Partner Empowerment and Relationship Failure in Franchising

Franchisors must empower franchisees to take decisions on a package of peripheral elements in response to pressure for local adaptations and for entrepreneurial autonomy. However, little is known about which specific elements should be decentralized and to what extent adaptation of such elements affects disputes between franchisor and franchisees. This study explores these issues by analyzing which decision rights should be franchisees’ responsibility to reduce early terminations instigated by the franchisor. The results show that delegating decision rights on local advertising and personnel reduces early terminations while delegation of pricing tends to increase them, regardless of the size of the system. Interestingly, successful delegation in other decision‐areas is contingent on the brand‐name value. More specifically, only larger chains seem to benefit from delegating assortment and decoration decisions.     

A field experiment to study sex and age discrimination in the Madrid labour market

This article presents the findings of a field experiment carried out in Madrid which aims to analyse gender and age discrimination in hiring in the labour market of Madrid. A set of five pairs of fictitious man–woman curricula was sent in response to 1062 job offers in six occupations which were advertised on Internet over an eight-month period. It was quantified subsequently the extent to which the different firms contacted more or less the candidates of different sex, age and marital status. No discrimination is detected against women in terms of access to job interviews; however, discriminatory conduct is seen regarding the phenomenon of occupational gender segregation, in the sense that there is a continuance among employers of stereotyped views on the greater suitability of women for certain tasks. No evidence is found to indicate firms showing relative discrimination against married women with children in the first phase of hiring process. And a clear evidence of discrimination is obtained on the basis of age: firms show a substantial fall in interest over interviewing 38-year-old candidates (compared to those aged 24 or 28). This would imply that the tendency to discriminate against older workers may be high, and, what is more, it may start at a surprisingly young age.     

The genesis of strategy in new ventures: escaping the constraints of founder and team knowledge

Although an entrepreneur's initial strategy choices have a critical effect on a new venture's survival, growth, and long‐term performance, few studies have explored how pre‐founding experience influences these choices. Founders who over rely on their historical industry experiences may simply replicate the strategies of legacy firms. In turn, little is known about how founders can break these experience‐based constraints, if they exist. In an empirical analysis of 120 prospective entrants in air transportation from 1995–2005 we find that a founder's past experience strongly constrains choices, and the effect depends on the form of experience and type of strategy choice. Diversity of experience, at the level of the founder and founding team, lessens these constraints. Our results have valuable implications for research in strategy and entrepreneurship. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Compative robustness of six tests in repeated measures designs with specified departures from sphericity

In this article we examine the behaviour of six univariate statistics for analyzing the data of a Split-plot factorial design. Except for the univariate analysis of variance, which assumes that the dispersion matrix underlying the data is spherical, the other five procedures assume absence of sphericity. However, they do so with a clear distinction between two alternatives, insofar as three of them presuppose an arbitrary correlation between the data and two presuppose serial autocorrelation. These six approaches were compared with regard to their robustness under multivariate normality in the absence of sphericity, both when there was serial autocorrelation and when there was underlying arbitrary correlation. In general, Monte Carlo comparisons show that when underlying the data there is a autoregressive stationary or decreasing structured non-stationary autoregressive process, the Hearne, Clark and Hatch procedure is the most robust. In the rest of the conditions studied, i.e., increasing structured non-stationarity autoregressive and arbitrary non-stationarity (autoregressive and with arbitrary correlation), the Greenhouse-Geisser and Lecoutre statistics display the best behaviour.     

ICT employment,over‐education and gender in Spain. Do information and communication technologies improve the female labour situation?

This paper investigates the extent to which ICT‐related employment is improving the labour situation of women in Spain by reducing female over‐education. Outcomes indicate no reduction in female over‐education, nor does a woman's marital status produce any significant differences. However, the best result is observed for ICT occupations linked to higher job quality characteristics.     

Model for measuring carrying capacity in inhabited tourism destinations

Portuguese Economic Journal - Sustainable development of tourist destinations, of any scale, such as countries, regions or municipalities, is hampered by the challenges that sustainability...     

The TD Wheel: A heuristic to shape,support and evaluate transdisciplinary research

Transdisciplinary approaches to research are increasingly touted for the messy social and environmental problems of our time. Such problems transcend disciplinary boundaries, are intertwined with sociopolitical context, and require participation of stakeholders to generate socially acceptable outcomes. A substantial barrier to transdisciplinary (TD) research is devising and applying evaluative criteria or schemas for an approach that is recognized as necessarily tailored, flexible and evolving. This paper addresses the challenge of shaping, supporting and evaluating transdisciplinary research. Firstly, we synthesise the literature on TD research characteristics, highlighting areas of emerging consensus and some implications of these for research design, execution and quality evaluation. Secondly, we present an adaptable heuristic called the TD Wheel (TDW). The TDW is a synthesis of the disparate insights available within the current literature, and is presented as an organizing graphic for TD research. We explain how the TDW has utility at three stages of the research process: shaping (planning and proposing research); supporting (guiding research in-train); and evaluating (planning for evaluation, periodically documenting/checking progress, and reporting on outcomes). The TDW is a provocative graphic geared to help researchers visualize and discuss the elements and process of TD research.     

How to support the management of intangibles

The main objective of this work is the application of the concept of intellectual capital to management for business development and innovation. Concretely, we propose strengthening the ‘Intellectus’ model of intellectual capital by combining it with a multicriteria methodology called the ‘analytic hierarchy process’. The proposed methodology seeks to facilitate decision making by managers in focusing actions and resources to innovate and improve the value of their services to their clients. In particular, an application was made to the banking service sector in Chile, to identify the intangibles of greater importance in loyalty-building of clients. We identified technological capital, human capital and business capital as the intangibles with the highest priorities.     

Passive timing effect in portfolio management

The primary objective of the present study is to analyse the extent of the passive timing effect in portfolio management. This effect is produced when a portfolio which is not managed actively shows signs of instability in its level of systematic risk. By contrast, market timing involves active management of the portfolio and therefore changes to the level of systematic risk in order to anticipate market movements in an appropriate manner. This study proposes a dynamic beta model which incorporates the effect of passive timing attributable to the accumulated evolution of weightings for the assets that make up the portfolio. The results demonstrate the importance of this effect when applying performance and market timing measures in order to evaluate portfolio results, such as those of mutual funds.