infonet-economy

Online customer reviews (OCRs) have become a major source of information for customers in the Internet. Understanding the impact of OCRs on customers' decisions is an important challenge for academics and practitioners. We apply a choice-based conjoint experiment that combines all relevant levels of the OCR dimensions (valence, volume, and variance) and that estimates the effect...

By 2030, sixty percent of the world’s population is projected to live in cities. The majority of this growth in urban areas is expected to occur in cities in Asia, Africa and Latin America. The transition from rural to urban life styles is likely to increase household consumption and will require massive investments in urban infrastructure.

How will society cope with this...

In order to promote risky behavior, it is a common practice that casinos incentivize their customers through the provision of free financial means, i.e., free play. Thereby, casino operators try to exploit what is known as the house money effect. However, evidence from the field is scarce and prior research provides explanations that predict different behavioral outcomes. This...

Does the government control of school systems facilitate equality in school quality? Whether centralized or localized control produces more equality depends not only on what ‘could’ happen in principle, but also on what does happen in practice. We use the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) database to examine the association between school sector and the variance...

The main barriers to maximize the benefits and minimize the risk of modern agricultural biotechnology for society and the environment are not technical but regulatory in nature. Preventive regulation of agricultural biotechnology must be understood as a policy response to public rather than scientific concerns about the development and use of genetically modified organisms (GMOs) in...

This book addresses the ability of market-based instruments to improve the sustainable provision of environmental services. The author combines field research and insights from the multi-stakeholder dialogue at the FAO to analyze the gap between the predictions provided by theory and the corresponding outcomes in practice. In particular, the author challenges the theory behind...

The cross-border flows of goods, investment, services, know-how and people associated with international production networks–call it ‘supply-chain trade’ for short–has transformed the world. The WTO has not kept pace. This paper argues that adapting world trade governance to the realities of supply-chain trade will require a new organization–a WTO 2.0 as it were. Reasoning on the...

In 1994, the Zapatistas took up arms claiming for indigenous people rights in Chiapas, Mexico. After 12 days of civil war, the national government called for dialogue. Nevertheless, since then, it has deployed a "low intensity war" over the self-declared Zapatista Autonomous Communities. At the same time, the Zapatistas started to implement a new set of institutions, which have...

This paper proposes novel identification techniques to examine the trade-offs that microfinance institutions face between increasing their profits and their social impact. It uses a quantile regression approach to examine how these trade-offs evolve as institutions become more commercialized. The identification strategy is based on an instrumental variable approach, and also...