Advertising Benefits from Ethical Artificial Intelligence Algorithmic Purchase Decision Pathways

Journal of Business Ethics - Artificial intelligence (AI) has dramatically changed the way organizations communicate, understand, and interact with their potential consumers. In the context of this...     

Why Don’t Most Merchants Use Price Discounts to Steer Consumer Payment Choice?

Recent legislation and court settlements in the United States allow merchants to use price discounts to steer customers to pay with means of payment that are less costly to merchants. We use transaction data to compute rough estimates of the expected net cost reduction by merchant type of giving debit card and cash price discounts. We find that steering consumers to debit and cash via simple price discounts reduces most merchants’ card processing cost; however, this reduction is small and may be insufficient to offset the increase in the cost of administering price menus that vary by payment instrument.     

Assessing financial market integration in Asia – Equity markets

Financial integration has strong implications for financial stability. On the one hand, financial integration among economies helps to improve their capacity to absorb shocks and foster development. On the other hand, intensified financial linkages in a world of increasing capital mobility may also harbour the risk of cross-border financial contagion. This paper provides a survey of high-frequency indicators to monitor the development of equity market integration in Asia. The results show that after slowing down between 2002 and 2006, the equity market integration process picked up again in 2007–08. Nevertheless, the process is not complete and the degrees of integration between mature and emerging equity markets are different. The divergence may be attributed to the difference in the political, economic and institutional aspects across jurisdictions in Asia.     

Internal governance mechanisms and firm performance in China

Corporate governance issues arising from concentrated ownership structure in emerging economies have received growing attention. Adopting a principal–principal perspective, this paper employs structural equation modeling to evaluate the independent and interdependent effects of internal governance mechanisms in enhancing firms’ value in China. Based on a 3-year dataset covering 304 publicly listed companies over 2003–2005, our findings suggest that ownership concentration has the most significant governance effect and has impacted negatively on firm performance. Furthermore, the governance role of the board of directors and supervisory boards is found to have been hindered by ownership concentration, rendering them unable to improve firm performance at present.     

Why do not you read the label? – an integrated framework of consumer label information search

This article facilitates deeper insight into label‐related consumer information acquisition behaviour. An integrated framework of label information search (LIS) has been developed based on a synthesis of related literature and explorative research conducted by analysing online discussions among customers (netnography). The framework focuses on three main groups of personal factors that serve as antecedents of LIS: general personal factors (e.g. health consciousness and socio‐demographics), label‐related personal factors (e.g. label‐related self‐efficacy, trust in labels and the perceived usefulness of labels) and product category‐related personal factors (trust in food products, enduring involvement, experience and perceived quality differences). Important characteristics of the framework are its process‐oriented nature and the dynamically changing relationships among its concepts. LIS is an antecedent to and a consequence of influencing factors. This article offers managerial implications and serves to incite future inquiry in this field.     

Natural Disasters and Firms in Vietnam

We investigate the consequences of natural disasters on operating firms in Vietnam, and find evidence of adverse effects of disasters on retail sales accompanied by increases in firm investment of very similar magnitude. There are important spatial differences, with the post‐disaster increase in investment unique to the largest cities and provinces with large urban concentrations. We find that more remote rural areas, especially in the North, experience declines in firm sales without the mitigating boost to investment in the disasters’ aftermath. The decline in firms’ sales does not appear to be associated with declines in household incomes in those regions.     

Sexual Identity,Same‐Sex Relationships,and Labour Market Dynamics: New Evidence from Longitudinal Data in Australia

Using newly collected data on sexual identity from the Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia Survey, this study examines the relationship between sexual identity and labour market outcomes. Our findings show that gay males are: (i) less likely to be continuously employed than their heterosexual counterparts, and (ii) face an annual earnings penalty of 16–21%. There are also important differences in earnings dynamics for men who transition into (or out of) same‐sex versus opposite‐sex live‐in relationships. Individual fixed effects estimates show that opposite‐sex partnerships are associated with increased earnings for men, while same‐sex partnerships are associated with small declines in earnings that are statistically indistinguishable from zero. For women, we find evidence of an earnings premium for lesbians, driven largely by increased labour supply on the intensive margin.     

Transplanting Social Capital to the Online World: Insights from Two Experimental Studies

The recent proliferation of computer networks has stimulated the emergence of thousands of online communities. Facebook, which has grown to 175-million users in five years and recently surpassed megasite MySpace to become the world's largest social networking site, is a classic example. As the importance of online communities continues to grow, a good understanding of their success factors for building and sustaining a community becomes crucial.

In this article, we apply social capital theories to examine the interactions among individuals and trust building at the initial development of an online community. Specifically, we postulate that offline social capital can be transplanted into an online community (small or large) to foster the development of trust and social norms that make a community thrive. We conduct two experimental studies: one in the context of real-world, small-scale online communities, and the other in the context of computer-simulated large-scale online communities. Results from these studies provide strong support for our proposition. We interpret these results and discuss their implications and contributions to theory and practice.     

Energy consumption and economic growth: evidence from non-OPEC oil producing states

According to the US EIA (2009, www.eia.doe.gov), out of the 15 largest oil producing nations in the world, 7 are not OPEC members, namely Brazil, Canada, China, Mexico, Norway, the Russian Federation, and the United States of America (USA). This paper investigates the causal relationship between energy consumption and economic growth for these non-OPEC oil producing countries. Real GDP per capita is used to measure economic growth; whereas; energy consumption is represented by four sub-variables (electric power, oil, natural gas, and coal energy). Using a panel data covering (1969–2009), this study employs the Pedroni (Econometric Theory, 20, 597–627, 2004) approach to determine cointegration and the (Econometrica, 55, 251–276, 1987) two-step procedure to explore short and long run causal effects. The results suggest that there are long run relationships between the real GDP, labour force, real capital, oil consumption, electricity consumption, gas consumption and coal consumption. Further analyses show that real GDP and oil consumption Granger cause real gross capital formation in the short run; real gross fixed capital and electricity consumption cause oil consumption in the short run; and also oil consumption and gas consumption cause electricity consumption in the short run.     

Drivers of firm formalization in Vietnam: an attention theory explanation

Informal enterprises are widely viewed as a mechanism to engage unemployed people in the economy and thereby alleviate poverty in developing economies. However, over-representation in an economy may lead to both economic growth and broader employment opportunities being sacrificed. This paper presents a process model to investigate three potential drivers for firms to formalize: the first from a desire to grow and develop the firm through innovation, the second from the wish to access government financial support and the third stimulated by the payment of unofficial payments or bribes. We use data from surveys of Vietnamese firms in 2005, 2007, 2009 and 2011 to investigate these drivers of formalization. Although we find support for all three of these drivers, the results differ in significance across years and firm types. We explain these differences using attention theory to show how different situations and events can make the formalization decision more likely over time.