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Demand for blockchains such as Bitcoin and Ethereum is far larger than supply, necessitating a mechanism that selects a subset of transactions to include "on-chain" from the pool of all pending transactions. This article investigates the problem of designing a blockchain transaction fee mechanism through the lens of mechanism design. We introduce two new forms of incentive compatibility that capture some of the idiosyncrasies of the blockchain setting, one (MMIC) that protects against deviations by profit-maximizing miners and one (OCA-proofness) that protects against off-chain collusion between miners and users. This study is immediately applicable to a major change to Ethereum's transaction fee mechanism, made on August 5, 2021, based on a proposal called "EIP-1559." Originally, Ethereum's transaction fee mechanism was a first-price (pay-as-bid) auction. EIP-1559 suggested making several tightly coupled changes, including the introduction of variable-size blocks, a history-dependent reserve price, and the burning of a significant portion of the transaction fees. We prove that this new mechanism earns an impressive report card: it satisfies the MMIC and OCA-proofness conditions, and is also dominant-strategy incentive compatible (DSIC) except when there is a sudden demand spike. We also introduce an alternative design, the "tipless mechanism," which offers an incomparable slate of incentive-compatibility guarantees—it is MMIC and DSIC, and OCA-proof unless in the midst of a demand spike. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Innovation in the mining sector is crucial for industrial, economic, and sustainable development, particularly for developing economies. It is important to understand the factors that stimulate innovation in this sector to upgrade productivity and growth. In the mining sector, innovation is driven by profit structure, which in turn depends strongly on commodity prices. We hypothesize two innovation responses to prices, which we test against existing evidence found in recent literature and available industry data. We find two different innovation responses to prices: exploration and in-house research and development (R&D) investments by mining companies increase as commodity prices rise, while the use of suppliers' innovation intensifies when prices decrease. Policies to strengthen the sector should provide long-term support for the Mining Equipment, Technology and Services (METS) sector so that they can continuously invest in R&D to provide innovative solutions for mining firms, possibly extending to lateral linkages, applying digital and low-carbon solutions developed for the mining sector and beyond. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Behaviour-based pricing (BBP) is commonly observed in the information goods industry. Information goods providers typically sell multi-version products and have implemented different BBP strategies for their products. However, previous research on BBP is mostly limited to single-version products, which may not effectively guide practical decision-making regarding multi-version products. This gap sparks interest in how BBP can be applied to multi-version information goods. We show that the equilibrium pricing strategy depends on the quality gap between the products and how much consumers and the firm value future benefits. The firm should implement BBP for both high- and low-quality products if it values future benefits more than consumers do. If consumers value future benefits more than the firm, the firm should not implement BBP for either product. Moreover, when the firm and consumers value future benefits equally, the firm should only practice BBP for the low-quality product. Our calculations of consumer surplus and social welfare reveal that the absence of BBP doesn't always lead to the maximum benefits for consumers and society. Interestingly, if the firm values future benefits more than its consumers do, applying BBP only to high-quality products or both products may lead to higher consumer surplus and social welfare. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cloud Manufacturing (CMfg) is a promising approach that leverages the sharing economy to reduce costs and enhance supply chain flexibility. Particularly, when utilised alongside Additive Manufacturing (AM), CMfg is considered a key enabler for collaborative production (CP) systems. However, there is still a lack of planning models that reduce entry barriers for CP. Therefore, we propose a decentralised CP planning framework for AM. In our approach, machines autonomously select jobs from an existing production plan to forward them to other suppliers that can produce these parts more efficiently. A CMfg platform facilitates job forwarding and creates promising part bundles and manufacturing machines autonomously places bids on the packages via a combinatorial $ 2^{nd} $ 2 nd price reverse auction. Costs of the reallocated bundles are shared throughout a Shapley value-based approach without the need to disclose critical information. We benchmark our proposed framework against a centralised planning approach and find that it achieves comparable effectiveness as the benchmark solution. We also show that this mechanism promotes individual rationality and that agents particularly benefit when participating in both offering and acquiring production jobs through the auction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1997, Statement of Financial Reporting Standards (SFAS) 131 introduced a substantial change in how segment information is reported in US-GAAP (Generally Accepted Accounting Principles) financial statements. We seek to examine whether this change in financial reporting policy increases investors' ability to process information relevant to conglomerate firms (i.e., those operating in multiple industries) more quickly, and whether this increased efficiency in information processing varies cross-sectionally based on firm complexity and the direction of industry news. Our results indicate that SFAS 131 has increased the speed with which stock prices capture information about conglomerates, relative to focused firms, although we find that some frictions remain with regard to disclosing bad news. This study documents an example of how a change in disclosure policy can enhance pricing efficiency, and hence, it may be of interest to the Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB) in its ongoing initiative to consider potential changes to SFAS 131. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The introduction of the Beijing–Shanghai high-speed rail (Launch) and the Wenzhou bullet-train collision (Crash) in China provided a unique occasion to study the effect of competition on price dispersion. Results show that price dispersion increased by about 48% after the Launch, as airlines offered greater discounts to price-elastic consumers than to price-inelastic consumers. By contrast, price dispersion decreased by about 55% after the Crash, as airlines raised prices more for price-elastic consumers than for price-inelastic consumers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Prior research shows that using mimetic isomorphism to select price/quality product strategies results in superior performance in the United States, the European Union, and Japan for both developed economy and emerging market manufacturers. However, do these results generalize in the case of emerging market service providers? Due to the nature of services, customers cannot gauge service quality prior to consumption, and they must rely on other cues; commonly, consumers rely on the brand name as a proxy. We theorize that for emerging market service providers, choosing a strategy of "distinctiveness" (pursuing a nondominant price/quality strategy) offers a way to differentiate their offering from the mimetic choice, resulting in superior performance. Implications for theory and practice are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Contemporary Accounting Research is the property of Canadian Academic Accounting Association and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Using an international sample of IPO firms and two country-level measures of financial literacy, we find strong evidence that financial literacy is negatively associated with IPO underpricing. In cross-sectional analyses, we find that the effect of financial literacy in reducing IPO underpricing is more pronounced when the information environment is less transparent. Employing path analysis, we document that information friction, firm transparency, and stock market participation are mechanisms that mediate this relationship. Our study contributes to and extends the literature by providing strong evidence that citizens' financial literacy has an important and consistent influence on IPO underpricing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We analyze a model in which an anomaly is unknown to arbitrageurs until its discovery, and test the model implications on both asset prices and arbitrageurs' trading activities. Using data on 99 anomalies documented in the existing literature, we find that the discovery of an anomaly reduces the correlation between the returns of its decile-1 and decile-10 portfolios. This discovery effect is stronger if the aggregate wealth of hedge funds is more volatile. Finally, hedge funds increase (reverse) their positions in exploiting anomalies when their aggregate wealth increases (decreases), further suggesting that these discovery effects operate through arbitrage trading. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Combining experimental data sets from seven individual studies, including 255 asset markets with 2,031 participants, and 36,326 short-term price forecasts, we analyze the role of heterogeneity of beliefs in the organization of trading behavior by reproducing and reconsidering earlier experimental findings. Our results confirm prior evidence that price expectations affect trading behavior. However, heterogeneity in beliefs does not seem to drive overpricing and asset market bubbles, as suggested by earlier studies, and we find no indication of short-term beliefs being better determinants of trading behavior than longer-term beliefs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The post-pandemic surge in inflation was accompanied by a surge in the corporate share of profits. As a result, several economists and policy makers have given to it names such as "profit-led inflation" or "sellers' inflation." The present paper discusses the extent to which profit-led inflation, as an explanation for the recent surge in inflation, is compatible with what we know about the price-setting behavior of firms, income distribution, and inflation. We do that in juxtaposition to two recent critiques: that the increase in the profit share is the result of cyclical factors and that the increase in import prices leads to higher profit shares even under constant markups. We show that there is little evidence that the recent surge in profitability is cyclical in nature. Moreover, after outlining the Structuralist/Kaleckian theories of prices and inflation, we argue that profit-led inflation does not require an increase in the markup of the firms and is consistent with these theories. In the face of large import and other price shocks even under constant markups, firms are able to pass the burden of adjustment to real wages. Thus, the term profit-led emphasizes the distributional source and consequences of inflation. We also provide an empirical examination of the markups in the post-pandemic period using data from the Compustat database. We show that, on average, firms were able to increase or maintain their markups, although there is significant heterogeneity across sectors or the position of the firms in the distribution of markups. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the overlapping global emergencies of the pandemic, climate change and geopolitical confrontations, supply shocks have become frequent and inflation has returned. This raises the question of how sector-specific shocks are related to overall price stability. This paper simulates price shocks in an input–output model to identify sectors which present systemic vulnerabilities for monetary stability in the United States. We call these prices systemically significant. We find that in our simulations the pre-pandemic average price volatilities and the price shocks in the COVID-19 and Ukraine war inflation yield an almost identical set of systemically significant prices. The sectors with systemically significant prices fall into four groups: energy, basic production inputs other than energy, basic necessities, and commercial infrastructure. Specifically, they are "Petroleum and coal products," "Oil and gas extraction," "Utilities," "Chemical products," "Farms," "Food and beverage and tobacco products," "Housing," and "Wholesale trade." We argue that in times of overlapping emergencies, economic stabilization needs to go beyond monetary policy and requires institutions and policies that can target these systemically significant sectors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Political frictions significantly affect both pricing and supply in the long-term care insurance (LTCI) market. Comparing the same insurer's requests submitted for the same policy at the same time to different state regulators, we find that they are 13% more likely to be approved and receive 4% more of the requested amount after an election year. Over time, regulatory pushback on premium increase requests leads to persistently lower cash reserves and increases the probability of company dropout. An insurer who receives one-standard-deviation less of their requested increase is 20% more likely to leave the market next year. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper studies the multiple period inventory replenishment problem for a capacitated warehouse when procurement prices and market demands are both uncertain, with the goal to minimise the procuring and holding costs. We analyse this problem under the framework of competitive analysis, where neither probabilistic distributions nor sets are available to characterise the unknown price and demand parameters. An efficient online real-time replenishment algorithm is developed, which is free of any distribution assumption, and the decisions are made based entirely on past and present information. We derive an instance-independent competitive ratio of the algorithm, which provides a worst-case theoretical performance guarantee, and shows that the proposed algorithm performs well for situations with high volatility uncertainty over time and is naturally risk-averse. Finally, a set of numerical experiments further verifies the effectiveness of the algorithm. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of the article is to analyze the relevance of earnings fundamentals in predicting extreme price reversals of an emerging stock market. We collect monthly price data on six sector indices from Bombay Stock Exchange (BSE) of India for the period 2004–2019. The research decomposes industry stock returns into Potential Maximum Gains (PMG) and Potential Maximum Losses (PML) with price extremes at first and then tests price reversal behavior using Generalized AutoRegressive Conditional Heteroskedasticity (GARCH) and vector autoregressive (VAR) models. The study finds symmetry between PMG and PML in the banking, realty, and oil sectors, while the asymmetric reversal behavior is noted in the automobiles and capital goods industries. The presence of industry fundamentals in the models estimating the reversal behavior of share prices enhances their predictive power, which suggests the significance of value strategies in making gains from extreme price variations. The price reversal behavior is sector specific and found inconsistent in emerging market. Hence, the investors cannot overlook the relevance of the industry characteristics and earnings fundamentals while predicting the stock price behavior in emerging markets. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Business models play a key role in companies' profit growth and competitiveness. A growing number of companies not only sell products but also provide leasing services. In traditional leasing models, companies usually charge customers for the time they occupy the product, but ignore differences in how long and how often customers actually use the product. In practice, customers have different product usage patterns, which will affect their purchase choice. Considering the pooling effect in the leasing service network, this paper describes customers' usage patterns in two dimensions (product occupancy time and utilisation rate) and determines the optimal pricing under three models (selling, leasing, and their hybrid model) to maximise corporate profits. Through comparative analysis, the optimal business model selection decision is obtained, and its market performance is also analysed. The results show that when the leasing service operational capability is strong, the pure leasing service model is superior; otherwise, the result also depends on the product value creation capability. When this capability is high, the hybrid model will be selected; otherwise, the pure selling model will be better. This result differs from the generally held result in previous studies that the hybrid model is more profitable in most cases. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In contemporary manufacturing and supply chain environments, there are various challenges that companies have to face. Many companies are facing challenges to respond quickly to customers' requirements and to provide customised products cost effectively. Mass customisation (MC) can help companies to provide customised products and services quickly at a low price. Integrated decision-making can obtain performance improvement in many situations. This paper investigates the problem of scheduling integration of flexible manufacturing systems (FMSs) for mass customisation. A mathematical model is formulated for the problem. A set-based dynamic algorithm is developed. Numerical studies are made on the proposed algorithm by simulation and by statistical analysis. Conclusions, managerial implications, and future research suggestions are provided. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Modern asset pricing models combine recursive preferences with complex dynamics for the underlying consumption process. The existence of solutions is for many of these models an unsettled question. This paper introduces a novel technique to prove existence and nonexistence, as well as uniqueness for models with recursive preferences. The approach applies to many models of interest, including those with long-run consumption risks, with stochastic volatility and jumps, with time-varying consumption disasters, and with smooth ambiguity aversion and learning. Collectively, the proven results settle the existence question for many of today's leading asset pricing models. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Contemporary Accounting Research is the property of Canadian Academic Accounting Association and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This article provides a survey of China's initial public offering (IPO) market, focusing on IPO pricing, bids and allocation, and aftermarket trading. We show that strict regulations result in suppressed IPO offer prices and high initial returns, causing a high cost of going public. Investors treat IPOs as lotteries with extremely high short-term returns, with little attention to the long term. The auction selling method, however, works in the way it is supposed to. Mutual funds bid in a more informative way than other investors, and their advantages are unlikely to be due to underwriters' preferential treatment. We also discuss the latest registration-system reform. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Forecasts of demands or prices become increasingly unreliable as the future becomes more distant. It is, therefore, beneficial to show that optimal decisions during an initial time interval are either partially or wholly independent of the forecasted data from some future time onwards. Using a commodity trading model as an example, we obtain conditions that allow us to make optimal buying and selling decisions for a commodity in some initial time interval without knowing its price forecast beyond some future time. Such an initial time interval is called a decision horizon and the time up to which the forecasted data is required to make the optimal decisions during the decision horizon is called a forecast horizon. We use the maximum principle to solve the example and show that the decision and forecast horizons in the problem arise from lower and upper bounds imposed on the on-hand inventory of the commodity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Emojis are being increasingly used in different types of communications, including in advertising campaigns. One emoji, the smiley face, has been an important part of consumers' informal communications. Interestingly, smiley faces now also appear in marketing communications, advertisements, and brand logos. The present research examines the role of smiley faces in restaurant logos as a form of marketing communication. A set of five studies—conducted in a lab and at a middle school—demonstrates that communication associated with restaurant logos including smileys is perceived as lower in healthfulness, which in turn leads to lower price expectations. These effects are caused by a visual association with a fast-food restaurant category, whereby consumers link the presence of smiley faces with fast-food restaurants. The authors conclude that including a smiley face logo in a restaurant's marketing communication can have unintended consequences on consumers' perceptions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Manufacturers experience random environmental fluctuations that influence their supply and demand processes directly. To cope with these environmental fluctuations, they typically utilise operational hedging strategies in terms of pricing, manufacturing, and procurement decisions. We focus on this challenging problem by proposing an analytical model. Specifically, we study an integrated problem of procurement, manufacturing, and pricing strategies for a continuous-review make-to-stock system operating in a randomly fluctuating environment with exponentially distributed processing times. The environmental changes are driven by a continuous-time discrete state-space Markov chain, and they directly affect the system's procurement price, raw material flow rate, and price-sensitive demand rate. We formulate the system as an infinite-horizon Markov decision process with a long-run average profit criterion and show that the optimal procurement and manufacturing strategies are of state-dependent threshold policies. Besides that, we provide several analytical results on the optimal pricing strategies. We introduce a linear programming formulation to numerically obtain the system's optimal decisions. We, particularly, investigate how production rate, holding cost, procurement price and demand variabilities, customers' price sensitivity, and interaction between supply and demand processes affect the system's performance measures through an extensive numerical study. Furthermore, our numerical results demonstrate the potential benefits of using dynamic pricing compared to that of static pricing. In particular, the profit enhancement being achieved with dynamic pricing can reach up to 15%, depending on the problem parameters. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study revisits the question of predicting patent value with observed patent statistics, exploiting a rare public auction of patents in China in which the starting prices are used as approximates of patent private value. Family size and the number of assignees come out as the most consistent indicators, while notably, forward citations turn out to be not important. This discrepancy with past studies is investigated. We propose some of the institutional features in the Chinese patent system could lead to the forward citations not as informative as their counterpart in other jurisdictions. The findings bear important implications as Chinese patent data are increasingly being used in innovation studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Contemporary Accounting Research is the property of Canadian Academic Accounting Association and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Consumers have an aversion to purchasing near-expiry food products, which leads to enormous food waste and economic loss. Given the importance of this issue, past research has studied the effect of impending expiration date on product sales, but its focus has been limited to perishable food products. Since the expiration dates of non-perishable food products are treated as less important than those of perishable food products, we expect that the resulting effect on sales largely varies by shopping environment. With the growing importance of online shopping in food sales, we examine how the effect of impending expiration date differs between mobile and PC shopping environments. By analyzing a unique data set from an online salvage store, we find that consumer aversion toward near-expiry products is more salient in the PC shopping environment than in the mobile shopping environment. However, when there is a deeper price promotion, the between-channel difference is reduced as the sensitivity of an impending expiration date on sales increases in the mobile shopping environment. These findings not only represent novel contributions to the literature but also provide managerial implications for practitioners. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The extent to which alternative measurement units affect consumer behaviour is the subject of a handful of studies, which, however, measure this effect at an aggregate level. This presents a gap in that it is of great importance for marketing practice to understand whether the observed effect applies to all consumers to a similar extent. Investigating the product category bottled beer and applying an importance-focused post hoc segmentation, it is discovered that no measurement-unit effect occurs for brand-oriented customers. The unit of measurement in which a unit price is indicated substantially influences the preference structure for only one in five respondents. Both strategic and operational decisions with regard to unit prices should therefore not be based on an averaged market view, but on a segment-specific perspective. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Motivated by the industrial observation of the increasing application of blockchain in the supply chain and its improvement in terms of consumer demand, this study examines the impact of investment decisions of blockchain data acquisition nodes upstream and downstream of the supply chain on firms' product recycling and pricing, market demand, and profits. The influences of different pricing leadership (i.e. supplier-led vs. retailer-led) in a supply chain are also thoroughly investigated. First, the presence of a strong retailer dramatically reduces suppliers' incentive to invest in blockchain. However, the supplier is still likely to invest more in a retailer-led supply chain than that in a supply chain led by itself under certain conditions; that is, the cost of blockchain is relatively small, or consumers' sensitivity to blockchain or product recycling benefits is rather large. Second, the total number of blockchain data acquisition nodes, market demand, and supply chain profit in a retailer-led supply chain are higher than in a supplier-led supply chain. Finally, interestingly, the supplier will be better off in a retailer-led supply chain when the return effect of product recycling is relatively high, while the cost-effectiveness of blockchain investment is relatively low. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Experience-in-store-and-buy-online (ESBO) is a popular omni-channel strategy. This paper studies the effects of inspection service provision on the interactions of a dynamic-pricing retailer and strategic consumers, i.e., the effects of the ESBO initiative on store operations. Selling a seasonal product over two periods, the omni-channel retailer may allow consumers to inspect this product offline only in the first period (first-period inspection) or in both periods (two-period inspection). First, we find that allowing first-period inspection makes the retailer better off. The retailer will price the product higher in the first period but probably lower in the second period. Even so, more consumers will purchase in the first period: that is, allowing first-period inspection can somewhat deter strategic deferral. Meanwhile, the seemingly negative intertemporal showrooming behavior (i.e., inspect the product offline in the first period but defer online purchase to the second period) benefits the retailer. Compared to first-period inspection, allowing two-period inspection increases the retailer's prices in both periods as well as profit, provided that inspection is definitely available in the second period. On the other hand, when inspection is possible in the second period, it may be profitable to allow inspection only in the first period.. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Based on the carbon emission policy and low-carbon capacity sharing, this paper studies the optimal product pricing and capacity matching strategies of competition and cooperation between two companies in a duopoly market. And the optimal strategies with or without capacity sharing are discussed. In addition, a differential game model based on carbon emission constraints, low-carbon capacity sharing, and delayed decision-making is established. We also study the evolution of duopoly enterprises from the initial state to the equilibrium state. Besides, the influence of delayed decision variables, price adjustment speed and decision weights on the stability of the game system is analyzed. The results show that the government can effectively intervene and guide the enterprises' low-carbon production strategy through carbon emission restriction policy. Low-carbon capacity sharing is beneficial to both enterprises, and the demand side benefits more than the supply side. We discuss the impact of stable and unstable systems on enterprises' decisions. When the system is stable, enterprises can converge from different initial game states to equilibrium states. The adoption of a delay strategy will not affect the tendency of convergence to the equilibrium. Furthermore, the system using the variable feedback control method is of higher stability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although the prices of cryptocurrencies remained volatile for the past decade, the factors that impact the price dynamics of the new type of investment instrument have not been fully identified yet. In this study, we recognize the dual nature of cryptocurrencies, that is, being a software program and a financial instrument, and examine the impact of software advancement on the price dynamics of cryptocurrencies. The open-source software (OSS) platform functionality enables social behaviors that we use as signals. Using data from the largest OSS platform, we establish the connection between open-source activities and the price movement of cryptocurrency. In particular, as project popularity (forks and watches) and users' feedback (issues) increase, the market price increases by 4.3 percent, 2.4 percent, and 4.4 percent per annum, respectively. On the contrary, the number of code corrections (pull requests) is negatively related to prices leading to a 5 percent annual price decrease. Our results suggest that OSS contributions create a perfect selection mechanism, where higher quality projects receive more developers' attention and user feedback, whereas lower quality projects do not, thus creating the separating equilibrium. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In leading strategy theories, such as industry analysis and value capture theory, maximizing bargaining power with transaction partners is a critical driver of profitability. However, in recent years a new business model has emerged that contradicts this fundamental precept: With pay-what-you-want (PWYW) pricing, a seller allows a buyer to name any nonnegative price, even zero, for the seller's product or service, and yet, enough buyers make voluntary positive payments, and of sufficient magnitude, that the seller may earn a substantial profit. Motivated by this development, we posit a theory of how value creation and value capture—though generally treated as distinct processes in strategy theory—are in fact strongly connected through the sociopsychological framing of a transaction: If a transaction is framed as a social exchange between the buyer and seller, the seller may capture more value with PWYW than if the seller posts a price or haggles with the buyer over terms in a market-based exchange. Our theory not only offers testable predictions about the conditions determining when PWYW will be successful but also extends strategy theory to consider social exchange as a mechanism for creating and capturing value. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Do consumers really read a price from left to right, as assumed in past research? Or does price reading operate like word reading, with a single fixation toward the middle? Three eye-tracking lab studies reject both theories, revealing instead a distinct reading pattern: multiple fixations, with the first located on average between the first third and middle of the price; the first eye movement is usually to the left; and subsequent eye movements are as often to the left as to the right. Overall, consumers pay as much attention to cents as euros, with the cents part influencing how prices are encoded in memory, as evidenced by an in-store price-recall survey. The reading process identifies whether to encode a price verbally as is or replace it with a shorter substitute that is easier to memorize and turns out to be well correlated with the actual price (r = 0.952). When consumers compare two prices, eye movements and the subsequent subjective estimation of the price difference depend on whether or not the prices have identical integer parts. The combined findings of four studies suggest that consumers have developed a reliable, efficient ability to read and encode prices, despite limitations of their visual span and working memory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purchase decisions typically involve tradeoffs between attributes associated with desirability (e.g. quality) and feasibility (e.g. price). In this article, we examine how the decision context impacts consumers' preference between a high-desirability (HD) option and a high-feasibility (HF) alternative. Nineteen studies demonstrate a novel context effect, the "upscaling effect," whereby introducing a symmetrically dominated decoy option to a set (i.e. an option that is inferior compared to all alternatives in the set) leads to an increase in the choice share of the HD option. To account for the upscaling effect, we advance a two-stage model of consumer decision-making for decisions that involve tradeoffs between desirability and feasibility. According to our model, when the decision context provides a reason for choosing either option, such as when a decoy option is added to the set, consumers prioritize reasons that support choice of HD options over HF alternatives. Our model can explain the upscaling effect, as well as other findings reported in the literature, such as asymmetric attraction effects (Heath and Chatterjee 1995) and asymmetric sales promotion effects (Blattberg and Wisniewski 1989). Furthermore, the upscaling effect holds important managerial implications because it provides an effective way to increase sales of high-end products. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We prove that the PoA of First Price Auctions is 1 -- 1/e² ≈ 0.8647, closing the gap between the best known bounds [0.7430, 0.8689]. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay offers a philosophical defense of deception about reservation prices in business negotiation. Its discussion is prompted by arguments that Charles N.C. Sherwood makes in a recent issue of Business Ethics Quarterly and develops ideas I put forward in an earlier issue of Business Ethics Quarterly. The essay argues that although reservation price deception cannot be justified by appeal to the consent of negotiating parties, it can be justified by appeal to a separate but related notion, assumption of risk, as long as the assumption of risk occurs in a suitably fair context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We provide evidence that the profitability of corporate insiders' trading decreases in the degree of asymmetric timely loss recognition (TLR) of their firms' financial reporting. Consistent with TLR reducing insiders' information advantage over outside shareholders regarding future negative news about the firm, we find that reduced insider trading profitability is mainly driven by (a) stock sales, as opposed to purchases; (b) the price change component of trading, as opposed to its volume; and (c) insiders' nonroutine trades, as opposed to less information driven routine trades. Although CEOs/CFOs are more likely to influence TLR, the effect is more pronounced for non-CEO and non-CFO insiders, inconsistent with reverse causality. Overall, our findings suggest that TLR reduces managers' ability to extract rents from investors via insider trading. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Accelerating antiglobalization challenges previously undisputed assumptions about the importance of a product's globalness/localness in purchase decisions. Putting these assumptions to test, this article conceptualizes globalness/localness as a distinct product attribute and decomposes its utility into weight and preference components. Subsequently, it offers an equity-theory-based prediction of the attribute's declining relevance/trivialization and quantifies its trade-offs with other attributes by calculating global/local price premiums. Conjoint experiments in two countries (Austria and India) reveal that (1) emerging- (developed-) market consumers exhibit relative preference for global (local) products, (2) emerging-market consumers perceive higher preference inequity between global and local products than developed-market consumers, and (3) the corresponding inequity triggers consumers' cognitive inequity regulation (manifested through attribute trivialization in developed markets) and behavioral inequity regulation (manifested through asymmetrical willingness to pay for global/local products across developed/emerging markets). In addition, attribute trivialization and price premium tolerance are moderated by consumers' spatial identities and price segment. The findings contribute to the theoretical debate on the relevance of product globalness/localness in deglobalizing times and inform competitive strategies; segmentation, targeting, and positioning; and international pricing decisions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper proposes a maintenance policy for a k-out-of-n: F system operating to fulfil several jobs without interruptions. The system is replaced when the Nth job completes or at the kth failure, whichever occurs first. So, there are some non-failed components when a replacement is done. These components can be sold as second-hand products to continue working in other systems for a while. The price of them is also considered in the proposed maintenance policy. An optimal maintenance policy is studied to minimise long-run average cost under the constraint of relative mean operating time. Comprehensive numerical studies are done to assess the effect of the model parameters on the optimal solutions. Also, to demonstrate the applicability of the proposed plan, a data set related to wind turbine generator failures is considered as a case study. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Contemporary Accounting Research is the property of Canadian Academic Accounting Association and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)