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on Cultural Economics |
| By: | Perona, Mathieu |
| Abstract: | This paper models the book retail market as a dual market. Consumers choose between competitively retailed, well-identified blockbusters and going to a monopoly bookshop to find the best match for their tastes. I show that uncertainty about the status on a given title (will it be a blockbuster or not?) places publishers in front of a trade-off between low prices (valuable if they get a blockbuster) and high prices (in the other case). The main effect of this trade-off is that the presence of blockbusters almost never lead to bookshop foreclosure by blockbusters and that a higher number of blockbusters leads to lower price for all books and increased consumer surplus. A fixed book price mitigates the effects of blockbuster, transferring suplus from blockbuster byuers towards publishers, and leads to perfect matching between readers and tastes. When the number of titles and of blockbusters becomes largers however, the situations with and without FBP converge. |
| Keywords: | books; fixed book price; book economy; resale price maintenance |
| JEL: | L11 L42 Z11 |
| Date: | 2009–10 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:pra:mprapa:17857&r=cul |
| By: | David Vincent |
| Abstract: | The paper explores the significance of counting communication skills in one of the earliest societies to achieve mass literacy. The Millennium Development Goals in education reflect structures of practice and thinking rooted in the 19th century. The notion of a goal itself, the measurable output of official endeavour, belongs to the founding of the modern state. Literacy as an early performance indicator of public expenditure embodied a construction of an opposition between ignorance and knowledge, a disaggregation of social structures and a dismissal of informal education. It sustained the rise of the performance orientation of schooling, which subordinated the role of users. Despite their cultural limitations, the literacy and postal statistics permitted long-run quantitative analysis. There remains a question, to which historians do not have a privileged answer, as to whether education in its fullest sense is a goal that can ever be consistently measured over time and across space. The contemporary shifts in the meaning of literacy threaten to disconnect the term from history and disable our capacity fully to understand the dynamics of change. |
| Date: | 2009 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:bwp:bwppap:6709&r=cul |
| By: | Bar?? K. Yörük |
| Abstract: | Fundraising campaigns advertised via mass media are common. To what extent such campaigns affect charitable behavior is mostly unknown, however. Using giving and volunteering surveys conducted biannually from 1988 to 1996, I investigate the e¡èect of a national fundraising campaign, "Give Five", on charitable giving and volunteering patterns. The widely advertised "Give Five" campaign was aimed to encourage people to give five percent of their income and volunteer five hours a week. After controlling for selection into being informed about the "Give Five", I find that people who were informed about the campaign increased their weekly volunteering activity on average by almost half an hour, but their giving behavior was not significantly affected. I discuss the policy implications associated with this result and argue that although the "Give Five" campaign did not achieve its goal, its economic impact was considerable. |
| Date: | 2009 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:nya:albaec:0902&r=cul |
| By: | Gatti, Silvia |
| Keywords: | reputation, wine, appellation, Italy, Demand and Price Analysis, |
| Date: | 2009–09 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ags:aawewp:53887&r=cul |