Service value chains and effects of scale

This paper generalizes Porter’s notion of the value chain for the analysis of service industries. The generalization entails that the flow and the physical transformation and assembly of goods that are characteristic of manufacturing are generalized into flows and transformation of data and flows and transformation of the physical and mental condition of people that are characteristic of many service industries. Utility is generalized from the utilities of forms and function of goods, characteristic of manufacturing, to the utilities of time, place, convenience, speed, safety, entertainment, physical and mental well-being, knowledge and mental capacity, funding and assurance. The analysis yields a categorization of industries according to central features of the value adding process. Here, the analysis is used to identify sources of (in)efficiency of scale, scope and experience, along the value chain.

Asymptotically perfect and relative convergence of productivity

In this paper we examine the extent to which countries are converging in per capita productivity levels. We propose to use cluster analysis in order to allow for the endogenous selection of converging countries. We formally define convergence in a time series analytical context, derive the necessary and sufficient conditions for convergence, and introduce a cluster analytical procedure that distinguishes several convergence clubs by testing for these conditions using a multivariate test for stationarity. We find a large number of relatively small convergence clubs, which suggests that convergence might not be such a widespread phenomenon. Copyright © 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The dynamics of price discovery for cross-listed shares: Evidence from Australia and New Zealand

This paper studies the dynamics of price discovery for markets with bilateral cross-listings. Using a sample of four Australian stocks cross-listed in New Zealand and five New Zealand stocks cross-listed in Australia for the period January 2002 to December 2007, we assess Hasbrouck (1995) information shares and Grammig et al. (2005) conditional information shares over time. We observe that in both cases the home market is dominant in terms of price discovery. However, when studying price discovery over time, we find that the importance of the Australian market (the larger of the two markets) is increasing for both Australian and New Zealand domiciled firms. Finally, using panel regression analysis, we find that the growth in the importance of the Australian market is positively related to the growth in the size of the firm and negatively related to the size of the percentage spread in the Australian market, implying that as firms grow larger and their cost of trading in Australia declines, the Australian market becomes more informative.     

Price discovery in tick time

This paper develops a tick time model for the quote setting dynamics on Nasdaq. The model decomposes quotes into an efficient price, asymmetric information and noise. Both the evolution of the efficient price and the information contents of quotes depend on quote durations. New measures for the contribution to price discovery are defined within this model. When aggregated to fixed calendar time intervals, they relate closely to Hasbrouck [Hasbrouck, Joel, 1995, One security, many markets: determining the contribution to price discovery, Journal of Finance 50, 1175–1199] information shares. Empirical results for 20 Nasdaq stocks indicate that ECNs, in particular Island, contribute most to price discovery for active stocks. For less active stocks, wholesale market makers contribute most.     

Employee involvement in ideation and healthcare service innovation quality

ABSTRACT

This study hypothesizes and empirically tests the influence of involvement of (1) frontline employees and (2) top managers in ideation process on healthcare service innovation quality. Based on data from 168 service innovation projects in Dutch healthcare organizations, the empirical results indicate that frontline employee involvement and top management involvement in, respectively, idea generation and idea application both improve the quality of healthcare service innovation. We find that the positive effect of frontline employee involvement is stronger under the condition of higher service innovativeness. In the direct relationship of top management involvement and healthcare service innovation quality, our data do not show such a moderating effect. The key and general managerial implication of the findings is that healthcare organizations are inspired to involve frontline employees in the idea generation processes and involve top managers in the idea application processes of service innovation projects, in order to improve innovation quality.     

On <Emphasis Type="Italic">Private Governance</Emphasis>

Edward Peter Stringham’s book Private Governance: Creating Order in Economic and Social Life (2015) is a compelling defense of the proposition that private governance is more widely used and more effective than most people think. Stringham looks to history to see how people solved problems of fraud and cheating without government intervention and provides example after compelling example to contradict the strong claim that a government or any third-party enforcer is necessary for voluntary exchange. While Stringham doesn’t take on the tough problem that private governance is not sufficient for its task, his book is intended to be the beginning, not the end, of thinking about private governance.     

The motivations,institutions and organization of university-industry collaborations in the Netherlands

This study builds on the economics and organization literatures to explore whether and how institutions and organizational structure complement or substitute each other to create specific spaces of alignment where specific individual actors’ motivations co-exist. Focusing on university-industry collaborations, the study examines whether and how different axes of alignment of university and industry motivations are integrated in projects with specific technological objectives and organizational structures, benefitting from the presence of specific institutions designed to facilitate collaboration. Empirically, the study relies on in-depth data on 30 university-industry collaborations in the Netherlands, and provides preliminary evidence that the technological objective and organizational structure of collaboration are malleable variables allowing the integration of both partners’ objectives and expectations. Different institutional incentives for university-industry collaboration favor specific axes of alignment of motivations and certain types of collaborative projects’ design. Hence, our exploratory results suggest that specific organizational and technological structures tend to prevail in the presence of specific institutions.     

The CDM framework: knowledge recombination from an evolutionary viewpoint

ABSTRACT

Since Crepon, Duguet, and Mairesse published their ground-breaking article (‘Research, Innovation and Productivity: An Econometric Analysis at the Firm Level’, 1998), the CDM framework has known a large diffusion, despite being published in a non-indexed journal. The present study is an exploration of the spread and recombination of ‘knowledge’ in the ‘CDM universe’, comprising all papers in Scopus indexed journals citing CDM or/and CDM cited papers. We assess first the speed and range of diffusion of CDM and investigate next the ‘origins’ and further ‘genealogical’ make up of the knowledge recombinations within the CDM universe. We find that CDM is cited by a growing number of papers, which spread over a variety of fields, and that it compares very well with the most cited comparable articles in indexed journals in its domain of research. We further find that the CDM universe is mainly constituted of three large clusters and for each of them we are able to identify knowledge paths going from the CDM and earlier cited papers to the subsequent main citing papers. We intend to provide a detailed interpretation of these findings in future work.     

Smile,Dictator, You're on Camera

We investigate the degree to which people in a shopping mall express other‐regarding behavior in the dictator game. Whereas many studies have attempted to increase the social distance between the dictator and experimenter and between the dictator and recipient, we attempt to minimize that social distance between random strangers by video recording the decisions, with the permission of the dictators, to display their image on the Internet. Offers made by dictators are high, relative to other experiments, and a nontrivial number give the entire experimental windfall away. However, a nontrivial number of people keep everything as well.