考研英语外报阅读8.pdf

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1、Passagel:It pays to giveAllowing consumers to set their own prices can be good for business;even better if the firms give some of it to charityIN OCTOBER 2007 Radiohead,a British rock group,released its firstalbum in four years,“In Rainbows”,as a direct digital download.Themove drew a fair bit of at

2、tention(including from this newspaper)not onlybecause it represented a technological thumb in the eye to the traditionalmusic industry,but also because the band allowed listeners to paywhatever they wished for it.Some 60%of those who seized theopportunity paid nothing at all,but the band seemed plea

3、sed with theresult;one estimate had it earning nearly$3m from the experiment.One group outside the music industry taking an interest was a trio ofprofessors then at the Rady School of Management at the University ofCalifornia,San Diego:Ayelet Gneezy,Uri Gneezy and Leif Nelson(whois now at the Haas S

4、chool of Business at the University of California,Berkeley).Inspired,they designed a series of experiments to gaugewhether pay-what-you-want pricing would work for other businesses.Their most recent experiment,co-authored with Amber Brown of DisneyResearch and published in Sciecce,also stirred in a

5、new element:would itmake any difference if firms donated some of the pay-what-you-want feeto charity?The authors set up their pricing experiment at the exit of a roller-coasterride at a large amusement park.Riders were offered a photograph ofthemselves,snapped mid-coast.The usual price was$12.95,but

6、 on oneday,riders were told they could pay what they wished,including takingthe photo for free.A second group was charged the full price but told thathalf the money would go to a well-regarded health charity.Yet a thirdgroup could set the price and see half of their chosen amount donated.Allowing cu

7、stomers to set the price dramatically increased the percentageof buyersfrom less than 1%to 8%.Even accounting for those who tooka free photo,the amusement park collected more revenue on thepay-what-you-want day than when selling for the usual fixed price.The authors also found that of the customers

8、who were allowed to paywhat they want,those who were told that half the money would go to agood cause paid substantially more than those who were not told aboutthe charitable donationto the point that revenue more than tripled.(Thecharity did,indeed,get its promised cut.)The smallest number ofpurcha

9、ses,meanwhile,came the day that customers had to pay the full$12.95 but half was donated.Therefore more than simple altruism was motivating the customers whogave money for a photo they could have had for free.One of the quirksabout paying what you want,suggests Mr Nelson,“is that it starts tosignal

10、something about who you are.Every dollar you spend is a directreflection of how much you care about this charity and what kind ofperson you are.No one wants to go cheap with a charity.He calls thisphenomenon“shared social responsibility:instead of passivelyaccepting a firms assertion of its charitab

11、le donations,the customer mustactively agree to give money to charity,and determine how much.But how widespread could shared social responsibility be?Ms Gneezy isthe first to point out that customer-determined pricing works best forproducts with low marginal costs.Since publishing their findings,the

12、researchers have spoken to several companies interested in pursuingsimilar experiments with their products,including software developersand video-game designers.But offering flexible pricing on a virtualproduct online,instead of in person at an amusement park,may make iteasier for people to“go cheap

13、“even if a charity is involved.Combiningcu stomer-deter mi n ed pricing,corporate social responsibility,andincreased profits will be tricky to pull off,and not every company will beable to do it-just like not every band can put their album online for freeand still profit.Passage 2:Why do firms exist

14、?Ronald Coase,the author of“The Nature of the Firm”(1937),turns100 on December 29thFOR philosophers the great existential question is:Why is theresomething rather than nothing?For management theorists the moremundane equivalent is:Why do firms exist?Why isnt everything doneby the market?5 5Today mos

15、t people live in a market economy,and central planning isremembered as the greatest economic disaster of the 20th century.Yetmost people also spend their working lives in centrally plannedbureaucracies called firms.They stick with the same employer for years,rather than regularly returning to the jo

16、bs market.They labour to fulfil thestrategic plans“of their corporate commissars.John Jacob AstofsAmerican Fur Company made him the richest man in America in the1840s.But it never consisted of more than a handful of people.TodayAstors company would not register as a blip on the corporate horizon.Fir

17、ms routinely employ thousands of workers and move billions ofdollars-worth of goods and services within their borders.Why have these“islands of conscious power”survived in the surrounding“ocean of unconscious co-operation，to borrow a phrase from D.H.Robertson,an economist?Classical economics had lit

18、tle to say about thisquestion.Adam Smith opened“The Wealth of Nations“with a wonderfuldescription of the division of labour in a pin factory,but he said nothingabout the bosses who hired the pin-makers or the managers whoorganised them.Smiths successors said even less,either ignoring the pinfactory

19、entirely or treating it as a tedious black box.They preferred tofocus on the sea rather than the islands.Who knows the secret of the black box?The man who restored the pin factory to its rightful place at the heart ofeconomic theory celebrates his 100th birthday on December 29th.Theeconomics profess

20、ion was slow to recognise Ronald Coases genius.Hefirst expounded his thinking about the firm in a lecture in Dundee in 1932,when he was just 21 years old.Nobody much listened.He published”TheNature of the Firm five years later.It went largely unread.But Mr Coase laboured on regardless:a second semin

21、al article on”TheProblem of Social Cost”laid the intellectual foundations of thederegulation revolution of the 1980s.Eventually,Mr Coase acquired anarmy of followers,such as Oliver Williamson,who fleshed out his ideas.In 1991,aged 80,he was awarded a Nobel prize.Far from resting on hislaurels,Mr Coa

22、se will publish a new book in 2011,with Ning Wang ofArizona State University,on“How China Became Capitalisf.His central insight was that firms exist because going to the market all thetime can impose heavy transaction costs.You need to hire workers,negotiate prices and enforce contracts,to name but

23、three time-consumingactivities.A firm is essentially a device for creating long-term contractswhen short-term contracts are too bothersome.But if markets are soinefficient,why dont firms go on getting bigger for ever?Mr Coase alsopointed out that these little planned societies impose transaction cos

24、ts oftheir own,which tend to rise as they grow bigger.The proper balancebetween hierarchies and markets is constantly recalibrated by the forcesof competition:entrepreneurs may choose to lower transaction costs byforming firms but giant firms eventually become sluggish anduncompetitive.How much ligh

25、t does“The Nature of the Firm throw on today5 scorporate landscape?The young Mr Coase first grew interested in theworkings of firms when he travelled around Americas industrialheartland on a scholarship in 1931-32.He abandoned his textbooks andasked businessmen why they did what they did.He has long

26、 chided hisfellow economists for scrawling hieroglyphics on blackboards rather thanlooking at what it actually takes to run a business.So it seems reasonableto test his ideas by the same empirical standards.Mr Coases theory continues to explain some of the most puzzlingproblems in modern business.Ta

27、ke the rise of vast and highly diversifiedbusiness groups in the emerging world,such as Indias Tata group andTurkeys Koc Holding.Many Western observers dismiss these as relicsof a primitive form of capitalism.But they make perfect sense when youconsider the transaction costs of going to the market.W

28、here trust inestablished institutions is scarce,it makes sense for companies to stretchtheir brands over many industries.And where capital and labour marketsare inefficient,it makes equal sense for companies to allocate their owncapital and train their own loyalists.But Mr Coases narrow focus on tra

29、nsaction costs nevertheless providesonly a partial explanation of the power of firms.The rise of theneo-Coasian school of economists has led to a fierce backlash amongmanagement theorists who champion the resource-based theory“of thefirm.They argue that activities are conducted within firms not only

30、because markets fail,but also because firms succeed:they can marshal awide range of resources-particularly nebulous ones such as corporateculture and collective knowledgethat markets cannot access.Companies can organise production and create knowledge in unique ways.They can also make long-term bets

31、 on innovations that will redefinemarkets rather than merely satisfy demand.Mr Coases theory of“marketfailure”needs to be complemented by a theory of organisationaladvantages”.All this undoubtedly complicates“The Nature of the Firm.But it alsovindicates the twin decisions that Mr Coase made all thos

32、e years ago as ayoung student at the London School of Economics:to look inside theblack box rather than simply ignoring it,and to examine businesses,notjust fiddle with theories.Is it too much to hope that other practitioners ofthe dismal science will follow his example and study the real world?Pass

33、age 3:Academic view:Virtuous circlesDaniel C Smith,dean of Indiana Universitys Kelley School of Business,says that universities need to find new ways to combat rising tuition costsTHE current economics of higher education,at least in America,are notsustainable.As high-paying manufacturing jobs disap

34、pear,collegeeducation becomes a necessity.Yet,for more than a decade,tuition feeshave risen at many times the rate of inflation.Whats more,the forcesdriving these increases will not abate.Americas public universities facesteep cuts in state support,rising healthcare and energy costs.And whencash is

35、tight,the philanthropists who are so important to universitiesdisappear.This means that not only will the price of tuition continue toincrease,but universities5 ability to offer financial aid to students is alsohit.If the cost of attending an American university becomes prohibitive itwill threaten t

36、he countrys long-term global competitiveness.It is,therefore,not only a problem for students but also for businesses andsociety.To remain competitive,America needs a new model of studentfinancial support;higher education and the private sector have a jointresponsibility to innovate in creating such

37、models.Enter the business school.Business schools are perfectly positioned todevelop new ways of paying for higher education.At the Kelley School,we are exploring an education circle of life”model of financial supportfor students.It begins with the immediate needs of businesses-particularly small-to

38、mid-size companies that are the growth engines of the economy.In orderto grow and hire more talent,these companies must explore opportunitiesbeyond US borders.But many lack the skills or global contacts to do so.Most top business schools,on the other hand,have a global network ofalumni,corporate fri

39、ends and government contacts.They also havesuperb students and faculty.Our idea is to create a consulting consortiumin which teams of students help client companies identify,assess andcapitalise on global growth opportunities.Using distance-learningtechnologies,student teams collaborate with interna

40、tional alumni,students at partner universities and global corporate partners to pairmid-size American firms with global opportunities.So where does tuition support come in?The firms pay a fee for thestudent consulting services.A portion of the fee goes towards thestudents5 tuition costs;the remainde

41、r is paid into an endowment accountthat provides financial aid for deserving students.Contracts are alsostructured so that a portion of new revenue generated from the globalventures will,for a set period of time,add to the scholarship endowmentaccount.The education circle of life creates growth for

42、mid-size firms,which canin turn spur employment.The initiative provides students with hands-onexperience and in the process creates a sustainable revenue stream for theschool to offset rising tuition costs.Passage 4:A fistful of dustThe true effect of windblown material is only now coming to beappre

43、ciatedClimate scienceON MAY 26th 2008 Germany turned red.The winds of change,though,were meteorological,not political.Unusual weather brought iron-richdust from Africa to Europe,not only altering the colour of roofs and carson the continent but also,according to recent calculations by MaxBangert,a g

44、raduate student at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology,making the place about a quarter of a degree colder for as long as the duststayed in the air.Unusual for Germany;commonplace for the planet as a whole.TheSahara and other bone-dry places continually send dust up into theatmosphere,where it may

45、 travel thousands of kilometres and influenceregional weather,the global climate and even the growth of forestshalfway around the planet.Earlier in 2008,for instance,Han Koren and his colleagues at theWeizmann Institute of Science,in Israel,detected a particularlyvoluminous burst of dust from the Bo

46、dele Depression.This low-lying bedof silt in Chad,across which powerful jets of wind are wont to blow,constitutes less than 1%of the Saharas area but is reckoned the worldsdustiest place.It is thought to be responsible for a quarter or more of theSaharas output of airborne dust.Dr Koren observed the

47、 dust rise with a camera on a satellite called Aqua;watched it obscure the sun using an automated photometer in Ilorin,Nigeria;followed it across the Atlantic with another satellite,CALIPSO;and finally saw a spike in levels of silicon,aluminium and iron as itlanded on detectors in Manaus,Brazil.His

48、results,presented at a meetingof the American Geophysical Union held in San Francisco in December,provide a remarkable account of the intercontinental transfer of dust.Blowin*in the windThe importance of this long-distance logistical chain has becomeapparent only in the past few years,and researcher

49、s are still working outits many repercussions-for the more you look at dust,the more effects itseems to have.African dust is thought,for example,to stimulate plantgrowth in the Amazon by bringing in phosphorus(which is in shortsupply there).This may put a check on global warming by removing whatwoul

50、d otherwise be a long-term constraint on the forests ability to suckup carbon dioxide as it grows.Dust which does not reach land may do something similar to the sea.Some parts of the ocean are short of iron,which red desert dust has inabundance.Dust from the Gobi desert seems to stimulate planktonbl