Market For Local Services Research Articles

PRZESTRZENNY WYMIAR ŻYWOTNOŚCI OSIEDLA Z PERSPEKTYWY UŻYTKOWNIKÓW I USŁUGODAWCÓW

Neighbourhood liveability is a concept reflecting the perceived living conditions in a housing area. Liveability depends on one hand on the relationship between demand and supply on the local services market, and on the other hand on the spatial structure of the neighbourhood. In this paper we combine those two aspects by asking a question: what physical forms are the most effective in providing quality of life and satisfying the everyday needs of citizens? We present the results of social survey and mapping analysis conducted in 5 neighbourhoods in Poland representing big cities, medium towns and suburbs. Each case study included opinions of both the customers and services providers. The results show that there are particular spatial structures (streets, squares, passages) positively evaluated by each of the two groups, determining the neighbourhood liveability.

Making platforms work: relationship labor and the management of publics

How do digital platforms govern their users? Existing studies, with their focus on impersonal and procedural modes of governance, have largely neglected to examine the human labor through which platform companies attempt to elicit the consent of their users. This study describes the relationship labor that is systematically excised from many platforms’ accounts of what they do and missing from much of the scholarship on platform governance. Relationship labor is carried out by agents of platform companies who engage in interpersonal communications with a platform’s users in an effort to align diverse users’ activities and preferences with the company’s interests. The authors draw on ethnographic research conducted at AllDone (a for-profit startup that built an online market for local services) and edX (a non-profit startup that partnered with institutions to offer Massive Open Online Courses). The findings leverage variation in organizational contexts to elaborate the common practices and divergent strategies of relationship labor deployed by each platform. Both platforms relied on relationship workers to engage in account management practices aimed at addressing the particular concerns of individual users through interpersonal communications. Relationship workers in each setting also engaged in community management practices that facilitated contact and collaboration among users in pursuit of shared goals. However, our findings show that the relative frequency of relationship workers’ use of account management and community management practices varies with organizational conditions. This difference in strategies also corresponded to different ways of valuing relationship workers and incorporating them into organizational processes. The article demonstrates how variation in organizational context accounts for divergent strategies for governing user participation in digital platforms and for the particular processes through which governance is accomplished and contested.

Price cap regulation in the Mexican telephone industry

This paper presents a model to analyze price cap regulation of the Mexican telephone industry. There is a vertically integrated firm that is a monopolist in the local service market and a duopolist in the long-distance service market. A regulator sets the access price and a price cap on the basket of final services provided by the integrated firm. We show that this type of price cap can increase the profits of this firm in the downstream market. Moreover, this constraint can actually increase its overall profits and reduce the profits of the downstream rival.

Outsourcing business services and the role of central administrative offices

In this paper, I study whether there is any evidence that the market scale surrounding a central administrative office (CAO) has any relation to a firm's cost-effectiveness in procuring business services. By linking plant-level data from the 1992 Annual Survey of Manufactures with CAO information from the Survey of Auxiliary Establishments, I examine manufacturing plants' practice of outsourcing services in relation to the size of the local service market surrounding the plant and that surrounding the plant's CAO. I found evidence which suggests that the greater the size of local market surrounding a CAO, the higher the plant's probability of relying on the CAO for outsourcing advertising, bookkeeping and accounting, and legal services.

The Essential Facilities Doctrine in the Deregulated Telecommunications Industry

The Telecommunications Act of 1996 required the formerly monopolistic telephone local exchange companies to open their networks up for competitors' use. This shift from anticompetitive federal regulation to mandated competition shook up an industry and necessitates another look at the basic antitrust jurisprudence undergirding the pro-competitive rationale. As this article points out, sections 251 and 252 of the Act, while purporting to encourage competition, actually may hamper entry into the local services market and provide a disincentive for current market participants to innovate. These deleterious effects can be overcome, the authors postulate, by returning to antitrust principles enumerated in the essential facilities doctrine.

The Theory-Practice Gap: Myth or Reality?

The series of papers that follow were first presented at an All-Academy of Management Symposium dealing with organizational change at the 1985 National Annual Meeting. The committee that organized the symposium did so with the beliefs that: (1) organizational change and redirection, the process of making and keeping organizations competitive in changing environments, is an important topic; (2) many executives were wrestling with just these issues, and had some interesting insights to share with us; and, most importantly, (3) an examination of what these executives and their organizations were doing would probably reveal that, in fact, many of the things being tried were consistent with research and theory in organizational behavior. In other words, in spite of the fact that some of our colleagues have bemoaned the gap between our research and the world of practice, our research, whether or not it has formed the basis for what was being done, was quite applicable and indeed was being applied in a number of contexts. Three industries that were facing particularly turbulent times and in which change was certainly required were banking, telecommunications, and computers. With increasing deregulation of banking and with the growth of competition from other kinds of financial institutions such as brokerage firms, savings and loans, and mutual funds, the days when a license to operate was almost the same as a license to make money were over. Interstate banking was either de facto occurring or on the horizon, and turbulence in the world economy was playing havoc with loan portfolios. Nowhere was or is this more evident than at one of the nation's largest banks, the Bank of America. Thus we decided to see if we could get Bob Beck to share with us his observations on the goals, the practices, and the preliminary results of what is surely one of the largest attempts to change an organization's culture, reaffirm its values, and revitalize its strategies and operations. His description of that process is a case study of the use of measurement, feedback, and information systems to both demonstrate the need for change and to help guide the change process. Telecommunications is and was yet another industry facing rapid and dramatic change that required new ways of operating and thinking. Since the late 1960s decisions of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) have slowly eroded the monopoly position the phone companies had on long-distance service, and new technologies were making it possible for competitors to develop even in the local service market, at least with respect to business customers in the downtown areas. These technologies and regulatory changes pale in comparison with the significance of the antitrust decree that forced the breakup of AT&T effective January 1, 1984. The divestiture created seven new operating entities as well as a new AT&T, and required the splitting up of people, assets, and activities on a truly tremendous scale. The largest of the newly created operating entities was Southwestern Bell, a company with about 90,000 employees and 8 million customers. Zane Barnes graciously volunteered to share with us his experience in managing the company through the period of divestiture. His remarks speak to the importance of communications, having a clearly defined strategy, and of the role decentralization and delegation has played in making Southwestern Bell more responsive to new opportunities and new competitors. And there is the case of the computer industry. Although the changes that IBM itself faces, particularly in the personal computer and minicomputer markets, are far from trivial, we wanted to get the experience of someone competing in this rapidly changing business but without the same kind of dominant market position and size, which would be both more important and more resource constrained. Jim Renier of Honeywell describes a major effort at organizational renewal, predicated on applying some basic managerial and behavioral science concepts in a consistent and intelligent fashion. In addition to charting a somewhat new strategy, the Information Systems division embarked on a process that involved getting enthusiasm, commitment, and teamwork from its workforce more effectively. Renier's discussion of how this was brought about deals with issues of the connection between organizational and personal goals and the role of ethics and morals in organizational change. These three case studies are interesting, both compared with each other-what was the situation, what was done, how did it work-and compared with other things that might have been done. It is particularly important to see the extent to which these major change efforts followed or departed from what might be derived from the organization development literature and the more general literature on organizations. This exercise will, I believe, be fruitful for executives, consultants, and academics who teach and conduct research in these areas. My impression is that there are remarkable consistencies among the cases and between