand, we reduce this to a discrete optimization. Moreover, for a large class of demands, a polynomially complex algorithm is developed to solve this problem. For homogeneous linear demands, we analytically characterize the system parameters that ensure the sustainability of the network in the long run. In addition, the influence of different system parameters on the economic outcomes is studied. Our investigation reveals several policy-making insights. For example, it unveils a fundamental trade-off between the number of users and the aggregated welfare. Also, it suggests that the leasing of fibers isa better deployment policy for the government as compared to the other alternatives. Finally, we show that the architectural details of the network play a key role in deciding the economics. In particular, one variant of the PON is shown to be more viable than another. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The authors address the following key questions: (1) When should a firm introduce a new product? (2) What should its performance level be? and (3) How do the decisions of a competing firm affect a firm's timing and product performance decisions? The authors present a detailed case study of the initial competitors in the personal digital assistant (PDA) industry on the basis of which they construct a stylized game-theoretic model of entry timing and product performance level decisions in a duopoly. Situations in which the duopolists are symmetric as well as asymmetric in terms of their estimates of market size and product development capabilities are considered. When firms are symmetric, the authors show that an equilibrium exists when the firms enter at different times with different performance levels. In the asymmetric cases, the firm that has a higher estimate of market size enters first, as does the firm with a superior development process. The performance level decisions, however, depend on the sensitivity of demand to this variable. The results provide one explanation for empirical observations that market pioneers maintain their leadership in some cases, and later entrants eventually dominate in other cases. The authors then relate the model results to actual decisions in the PDA market, finding that Apple's Newton was "too little, too early." [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Managers are often advised, "beat your competitors," which sometimes contrasts with the advice, "do the best for your firm." This may lead managers to focus on comparative measures such as market share. Drawing on game theory, the authors hypothesize that managers are competitor oriented under certain conditions, in particular, when they are provided with information about competitors' performance. Empirical studies lead to the additional hypothesis that a competitor orientation is detrimental to performance. To examine these hypotheses, the authors conduct two studies. The first is a laboratory study in which 1016 subjects made pricing decisions. When information about the competitor's profits was provided, over 40% of the subjects were willing to sacrifice part of their company's profits to beat or harm the competitor. Such competitor-oriented behavior occurred across a variety of treatments. The second is a field study used to examine the performance over a half-century of 20 large U.S. firms with differing objectives. Firms with competitor-oriented (market share) objectives were less profitable and less likely to survive than those whose objectives were directly oriented to profits. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A mathematical programming model and heuristic solution procedure are developed to realign sales territories. Unique model aspects are: (1) the objective function is the anticipated profit generated by the sales force; (2) the interrelated problem of account specific call frequency determination is simultaneously considered; (3) travel time is considered, including combining calls on accounts into trips. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

High profit and low profit strategic "gestalts" in two different types of mature capital goods industries are examined. Multiple avenues to high profits are found within both types, but they differ between the two types in ways that can be reconciled with industry characteristics. Cluster analysis emerges as a promising technique for strategy research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is generally accepted that takeover bids help to bring about an efficient allocation of resources. However, the following argument is often suggested by those who want the government to restrict takeover bids: the acquiring firm may have special information about the target firm's resources which indicates that the target is really worth more than its current market valuation. Hence, the acquiring firm, by paying only a small premium, is able to acquire these resources at a price below the true worth to shareholders indicated by the inside information. Thus shareholders are unable to capture the true benefits of their investments, and an inefficient amount of investment will take place. Therefore the government should restrict takeover bids. The above argument is clearly wrong if there is competition among informed bidders for the target firm's assets. However, proponents of the argument claim that some takeover bids occur exactly because only one agent has special, inside information about the target company's resources. In this paper we show that the argument is false even if there is only one bidder as long as shareholders have rational expectations about the takeover bid process. Though we think it is important to point out the error in the above argument, this paper's main purpose is to study the informational role of takeover bids. In the process of modelling the transmission of information, we provide a theoretical model which explains among other things the empirical result that firms which are subject to an unsuccessful takeover bid are (on average) revalued upwards by the market even after the bid fails. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The author reviews the field of pricing strategy and constructs a unifying taxonomy of the many strategies described in the literature. The taxonomy is based on the simple proposition that all the strategies have a common denominator--shared economies among buyer segments, across firms, or among products. The author presents the strategies in comparable terms, emphasizing the principles underlying each and demonstrating the relationship among strategies, the circumstances in which each can be used, and the legal and policy implications of each. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examines how advertising budget setting, framed as a prisoner's dilemma, is affected by information on the competitive situation and characteristics of the decision maker. Hypotheses are tested using experiments in which subjects set advertising budgets. Results indicate that subjects were generally competitive, but also based their strategy selections on what they expected their opponents to do, what their opponents did last time, whether the competitive relationship was expected to continue, market shares, and whether the subject's profit objectives were short-or long-term. Individual differences also played a part in determining strategy selection. INSET: Summary of instructions for computer simulation.. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article surveys the available empirical evidence assessing merger performance; its conclusions are important to the senior management of both potential acquirers and firms seeking to be acquired. The authors examine relative gains to the merging units, changes in their risk characteristics, and changes in the operating results of the merging firms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

If decisions of marketing managers are to be influenced by predictions based on theoretical models, it is important that the assumptions in the models be accurate. Marketeers must reformulate concepts in such models to make them empirically meaningful, as the author of this article shows. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The contributions of marketing research to managerial effectiveness can help to raise profits, but research itself is not a decision-making function. The decisions to use the outcome of research wisely must properly be made by management. But will management learn to deal effectively with the future? Can marketing efforts be organized to handle successfully the radical changes in business that tomorrow will bring? These are the questions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is a discussion of the external or side effects of business and rational responses to these external effects for profit-maximizing firms. Some people would argue that the rational response for the profit-maximizing firm is to do nothing about its external effects until required by law; whereas others, as we in this paper, argue that the rational response for the profit-maximizing firm is to take some action. The first section of the paper deals with the meaning of externalities, of which pollution is a fundamental type, and the phases of a solution to such problems. In the second section, the paper deals with rational responses for the profit-maximizing firm regarding its externalities, in which many aspects of the popular arguments against the rationality and the practicability of independent corrective action by a firm are examined. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A framework is indispensable in pursuing share price maximization. By making explicit many of the interdependent effects of management decisions concerning the investment and financing activities of the firm, the framework presented in this article is an ideal tool to evaluate the impact of management decisions upon the firm's stock price. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The writer believes that much that has been written about reciprocity ignores some of the problems inherent in its use. These problems include knowing when reciprocity is expected, how power is balanced in the buyer/seller relationship, reconciling reciprocity with profit centers, administrative costs, possible increased buying costs, and organizational difficulties. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article reports on aspects of corporate long range profit planning practices. The increased attention to long range planning is a result of declining returns on net worth, changes in consumer attitudes and preferences, new product development, and integration and diversification. The phases of long range planning include determining profit objectives, proprietary directions for corporate growth, planning new products, and programming requirements of business functions. Long range planning is particularly advantageous in terms of the benefits it provides in stabilizing profits at high levels.

In a delay-sensitive mobile crowdsensing (MCS) platform, a service provider offers monetary incentives to mobile users for participating in the data collection and reporting their obtained data by a deadline. One aspect missing from most prior literature in the incentive mechanism design is the consideration of the detailed data reporting process through cellular or Wi-Fi networks. In this paper, we consider the interactions between the service provider and the users in two stages. First, the service provider chooses a reward to maximize its expected profit under the incomplete information of the users’ responses. Next, given the reward, each user makes his participation and reporting decisions, which are complicated due to his mobility and network heterogeneity. We propose an algorithm to compute the optimal user's decisions under the general setting using dynamic programming, and derive closed-form decision criteria for the special yet practical case of a non-discounted reward. We compute the optimal reward by characterizing the solution set and the discontinuity in the profit function. Simulation results show that our proposed algorithm achieves a significant gain in the user payoff over three benchmark heuristic schemes. In addition, a service provider's profit is sensitive to the estimation of the users’ Wi-Fi availabilities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Political economists have argued that user activity on corporate social media is regarded as labour that appears playful and fun but is exploited and sold to advertisers for profit maximization. This article begins with the working assumption that such user labour on social media constitutes a form of playing. It is theorized through a psychoanalytic perspective on the term as developed by D. W. Winnicott and André Green. The notion of gaming-playing is put forward to account for set interface structures on Facebook that resemble a game as well as free-flowing dimensions more akin to playing. Some user discourses on Facebook are analysed through this prism. A psychoanalytic conceptualization of user labour as playing allows one to analyse both positive discourses that emphasize Facebook as a space for creativity, exploration and the unknown, as well as negative discourses that critique the platform with regard to lacking privacy controls or data ownership. Both discourses are conducted in a playful manner that creatively utilize a sense of user agency in relation to others and Facebook itself, but often remain without consequences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

ABSTRACT: The economic theory of the labor‐managed firm dates back 60 years. Here I review the intellectual history of this field, with critical remarks and proposals for future development. The decades of the 1960s–1980s saw a burst of theoretical speculation that generally did not hold up well under empirical scrutiny. By the 1990s, progress on the mainstream theory of the firm was overtaking some of this early research. At the same time, a growing body of econometric work on labor‐managed firms was providing new stylized facts for theorists to explain. While the earlier period was characterized by an excess supply of theories relative to facts, more recently the balance has begun to tip in the opposite direction. I close by suggesting new theoretical directions that might shed light on the empirical asymmetries between capital‐managed and labor‐managed firms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Land-use changes have dramatically transformed tropical landscapes. We describe an ecological-economic land-use change model as an integrated, exploratory tool used to analyze how tropical land-use change affects ecological and socio-economic functions. The model analysis seeks to determine what kind of landscape mosaic can improve the ensemble of ecosystem functioning, biodiversity, and economic benefit based on the synergies and trade-offs that we have to account for. More specifically, (1) how do specific ecosystem functions, such as carbon storage, and economic functions, such as household consumption, relate to each other? (2) How do external factors, such as the output prices of crops, affect these relationships? (3) How do these relationships change when production inefficiency differs between smallholder farmers and learning is incorporated? We initialize the ecological-economic model with artificially generated land-use maps parameterized to our study region. The economic sub-model simulates smallholder land-use management decisions based on a profit maximization assumption. Each household determines factor inputs for all household fields and decides on land-use change based on available wealth. The ecological sub-model includes a simple account of carbon sequestration in above-ground and below-ground vegetation. We demonstrate model capabilities with results on household consumption and carbon sequestration from different output price and farming efficiency scenarios. The overall results reveal complex interactions between the economic and ecological spheres. For instance, model scenarios with heterogeneous crop-specific household productivity reveal a comparatively high inertia of land-use change. Our model analysis even shows such an increased temporal stability in landscape composition and carbon stocks of the agricultural area under dynamic price trends. These findings underline the utility of ecological-economic models, such as ours, to act as exploratory tools which can advance our understanding of the mechanisms underlying the trade-offs and synergies of ecological and economic functions in tropical landscapes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]