There is a growing body of evidence that customer satisfaction is predictive of firms’ future financial performance. However, studies of this relationship have been limited to competitive markets, ...and monopolistic markets have been largely ignored. This study explores the large and important utilities market and exploits its unique regulatory requirements that generate detailed and reliable operating and accounting data to examine the overall relationship between customer satisfaction and utility profit and establish the causal mechanisms involved. Using data from U.S. public utility firms, the authors show that even when customer satisfaction does not affect future revenues, it does positively predict future profitability by reducing utility firm operating costs. More specifically, they find that higher satisfaction reduces the costs of utility firm distribution, customer service, and sales and general administration expenses. These findings and additional post hoc evidence are consistent with the notion that customer satisfaction (1) generates efficiency-enhancing benefits for utility firms by lowering the direct and employee engagement costs of dealing with dissatisfied customers and (2) fosters greater trust and cooperation from customers. This study has important implications for both managers and regulators and provides important new insights for market-based asset theory and regulatory economic theory.
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IZUM, KILJ, NUK, OILJ, PILJ, SAZU, UKNU, UL, UM, UPUK
When luxury purchases signal the incomes of buyers, a monopoly will deliver signals efficiently. If in contrast competitors sell counterfeit copies of luxury goods at low prices, consumers will have ...to buy larger quantities or higher qualities to transmit the same signals, which wastes resources. Competition does maximal harm when entrants produce indistinguishable replicas of existing luxury goods since prices will fall the furthest. The choice of which goods should deliver signals presents a trade-off: goods with a large gap between marginal cost and the price a monopoly would charge signal efficiently but those large gaps increase the reward to counterfeiting.
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BFBNIB, FZAB, GIS, IJS, INZLJ, IZUM, KILJ, NLZOH, NMLJ, NUK, OILJ, PILJ, PNG, SAZU, SBCE, SBMB, UL, UM, UPUK, ZRSKP
Building on the controversial charge of Netflix imperialism made in 2019 by Canadian Broadcasting Corporation president Catherine Tait, this piece attempts to develop a theoretical and technical ...framework for understanding whether the American content provider/streaming service is engaging in 'media imperialism' by rapidly and expansively importing its service into other nations--often to the chagrin of governments and other media companies. Reading a variety of textual sources ranging from trade publications to industry press outlets to popular autobiographies, we will argue that the company is engaged in a hybrid form of media imperialism and platform imperialism through a variety of industrial practices: vertical integration built around a proprietary platform, transnational scaling up of production at a rapid pace, and engaging in corporate practices that systematically disregard accountability and legal regulation. The article ends with examining how national governments and inter-imperialist rivalries might complicate Netflix's ambitions.
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BFBNIB, NUK, PILJ, SAZU, UL, UM, UPUK
Government alcohol monopolies were created in North America and Scandinavia to limit health and social problems. The Swedish monopoly, Systembolaget, reports to a health ministry and controls the ...sale of all alcoholic beverages with > 3.5% alcohol/volume for off-premise consumption, within a public health mandate. Elsewhere, alcohol monopolies are being dismantled with evidence of increased consumption and harms. We describe innovative modelling techniques to estimate health outcomes in scenarios involving Systembolaget being replaced by 1) privately owned liquor stores, or 2) alcohol sales in grocery stores. The methods employed can be applied in other jurisdictions and for other policy changes.
Impacts of the privatisation scenarios on pricing, outlet density, trading hours, advertising and marketing were estimated based on Swedish expert opinion and published evidence. Systematic reviews were conducted to estimate impacts on alcohol consumption in each scenario. Two methods were applied to estimate harm impacts: (i) alcohol attributable morbidity and mortality were estimated utilising the International Model of Alcohol Harms and Policies (InterMAHP); (ii) ARIMA methods to estimate the relationship between per capita alcohol consumption and specific types of alcohol-related mortality and crime.
Replacing government stores with private liquor stores (Scenario 1) led to a 20.0% (95% CI, 15.3-24.7) increase in per capita consumption. Replacement with grocery stores (Scenario 2) led to a 31.2% (25.1-37.3%) increase. With InterMAHP there were 763 or + 47% (35-59%) and 1234 or + 76% (60-92%) more deaths per year, for Scenarios 1 and 2 respectively. With ARIMA, there were 850 (334-1444) more deaths per year in Scenario 1 and 1418 more in Scenario 2 (543-2505). InterMAHP also estimated 10,859 or + 29% (22-34%) and 16,118 or + 42% (35-49%) additional hospital stays per year respectively.
There would be substantial adverse consequences for public health and safety were Systembolaget to be privatised. We demonstrate a new combined approach for estimating the impact of alcohol policies on consumption and, using two alternative methods, alcohol-attributable harm. This approach could be readily adapted to other policies and settings. We note the limitation that some significant sources of uncertainty in the estimates of harm impacts were not modelled.
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DOBA, IZUM, KILJ, NUK, PILJ, PNG, SAZU, SIK, UILJ, UKNU, UL, UM, UPUK
We study the efficiency of the standard‐setting process when standards result from competition between groups of firms sponsoring different technologies. We show that ex ante agreements may decrease ...welfare in the case of standards wars: Even though industry profits are larger with ex ante agreements, welfare is not necessarily larger, because the interests of firms and society may not be aligned. This result contrasts with the findings of previous works studying de jure monopoly standards. Including adopters in the standard‐setting process may restore the efficiency of ex ante agreements.
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FZAB, GIS, IJS, IZUM, KILJ, NLZOH, NUK, OILJ, PILJ, SAZU, SBCE, SBMB, UL, UM, UPUK
In republican Colombia, salt became an important source of revenue not just to individuals, but to the state, which levied taxes on it and in some cases controlled and profited from its production. ...Focusing his study on the town of La Salina, Joshua M. Rosenthal presents a fascinating glimpse into the workings of the early Colombian state, its institutions, and their interactions with local citizens during this formative period.
ABSTRACT
An important focus of China’s Anti-Monopoly Law (AML) is “administrative monopolies”—government-imposed restraints on competition. Since adopting the AML in 2008, China gradually has ...strengthened its efforts to curb administrative monopolies. Despite notable reforms such as the creation of the Fair Competition Review System (FCRS), government restrictions remain a major obstacle to competition in China’s economy. The 2008 legislation narrowly defined what constitutes improper government intervention, adopted a permissive standard for determining when public restraints were legitimate, and relied heavily on internal administrative controls to correct infringements. This paper draws upon experience in China and abroad to enhance the ability of China’s competition authorities to challenge administrative monopolies. Suggested upgrades include augmenting the robustness of FCRS, introducing new tools to improve competition advocacy, bolstering the ability of competition authorities to initiate or join litigation to attack administrative monopolies, and narrowing the range of justifications that can immunize public restraints.
The English East India Company was one of the most powerful and enduring organizations in history.Between Monopoly and Free Tradelocates the source of that success in the innovative policy by which ...the Company's Court of Directors granted employees the right to pursue their own commercial interests while in the firm's employ. Exploring trade network dynamics, decision-making processes, and ports and organizational context, Emily Erikson demonstrates why the English East India Company was a dominant force in the expansion of trade between Europe and Asia, and she sheds light on the related problems of why England experienced rapid economic development and how the relationship between Europe and Asia shifted in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
Though the Company held a monopoly on English overseas trade to Asia, the Court of Directors extended the right to trade in Asia to their employees, creating an unusual situation in which employees worked both for themselves and for the Company as overseas merchants. Building on the organizational infrastructure of the Company and the sophisticated commercial institutions of the markets of the East, employees constructed a cohesive internal network of peer communications that directed English trading ships during their voyages. This network integrated Company operations, encouraged innovation, and increased the Company's flexibility, adaptability, and responsiveness to local circumstance.
Between Monopoly and Free Tradehighlights the dynamic potential of social networks in the early modern era.
We study an extremal question for the (two-way) r−bootstrap percolation processes. Given a graph and an initial configuration where each vertex is active or inactive, in the r−bootstrap percolation ...process the following rule is applied in discrete-time rounds: each vertex gets active if it has at least r active neighbors, and an active vertex stays active forever. In the two-way r−bootstrap percolation, each vertex gets active if it has at least r active neighbors, and inactive otherwise. We consider the following question on thed-dimensional torus: how many vertices must be initially active so that the whole graph becomes active? Our results settle an open problem by Balister et al. (2010) and generalize the results by Flocchini et al. (2004).
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GEOZS, IJS, IMTLJ, KILJ, KISLJ, NLZOH, NUK, OILJ, PNG, SAZU, SBCE, SBJE, UILJ, UL, UM, UPCLJ, UPUK, ZAGLJ, ZRSKP
El artículo analiza el principio de legalidad desde una postura crítica, verificando si este, examinado en todas sus partes, puede o no ser aplicado mediante un discurso homogéneo y bajo la ...perspectiva de un principio autoritario que rige en todo el sistema penal y procesal penal. De igual forma, se analiza el monopolio de la ley y de la política criminal, y se busca determinar si en Colombia se aplica legalidad estricta o flexible. El trabajo se centra en el principio de legalidad de los delitos y de las penas, que constituyen la piedra angular de nuestro sistema penal, pues así lo establecen la Constitución, el Código Penal y el Código Procesal. Sin desconocer que el principio de legalidad, en materia penal, es uno de los mayores avances y logros de la ciencia del derecho, es necesario repensar si este principio puede, en efecto, ser concebido en la contemporaneidad tal y como fue proyectado en sus orígenes. Se concluye que el actual principio de legalidad aplicado en Colombia es flexible, aunque no elimina su condición esencial de ser un monopolio estatal.
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