infonet-economy

Multinational Corporations can contribute to reach the targeted poverty reduction goals – the Millennium Development Goals of the United Nations. Linking the core business of a multinational with development goals can be found in the concept of Serving the Base of the Pyramid mainly pushed by C.K. Prahalad and Stuart L. Hart. In the “classic” development work, bottom up approaches, which give more power to the poor, are taking advance in the theoretical debate. This know how however, hasn’t found a systematic consideration in the BoP concept yet. Focusing on Multinational Corporations, the paper takes a closer look at bottom up development approaches and agues for the importance of integrating this know how in the BoP debate by highlighting the relation between the concepts.

Revolutionary developments in economics are rare. The conservative bias of the field and its enshrined knowledge make it difficult to introduce new ideas not in line with received theory. Happiness research, however, has the potential to change economics substantially. Its findings, which are gradually being taken into account in standard economics, can be considered revolutionary in three respects: the measurement of experienced utility using psychologists' tools for measuring subjective well-being, new insights into how human beings value goods and services and social conditions that include consideration of such non-material values as autonomy and social relations, and policy consequences of these new insights that suggest different ways for government to affect individual well-being. In Happiness, Bruno Frey, emphasizing empirical evidence rather than theoretical conjectures, substantiates these three revolutionary claims for happiness research.

After tracing the major developments of happiness research in economics and demonstrating that we have gained important new insights into how income, unemployment, inflation, and income demonstration affect well-being, Frey examines democracy and federalism, self-employment and volunteer work, marriage, terrorism, and watching television from the new perspective of happiness research. Turning to policy implications, Frey describes how government can provide the conditions under which people can achieve well-being, arguing that effective political institutions and decentralized decision making play crucial roles. Happiness demonstrates the achievements of the economic happiness revolution and points the way to future research.

We provide a critique of the development in organisation studies of the idea of ‘unlearning’ as allegedly imported from the psychology literature by Hedberg and understood to mean the manageable discard of knowledge precedent to and aiding later learning. We re-review the psychology literature and in contrast to Hedberg, find that this definition of unlearning is not empirically warranted. We re-examine a selection of highly cited articles in the organisational literature that claim to have conducted empirical research into the Hedberg model of unlearning. We find none provide evidence of its existence. Typically, under the label ‘unlearning’ evidence is provided of a conventional process of theory-change, the setting aside (not deletion) of an established understanding in favour of new understanding when presented with perceived new facts. In all cases that we examine, clear alternative and less problematic concepts should provide a better conceptual framework for the research, such as learning, theory-change, discard of practice and extinction. It follows that the unlearning literature is not in fact the independent, scholarly and scientific literature that many of its adherents believe it to be. We recommend that for concepts allegedly imported from other disciplines more frequent commissioning of cross-disciplinary reviews may encourage the critical works so obviously lacking in the unlearning literature.

When deciding between product alternatives, consumers have to compare the observed prices to their internal reference price to determine whether the offer is a good deal or not. For product innovations, for which no reference price has been established, it is unclear against which standard the observed price is compared. Despite extensive research on the use of reference prices, little attention has been devoted to the formation of an internal reference price for an unfamiliar product category. We suggest two mechanisms of how reference prices are constructed and find support for these in two experiments. Reference prices for an unfamiliar product category can either be formed through repeated exposure to incidental price information or through transfer of price information from a familiar, similar product category to an unfamiliar product category. Crucial is however that the product price-value relationship is consistent; a condition often not accounted for in product innovation testing.

The share of the public sector in health insurance provision
varies enormously from country to country. It is larger in more redistributive countries. We provide a possible theoretical explanation for these facts: a public health insurance system, fi nanced by taxes, can be an effi cient means of redistribution, complementary to income taxation. This relies on the assumption of a negative correlation between income and morbidity. We examine the empirical validity of this assumption on macro data.