搜索结果：Goods

Economists and others have long believed that by balancing the costs of such public goods as air quality and wilderness areas against their benefits, informed policy choices can be made. But the problem of putting a dollar value on cleaner air or water and other goods not sold in the marketplace has been a major stumbling block. Mitchell and Carson, for reasons presented in this book, argue that at this time the contingent valuation (CV) method offers the most promising approach for determining public willingness to pay for many public goods---an approach likely to succeed, if used carefully, where other methods may fail. The result of ten years of research by the authors aimed at assessing how surveys might best be used to value public goods validly and reliably, this book makes a major contribution to what constitutes best practice in CV surveys. Mitchell and Carson begin by introducing the contingent valuation method, describing how it works and the nature of the benefits it can be used to measure, comparing it to other methods for measuring benefits, and examining the data-gathering technique on which it is based---survey research. Placing contingent valuation in the larger context of welfare theory, the authors examine how the CV method impels a deeper understanding of willingness-to-pay versus willingness-to-accept compensation measures, the possibility of existence values for public goods, the role of uncertainty in benefit valuation, and the question of whether a consumer goods market or a political goods market (referenda) should be emulated. In developing a CV methodology, the authors deal with issues of broader significance to survey research. Their model of respondent error is relevant to current efforts to frame a theory of response behavior and bias typology will interest those considering the cognitive aspects of answering survey questions. Mitchell and Carson conclude that the contingent valuation method can obtain valid valuation information on public goods, but only if the method is applied in a way that addresses the potential sources of error and bias. They end their book by providing guidelines for CV practitioners, a list of questions that should be asked by any decision maker who wishes to use the findings of a CV study, and suggestions for new applications of contingent valuation. Additional features include a comprehensive bibliography of the CV literature and an appendix summarizing more than 100 CV studies.

There is widespread belief that firms should pursue superiority in both customer satisfaction and productivity. However, there is reason to believe these two goals are not always compatible. If a firm improves productivity by “downsizing,” it may achieve an increase in productivity in the short-term, but future profitability may be threatened if customer satisfaction is highly dependent on the efforts of personnel. If so, there are potential tradeoffs between customer satisfaction and productivity for industries as diverse as airlines, banking, education, hotels, and restaurants. Managers in these types of service industries, as well as goods industries in which the service component is increasing, need to understand whether or not this is the case. For example, if efforts to improve productivity can actually harm customer satisfaction—and vice-versa—the downsizing of U.S. and European companies should be viewed with concern. It follows that developing a better understanding of how customer satisfaction and productivity relate to one another is of substantial and growing importance, especially in light of expected continued growth in services throughout the world economy. The objective of this paper is to investigate whether there are conditions under which there are tradeoffs between customer satisfaction and productivity. A review of the literature reveals two conflicting viewpoints. One school of thought argues that customer satisfaction and productivity are compatible, as improvements in customer satisfaction can decrease the time andeffort devoted to handling returns, rework, warranties, and complaint management, while at the same time lowering the cost of making future transactions. The second argues that increasing customer satisfaction should increase costs, as doing so often requires efforts to improve product attributes or overall product design. A conceptual framework useful in resolving these contradictory viewpoints is developed. The framework serves, in turn, as a basis for developing a theoretical model relating customer satisfaction and productivity. The model predicts that customer satisfaction and productivity are less likely to be compatible when: 1) customer satisfaction is relatively more dependent on customization—the degree to which the firm's offering is customized to meet heterogeneous customers' needs—as opposed to standardization—the degree to which the firm's offering is reliable, standardized, and free from deficiencies; and 2) when it is difficult (costly) to provide high levels of both customization and standardization simultaneously. To move forward from the model's propositions to the development of testable hypotheses, we argue that services are more likely than goods to have the preceding characteristics. Hence, tradeoffs between customer satisfaction and productivity should be more prevalent for services than for goods. Although this classification is not precise—many services are standardizable and many goods have a service component—it has the advantage of allowing an initial test of the propositions. The empirical work employs a database matching customer-based measures of firm performance with traditional measures of business performance, such as productivity and Return on Investment (ROI). The central feature of this database is the set of customer satisfaction indices provided by the Swedish Customer Satisfaction Barometer (SCSB). The SCSB provides a uniform set of comparable customer-based firm performance measures and offers a unique opportunity to test the study's hypotheses. The findings indicate that the association between changes in customer satisfaction and changes in productivity is positive for goods, but negative for services. In addition, while both customer satisfaction and productivity are positively associated with ROI for goods and services, the interaction between the two is positive for goods but significantly less so for services. Taken together, the findings suggest support for the contention that tradeoffs are more likely for services. Hence, simultaneous attempts to increase both customer satisfaction and productivity are likely to be more challenging in such industries. Of course, this does not imply that such firms should not seek improvements in both productivity and customer satisfaction. For example, appropriate applications of information technology may improve both customer satisfaction and productivity simultaneously. The findings should provide motivation for future research concerning the nature of customer satisfaction and productivity, as well as appropriate strategy and tactics for each one. It is worth emphasizing that this is an issue that is not only important today, but certainly will become even more important in the future. As the growth of services continues and world markets become increasingly competitive, the importance of customer satisfaction will also increase. To compete in such a world, firms must strike the right balance between their efforts to compete efficiently and their efforts to compete effectively.

The paper is concerned with the concept, definition and measurement of a service. Although services are often dismissed as immaterial goods, they are not special kinds of goods and belong in a quite different logical category from goods. The search for appropriate units of quantity in which to measure services is not an idle metaphysical pursuit. Without quantity units there can be no prices, and most economic theory becomes irrelevant. Indeed, large parts of economic theory may be irrelevant to the analysis of services anyway, precisely because they are not goods which can be exchanged among economic units. Services are as important as goods in modern developed economies and they need to be identified and quantified properly if the measurement of economic growth and inflation is to have any meaning for the economy as a whole. The concept of a service is explained in some detail in the paper, and various ways in which services can be classified for purposes of economic analysis are elaborated. The distinction between private and public goods, or rather between private and collective services, is re‐examined in the light of the general concept of a service proposed in the paper. Externalities are shown to be simply special kinds of services.

Public-goods theory constituted a major element in James M Buchanan's research agenda throughout the 1960s. THE DEMAND AND SUPPLY OF PUBLIC GOODS is a major part of that work. At the time that Buchanan was elaborating on his theories of public goods, the prevailing trend in public economics was the emergence of public-expenditure theory, which attempted to form a comprehensive theory of the state around the notion of market failure. THE DEMAND AND SUPPLY OF PUBLIC GOODS established Buchanan's broad purpose of explicitly comparing market performance with political performance. As such, the book is an important part of Buchanan's contractarian theory of the 'productive state'. Conceived originally as a series of lectures given at Cambridge University in 1961 and 1962, THE DEMAND AND SUPPLY OF PUBLIC GOODS is written for students, but is in no way a textbook of dry pedagogy. Instead, as Geoffrey Brennan writes in the foreword, What Buchanan provides here is a clear statement of the contractarian approach to public goods problems, very much in the 'voluntary exchange' tradition of Wicksell and Lindhal.

A large and growing literature links high levels of ethnic diversity to low levels of public goods provision. Yet although the empirical connection between ethnic heterogeneity and the underprovision of public goods is widely accepted, there is little consensus on the specific mechanisms through which this relationship operates. We identify three families of mechanisms that link diversity to public goods provision—what we term “preferences,” “technology,” and “strategy selection” mechanisms—and run a series of experimental games that permit us to compare the explanatory power of distinct mechanisms within each of these three families. Results from games conducted with a random sample of 300 subjects from a slum neighborhood of Kampala, Uganda, suggest that successful public goods provision in homogenous ethnic communities can be attributed to a strategy selection mechanism: in similar settings, co-ethnics play cooperative equilibria, whereas non-co-ethnics do not. In addition, we find evidence for a technology mechanism: co-ethnics are more closely linked on social networks and thus plausibly better able to support cooperation through the threat of social sanction. We find no evidence for prominent preference mechanisms that emphasize the commonality of tastes within ethnic groups or a greater degree of altruism toward co-ethnics, and only weak evidence for technology mechanisms that focus on the impact of shared ethnicity on the productivity of teams.

First published in 1979, this volume introduces a cultural factor to theories of consumption. The World of Goods goes beyond standard economic analyses, which rely on theories of individual psychology. Douglas studies how consumers use goods to fulfil their intentions in regard to one another. The World of Goods insists that goods are wanted for social purposes, for sharing and giving, more than for the private enjoyment that is the pivot of utilitarian explanations. This book offers a completely original way of thinking about consumption as a series of rituals.

This paper develops a method for using data for a large cross-section of municipalities relating expenditures on specific local public goods, median income, median house value, total assessed valuation, and population to estimate demand functions for local public goods. The key idea is to make the assumption that the quantity chosen in any municipality is the median of the preferred quantities of its citizens. The method is applied to cities with population exceeding 10,000 in several states. Seemingly plausible estimates of income and price elasticity are found. The estimated crowding parameter suggests that most local public goods are congestible in the sense that utility functions depend on the per capita quantity of public goods.

In this essay I have two aims: first, to elaborate the notion of primary goods, a notion which is part of the conception of justice as fairness presented in my book A Theory of Justice; and, second, to explain the connection between the notion of primary goods and a certain conception of the person which leads in turn to a certain conception of social unity. Following a brief preface in section I, the main part of my discussion is in sections II–V. Here I describe how in justice as fairness primary goods enable us to make interpersonal comparisons in the special but fundamental case of political and social justice. I remove certain gaps in the exposition in my book and by emphasizing that the notion of primary goods depends on a certain conception of the person I also remove a serious ambiguity. My thesis is that the problem of interpersonal comparisons in questions of justice goes to the foundations of a conception of justice and depends on the conception of the person and the way in which social unity is to be conceived. In justice as fairness the difficulties in defining these comparisons turn out to be moral and practical. The last three sections, VI–VIII, try to clarify these ideas by contrasting them with an account of interpersonal comparisons in the utilitarian tradition which informs so much of contemporary economic theory when it turns to questions of justice. In this tradition interpersonal comparisons are thought to raise difficulties of another kind, namely, the various problems connected with knowledge of other minds.

Environments with public goods are a wonderful playground for those interested in delicate experimental problems, serious theoretical challenges, and difficult mechanism design issues.In this chapter I will look at one small but fundamental part of the rapidly expanding experimental research.In Section 1, I describe a very simple public good experiment -what it is, what some theories predict, what usually happens, and why we should care -and then provide a methodological and theoretical background for the rest of the chapter.In Section 2, I look at the fundamental question: are people selfish or cooperative in volunteering to contribute to public good production?We look at five important early experiments that have laid the foundations for much that has followed.In Section 3, I look at the range of experimental research which tries to identify and study those factors which increase cooperation.In order to help those new to experi mental work I have tried to focus on specific experimental designs in Section 2 and on general results and knowledge in Section 3. The reader will find that the public goods environment is a very sensitive one with much that can affect outcomes but are difficult to control.The many factors interact with each other in unknown ways.Nothing is known for sure.Environments with public goods present a serious challenge even to skilled experimentalists and many opportunities for imaginative work.

Acknowledgments Introduction Part I. History One. The Making of Modern Consumption Two. Ever Dearer in Our Thoughts: Patina and the Representation of Status before and after the Eighteenth Century Three. Lois Roget: Curatorial Consumer in a Modern World Part II. Theory Four. Clothing as Language: An Object Lesson in the Study of the Expressive Properties of Material Culture Five. Meaning Manufacture and Movement in the World of Goods Part III. Practice Six. Consumer Goods, Gender Construction, and a Rehabilitated Trickle-down Theory Seven. The Evocative Power of Things: Consumer Goods and the Preservation of Hopes and Ideals Eight. Diderot Unitites and the Diderot Effect: Neglected Cultural Aspects of Consumption Nine. Consumption, Change, and Continuity Notes References Index

When people make donations to privately provided public goods, such as charity, there may be many factors influencing their decision other than altruism. Social pressure, guilt, sympathy, or simply a desire for a "warm glow" may all be important. This paper considers such impure altruism formally and develops a wide set of implications. In particular, this paper discusses the invariance proposition of public goods, solves for the sufficient conditions for neutrality to hold, examines the optimal tax treatment of charitable giving, and calibrates the model based on econometric studies in order to consider policy experiments. Impure altruism is shown to be more consistent with observed patterns of giving than the conventional pure altruism approach, and to have policy implications that may differ widely from those of the conventional models. Copyright 1990 by Royal Economic Society.

This research introduces “brand prominence,” a construct reflecting the conspicuousness of a brand's mark or logo on a product. The authors propose a taxonomy that assigns consumers to one of four groups according to their wealth and need for status, and they demonstrate how each group's preference for conspicuously or inconspicuously branded luxury goods corresponds predictably with their desire to associate or dissociate with members of their own and other groups. Wealthy consumers low in need for status want to associate with their own kind and pay a premium for quiet goods only they can recognize. Wealthy consumers high in need for status use loud luxury goods to signal to the less affluent that they are not one of them. Those who are high in need for status but cannot afford true luxury use loud counterfeits to emulate those they recognize to be wealthy. Field experiments along with analysis of market data (including counterfeits) support the proposed model of status signaling using brand prominence.

Durable-goods monopolists face special problems because the sale of their products creates a secondhand market not controlled by the monopolist. To the extent the monopolist is able to rent his product rather than sell it, or to make binding promises about his future production, such problems are ameliorated. Given the inability to do the above, the monopolist is led to producing goods less durable than those produced by either competitive firms or monopolist returns. A reverse Averch-Johnson result--that monopolist sellers may invest less in fixed costs (including plant modernization and research and development) than would the renters--is shown. It is also shown that, even though sellers have less monopoly power than renters and nondurable-goods monopolists, it is possible that the seller will cause a greater deadweight loss than the other types of monopolies.

Abstract Cultural meaning in a consumer society moves ceaselessly from one location to another. In the usual trajectory, cultural meaning moves first from the culturally constituted world to consumer goods and then from these goods to the individual consumer. Several instruments are responsible for this movement: advertising, the fashion system, and four consumption rituals. This article analyzes the movement of cultural meaning theoretically, showing both where cultural meaning is resident in the contemporary North American consumer system and the means by which this meaning is transferred from one location in this system to another.

This book presents a theoretical treatment of externalities (i.e. uncompensated interdependencies), public goods, and club goods. The new edition updates and expands the discussion of externalities and their implications, coverage of asymmetric information, underlying game-theoretic formulations, and intuitive and graphical presentations. Aimed at well-prepared undergraduates and graduate students making a serious foray into this branch of economics, the analysis should also interest professional economists wishing to survey recent advances in the field. No other single source for the range of materials explored is currently available. Topics investigated include Nash equilibrium, Lindahl equilibria, club theory, preference-revelation mechanism, Pigouvian taxes, the commons, Coase Theorem, and static and repeated games. The authors use mathematical techniques only as much as necessary to pursue the economic argument. They develop key principles of public economics that are useful for subfields such as public choice, labor economics, economic growth, international economics, environmental and natural resource economics, and industrial organization.

THIS PAPER DEVELOPS some models for limited dependent variables.2 The distinguishing feature of these variables is that the range of values which they may assume has a lower bound and that this lowest value occurs in a fair number of observations. This feature should be taken into account in the statistical analysis of observations on such variables. In particular, it renders invalid use of the usual regression model. The second section of this paper develops several models for such variables. Like Tobin's [10] model, they are extensions of the multiple probit analysis model.3 They differ from that model by allowing the determination of the size of the variable when it is not zero to depend on different parameters or variables from those determining the probability of its being zero. Estimation and discrimination in the models are considered in Section 3. The models, like their prototypes, seem particularly intractable to exact analysis and large sample approximations have to be used. The adequacy of inferences based on these procedures is explored in Section 4 through a small sampling experiment. Limited dependent variables arise naturally in the study of consumer purchases, particularly purchases of durable goods. When a durable good is to be purchased, the amount spent may vary in fine gradations, but for many durables it is probably the case that most consumers in a particular period make no purchase at all. In Section 5 we apply the models to the demand for durable goods to provide an application of the techniques.

We present a model that links heterogeneity of preferences across ethnic groups in a city to the amount and type of public goods the city supplies. We test the implications of the model with three related data sets: U. S. cities, U. S. metropolitan areas, and U. S. urban counties. Results show that the shares of spending on productive public goods—education, roads, sewers and trash pickup—in U. S. cities (metro areas/urban counties) are inversely related to the city's (metro area's/county's) ethnic fragmentation, even after controlling for other socioeconomic and demographic determinants. We conclude that ethnic conflict is an important determinant of local public finances.

Abstract I survey the literature post Ledyard (Handbook of Experimental Economics, ed. by J. Kagel, A. Roth, Chap. 2, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1995) on three related issues in linear public goods experiments: (1) conditional cooperation; (2) the role of costly monetary punishments in sustaining cooperation and (3) the sustenance of cooperation via means other than such punishments. Many participants in laboratory public goods experiments are “conditional cooperators” whose contributions to the public good are positively correlated with their beliefs about the average group contribution. Conditional cooperators are often able to sustain high contributions to the public good through costly monetary punishment of free-riders but also by other mechanisms such as expressions of disapproval, advice giving and assortative matching.

People want to have fun, and they are more likely to have fun if the situation allows them to justify it. This research studies how people's need for justifying hedonic consumption drives two choice patterns that are observed in typical purchase contexts. First, relative preferences between hedonic and utilitarian alternatives can reverse, depending on how the immediate purchase situation presents itself. A hedonic alternative tends to be rated more highly than a comparable utilitarian alternative when each is presented singly, but the utilitarian alternative tends to be chosen over the hedonic alternative when the two are presented jointly. Second, people have preferences for expending different combinations of time (effort) and money for acquiring hedonic versus utilitarian items. They are willing to pay more in time for hedonic goods and more in money for utilitarian goods. The author explores the topic through a combination of four experiments and field studies.