Small Market Share Research Articles

Tapping birdwatchers to promote bird‐friendly coffee consumption and conserve birds

Abstract Though coffee was traditionally grown as an understory crop beneath mature trees (i.e. ‘shade‐grown’ coffee), most farms have been converted to full‐sun monocultures over time, which fail to support ecosystem services or biodiversity. The conversion from shade‐ to sun‐grown coffee has prompted the development of environmentally focused certifications, such as Smithsonian Bird Friendly® coffee, as one market‐based strategy to incentivize sustainable production of coffee. Birdwatchers, of which there are 45 million in the US alone, are among the primary targets for coffee certifications—partly due to their high propensity to participate in and pay for conservation activities that benefit birds. Yet birdwatchers still represent a small market share of certifications, and their purchasing preferences relatively unknown. In 2016, we administered an online survey to 912 donors and/or members of the Cornell Lab of Ornithology who self‐identified as coffee drinkers and ‘birdwatchers’ to assess their familiarity with, receptivity to purchase, and perceived constraints on purchasing certified coffee. Nearly half (49%) of respondents reported considering bird habitat when purchasing coffee. However, only 38% of respondents were familiar with the Smithsonian Bird Friendly® certification and only 9% reported purchasing it. Consumers who were older, female, and more skilled at birdwatching were more likely to consider birds when purchasing coffee, whereas those with higher levels of education were less likely. The highest rated constraints on buying bird‐friendly coffee were lack of awareness, cost, and lack of availability. Because most birdwatchers considered both social and environmental impacts when purchasing coffee, they may be a promising market segment for many coffee certifications. Indeed, about half of the birdwatchers purchased organic (50%) and Fair Trade® (52%) certifications. Our results suggest that uptake of bird‐friendly coffee may be strengthened by better communicating the impact of coffee production on bird habitat, the unique attributes of bird‐friendly coffee (including the high‐quality taste), differences among certification standards and credibility, and easy ways to find and purchase bird‐friendly coffee. A free Plain Language Summary can be found within the Supporting Information of this article.

Credit Market Competition and Bank Capitalization

We document that within regional U.S. mortgage markets an increase in competition exerts differential effects on banks with large and small market shares. Large market share banks reduce capitalization and increase risk taking as a response to an increase in the intensity of competition, while small market share banks enhance capitalization and reduce risk taking. These results are tied to market shares and not driven by bank size or the level of concentration within local regional markets.

On Interest-Bearing Central Bank Digital Currency with Heterogeneous Banks

We explore the implications of introducing an interest-bearing central bank digital currency (CBDC) through commercial banks that differ in size. Banks of heterogeneous sizes offer different convenience properties to depositors, which the CBDC adopts. The large bank gives depositors a higher convenience value and hence possesses market power. The interest rate on CBDC puts a lower bound on banks’ deposit interest rates, which is particularly binding on the large bank. While a higher CBDC interest rate enhances monetary policy pass-through by raising deposit interest rates, it reduces the small bank's deposit market share and its lending volume. By contrast, a CBDC that delivers its own convenience value to users levels the playing field by shifting deposits and lending from the large bank to the small one, although it can enhance or reduce the transmission of monetary policy.

Design and experimental study of minitype modularized fluorescence microscopic imaging system and focusing mechanism

In the global in vitro diagnostic(IVD) market, point-of-care testing(POCT) features the largest market share, while POCT in China features small market share. With the development of consumption upgrading, urbanization and medical reform of China, this kind of real-time detection without central laboratory features huge market demand and potential. POCT is a testing method, which can obtain test results in just few minutes with portable equipment and supporting reagents. In this paper, a minitype modularized fluorescence microscopic imaging system is proposed, which is used for blood cells detection, microbial observation and pathological section scanning. In order to meet the needs of portable, miniaturized and chip-type, a linear objective lens switching and focusing mechanism (LOLSFM) has been designed and developed, which changed the rotating disk switching mode of existing microscope. Finally, the precision and verticality of the LOLSFM are verified by experiments. The imaging quality of minitype modularized fluorescence microscopic imaging system.

Publishing under COVID-19 in small book markets

The paper is based on a survey that was conducted among publishers in Slovakia, Iceland, Lithuania and Slovenia in May and August 2020. The paper looks at how publishers reacted to the COVID-19 crisis in their respective countries, what was its impact on book sales and how did the publishers adapt the production of new books to changed circumstances. In addition, the paper analyses changed attitudes of publishers towards e-books and other digital book formats that become more popular in lockdown times. The research revealed that COVID-19 lockdowns resulted in decreased sales of printed books in all four small book markets. However, sales of e-books and audiobooks slightly increased during that period. This increase in digital sales did not contribute significantly to overall results of book industries due to its small market share in all four countries.

How SMEs Can Create Value for Customers through Emergency Logistics and Human Resource Management under Unexpected Events<br/>—Service-Dominant Logic Perspective

The worldwide impact of the COVID-19 outbreak was huge, and with the joint efforts of the whole country, the epidemic was basically controlled in China, but the outbreak gave us a long-lasting reflection. The outbreak has had a significant impact on our economic development and people’s lives. For SMEs with small market share and poor risk resistance, it is a difficult problem to deal with the outbreak, and the lack of crisis awareness and contingency plans of most SMEs makes the survival crisis of SMEs deepen greatly, so it is necessary to explore how SMEs can deal with the outbreak. Since there are different and unevenly distributed resources in China, emergency logistics in response to emergencies is particularly important. This paper examines how SMEs can achieve emergency logistics and human resource management to create value for customers in the context of emergencies from the perspective of service-dominant logic, in order to provide solutions for SMEs to escape from the dilemma of survival. The service-dominant logic focuses on the process of co-creation of value through continuous interaction between producers and consumers, and believes that value co-creation can be achieved through healthy and effective interaction between enterprises and customers. In this paper, we take COVID-19, a social hotspot, as the background to discuss how SMEs can do a good job in emergency logistics and human resource management for their own better development in the face of emergencies.

Do Islamic banks more stable than conventional banks? Evidence from Indonesia

Purpose – Albeit Islamic banks are often considered more stable than conventional banks, empirical evidence to support the stability view is relatively scanty. This study, therefore, mainly aims to investigate whether Islamic banks are more stable than conventional banks in Indonesia. To enrich and support the analysis, it will also compare the factors influencing the stability of Islamic banks and conventional banks in the country. Methodology – This paper employs a dynamic panel data model using the system-GMM (General Method of Moment) estimator. The data used are quarterly data from 83 conventional banks and 11 Islamic banks in Indonesia during September 2015-June 2019 period. Findings – The study did not find any significant difference in the stability of conventional and Islamic banks. This result is presumably influenced by the small size and small market share of Islamic banks, as well as many similarities between the two types of banking systems. Furthermore, the stability of the conventional bank in Indonesia is more influenced by macroeconomic factors including interest rate, exchange rate and financial inclusions, meanwhile the stability of Islamic banks is more influenced by the banks’ specific factors such as financing growth, efficiency and risk management factors. Research limitations – The data used in the study is limited to the period from September 2015 to June 2019. The variables utilized are also limited to those taken from publicly available financial statements. Originality – This paper provides additional empirical evidence regarding Islamic banking stability in Indonesia by using the latest data. While theoretically Islamic banks are expected to be more stable than conventional banks, this study did not find strong support for the case of Indonesia during the period of observation.

Economic Analysis of Rollover and Shared Data Plans

In today's growing data market, wireless service providers (WSPs) compete severely to attract users by announcing innovative data plans. Two of the most popular innovative data plans are rollover and shared data plans, where the former plan allows a user to keep his unused data quota to next month and the latter plan allows users in a family to share unused data. As a pioneer to provide such data plans, a WSP faces immediate revenue loss from existing users who pay less overage charges due to less data over-usage, but his market share increases gradually by attracting new users and those under the other WSPs. In some countries, WSPs have asymmetric timing for providing such innovative data plans, while some other markets' WSPs have symmetric timing or no planning. This raises the question of why and when the competitive WSPs should offer the new data plans. This paper provides game theoretic modelling and analysis of the WSPs' timing of offering innovative data plans, by considering new user arrival and dynamic user churn between WSPs. Our equilibrium analysis shows that the WSP with small market share prefers to announce the innovative data plan first to attract more users, while the WSP with large market share prefers to announce later to avoid the immediate revenue loss. In a market with many new users, WSPs with similar market shares will offer the data plans simultaneously, but these WSPs facing few new users may not offer any new plan. Perhaps surprisingly, WSPs' profits can decrease with new user number and they may not benefit from the option of innovative data plans. Finally, unlike rollover data plan, we show that the timing of shared data plan further depends on the composition of users.

Field Experiments (and the Lack of Thereof) for Testing Revenue Strategies in the Hospitality Industry

This paper outlines opportunities that field experimentation can bring to accommodation managers. It also describes specific types of experiment designs that can help exploit those opportunities and increase the adoption of field experimentation. Field experimentation (often through randomized testing) has been widely adopted as an optimization technique in product design and marketing in several industries. It is also considered as the golden standard for causal inference and thus a critical tool for decision makers. As such, companies have successfully used field experimentation to reduce costs, increase revenues, and maintain an edge in their customer experience in highly competitive environments. However, a number of optimization problems with a rich academic and commercial history have resisted this push. In certain industries, such as hospitality, to the authors’ knowledge, there is little publicly documented work detailing results of field experiments applied to revenue management, and the use of such tools remains the privilege of big corporate brands with a small overall market share. This happens in a $500 billion industry in which vendors and academics alike claim that price optimization can yield uplifts of 10% in revenue. This paper discusses the likely causes of the sparse adoption of field experimentation for revenue management in hospitality. By explicitly addressing the complexities of revenue management, and outlining specific experimental designs aimed at handling those complexities, this paper aims to start a public conversation about experimentation in hospitality that should benefit the industry as a whole.

Factors to Consider During and After Job Loss or Displacement from Corona virus 2020

In the year 2020, many people will undergo two of the top five stressful life events, namely a major illness or job loss. In fact, over 45 million Americans are unemployed because of COVID-19 in the workplace today.In addition to contracting coronavirus in the workplace, many other concerns affect individuals today: Taking a financial loss (24%) Being furloughed (22%) Experiencing mental health issues (20%) Having to care for a family love one (19%) Experiencing first time issues with working from home (15%) Balancing childcare activities (14%). All these concerns were recognized by more than 1,035 individuals surveyed by Indeed.com in a recent article published March 24, 2020 [1]. In addition to possible job loss, numerous individuals have had to redeem sick leave benefits and vacation time to offset reduced income, reduced contract work, and decreased paid leave. Employers are acutely aware that rehiring of personnel may be financially taxing in that a smaller market share and less demand for services will have a significant impact on rehiring.

Växjö Municipality’s Planning Strategy to Increase the Construction of Wooden Multi-Family Buildings

Sweden has a housing shortage, which the Swedish authorities expect to continue until 2025. Producers of wooden multi-family buildings have a relatively small market share in comparison to traditional building materials. The limited capacity to fulfil the increased building demand also restricts the possibilities for development towards innovation, bio-economy and sustainability. The municipalities in Sweden have responsibility for the planning of the building development in their region based on their projected requirements and strategies. Combining this with a desire to develop sustainable building solutions based on wood increases the complexity. Currently, public building developments are achieved through the public procurement act or the land allocation activity, dependent on their development strategy. This normally involves the development of local strategies regarding, for example, design, material choice and geographical development. This study aims to identify drivers that will enable improved market activities related to actions in public building initiatives using wood-based solutions, which is conducted by studying a specific building project managed by the Växjö Municipality in Sweden. The result indicates that improved transparency in the land allocation activity generates possibilities for developers to respond successfully to the requests submitted by the municipalities, and thus, increase the possible use of sustainable building methods using wood. This knowledge improves the understanding of the required strategic development for the companies, the government and the municipalities, to increase the use of sustainable building materials in Swedish multi-family housing projects.

Does COMESA Have Export Potential to Emerging Economies?

By the virtue of their size, Emerging Market Economies (EMEs) present trade opportunities for both developed and developing countries. To benefit from such opportunities, countries need to identify the areas where they have comparative advantage. This paper analyses the export potential of the Common Market for Eastern and Southern Africa (COMESA) member countries to selected emerging market economies (EMEs) including Brazil, Russia, India, China, Turkey, Singapore, Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates (UAE), South Africa and Nigeria. The aim is to investigate if COMESA member countries are competitive in the EMEs and identify the specific products which the region has a revealed comparative advantage (RCA) in specific EME market. Using RCA method, the study finds that COMESA countries have RCA in at least 200 products (about 4 percent) of the total 5,134 products they export to the selected emerging markets. Export of these products also account for a small market share in the emerging markets. COMESA countries therefore have a large export potential in these markets which remains unexploited. Export potential is larger in Russia, Nigeria, Saudi Arabia and UAE, respectively. Textiles and textile products, mineral products, base metal and articles of base metal, live animals and vegetable products have the largest export potential in EMEs. Keywords : COMESA, emerging market economies (EMEs), RCA and export potential DOI: 10.7176/JESD/11-10-07 Publication date: May 31 st 2020

Satisficing Search and Price Competition

The rising prevalence of algorithmic pricing in industry calls for a closer study of market outcomes that arise when these algorithms interact in a competitive environment. In this paper, we study the impact of boundedly rational customer choice on the landscape of joint demand curves in competition, and its consequences on the properties of competing pricing algorithms derived from the online convex optimization framework. In particular, we study price competition in a duopoly under a new customer behavior model motivated by online platforms offering perfectly substitutable services, e.g., ride-hailing. In this model, a customer samples the firms in an idiosyncratically preferred order until she finds one priced below her willingness-to-pay. We exhaustively characterize the equilibrium profile of the resulting pricing game when customers' willingness-to-pay distribution has a monotone hazard rate. We show that these games are plagued by a particular strictly-local Nash equilibrium, in which the price of the firm with a smaller market share is only a local best-response to the competitor's price, when a globally optimal response with a potentially unboundedly higher payoff is available. Through numerical experiments, we show that price dynamics resulting from distributed online gradient descent may often converge to this undesirable outcome, causing the smaller firm to incur linear regret relative to its best-response price. Our results thus suggest that algorithms that adaptively rely on local information for pricing, despite faring well in monopolistic settings, may suffer from serious drawbacks in competitive environments. We finally propose and test a practical resolution of this concern in the context of our model.

Stability of Islamic banks in Indonesia: Autoregressive Distributed Lag Approach

Islamic banks in Indonesia are very vulnerable to the instability of their business processes because of their small market share. Moreover, based on their financial performances, Islamic banks are worse than those of conventional banks due to lower profits (ROA) and higher Non-performing financing (NPF). Our study investigates the stability of Islamic banks. We measure the stability using Z-score and NPF. Instead of an individual bank, the study applies an aggregate data of Islamic banks encompassing Islamic commercial banks along with Islamic business units. Monthly time series data, covering January 2010 to December 2018 are selected. We apply the Autoregressive Distributed Lag (ARDL) model. The findings document that the Islamic bank's specific variables affecting stability are size, CAR, and efficiency. The larger size and CAR support the Islamic bank's stability. Lower efficiency increases the Islamic bank's instability. Meanwhile, Inflation and exchange rates affect the Islamic bank's stability. Economic downturns due to inflation and depreciation of rupiah increase the instability of Islamic banks. JEL Classification: G21, G24 How to Cite: Widarjono, A. (2020). Stability of Islamic banks in Indonesia: Autoregressive Distributed Lag Approach. Jurnal Keuangan dan Perbankan, 24 (1), 40-52. DOI: https://doi.org/10.26905/jkdp.v24i1.3932

Economics of Mobile Data Trading Market

To exploit users' heterogeneous data demands, several mobile network operators worldwide have launched the mobile data trading markets, where users can trade mobile data quota with each other. In this paper, we aim to understand the importance of data trading market (DTM) by studying the users' operator selection and trading decisions, and analyzing the operator's profit maximizing strategy. We model the interactions between the mobile operator and the users as a three-stage Stackelberg game. In Stage I, the operator chooses the operation fee imposed on sellers to maximize its profit. In Stage II, each user chooses his operator. In Stage III, each DTM user chooses his trading decisions. We derive the closed-form expression of the unique Nash equilibrium (NE) in Stages II and III, where every user proposes the same price such that the total demand matches with the total supply. We further show that the Stage I's problem is convex and compute the optimal operation fee. Our analysis and numerical results show that an operator with a small initial market share can increase its profit by proposing a DTM, which is in line with the real-world situation in Hong Kong.

Market Development Barriers for the Swedish Wooden Multi-family House Industry

The Swedish industry for wooden multi-family houses have in comparison with houses in concrete had a relatively small market share. This contradicts EU’s ambitions defined in the Europe 2020 strate ...

PMU151 ECONOMIC BURDEN OF BIOSIMILAR DELIVERY IN FRANCE: REAL WORLD ANALYSIS FROM THE PERMANENT SAMPLE OF NATIONAL HEALTH INSURANCE BENEFICIARIES, BETWEEN 2007 TO 2017

Biosimilars drugs represent significant savings for the French National Insurance. The biologic drugs environment is challenging in France and health authorities create stronger incentives to encourage biosimilar prescription and the loss of patents has accelerated. The aim of the study is to analyszed the economic burden and the market share evolution of biosimilar drugs based on claims data “permanent sample of national health insurance” between 2007 (first biosimilar launch) and 2017. Retrospective observational study of biosimilars and reference products consumptions. We have extracted the health insurance reimbursement for all biosimilar and reference medicinal products commercialized in France during the period. Market shares were calculated by dividing the number of biosimilars packages delivered to all drug packages (biosimilar and references). Costs (in Euro) were extrapolated to national level by using coefficient published by the national health insurance office (CNAM). Consumptions of 11 biosimilars and 6 reference drugs were analyzed. Biosimilar expenditures were €0,7 billion compared to €6,5 billion for reference drugs. Biosimilar market shares increased from 4% to 19% between 2010 and 2017. Biosimilar drugs like filgrastim and epoetin had the most important expenditures (respectively €286 million and €186 million). In 2017, these same drugs had the most important market shares with respectively 80% and 63%. On the other side, biosimilar drugs like etanercept and insulin glargin had the smallest expenditures during the period (respectively €7,3 million and €7,2 million) and the smallest market share (4% each) in 2017. This study demonstrate that biosimilar drug market increased during the period. The “Health National Strategy » biosimilar objective for 2022: 80% of market share is achievable if the market keeps the actual trend. Patient’s characteristics description could be complementary to this study, to give more information to the biosimilar landscape.

Disentangling economic, cultural, and nutritional motives to identify entry points for regulating a wildlife commodity chain

Development of reduction policies for products risking the health or the environment usually begins with the question of whether the most promising entry point is reducing production, distribution or consumption. We aim to answer this crucial question for bushmeat, a wildlife product whose unsustainable harvest threatens biodiversity and food security. We collected one of the largest data sets available on bushmeat commodity chains by interviewing 348 hunters, 202 bushmeat traders, 190 restaurant owners, and 985 consumers in 47 urban and rural settlements around Taï National Park, Côte d'Ivoire. We examined 1) structural traits by network analyses and 2) disentangled the underlying economic, cultural, and nutritional motives for bushmeat utilization at the level of production (hunters), distribution (bushmeat traders), and consumption (households). We found that while economic drivers determined hunting, trading was associated with economic and cultural drivers and consumption was purely influenced by cultural habits. Bushmeat traders were promising candidates for effective regulation interventions, but held a small market share and the risk of displacement to other trading channels remains. Since cultural motives for consumption provide a key opportunity for large-scale behavioral changes, we propose consumers as the most effective point of entry for interventions. However, any such consumer level intervention should be supported by programs providing the remaining commodity chain actors with alternative livelihoods. Generally, interventions into the complex social-ecological system of wildlife commodity chains must consider interdependencies and require multi-actor approaches and monitoring to avoid displacement and diffusion effects and to guarantee a socially and ecologically sustainable change.

Government guarantees and the risk-taking of financial institutions: evidence from a regulatory experiment

The potential dark side of government guarantees, introduced to mitigate concerns about financial stability during economic downturns, is that they may create incentives for excessive risk-taking. In a low-interest rate environment, this effect may be even stronger as financial institutions try to “reach for yield”. In this paper, we use the 2008 introduction of unlimited deposit insurance for all credit unions in the province of British Columbia, Canada, to examine the effect of government guarantees on financial institutions’ earnings uncertainty. We find that the policy change resulted in an economically and statistically significant decrease in earnings uncertainty. In addition, although deposits grew following the policy change, lending did not increase and instead capitalization ratios improved. Overall, our results suggest that the provincial government guarantee boosted depositor confidence and increased the flow of funds to the insured financial institutions. We do not find support for the risk-taking hypothesis but instead show that risk management improved following the policy change. Finally, the effect of the policy change was stronger for smaller, more levered credit unions as well as those with fewer members and smaller market share.

Simultaneous estimation of battery electric vehicle adoption with endogenous willingness to pay

Abstract To alleviate climate change and health issues caused by the transportation sector, a number of countries and sub-national regions have enacted policies to promote adoption of plug-in vehicles, including policies encouraging the battery electric vehicle (BEV) adoption. Despite the potential benefits of BEVs to both society and consumers, barriers such as high purchase price and limited driving range impede the widespread adoption of BEVs, as evidenced by the small market share of BEVs at present. There is a need to better understand the process in which people make vehicle decisions, and more importantly the value they are willing to pay for purchasing a vehicle. This study employs a bivariate model, wherein a binary probit model of BEV adoption is simultaneously estimated with a log-linear regression of willingness to pay (WTP). The model accounts for the endogeneity of WTP to the equation of BEV adoption and also captures the cross-equation error correlation between the two model components. The estimation results using the 2016 California Vehicle Survey determines the associated influence of factors such as socio-economic characteristics, residential energy sources and prices, and travel behavior, as well as two sets of attitudinal/preferential factors including importance of vehicle attributes and BEV concern factors. The sensitivity analysis of the results reveals that BEV owners are more inclined towards adding another BEV to their households than those with other fuel types and it can be inferred that consumers’ familiarity with the benefits and costs of BEVs may lead to its higher adoption rates.