Channel Efforts Research Articles

Strategic Information Sharing in Competing Channels

We investigate strategic information sharing in two competing channels. The retailer in a channel can ex post decide whether to share private demand information with his upstream manufacturer after the content of information becomes known. We find that a retailer discloses low demand and withholds high demand to induce lower wholesale prices from his manufacturer. We show that a retailer should share less information when the retail market becomes more competitive, but should disclose more information when his capability to acquire information improves. When a decentralized supply chain competes with an integrated channel, we show that firms in the supply chain benefit from the rival channel's effort to improve information capability, that the incentive for the retailer in the supply chain to improve his information capability increases with the intensity of competition and with the rival channel's information capability, and that the retailer may not want to pursue perfect information acquisition even when doing so is costless. Extensive numerical studies demonstrate that similar results also hold for two decentralized supply chains competing with each other.

Book Review: Al Jazeera English: Global News in a Changing World, edited by Philip Seib

Al Jazeera English: Global News in a Changing World. Philip Seib, ed. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. 204 pp. $95 hbk. $25 pbk.For this look at Al Jazeera English (AJE), Philip Seib, professor of journalism and public diplomacy at the University of Southern California, has drawn together authors remarkable for their knowledge and insights, who are also notable for their distinctly different academic backgrounds, positions, and the passions they bring to their work.Anyone familiar with the topic will recognize these scholars' names-such as el- Nawawy or Gilboa-but that is not to say all of them are gray eminences. The collection presents work by scholars who know what they are writing about, whatever rank they are, and wherever they are to be found. The result is a book that is well worth reading and one, in which the authors themselves brought into a room might have a spirited debate.Shawn Powers, of Georgia State, provides an interesting and well-done review of the history of the channel's creation and development, which opens the book. In the second chapter, Hussein Amin, of the American University in Cairo, considers the shape and reach of AJE's global footprint. In the next chapter, Tine Ustad Figenschou, from the University of Oslo, considers the nature of the channel's news content, pro- viding a rare and detailed analysis of whether the channel was living up to its commit- ment to cover news from the Global South and to extend its reach to sources beyond the normal elite familiar to Western global news consumers.Will Youmans, of George Washington, reviews the challenge AJE executives have faced getting the channel on the cable lineups available to mainstream American audi- ences. Amelia Arsenault, of Georgia State, and Michael Kugelman, of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, explore AJE's experience covering and reaching into Africa and South Asia, respectively. Both find that the channel's efforts have been challenged by conditions on the ground, including among them issues with demand, distribution, and audience access.El-Nawawy, at Queens University of Charlotte, provides a qualitative analysis of AJE's coverage of the Ground Zero mosque controversy-coverage that he finds was notably balanced and conciliatory in a climate where most mainstream media cover- age of the story was neither. The book ends with Seib's effort to pull from all the chapters that came before to make sense of the whole.The most significant chapters in the book, however, are the opposing viewpoints offered of AJE's coverage of events in Gaza in 2008-2009. The Palestinian viewpoint is provided by Rima Najjar Merriman, of Al Quds University, and the Israeli view- point is provided by Eytan Gilboa, of Bar-Ilan University in Israel. …