Avatars as information: Perception of consumers based on their avatars in virtual worlds

The presence of consumers and companies in the virtual worlds has increased in recent years. It is predicted that 80% of active Internet consumers and Fortune 500 companies will have an avatar or presence in a virtual community, including social networks, by the end of 2011 (eMarketer, 2007 ). The increase in the number of consumers with avatars emphasizes the need for a better understanding of who these consumers behind the avatars really are in order to convert these individuals to online and real‐world customers. The objective of this paper is to investigate how avatars reflect the personality of their creators (targets) in virtual worlds. Using the Brunswik Lens Model as the theoretical framework, an investigation of real consumers in the virtual world Second Life reveals that perceivers who view targets' avatar use particular thin‐slices of observations such as avatar cues (e.g., attractiveness, gender, hairstyle) to form accurate personality impressions about targets. The findings support the premise that real‐life companies that intend to expand to virtual worlds can use member avatars as a proxy for member personality and lifestyles. As a future research direction, avatars and other consumer‐generated media could be used as the basis for targeting and segmentation of online consumers. © 2010 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.     

Education and early career outcomes of second-generation immigrants in France

We estimate a flexible reduced form dynamic model of schooling choices and labor market outcomes in France. Our analysis focuses on the comparison between second-generation immigrants and their French-natives counterparts. We show that the gap in higher education attainments between those two sub-populations is mainly explained by parents' background, and that schooling investment is the main determinant of the gap in permanent employment. After conditioning on schooling and observed characteristics, we find that ethnic origin explains less than 6% of the gap in access to permanent employment. A test of equality of counterfactual probabilities of accessing permanent employment across ethnic groups (measured at identical individual characteristics) typically fails to be rejected.     

Corporate Social Responsibility in Colombia: Making Sense of Social Strategies

As corporate social responsibility (CSR) grows increasingly well known and accepted worldwide, organizations attempt to make sense of their social strategies bridge the gap between their current situation and what their stakeholders expect of them. If social strategies represent a potential stepping stone to more sophisticated forms of CSR, then research must investigate the strategies that organizations have adopted. After defining a framework for classifying and analyzing organizations’ social strategies, this article considers empirical evidence from 10 case studies in Colombia to reveal how organizations might build on their social involvement to engage in more sophisticated CSR practices. The framework also suggests some different trajectories that organizations might follow.     

Internationalization, Performance and Volatility: The World Largest Financial Groups

The objective of this paper is to investigate the shape of the relationship between internationalization and performance of the world largest financial institutions. International diversification in several countries is expected to have a significant impact on the performance but also on the overall variability of the performance over time. The paper documents the relative importance of the largest financial groups in the world. The empirical analysis over the period 2003-2006 may have important implications for the structure of global financial markets. It suggests that performance considerations may limit the global consolidation of financial institutions if profitability decreases when size increases after a certain threshold. Furthermore, the ability to operate efficiently across borders appears to be linked to specialization rather than the nation of ownership or the size of the home market.     

The entrepreneur’s mode of entry: the effect of social and financial capital

This article uses a French database of firms set up in 1998 to investigate the determinants of takeovers versus startups as a mode of entry. It focuses on two determinants that previous research has not fully analyzed: social capital and financial capital. Our findings suggest social capital affects the mode of entry. They show that entrepreneurs with social capital are more likely to create new firms from scratch than to take over existing firms. We confirm the effect of financial capital on the mode of entry. Bank loans are more often associated with takeovers than with startups and low initial wealth is more often associated with startups than with takeovers. These results show that finance affects the mode of entry.     

Degree of innovativeness and new product performance

The relationship between innovativeness and innovations’ success still remains unclear. This lack of consensus stems from a confusion between customer familiarity with the innovation and synergy with the focal firm's existing set of resources and competencies, to explain performance, as well as from the use of different measurement methods. On the basis of a sample of 114 innovation projects in small and medium-sized french companies, using our own measurement method, we show a U-shaped relationship between customer familiarity and performance, and a negative relation, as expected, between newness to the company and the innovation's performance.     

Cumulant instrument estimators for hedge fund return models with errors in variables

We revisit the factors incorporated in asset pricing models following the recent developments in financial markets – i.e., the rise of shadow banking and the change in the transmission channel of monetary policy. We propose two versions of the Fung and Hsieh (2004) hedge fund return model, especially an augmented market model which accounts for the new dynamics of financial markets and the procyclicality of hedge fund returns. We run these models with an innovative Hausman procedure, tackling the measurement errors embedded in the models factor loadings. Our empirical method also allows for confronting the drawbacks of the instruments used to estimate hedge fund asset pricing models.     

Modelling conditional moments and correlation with the continuous hidden-threshold-skew-normal distribution

A key issue in modelling conditional densities of returns of financial assets is the time-variation of conditional volatility. The classic econometric approach models volatility of returns with the generalized autoregressive conditional heteroscedasticity (GARCH) models where the conditional mean and the conditional volatility depend only on historical prices. We propose a new family of distributions in which the conditional distribution depends on a latent continuous factor with a continuum of states. The distribution has an interpretation in terms of a mixture distribution with time-varying mixing probabilities. The distribution parameters have economic interpretations in terms of conditional volatilities and correlations of the returns with the hidden continuous state. We show empirically that this distribution outperforms its main competitor, the mixed normal conditional distribution, in terms of capturing the stylized facts known for stock returns, namely, volatility clustering, leverage effect, skewness, kurtosis and regime dependence.