This article examines the demand for services of the Slovenian national postal operator for the direct mail and periodicals market and separately for the direct mail market. The main factors of the demand are found to be various price indicators with respect to individual market, two income series and the variable of economic environment. The results of our empirical analysis suggest that the price elasticity of demand on both markets is below zero. The autonomy in price increases is limited due to positive cross-price elasticity of demand for direct mail with regard to price fluctuations for TV commercials. Substitution effects on the direct mail market are even more evident with regard to price fluctuations for advertisements in magazines and daily papers. An additional finding is that the demand on both markets varies seasonally in all models estimated by us. Finally, coefficients of income elasticity of demand for direct mail services show that the total number of mail deliveries on the direct mail market increases faster than the retail revenue in real terms.
COBISS.SI-ID: 10071324
Established already in Biblical times, the Matthew effect refers to the fact that in societies the rich tend to get richer and the potent even more powerful. Here we investigate a game theoretical model describing the evolution of cooperation on structured populations where the distribution of public goods is driven by the reproductive success of individuals. Phase diagrams reveal that cooperation is promoted irrespective of the uncertainty by strategy adoptions and the type of interaction graph, yet the complete dominance of cooperators is elusive due to the spontaneous emergence of superpersistent defectors that owe their survival to extremely rare microscopic patterns. This indicates that success-driven mechanisms are crucial for effectively harvesting benefits from collective actions but that they may also account for the observed persistence of maladaptive behavior.
COBISS.SI-ID: 18702344
This paper examines the quality of the macroeconomic forecasts of six institutions that regularly publish forecasts for Slovenia. The analysis focuses on an evaluation of the quality of forecasts for the real and nominal growth of GDP and for the average annual inflation rate for the period from 1997 to 2009. The quality of forecasts for selected macroeconomic variables was evaluated based on five groups of criteria: statistical measures of accuracy, comparison with the results of naive models, trace test, sign test and statistical tests of the unbiasedness and efficiency of forecasts. The results of the analysis do not provide an "absolute winner", but they do indicate the features of particular forecasts. It is also clear that the developers of models have until now most likely given priority to reducing forecasting errors, while neglecting the congruence in the direction of trend between the forecast and the actual result. The latter criterion in particularis very important for effective economic policy making.
COBISS.SI-ID: 10964508