Follow Apple’s Lead?

Establish an Online Presence?

Product Differentiation

Offerings with Online Advantage

Offerings with neither Online nor Offline Advantage

Offerings with Offline Advantages

Conclusions

I wrote a previous blog entry on retailing competition between offline and online stores, Will Smartphone-Enabled on-the-Spot Price Comparisons “Upend” Stores’ Business Models? This blog entry takes the previous analysis a step further and considers more explicitly how offline stores might be able to compete with Internet providers. In particular, this examination considers the increasing tendency of consumers to use bricks-and-mortar stores to test out new products, but then buy the products at lower prices on the Internet. How can bricks-and-mortar stores prevent such free-riding or otherwise continue to sustain viable businesses despite the existence of lower prices on the Internet?

Conversion to $1 Coin: US Government

Conversion to $1 Coin: Private Industry

Conversion to $1 Coin: Consumers

Special Interest Groups

Other Issues

Efficiency of US Currency

A recent article in the WSJ, “The Buck Stops Here: $1 Coins to Be Curtailed” by Jeffrey Sparshott, reports that the US Mint is suspending production of $1 coins, due to lack of demand. The issue of replacing the US $1 bill with a $1 coin has been debated for quite some time. When I was in graduate school 20 years ago, one of my professors was commissioned to perform a cost-benefit analysis of replacing the $1 bill with a $1 coin, and I worked as a research assistant on the project. I spent my summer that year contacting various representatives in the economy who would be affected by the conversion and collecting information from them on the costs and benefits. I learned some very interesting things.

Amazon

Apple

Amazon vs Apple

I just Googled “Apple” and “Amazon” and “war” and got 40,300,000 hits, with such headlines as

The Amazon-Apple War Is On

New $199 Amazon Kindle Stokes Fire in War With Apple

Amazon Ignites Tablet War with Fire, Takes on Apple

The Amazon-Apple War Is On - Kindle Fire, 7" Tablet for USD199

But is Amazon’s release of its new tablet really an indication that it is trying to take on the Apple ecosystem?  I don’t think so.

Structure of the Visa EMV Game

Outcome of the Visa EMV Game

What Can Visa Do to Speed Up Adoption of EMV?

Visa’s EMV ("Europay, MasterCard and Visa") technology standard (aka "Chip and PIN") -- used for credit card processing -- was introduced several years ago as a means of decreasing credit card fraud.  This new EMV standard has passed well into the intermediate stages of adoption in virtually all countries in the rest of the world.  However, EMV adoption in the US has barely taken hold.  Visa has made a recent push to encourage US Merchants to upgrade their Visa credit card processing systems to the EMV standard.  Interestingly, the media has noted that while the Merchants who accept Visa credit cards as payment for purchases made by their Customers will have to bear the majority of the total costs to industry associated with the technology upgrade, it will be the Issuers who realize the majority of the benefits of decreases in credit card fraud.

An analysis of this game was undertaken as a means to better understand the dynamics among industry players involved with adoption of EMV.  The following is an excerpt from the analysis.  A copy of the full analysis can be downloaded by clicking on the link at the bottom of this blog entry.

A recent article in the NYT, “On Tyson’s Face, It’s Art. On Film, a Legal Issue” by Noam Cohen, discusses the uncertainty that exists regarding the interpretation of many Federal laws, copyright laws in this case, especially when the jurisdiction of the laws creep into unchartered territory:

GDP vs. Social Value

GDP Is Not an Accurate Measure of Well-Being

Has the Internet Been Revolutionary for Well-Being?

Tyler Cowen, an economist at George Mason University, recently published an ebook called The Great Stagnation: How America Ate All The Low-Hanging Fruit of Modern History, Got Sick, and Will (Eventually) Feel Better.