In public services, the political component of the marketing environment has a major importance, as all decisions adopted within central administration influence both the objectives and measures implemented by units of local government and other public service providers. Any discontinuity in the...

The importance-performance grid is a marketing instrument used to make decisions regarding the growth of the consumersâ€(tm) satisfaction, by optimizing the attributes of products. This grid is a useful instrument, as it is shown in the paper, to the extent to which the importance and...

For developing economies the development of enterprises should be a strategic goal, this way of thinking may become viable only as a result of a combination of judicious analysis based on specific local economic aspects and a set of actions to correct any slippage or amplify existing development...

The "revolving door" phenomenon has become very common in most industrialised countries, and is leading to conflicts of interest as well as economic distortions. The purpose of this paper is to develop an indicator of the distortionary effects of the revolving door - The Revolving Door Indicator...

This paper examines bidding behavior in a setting where post-bid-letting project modifications occur. These modifications change both the costs and payouts to the winning contractor, making the contract incomplete. Recent empirical research shows that bidders incorporate the likelihood of such...

Improving a company's bargaining position is often cited as a chief motivation to vertically integrate with suppliers. This paper expands on that view in building a new theory of vertical integration. In my model firms integrate to gain bargaining power against other suppliers in the production...

Can an increasing importance of intangible capital explain increases in markups and profits? I use a heterogeneous firm model to show how intangible capital, characterized by fixed costs and uncertainty, is related to markups and profits at the industry level. The scalability and uncertainty...

This paper develops a fully-endogenous, variety-expansion growth model with firm-specific quality heterogeneity, limit pricing, and an endogenous distribution of markups.Trade induces only firms with high-quality products to export, whereas firms with low-quality products serve only the domestic...

We develop a new monthly panel survey of business executives and a new question design that elicits subjective probability distributions over own-firm outcomes at a one-year lookahead horizon. Our Survey of Business Uncertainty (SBU) began in 2014 and now covers 1,500 firms drawn from all 50...

This paper has made an attempt to identify the role of lead firms in mapping the activities related to upgrading. Upgrading refers to the process through which firms may move up the value chain. The literature identifies different types of upgrading such as product, process, functional and...