Internet-based technologies are revolutionizing the stodgy $625 billion global advertising industry. There are a number of public policy issues to consider. Will a single ad platform emerge or will several remain viable? What are the consequences of alternative market structures for a web economy that is increasingly based on selling eyeballs to advertisers? This article describes the online advertising industry. The industry is populated by a number of multi-sided platforms that facilitate connecting advertisers to viewers. Search-based advertising platforms, the most developed of these, have interesting economic features that result from the combination of keyword bidding by advertisers and single-homing.

This paper develops a hedonic-price growth model where Superstar rewards induce patterns of innovation, learning, and income mobility and inequality. The model provides one formalization of how consumer attitudes towards knowledge-like goods (e.g., computer software) influence the latter's creation and dissemination, and thereby economic growth and income distribution dynamics. The model can be viewed as applying: (i) across producers and consumers within developed or developing economies; or (ii) to the process of knowledge dissemination from developed to developing countries. The model generates dynamics consistent with particular features of actual crosscountry income distribution dynamics. Keywords: income distribution, innovation, knowledge creation, knowledge dissemination, learning, software JEL Classification: O33, O41 Communications to: D. Quah, LSE, Houghton Street, London WC2A 2AE. [Tel: +44 (171) 955-7535, Email: D.Quah@lse.ac.uk] [(URL) http://econ.lse.ac.uk/~dquah/] -...

The authors’model of Internet pricing competition shows how differences in switching costs, increasing returns to scale, and discount rates between pure and hybrid etailers affected their choice of pricing objective. During the run-up of Internet stocks, differences in these determinants motivated pure e-tailers to build their customer base, whereas hybrid e-tailers leveraged their relationship with existing (offline) customers. In the resulting twotiered pricing structure, pure e-tailers offered substantially lower prices than hybrid e-tailers. The dot.com crash of April 2000 increased the discount rate for pure etailers. Using a longitudinal database of printer prices, the authors ’ model correctly predicts changes in overall price dispersion and the direction and magnitude of price changes for pure and hybrid e-tailers associated with this change in the financial markets. This study illustrates how changes in financial markets can affect pricing competition among Internet retailers in a single category.

The authors gratefully acknowledge financial support by the Volkswagen-

The Capacity Development Results Framework (CDRF) provides a guide to the strategic use and design of capacity development programs, as well as practical instruments to strengthen the results-orientation of such programs. A key feature of the CDRF is the perspective that learning can empower agents of change to improve sociopolitical, policy-related, and organizational factors that are key to the effectiveness of development efforts, and thereby enhance achievement of development goals. The Rapid Results Approach (RRA) is a set of principles and methodologies for organizing and managing change efforts and for improving organizational performance. Before being introduced into development work, this approach was developed and refined over several decades by management consultants working with private sector organizations in the United States and Europe. This technical note is intended primarily for teams who are interested in using the CDRF to design, manage, and monitor learning programs in their operations. More broadly, the note is aimed at development practitioners who have an

Upon completion of this chapter, you will be able to: 1. Describe the need for justifying EC investments, how it is done, and how metrics are used to determine justification. 2. Understand the difficulties in measuring and justifying EC investments. 3. Recognize the difficulties in establishing intangible metrics and describe how to overcome them. 4. List and briefly describe traditional and advanced methods of justifying IT investments. 5. Understand how e-CRM, e-learning, and other EC projects are justified. 6. Describe some economic principles of EC. 7. Understand how product, industry, seller, and buyer characteristics impact the economics of EC. 8. Recognize key factors to the success of EC projects and the major reasons for failures.

This article presents results from a Delphi study on the future impact of Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems on Supply Chain Management (SCM). The Delphi study was conducted with 23 Dutch supply chain executives of European multinationals. Findings from this exploratory study were threefold. First, our executives have identified the following key SCM issues for the coming years: (1) further integration of activities between suppliers and customers across the entire supply chain; (2) on-going changes in supply chain needs and required flexibility from IT; (3) more mass customization of products and services leading to increasing assortments while decreasing cycle times and inventories; (4) the locus of the driver’s seat of the entire supply chain and (5) supply chains consisting of several independent enterprises. The second main finding is that the panel experts saw only a modest role for ERP in improving future supply chain effectiveness and a clear risk of ERP actually limiting progress in supply chain management. ERP was seen as offering a positive

The key to competitive success is likely to be the ability to create, leverage, and develop specialised knowledge and intellectual resources. This new reality presents both challenges and opportunities for accounting, a discipline which has traditionally found it difficult to deal with the recognition and measurement issues surrounding intangible assets. This paper makes two contributions to the emerging literature on intellectual capital. Firstly, it offers some preliminary results of a study of the drivers and generators of intellectual capital. Secondly, it posits a theoretical/ methodological approach to intellectual capital based upon Habermas' concept of communicative action, a concept that allows the premium attaching to the human and dynamic elements of organisations to be accentuated.

Computer platforms provide an integrated architecture of hardware and software standards as a basis for developing complementary assets. The most successful platforms were owned by proprietary sponsors that controlled platform evolution and appropriated associated rewards. Responding to the Internet and open source systems, three traditional vendors of proprietary platforms experimented with hybrid strategies which attempted to combine the advantages of open source software while retaining control and differentiation. Such hybrid standards strategies reflect the competing imperatives for adoption and appropriability, and suggest the conditions under which such strategies may be preferable to either the purely open or purely proprietary alternatives.

The tension in the air is as palpable as a high-stakes prize fight. In one corner, the finance professors — the proponents of stock market efficiency — argue that investors cannot outperform the market over time. In the opposing corner, the practitioners