In opaque selling certain characteristics of the product or service are hidden from the consumer until after purchase, transforming a differentiated good into somewhat of a commodity. Opaque selling has become popular in service pricing as it allows firms to sell their differentiated products at...

We investigate the make-buy decision of a manufacturer who does not know its potential suppliers’ capabilities. In order to mitigate the consequences of this limited knowledge, the manufacturer can either perform in-house or audit suppliers. An audit reveals the audited supplier’s capability...

In this paper, we consider the scenario where an original equipment manufacturer (OEM) has decided to outsource the production of a critical component. There are two potential suppliers: one of them is an independent supplier, while the other is a manufacturer that sells a competing product. The...

This paper attempts to investigate the time-varying causal dynamics between China's money and output by using a Markov switching causality approach. Unlike the pre-specified break points and rolling-window methods, the Markov switching causality approach can capture the time-varying causality...

Tests of social support theory have relied on aggregate crime rates as the outcome of interest, but such a focus ignores the potentially important macro-level processes and effects on individual-level behavior We thus perform the first multi-level investigation of social support theory.

The Consumer Sentiment Index (CSI), a leading macroeconomic indicator, reflects consumers' assessments of current financial situations, forecasts consumers' buying behavior, and allows business organizations, such as banks, to capture business opportunities. There is a consensus that the trend...

Using a combination of analytical and numerical methods, the global bifurcations and chaotic dynamics of two non-linearly coupled parametrically excited van der Pol oscillators are investigated in detail. With the aid of the method of multiple scales, the slow flow equations are obtained. Based...

This article proposes a mathematical model which has been used to investigate the importance of lytic and non-lytic immune responses for the control of viral infections. By means of Lyapunov functions, the global properties of the model are obtained. The virus is cleared if the basic...

This study seeks to advance and test the knowledge-based theory of the firm as it applies to explaining the governance structure of R&D alliances. Unlike transaction-cost economics, the knowledge-based theory attempts to explain organizational form not primarily in terms of incentive...

This paper introduces a regime-switching forward-looking Taylor rule to describe the monetary policy behavior and considers its estimation using a two-step MLE procedure due to Kim and Nelson (2006), Kim (2009) and Zheng and Wang (2010). By doing an empirical analysis on quarterly data for China...