Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: Using a multi-year database on gun sales in one state and subsequent police recoveries of those guns, this presentation will identify the characteristics of firearms, sellers, buyers, and sales transactions that influence the likelihood that a gun sold in the retail or secondhand gun market is subsequently used in crime. Implications for gun legislation and enforcement will also be considered.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: After the 1990s, original equipment manufacturers (OEM) as multinational conglomerates have become more powerful than ever, exerting control over their suppliers, owing in part to the advanced machining and information technologies. Is this a revival of the traditional Marxian framework, or a “dual economy”? Conducting network analysis of supplier-prime buyer relations among over 8,300 firms in an industrial district, we found not only structural properties of ‘flexible specialization’ as a division of labor among dedicated small- and medium-sized suppliers but also an invisible “elite club” or cohesive core composed of extremely powerful OEMs plus their elite suppliers, employing analyses of cohesion and assortative correlation in the structural embedding. An overwhelming majority of the suppliers were not free from dependency upon the core in order to gain access to and social endorsement from the consumers, as substantiated by the overall power-law node links, against the claims of “flexible specialization.” The present study suggests a “dual economy” not on the basis of firm size as traditionally claimed, but of competition to be suppliers of prominent OEMs in the acyclically hierarchical network, from the relational approach of network integration mechanisms, as a latent but decisive explanatory variable.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: Comedy is generally considered the hardest genre to export, because of its cultural and linguistic specificity. However, American television comedies have managed, with various degrees of suc-ces, to penetrate the television landscapes of most European countries. This paper analyzes the import of American television comedy in France, Italy, the Netherlands, and Poland, focusing on the role and position of central figures in the import of television programming: television buy-ers. Using television import figures as well as interview data, this paper will address, first, the po-sition of TV buyers, mediating between the international field of television exchange and national media contexts. Second, it will address the professional ethos of these television buyers. Ameri-can television import patterns are strongly dependent on the media landscape of a specific coun-try and TV network, much less on cultural similarity between a country and the US. However, while cultural differences may not have a very large impact on cross-national differences in im-port patterns, there are cultural barriers to import: some comedies are “too American” for Euro-pean audiences. Such cultural barriers, I will argue, tend to be the blind spot of cosmopolitan professionals like television buyers.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: Although antitrust law applies equally to buyer and seller power in theory, the history of actual enforcement shows very little concern for buyer power. In fact, from WalMart to Dean Foods and on through the economy, the capacity of buyers to distort and harm upstream suppliers is a serious concern. This paper first demonstrates that buyer power posses serious problems for fair, efficient and competitive operation of markets. Second, it explains why buyer power must be evaluated using different measures of power in comparison with seller power. Third, it evaluates the standards for determining whether a merger is likely to create undesirable levels of buyer power.