This article investigates a manufacturer's optimal decisions on trade promotion and product line design when selling through an independent retailer in an uncertain market. Two major types of trade promotion, off-invoice and scan-back, are examined. The results demonstrate that both demand uncertainty and trade promotion policies significantly influence the retailer's ordering behavior. Specifically, high market demand volatility may induce the retailer to place positive orders, but the scan-back policy provides weaker incentives for such orders than the off-invoice policy. Moreover, when the market exhibits discrete demand uncertainty, the manufacturer may prefer the scan-back policy over the off-invoice policy, regardless of whether a single product or a product line is offered. This preference becomes stronger as the product line length increases, suggesting that the scan-back policy is more effective at managing demand uncertainty across multiple products. This study further reveals that under demand uncertainty, product line extension can be achieved by reallocating demand risk, which the manufacturer accomplishes by adopting trade promotion strategies. We also identify a policy-dependent difference in the retailer's incentives. Under the off-invoice policy, the retailer is more willing to carry a longer product line compared to under the scan-back policy. Finally, the main results hold under robustness checks incorporating marginal cost concerns and random market-size probabilities. The findings of this study provide new insights into the joint design of trade promotion and product line strategies under demand uncertainty. Managerial Relevance Statement-Drawing upon the findings, we provide the following valuable insights for managers of retailers and manufacturers. First, managers of retailers should recognize the critical impact of demand disruptions on retail decision-making and leverage data-driven tools to forecast market demand volatility. Given the feasible trade promotion policies offered by upstream manufacturers, retailers can integrate consumer purchasing data with predictive analytics to develop optimal ordering strategies. Second, managers of manufacturers should account for the interaction between product line decisions and trade promotion strategies rather than evaluating them independently. In particular, they are encouraged to invest in technologies that enable the implementation of scanning systems supporting scan-back policies under demand uncertainty. Such scanning systems are especially effective when firms operate extended product lines. Moreover, in the presence of uncertain factors such as technology-induced demand disruptions and various upstream-downstream discount mechanisms, manufacturers should actively engage in product innovation and product line extension projects to enhance their competitiveness and resilience in an increasingly volatile market environment. This article also contributes to SDG 12.

Numerous manufacturers started to embrace live-streaming selling channels in addition to their preexisting retail channels during the outbreak of COVID-19. Our work investigates a retailer’s optimal strategy for sharing demand information with a manufacturer who may collaborate with a streamer to build a live-streaming selling channel. The results indicate that the manufacturer’s live-streaming selling channel expansion via an influencer does not necessarily harm the retailer because the retailer can free ride on the market expansion due to the social influence of the streamer. We also provide a rationale for the widespread voluntary information sharing observed in the era of live-streaming selling. The retailer can discourage or encourage the manufacturer to establish a live-streaming channel by sharing the demand information, which depends on the streamer’s social influence. In addition, potential changes to the information sharing policy result in several unexpected profit implications for the manufacturer, whose profit exhibits a nonmonotonic relationship to the streamer’s social influence and the channel expansion cost. In other words, our results counterintuitively show that the manufacturer may suffer from cooperating with a highly influential streamer in a live-streaming channel but benefit from choosing a less influential one.

This study offers a new approach to measure the intensity of local government debt regulations using textual analysis. Based on a sample of 71 rural banks in 21 Chinese provinces from 2013 to 2019, we investigate the impact of the number and proportion of keywords in local debt-related documents on rural banks' performance. Results show that an increase in debt regulation improves banks' performance by reducing local government debt. Moreover, an increase in the proportion of government shareholdings in rural banks as well as fiscal pressure weaken this impact; an increase in economic development pressure strengthens this impact.

Technological innovation enables firms not only to produce green and energy-efficient products but also to more conveniently collect consumer data for price discrimination. However, such price discrimination can easily lead to unfairness when consumers find that they pay a higher price for the same product than others. This paper considers a two-period model with two firms differentiated with respect to greenness and studies the impact of behavior-based pricing (BBP) on the firm when consumers exhibit fairness concerns and the products differ in the improvement in their greenness. We find that when the greening improvement level is exogenous, the existence of consumer fairness concerns and differentiation in the level of greenness make the firm’s practice of BBP profitable. When the greening improvement level is endogenous, fairness concerns can increase the differentiation in the improvement in greenness. In addition, consumers’ fairness concerns do not always lead to BBP practices yielding a higher consumer surplus. The differentiation in the greenness level and fairness concerns mean that the use of BBP reduces social welfare.

Currently, an increasing number of online platforms are entering retail markets, sharing a common man-ufacturer with traditional retailers. This study focuses on the platform entry strategy in a supply chain, where a manufacturer that could voluntarily disclose quality information sells its product via a retailer. Two common distribution contracts (reselling and agency selling) between the manufacturer and the on-line platform are considered. We find that downstream entry induces the manufacturer to reveal more quality information to the consumer than in the monopoly setting and that the agency contract results in a higher (lower) transparency level of the supply chain than the reselling contract when the commission fee is small (large). Moreover, contrary to the conventional wisdom that downstream entry likely harms incumbent retailers, we show that entry is not necessarily a problem that harms existing traditional re-tailers due to the increased quality transparency caused by entry. It is generally believed that a higher commission fee may encourage the platform to adopt the agency contract. In contrast, we demonstrate that the platform does not always benefit from a higher commission fee when an agency selling contract is adopted; the platform still chooses a reselling contract to enter the market in a context with asymmet-ric quality information, despite the higher commission fee. That is, the manufacturer's quality disclosure can create a new win-win outcome for the platform and manufacturer in the choice of distribution con-tract.(c) 2023 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Cause marketing (CM) has become a prevalent form of generating support for a cause while netting valuable visibility for both the firm and the environmental nonprofit organisation. In this paper, to better help the government encourage CM campaigns, we adopt a stylised game-theoretical model to explore the strategic role of CM in sustainable supply chain management (SSCM) for an offline-online dual-channel system. We show that the offline retailer's incentives for CM can be weakened by online drop-shipping, and that the manufacturer prefers online drop-shipping rather than batch ordering if the degree of consumer mistrust for CM is sufficiently low. One other counter intuitive finding is that offline CM may be harmful to sustainability when the online channel is dominant. This result suggests that the government should carefully regulate CM in such supply chain systems.

An extensive body of work within the marketing and economics literature has been devoted to studying vertical restraints, yet only a few researchers have investigated the violation behavior of retailers. In this paper, we investigate violation behavior in the context of retailer price maintenance. We investigate this behavior using a unique data set from a subsidy program in China, which includes transaction-level information that shows retail price maintenance (RPM) practices in multiple product categories by multiple manufacturers across multiple markets. The results from our fixed effects regression show that retailer violations are more likely to occur when intra-product competition is high. However, how retailer violation likelihood varies with inter-product competition may depend on the product category. We find that inter-product competition, is negatively associated with the likelihood of violation, for “less popular” product categories in the program such as washing machines, air conditioners, etc., but is positively associated with the likelihood of violation for “popular” product categories such as refrigerators, televisions, and cell phones. Our research provides some of the first empirical evidence about retailer violation behavior under RPM in the world’s largest emerging market by focusing on the relationship between violation behavior and market structure. We discuss the implications for monitoring efforts of manufacturers and regulators.

As the current important environmental management method in China, the green development concept aims to improve the environmental development status of the region from the perspectives of energy conservation, emission reduction, and pollutant control. Based on the concept of green development, we mainly consider the allocation of resources and the distribution of emission rights from the perspective of resource allocation and improve the efficiency of green development. We analyze how to allocate the additional fixed assets investment and emission rights to each province. We determine that the government should prioritize the faster economic growth areas when there is enough additional investment. Some coastal areas are not priority allocation regions, indicating that their development has basically reached saturation. We also investigated the emission rights of “three wastes” of 30 provinces in China. The result shows that only Shanghai, Sichuan, Guangxi, and Gansu are affected by three wastes emissions after the allocation of additional resources, and their emissions of those three wastes are all reduced. Finally, we dynamically analyze the amount of resource reallocation between different regions under different growth (reduction) rates of fixed resources and emission rights while ensuring maximum overall efficiency. Eventually, we obtained the optimal investment increase and emission reduction by the algorithm.

Rural consumers may face not only the challenge of affordability but also the problem of limited accessibility. Can a government’s subsidy program effectively address these issues? This paper examines the impact of a large-scale subsidy program, “Household Electrical Appliances Going to the Countryside,” offered by the Chinese government. The government regulation imposes price subsidy combined with price ceiling on products in the program. We consider two effects of the subsidy: lowering the retail price to make the product more affordable to consumers and encouraging manufacturers to expand their distribution coverage to make products more accessible to consumers. We build a dynamic model of oligopoly to study how firms adjust their distribution coverage. Conditional on the model estimates, we evaluate the program’s effects on social welfare, consumer surplus, and firms’ market performance and marketing channel decisions through counterfactual analyses. We find that the subsidy program increases social welfare by CNY¥ 0.209 billion, as a result of a subsidy expense of CNY¥ 0.236 billion. When breaking down the impact, we find it increases consumer surplus by CNY¥ 0.184 billion (50%), manufacturers’ profits by CNY¥ 0.125 billion (53%) and manufacturers’ payoff by CNY¥ 2.5 million (17%). Specifically, 14% (13.2%) of the consumer surplus (firm profit) increase are from changes in distribution coverage, and the rest is from the subsidy (price changes). The program’s return of investment (i.e., social welfare minus subsidy expense), which is negative, however, could be improved by applying a relatively lower subsidy rate.

The factors that influence whether financial products would raise enough amounts to reach the standard (the actual amounts of products raised reach prescribed minimum of planned amounts) were studied.A sample of 13 667 bank financial products issued in two years from 2011 December to 2013 December was used,which contains two parts (a training sample and a prediction sample),and Logit model was employed to analyze the relationship between the basic elements of bank financial products and raise compliance rate.In addition,the validity of the model was verified with a prediction sample.The results indicate that higher credit ratings of the issuing banks,wider sales area,higher expected rates of return,and lower prescribed minimum of planned amounts of producted raised will create a higher raise compliance rate.Furthermore,among the four factors,bank's credit ratings made the largest influence,followed by sales area,expected rates of return ceiling and prescribed minimum of planned amounts of producted raised.

基于Romer模型,构建了一个带有制度约束以及人力资本约束的4部门内生增长模型,选取东西部地区各11省的省级面板数据进行实证分析。实证结果给出了制度变迁的代理变量非国有化率、对外开放以及政府干预程度对东西部地区经济增长的影响,总体看来其对经济增长都起着促进作用,但是制度变迁每个具体的代理变量也表现出了各自的差异性。

This paper applies the DEA ratio model to calculate the environmental efficiency of Chinese provinces from 2005 to 2012.The results show:the pollutants significantly reduce the average efficiency of each region , so the effi-ciency evaluation without considering pollutants is not scientific ;the environmental efficiency of the western region is the highest, followed by the eastern region and the middle region is the lowest .At the same time, this paper uses the multiple regression model to analyze the factors which affect the environmental efficiency , and finds that the AGDP , external trade and population density have a significantly positive effect on environmental efficiency ;In contrast, the proportion of the second industry and the number of patents have a significantly negative impact on the improvement of environment efficiency;Investments in industrial pollution control don't have an obvious influence on environmental efficiency.Finally, some advices have been given based on the empirical research .

企业是创新的主体,创新绩效是其发展程度的评判指标.分析企业创新投入的资本结构和创新绩效之间的关系,结果表明:相比权益资本,企业经营产生的自由现金流和资本公积对创新绩效的改善有更显著作用;长期贷款比短期贷款更能促进企业创新,提升企业绩效,且债务资本的滞后期与绩效呈倒U型关系;企业股权越集中,创新绩效越明显;且股权集中度通过企业用于研发的资本公积间接影响创新绩效.基于此,提出以下建议:合理配置企业内部自由资金流,保证稳定供给;利用债务的税盾效应,降低财务杠杆,提高经营杠杆;争取国家补助,加强企业、科研机构、高校等主体之间的合作,充分利用社会资本,形成知识生产-扩散-吸收-转化的良性循环.

Data envelopment analysis (DEA) has gained great popularity in environmental performance measurement because it can provide a synthetic, standardized environmental performance index when pollutants are suitably incorporated into the traditional DEA framework. This paper applies the DEA approaches to evaluate the CO2 emission performance and measure its satisfaction degree of 40 countries and regions from 2008 to 2009. We use the input variables of capital, energy consumption and population and the output variables of gross domestic product (GDP) and the amount of fossil-fuel CO2 emissions. Past studies about the application of DEA to environmental performance measurement have not considered uncontrollable factors. In this paper, we present the DEA formulas with controllable and uncontrollable factors to measure environment performance and its satisfaction degree. We first define and construct the environmental production technologies with desirable and undesirable outputs. The degree of environment satisfaction performance based on the DEA approach can be computed by solving a series of data envelopment analysis formulas. A case study of 40 countries and regions applying the DEA approach is also presented.

高技术产业是以当代尖端技术为基础的高研发投入产业群,是国民经济的战略性先导产业,对产业结构调整和经济增长方式转变发挥着重要作用.运用熵权法这一客观评价方法,对我国国有企业、内资企业、港澳台资企业及外资企业的技术创新能力进行评价分析,有助于提高我国企业的技术创新能力.

This study introduced a stress-testing model with a dummy variable that refers to write-off non-performing loans (NPL) by Agricultural Bank of China. A new variable Y that indicated the rate of NPL in major national commercial banks in terms of logit transformation was applied to test stress tolerance. This article built a regression model on the basis of four explanation variables: the growth rate of GDP, indicator of customer price, the growth rate of supplying nominal currency and indicator of house price. Then we took advantages of VAR model to establish the relationship between variables. Based on the model, diverse scenario was set up to conduct stress test to NPL of commercial banks. The test covered four quarters and discovered that lower growth rate of GDP, slump in CPI, slowdown in supply of nominal currency and surging price of house are in charge of short-term increase in non-performing loans. From long-term perspective, the commercial banks would initiate internal system to mitigate the shock from volatile macro factors.

By using panel data related to high-tech industry from 2000-2009,we build DEA model based on Malmquist productivity index and its decomposition index,which contains technical progress efficiency and comprehensive efficiency changes index,and therefore make empirical analysis on the development of productivity of RD in high-tech industry.The results show that the development of high-tech industry is not balanced in all industries,the development of productivity in some parts of industries are volatile,while the other parts are relatively stable.Overall,all the index of high-tech industry productivity show very stable performance,we also find that from 2000 to 2004 the main motive force which promotes the development of total factor productivity is the improvement of comprehensive management level,and from 2005 to 2009 the main motive force is technical progress.The main supporting force of the average growth rate of total factor productivity is derived from the technical progress efficiency.

This paper uses a Vector Error Correction Model (VECM), a method to estimate the adjustment speed of variables toward their long-run relationship in the short run, to investigate the dynamic relationship between the prices of EUA, coal, natural gas and electricity futures. It finds that there is a long-run equilibrium relationship between them. Short-run relationships between them are also revealed by impulse response analysis. The price of electricity futures has a positive short-run response to EUA futures price shocks. It also has a positive short-run response to the price of fossil fuel futures. Price shocks in EUA futures have a significant impact on fossil fuel prices, but fossil fuel prices have a small impact on EUA futures. The effect of price shocks in EUA and coal futures on the price of peak load electricity futures is smaller than that of the price of base load electricity futures.

This paper fills the gap in the literature that the functions of the European Union Allowance (EUA) futures have only been studied in the pilot phase of the European Union Emission Trading Scheme (EU ETS) and no market evolvement has been explored. The cost-of-carry pricing efficiency of the EUA futures and information spillover between the EUA spot market and futures market are examined in Phase I (2005–2007) and Phase II (2008–2012), respectively. First, it was found that only the December 2007 futures price was in long-run equilibrium with the spot price, but the relationship was not given by a cost-of-carry model. Second, the information spillover pattern also changed from Phase I to Phase II. The leading role of futures contract in price discovery can only be seen in Phase I, but not in Phase II. We conclude that, in the second phase of EU ETS, the market fundamentals are imposing stronger impacts on EUA price formation while the impact from speculation has weakened significantly.

This paper gives an introduction to the European Union Emission Trading Scheme （EU ETS） and then uses the European Union Allowance （EUA） futures traded on European Climate Exchange （ECX） to represent the emission permits （carbon assets） and applies the Copula function to get the joint distribution function of the yields of EUA futures and a QDII flmd in China. Based on the joint distribution function of the two assets, the distribution function of any portfolio of the two assets is presented. Optimal portfolios of the two assets with the minimal VaRs at different significance levels are shown. It is found that all optimal portfolios exhibit a higher rate of return than the original QDII fund, in addition to their lower VaRs at different significance levels. Furthermore, the optimal investment proportional coefficient is found to be with a low sensitivity to the variation of VaRs, affirming the feasibility of the proposed portfolio construction method.