Economics Insights @ CBS

We examine the Internet’s impact on the cross-border distribution of cultural goods and assess its implications for cultural policy and cultural diversity. We present a stylized model of a two-country economy where governments are endowed with political preferences over the consumption of domestic content and enact import barriers and subsidies to protect it. We introduce peer-to-peer file sharing as a distinct distribution channel enabled by the Internet that provides access to all media products at a low cost. We report two main findings.

This article offers a primer on social power and social class with respect to their theoretical importance, conceptual distinction, and empirical relationship. We introduce and define the constructs of social power, social class, and one's psychological sense of power. We next explore the complex relationship between social power and social class. Because social class can produce a sense of power within an individual, studies on social power can inform theory and research on social class.

The rise of "Big Data" had a big impact on marketing research and practice. In this article, we first highlight sources of useful consumer information that are now available at large scale and very little or no cost. We subsequently discuss how this information — with the help of new analytical techniques — can be translated into valuable insights on consumers' psychological states and traits that can, in turn, be used to inform marketing strategy.

In hospitals, Step Down Units (SDUs) provide an intermediate level of care between the Intensive Care Units (ICUs) and the general medical-surgical wards. Because SDUs are less richly staffed than ICUs, they are less costly to operate; however, they also are unable to provide the level of care required by the sickest patients. There is an ongoing debate in the medical community as to whether and how SDUs should be used. On one hand, an SDU alleviates ICU congestion by providing a safe environment for post-ICU patients before they are stable enough to be transferred to the general wards.

Community differences in organizing capacity have been attributed to cohesion and trust among population members and from population members to organizations and have been seen as an enduring feature of communities. The experience of a crisis, and the handling of the crisis, can be seen as a test of cohesion that verifies community support of organizations or proves its absence.