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on Marketing |
| By: | de Mel, Suresh; McKenzie, David; Woodruff, Christopher |
| Abstract: | Innovation is key to technology adoption and creation, and to explaining the vast differences in productivity across and within countries. Despite the central role of the entrepreneur in the innovation process, data limitations have restricted standard analysis of the determinants of innovation to consideration of the role of firm characteristics. The authors develop a model of innovation that incorporates the role of both owner and firm characteristics, and use this to determine how product, process, marketing, and organizational innovations should vary with firm size and competition. They then use a new, large, representative survey from Sri Lanka to test this model and to examine whether and how owner characteristics matter for innovation. The survey also allows analysis of the incidence of innovation in micro and small firms, which have traditionally been overlooked in the study of innovation, despite these firms comprising the majority of firms in developing countries. The analysis finds that more than one-quarter of the microenterprises are engaging in innovation, with marketing innovations the most common. As predicted by the model, firm size has a stronger positive effect, and competition a stronger negative effect, on process and organizational innovations than on product innovations. Owner ability, personality traits, and ethnicity have a significant and substantial impact on the likelihood of a firm innovating, confirming the importance of the entrepreneur in the innovation process. |
| Keywords: | E-Business,Education for Development (superceded),Innovation,Labor Policies,Microfinance |
| Date: | 2009–05–01 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:wbk:wbrwps:4934&r=mkt |
| By: | Shchetinin, Oleg |
| Abstract: | The paper explores the analogy between city and two-sided market. It generalizes the results on the pricing strategies of the platform in the two-sided markets for the case when concentration spillover plays an important role. The two-sided market framework is applied to model a city. The paper highlights the importance of the network effect and labor market structure for city size, governance and agglomeration formation. The cases of an isolated city and competing cities are considered. |
| Keywords: | Two-sided markets; Industrial organization; Urban economics; Concentration spillover; City; Labor matching market |
| JEL: | D4 |
| Date: | 2009 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:pra:mprapa:15428&r=mkt |
| By: | Nanno Mulder; Rodrigo Paillacar; Soledad Zignago |
| Abstract: | There is increasing empirical evidence that trade specialisation and competition takes place in varieties rather than in products or industries. This paper examines recent changes in the export specialisation of Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) and their Asian competitors by looking at their vertical specialisation through prices. Three price (or quality) segments are distinguished to compare export performance between the two regions using our BACI database, which provides harmonised bilateral unit values for most countries in the world at the most disaggregated product-level (5,000 products) for the period 1995 to 2004. The technology-content of products is also taken into account. The evidence suggests that LAC is losing out on China which is gaining large market shares, notably in the low-quality segment and low-tech segment. However, LAC has retained its initial overall market share, by slightly upgrading the quality and technology content of its exports. Our estimates of similarities in export structures confirm that varieties exported by the two continents are very different. Moreover, LAC export prices are much higher than those of China, but relatively similar to the ones of other Asian nations. Finally, we analyse the determinants of unit values of Latin American and Asian exports. Econometric tests confirm that the type of global competition differs between the two regions: prices play a bigger role in the case of Asian exports, whereas Latin America competes more on quality in world markets. |
| Keywords: | Export unit values; vertical differentiation; Latin America; Asia |
| JEL: | F1 F4 |
| Date: | 2009–04 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:cii:cepidt:2009-09&r=mkt |
| By: | Kathryn Graddy; George Hall |
| Abstract: | We estimate a dynamic profit-maximization model of a fish wholesaler who can observe consumer characteristics, set individual prices, and thus engage in third-degree price discrimination. Simulated prices and quantities from the model exhibit the key features observed in a set of high quality transaction-level data on fish sales collected at the Fulton fish market. The model's predictions are then compared to the case in which the dealer must post a single price to all customers. We find the cost to the dealer of posting a uniform price to be extremely small. |
| JEL: | D21 D4 L1 L81 |
| Date: | 2009–05 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:nbr:nberwo:15019&r=mkt |
| By: | Juan Luís Jiménez (Departamento de Análisis Económico Aplicado. Grupo de Economía de las Infraestructuras y el Transporte. Universidad de Las Palmas de Gran Canaria); Jordi Perdiguero (PPRE-IREA, Universitat de Barcelona) |
| Abstract: | Various methodologies in economic literature have been used to analyse the international hydrocarbon retail sector. Nevertheless at a Spanish level these studies are much more recent and most conclude that generally there is no effective competition present in this market, regardless of the approach used. In this paper, in order to analyse the price levels in the Spanish petrol market, our starting hypothesis is that in uncompetitive markets the prices are higher and the standard deviation is lower. We use weekly retail petrol price data from the ten biggest Spanish cities, and apply Markov chains to fill the missing values for petrol 95 and diesel, and we also employ a variance filter. We conclude that this market demonstrates reduced price dispersion, regardless of brand or city. |
| Keywords: | Competition, Petrol, Variance filter analysis, Gibbs sampling, Markov chain Monte Carlo. |
| JEL: | L13 L59 L71 |
| Date: | 2009–05 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:xrp:wpaper:xreap2009-5&r=mkt |