Price Incentives and Coordination in a Two‐Product Decentralized Supply Chain

We investigate pricing incentives for competing retailers who distribute two variants of a manufacturer's product in a decentralized supply chain. Under a two‐dimensional Hotelling model, we derive decentralized retailers' prices for the products, and distortions in pricing when compared to centrally optimal prices. We show that price distortions decrease as consumers' travel cost between retailers increases, due to less intense competition. However, price distortions do not change monotonically in consumers' switching cost between products within stores. To fix decentralized retailers' price distortions, we construct a two‐part pricing contract that coordinates the supply chain. We show that the coordinating contract is Pareto‐improving and analyze increase in the supply chain profit under coordination.     

Non‐Manipulable House Allocation With Rent Control

In many real‐life house allocation problems, rents are bounded from above by price ceilings imposed by a government or a local administration. This is known as rent control. Because some price equilibria may be disqualified given such restrictions, this paper proposes an alternative equilibrium concept, called rationing price equilibrium, tailored to capture the specific features of housing markets with rent control. An allocation rule that always selects a rationing price equilibrium is defined, and it is demonstrated to be constrained efficient and (group) non‐manipulable for “almost all” preference profiles. In its bounding cases, the rule reduces to a number of well‐known mechanisms from the matching literature. In this sense, the housing market with rent control investigated in this paper integrates several of the predominant matching models into a more general framework.     

Bounded Memory and Biases in Information Processing

Before choosing among two actions with state‐dependent payoffs, a Bayesian decision‐maker with a finite memory sees a sequence of informative signals, ending each period with fixed chance. He summarizes information observed with a finite‐state automaton. I characterize the optimal protocol as an equilibrium of a dynamic game of imperfect recall; a new player runs each memory state each period. Players act as if maximizing expected payoffs in a common finite action decision problem. I characterize equilibrium play with many multinomial signals. The optimal protocol rationalizes many behavioral phenomena, like “stickiness,” salience, confirmation bias, and belief polarization.     

State carnivals and the subvention of multiculturalism in Singapore

Increasing attention is being paid to the specificities of Asian multiculturalism in relation to ethnic pluralism, citizenship and developmental state formation. This article examines these relationships by analysing three carnival events in colonial and postcolonial Singapore that were organized by the state to promote its official multiculturalism. Through its cultural logics of horizontal racial segmentation, cascading symbolic authority from the state to co-opted communal representatives and multi-modal ritual iteration, the 1937 King George VI coronation celebrations proffered an imperial multiculturalism based on mediating plural groups and procedural norms. Adopting the same cultural logics in the 1970s, the newly-independent nation-state revived and transformed Chingay, a creole Chinese religious procession, into an annual parade celebrating the nation as comprising racially plural groups bound together by the modern ethos of progress the developmental state exemplified. In the 2000s, Chingay has been turned into an international spectacle celebrating Singapore as a cosmopolitan global city of hybridizing multiculturalism. But indicative of new racial-class segmentation, the old nation-building pluralism is promoted by Racial Harmony Day carnivals held in suburban public housing neighborhoods. This bifurcated multiculturalism reflects the developmental state's attempts to deal with new citizenship trends as they grind against the old ethnic pluralism. While faced with the same issues globalization brings, this postcolonial multiculturalism is distinctively different from liberal multiculturalism, not least because the subvention of multiculturalism is achieved through the state appropriation of vernacular cultural practices through its carnivals.     

Parental Strains and Rewards Among Mothers: The Role of Education

Using data from the NICHD Study of Early Child Care and Youth Development (N = 1,198), this study examines the associations between education and parental strains and rewards among mothers of young children. Findings indicate that a college degree or more is related to less parenting anxiety, but more role captivity, and less new life meaning from parenting than lower levels of education. Differences by education are partly explained by variation in levels of progressive parenting values and work commitment, but remain significant. These patterns indicate that education provides greater resources that ease parental anxiety, but also leads to greater perceived demands of having a successful career, which contribute to more role captivity and less new life meaning from parenting.     

Staging language: An introduction to the sociolinguistics of performance

Staged performance involves the overt, scheduled identification and elevation of one or more people to perform, with a clearly demarcated distinction between them and the audience. It involves the agentive use of language, building on the foundation of existing social meanings. Staged performances tend to be linguistically stylized, pushing the limits of language creativity. They have the potential to trigger significant sociolinguistic effects, circulating novel forms and contributing to language change. The paradigms used in this theme issue for approaching language performance include Bakhtin's notion of Stylization, Bell's Audience and Referee Design, Silverstein's Indexicality, Agha's Enregisterment, and Bauman's construct of Discursive Culture. Themes that run through the articles include: a concept of identity that is part product, part process; the centrality of the audience; the reflexivity of staged performance; and the importance of non‐linguistic modalities such as music and appearance. The language analysis in this collection of papers concentrates mainly on phonological features of varieties of English, finding instances of selectivity, mis‐realization, overshoot and undershoot in their performances of a range of targeted dialects.     

Cut the Crap: Language — Risks and Relationships in Systemic Therapy and Supervision

This article concerns the use of language in both therapy and supervision, and how it contributes to the necessary risk‐taking that will be a part of therapists' and supervisors' repertoires. The focus will be on my own examples in both roles, and will refer to both successes and failures, while questioning the usefulness of either concept. Within a postmodern paradigm, and influenced by thinkers including Foucault and Bakhtin as well as systemic clinicians, I will examine the use of language (including in cross‐cultural settings where risks can sometimes be amplified) and of humour and self while exploring the meanings of identity. I contend that all relationships contain some element of risk and the ways in which we create a safe enough context, through the uses of language as well as nonlinguistic means, are the crucial elements in our endeavours as supervisors and therapists. I favour the idea that therapy is more of an art than a science and that this is most exemplified in the graceful use of language by which we strive to engage rather than alienate people. The article may be considered by some as being useful advice, and by others as a risk too far, such is the controversial nature of language, which highlights the importance of relationships and context.     

Brokerage in the Sacred Sphere: Religious Leaders as Community Problem Solvers in Rural Malawi1

Religious leaders in Sub‐Saharan Africa do not just deal with the spiritual needs of members but are also heavily engaged in dealing with social problems and material needs. Although true elsewhere, the realities of limited state infrastructure and an increasingly diverse religious landscape make it crucial for religious entrepreneurs to deal with material problems if they hope to gain adherents. This article applies the concepts of problem solving and brokerage ( Burt, 2005 ; Knoke, 1990 ) to a case study of religious leaders in Balaka, a small town of rural Malawi. I argue that religious leaders solve problems in three major areas—material infrastructure, activities and organization, and healthcare—and that they are able to do so at least partly because of their connections to various overlapping secular and religious networks. I focus both on the provision of material resources and the facilitation of effervescent experiences in order to advance a fuller understanding of the experience of poverty and the ways leaders in poor communities work to solve problems.     

Capacity Investment and Product Line Decisions of a Multiproduct Leader and a Focus Strategy Entrant

In this article, I investigate the capacity investment cost conditions where a multiproduct market leader may respond to a focus strategy entrant by using different strategies such as changing the product mix, production volumes, quality levels, and/or by investing in more capacity. The products offered in the market are quality differentiated and customers are heterogeneous in their willingness to pay for quality. The capacity investment costs of the two firms (i.e., the leader and the entrant) may also be different. The classical Stackelberg model predicts that an incumbent does not change its position in response to entry. However, when heterogeneous customer base, product differentiation, and capacity costs are taken into consideration, I find that the leader with a low capacity cost may choose to expand its product line and increase its production. The leader with low capacity cost may introduce a product that it was holding back when the entrant has to bear the high‐capacity cost and cannibalization threat is relatively small. Nevertheless, the extent of production volume strategies reduces as the capacity cost increases for the leader. I also find that when the leader has the power to set the industry standards by deciding the quality levels, as a response to a high‐quality focused entrant, the leader increases both levels of quality and production of the low‐quality product. Moreover, when the capacity investment cost is high for both the entrant and the leader, I find that market prices may increase with entry.     

Transaction‐Specific Investments,Relational Norms,and ERP Customer Satisfaction: A Mediation Analysis*

Integrating the perspectives of transaction cost economics, the resource‐based view, and resource dependency theory, this study analyzes the institutional settings of enterprise resource planning (ERP) implementations in China. Specifically, it examines how bilateral transaction‐specific investments (TSIs) and relational governance mechanisms influence customer satisfaction with ERP implementations. The model is empirically tested using data from on‐site interviews with 208 ERP customers in China. The results demonstrate that the effects of vendors’ and customers’ TSIs on customer satisfaction are facilitated by multiple‐stage micromediational chains. The influence of TSIs on customer satisfaction is mediated by relational norms, and the impact of relational norms on customer satisfaction is bridged by perceived service quality and customer trust. Furthermore, the influence of vendors’ TSIs is stronger than the influence of customers’ TSIs. The findings contribute to business research and practice by providing valuable insights into how ERP vendors and customers should strategize TSIs to enhance relationship performance.