When Business Strategy and the Law Are in Conflict: The Case of Parallel Importation in Canadian Border Communities
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The recession of 1989 and the concomitant appreciation of the Canadian dollar resulted in a serious business problem for Canadian retailers. Intellectual property rights protection accorded to the authorized importers is a source of conflict between business strategy and the law. The Canadian market is rather small and scattered thus inhibiting sizable economies of scale. Government regulation, an excessive tax burden, high property values and a high minimum wage all conspire to force Canadian retailers to charge a high margin in order to continue in business. Eighty-two percent of respondents surveyed either currently or in the recent past had engaged in parallel importation. Without exception, respondents who engaged in gray marketing saw the practice as a process necessary for survival in a border economic environment. Canadian suppliers, despite being made aware of the broader competitive environment of border communities, failed to respond to requests from Windsor retailers for competitive wholesale prices.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.047 | 0.028 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.012 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.006 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".