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This year (2002), Taiwan participates in WTO under the worldwide economic depression. Besides facing the worldly market competition, Taiwan competes with the cheap labor force pressure from mainland China. In the meanwhile, Taiwan is at the transitional point of economic organization. K company is an over thirty-year overseas branch of an international Japanese Industry. How should it work out new management strategies for liquid crystal industry to promote its competition at this moment? Liquid crystal industry has developed for ten years. It has had one Crystal Cycle every three year. Under the economic depression, the demands of the worldwide PC market and information products have been decreasing. The price of panels has been going down. Factories have suffered heavy loss. Thus, how to work out management strategies for products to avoid virulent competition and to promote profitable competence is the most important issue for the managers of economic industry. This report research on K company¡¦s creative management strategies for liquid crystal. They include (1) Core Strategy (2) Strategic Resources (3) Customer Interface (4) Value Network (5) Customerization Goods Strategy. By industrial analysis and by management strategic analysis of Taiwan crystal industry, the report applies the organization analysis and research on business model, and then synthesizes K company¡¦s whole creative management strategies for liquid crystal industry. Key Words: liquid crystal, market competition, management strategy, customization goods

In the past, luxury goods only a few privileged people who can have, such as the nobility. However, due to the economic development made from the upgrading of the consumption patterns change, market liberalization, the Western to the East luxury wave of popular, people are willing to spend money to buy so-called high-priced luxury goods. In other words, the luxury goods consumption is a demand that has nothing to do with the survival of consumer behavior. However, why people are willing to buy luxury goods? What is the motive behind the demand of luxury goods? What are conditions to constitute a luxury market? If the above issues at a different time and space, we might have different answers. Obviously, the formation of a luxury market that behinds a very complicated message, and through observation of the luxury market, perhaps also to reflecting the political, economic or social and cultural meaning. This study attempted to take the rapid economic rise of China as an example, the luxury market with its observation of objects as a source of information, China's luxury market can produce, first, for the luxury goods industry, to see China's consumption why this market have the prospects for development to provide a favorable supply for the industry that can make growth to the industry. Second, as a observer to see, what are the purposes by consumers to buy the luxury goods. In addition, this study is expected to achieve these results. From China's special national characteristics and cultural values of fairness, such a luxury consumer behavior is the consumption of their special meaning. Between producers and consumers posed by the Chinese luxury goods market will show a positive development complement each other.

Thesis (M.P.A.)--University of Hong Kong, 2001. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 87-90).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, 2003. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 117-130). Also available in electronic version. Access restricted to campus users.

Thesis (Professional Degree)--University of Missouri, School of Mines and Metallurgy, 1924. / The entire thesis text is included in file. Typescript. Illustrated by author. Title from title screen of thesis/dissertation PDF file (viewed February 23, 2010) Includes bibliographical references (p. [101-105]) and index (p. [106-107]).

In this dissertation, we show how the firm can improve its revenue and competitiveness through segmenting the market by exploring consumer heterogeneity. In the first essay, we show that asymmetric assortment breadth among two competing retailers can emerge as an equilibrium when consumers differ in their prior knowledge about their product preferences and their shopping costs. Under this equilibrium, the full line retailer expands the market demand by attracting the uninformed consumers with large shopping costs and the single product retailer passes on the savings from a streamlined assortment to the informed consumers by setting a lower price. Therefore, the two retailers soften the competition between them and both achieve higher profits. In the second essay, we consider a setting in which consumers experience distinct instances of need for a durable product at random intervals and derive random amount of utility from each instance. Consumers are differentiated according to the frequency with which they experience instances of need. For a firm that provides a durable product to such a market, we consider the implications of selling versus renting on a per-usage basis. Selling minimizes transaction costs, but may result in inefficient utilization of units that are produced. Alternatively, per-usage rentals allow more utility to be generated per unit of product that is produced. Focusing on these trade-offs, we identify conditions under which the firm should sell, offer per-usage rentals, or offer a combination of the two. In the third essay, we continue to use the durable good framework to study how various forms of government subsidy programs shift consumer's demand patterns and thus generate different magnitude of additional savings in resource consumption. We give the conditions under which each type of cash rebate programs does the best in generating resource savings per dollar spent. / text

In recent years, the call for business actors to be part of collaborations addressing sustainable development has become more common. There is a consensus that no single sector alone can solve the environmental problems and poverty conditions challenging humanity. However, it is not clear if these cross-sector collaborations thrive when disasters can strike any time and when some actors are richer than others. Through a series of experiments involving threshold public goods games with stochastic shocks, this dissertation contains three related papers exploring different facets of the persistence of cooperation. The experiments were conducted in Sweden, the Philippines and South Africa, countries with varying disaster risk exposures and income structures. Cooperation in the face of disaster explores the effects of different types of uncertainties on cooperation, particularly when there is a risk for repeated disasters (i.e. losses resulting from inadequate cooperation). The results show that cooperation persists when we do not know when disasters may strike (i.e. timing), as well as when there are uncertainties on what is required to avoid the disaster (i.e. threshold) and which losses will be incurred (i.e. impact). Conditional cooperation and disaster uncertainty explores the mechanism behind the persistence of cooperation, as it investigates if conditionality continues to prevail in the face of disaster. The findings show that conditionality and free-riding attenuates while unconditional cooperation accelerates. Cooperating in an unequal and uncertain world explores what happens when inequality enters the picture. The findings reveal that cooperation remains the same when there is inequality and increases in the presence of uncertainty. The effect of uncertainty is stronger than inequality, with high unconditional cooperation and low freeriding. / <p>Diss. Stockholm :  Stockholm School of Economics, 2015</p>

In recent decades, a new direction of development economics has emerged, led by economists on a mission to improve the quality of life for citizens of developing countries through proven, cost-effective interventions. This micro-economic focus on development hinges on identifying barriers to growth and implementing targeted programs designed to alleviate these constraints. However, identifying constraints is far easier than measuring their magnitude, and designing effective measures to quantify these barriers remains a substantial challenge. Numerous microeconomic indicators of development are famously intractable and resist simple methods of accurate measurement. This dissertation tackles measurement challenges by quantifying three major development drivers: efficient investment, effective institutions, and public good provision. Using three case studies on business development and cooperation conducted in Russia and Kenya, I develop novel ways to quantify constraints and suggest methods to alleviate them. In the first chapter, I estimate marginal rates of return to capital for small retail firms, evaluate the causes of inefficiency and examine interventions that may aid growth. Next, I examine corruption as a barrier to small business growth and assess whether policy reform is capable of decreasing corrupt activity. Finally, I investigate the causes of heterogeneity in the financing of local public goods and experimentally document the conditions that improve communities’ ability to cooperate and coordinate on efficient Nash equilibria. In sum, I propose new ways of measuring marginal rates of return to capital, corruption incidence, and cooperation in public good provision; then leverage these measures to shed light on barriers to growth and to assess the effectiveness of possible interventions to enable development and achieve more efficient resource distribution.

published_or_final_version / Industrial and Manufacturing Systems Engineering / Master / Master of Philosophy