Amnesty International has long been an effective champion of free speech. Amartya Sen, the winner of the Nobel Prize in economics, has argued that famines do not occur in societies in which there is a free press. In this lecture, I want to set forth the case for greater openness and transparency in government.
In the field of economics, perhaps the most important break with the past - one that leaves open huge areas for future work - lies in the economics of information. It is now recognized that information is imperfect, obtaining information can be costly, there are important asymmetries of information, and the extent of information asymmetries is affected by actions of firms and individuals.
Marketers all over the world agree that the Internet will have a major impact on the way firms do business. What changes will exactly occur, however, is hard to predict as the Internet is in a phase of rapid growth and constant change. Patterns are difficult to isolate, especially since despite its explosive growth, today, the Net is still in its infancy, only being available to a small proportion of people. In spite of this general lack of reliable patterns, one consensus among managers seems to be that the Internet is likely to intensify price competition.
For most firms, successful new product introductions are rare, and failed products represent substantial monetary loss, particularly at the market launch stage. Unfortunately, the ability to reliably predict successes/failures early in the new product development process remains an elusive goal.
This article proposes a method that overcomes a number of problems associated with new product diffusion models noted in the marketing literature. We illustrate the methodology in the context of better understanding global variances in new product adoption. Building on existing diffusion models and sample matching principles from international consumer research, we suggest a "staged estimation procedure." The procedure provides both sensible and robust estimates and remains usable even if the diffusion process is in its earliest stage in most or all countries.
We present diÆculties with realizing the capacity of queueing networks with batch servers under well known scheduling disciplines. We intro duce a family of scheduling p olicies called discrete-review p olicies, which not only guarantee capacity realization for queueing networks with batch servers, but also contain among them p olicies that allow us to realize desired b ehavior on \ uid" scale, including asymptotically optimal p olicies.
We study the competitive provision and endogenous acquisition of political information. Our main result identifies a natural equilibrium channel through which a more competitive market decreases the efficiency of policy outcomes. A critical insight we put forward is that competition among information providers leads to informational specialization: firms provide relatively less information on issues that are of common interest and relatively more information on issues on which agents’ preferences are heterogeneous.