Look How Little I’m Advertising!

This paper studies the role of advertising and prices as signals of quality in a purely static setting, where repeat purchases are suppressed altogether, but where advertising affects demand directly. We first show, under standard regularity assumptions, that the high-quality firm will distort its price upwards and its level of advertising downwards compared to the complete-information case. We then show, under relatively mild additional conditions, that the high-quality firm will choose a level of advertising below that of the low-quality firm, even if the high-quality firm advertises most under complete information. Hence, empirically, a high price and a modest advertising budget may well signal high quality.quality; signaling; pricing; advertising

Pre-Auction Offers in Asymmetric First-Price and Second-Price Auctions

We consider “must-sell” auctions with asymmetric buyers. First, we study auctions with two asymmetric buyers, where the distribution of valuations of the strong buyer is “stretched” relative to that of the weak buyer. Then, it is known that inefficient first-price auctions are more profitable for the seller than efficient second-price auctions. This is because the former favor the weak buyer. However, we show that the seller can do one better by augmenting the first-price auction by a pre-auction offer made exclusively to the strong buyer. Should the strong buyer reject the offer, the object is simply sold in an ordinary first-price auction. The result is driven by the fact that the unmodified first-price auction is too favorable to the weak buyer, and that the pre-auction offer allows some correction of this to the benefit of the seller. Secondly, we show quite generally that pre-auction offers never increase the profitability of second-price auctions, since they introduce the wrong kind of favoritism from the perspective of seller profits.first-price and second-price auctions; asymmetric bidders; pre-auction offers

Malaria mosquito resistance to agricultural insecticides: risk area mapping in Thailand

Malaria / Disease vectors / Waterborne diseases / Irrigated farming / Pest control / Insecticides / Public health / Risks / Mapping / GIS / Land use / Thailand / Chiang Mai / Mae Hong Son / Tak / Kanchanaburi

Land-surface modelling in hydrological perspective – a review

The purpose of this paper is to provide a review of the different types of energy-based land-surface models (LSMs) and discuss some of the new possibilities that will arise when energy-based LSMs are combined with distributed hydrological modelling. We choose to focus on energy-based approaches, because in comparison to the traditional potential evapotranspiration models, these approaches allow for a stronger link to remote sensing and atmospheric modelling. New opportunities for evaluation of distributed land-surface models through application of remote sensing are discussed in detail, and the difficulties inherent in various evaluation procedures are presented. Finally, the dynamic coupling of hydrological and atmospheric models is explored, and the perspectives of such efforts are discussed