Low cost competitors, who offer “good enough” products and services at very attractive prices, are currently significantly impacting the businesses of many leading companies, and some are starting to “move up” to challenge the traditional companies in their core markets. It’s only a matter of time before most companies will feel the pressure from these aggressive, cut-price competitors. Beating Low Cost Competition offers a step–by–step structured approach to help executives in traditional companies with premium brands think through the options for responding to their low cost rivals and select the most appropriate strategy to win in their chosen markets. By examining a wide-ranging group of companies from around the world, Adrian Ryans provides numerous examples of how different companies in different industries have responded to low cost competitors and analyses the effectiveness of their strategies. He also discusses the leadership and cultural challenges that many companies are facing as they take steps to respond to their low cost rivals. Ultimately, the insights gained from this book will lead to better and more profitable business decisions. Adrian Ryans is Professor of Marketing and Strategy at IMD, Lausanne, Switzerland. He has designed and taught on executive programs for organizations in North America, Europe, Australia and Asia, including GE, Bank of Montreal, Medtronic, Deloitte, Borealis, Saurer, Vestas, IBM, Boeing, National Semiconductor, BioWare, ASML, Holcim, Varian, Hoechst, Amgen, Fluke, LSI Logic, Hutchison Port Holdings and Qualcomm. He has also acted as a consultant for a number of leading global corporations.

The central theme of Competition and Cost Accounting is that strategic considerations may make it desirable for a firm to have divisions and product managers internalize something other than their true costs. In the case of transfer prices, a high transfer price serves as a means of promoting tacit collusion. In the case of product cost measurement, an inferior cost allocation system that just spreads costs evenly may promote tacit collusion.

Sunk Costs and Market Structure bridges the gap between the new generation of game theoretic models that has dominated the industrial organization literature over the past ten years and the traditional empirical agenda of the subject as embodied in the structure-conduct-performance paradigm developed by Joe S. Bain and his successors.

The German banking system is characterized by high fragmentation, low profitability and low foreign ownership. Main reason for this is its particular structure that can best be described as forced segmentation. This structure produces local banking markets. The book argues that local bank competition is not as pronounced as national concentration ratios predict and presents a bank pricing study which indicates that local banks, banks located in less densely populated areas and less productive banks tend to charge higher prices for retail bank services than banks that operate nationally. These results as well as lessons drawn from international reforms suggest that the German banking system could benefit from cross-pillar consolidation which promises to export competition from the national to local banking markets. Last but not least, the book analyzes political economy implications of banking reforms and provides suggestions on status quo resolution by identifying ways to facilitate reform implementation in the German banking system.

The evolving modern world is characterized by two opposing trends: integration and segregation. On the one hand, we witness strong forces for segregation on the basis of nationality, ethnicity, religion, and culture in the former Soviet Union, the former Czechoslovakia, the former Yugoslavia, as well as in Northern Ireland, Spain, and Canada. These forces are quite strong and, in some cases, violent. On the other hand, the European Union and NAFTA represent the tendency for integration motivated primarily by economic considerations (such as gains from trade and scale economies). In fact, these opposing trends can be explained by the concepts developed in modern club theory, local public finance, and international trade.

Insurance Planning Models: Price Competition and Regulation of Financial Stability is an exciting new book that takes readers inside the secrets of internal organization of the modern general insurance business. Many people know that it is subject to intensive state regulation, whereby the purpose is to maintain long-term efficiency, honesty, security and stability in the interest and for the protection of policyholders. However, except for knowing that the insurance system is regulated by intensive calculations, that the insurance companies have different positions on the market, that they pursue different goals and even compete with each other, and that one of the tools of this competition is the policy price, not so many people know how to achieve these deserving goals.In developing quantitative recommendations and directives to competing insurers, regulators rely on certain models. In the 1900s, such models were proposed. They were useful for an insight into the probabilistic nature of the insurance process, but not for direct application to practically meaningful problems of insurance regulation. This book is your guide to the rigorously constructed long-term dynamic models with the aim to improve regulatory methods and develop quantitative recommendations using both analytical calculations and computer simulation. It is addressed to a wide range of readers, including interested policyholders, economists whose interest lies in insurance management and regulation, and mathematicians wishing to expand the scope of application for their knowledge.This book is devoted to certain issues that are either not sufficiently presented, or even absent in the literature. It is an attempt to penetrate from the standpoint of mathematical modeling into the goals which face insurance regulators and contending company managers for preventing insolvencies, or even crises pertinent to badly regulated complex reflexive systems.It offers rigorous probabilistic models of long-term insurance business based on the laws of mass phenomena. They mitigate deficiencies of oversimplified risk models. The book presents advances in probabilistic techniques designed to seek quantitative, rather than qualitative, directives and recommendations regarding safe control aiming to achieve different business goals.

A pioneering account of the surging global tide of market power—and how it stifles workers around the world In an era of technological progress and easy communication, it might seem reasonable to assume that the world’s working people have never had it so good. But wages are stagnant and prices are rising, so that everything from a bottle of beer to a prosthetic hip costs more. Economist Jan Eeckhout shows how this is due to a small number of companies exploiting an unbridled rise in market power—the ability to set prices higher than they could in a properly functioning competitive marketplace. Drawing on his own groundbreaking research and telling the stories of common workers throughout, he demonstrates how market power has suffocated the world of work, and how, without better mechanisms to ensure competition, it could lead to disastrous market corrections and political turmoil. The Profit Paradox describes how, over the past forty years, a handful of companies have reaped most of the rewards of technological advancements—acquiring rivals, securing huge profits, and creating brutally unequal outcomes for workers. Instead of passing on the benefits of better technologies to consumers through lower prices, these “superstar” companies leverage new technologies to charge even higher prices. The consequences are already immense, from unnecessarily high prices for virtually everything, to fewer startups that can compete, to rising inequality and stagnating wages for most workers, to severely limited social mobility. A provocative investigation into how market power hurts average working people, The Profit Paradox also offers concrete solutions for fixing the problem and restoring a healthy economy.