Local Market Structure and Strategic Organizational Form Choices: Evidence from Gasoline Stations

An extensive literature shows that agency issues and transaction costs impact vertical integration decisions. Another mature literature indicates that market structure influences competitive behavior. Less consideration has been given to how vertical integration and market structure may interact. I address this gap by focusing on the potential for moral hazard arising from intra-firm competition. Focusing on retail gasoline sales, I argue that when multiple stations share a common brand in a market, a vertically separated station has an incentive to deviate from the cooperative strategy that the brand-owning refiner would prefer. I empirically test this prediction using rich data, and find evidence of both such moral hazard and the desire to avoid it.     

Meeting the demand: An estimation of potential future greenhouse gas emissions from meat production

Current production processes for meat products have been shown to have a significant impact on the environment, accounting for between 15% and 24% of current greenhouse gas emissions. Meat consumption has been increasing at a fantastic rate and is likely to continue to do so into the future. If this demand is to be met, technology used in production in the form of Confined Animal Feeding Operations (CAFOs) will need to be expanded. This paper estimates future meat consumption and discusses the potential aggregate environmental impact of this production if the use of CAFOs is expanded. I first separate meat into beef, chicken and pig products and estimate the elasticities associated with each product in order to forecast the world demand for meat. Using research on the environmental impact of food production in the US, which uses one of the most efficient CAFO processes in the world, I then calculate the total potential greenhouse emissions of this meat production and discuss the impact of these consumption patterns. I find that, under an expanded CAFO system, meat production in the future will still be a large producer of greenhouse gases, accounting for up to 6.3% of current greenhouse gas emissions in 2030.     

Insights from Industry Leaders: A Maturity Model for Strengthening Communication Measurement and Evaluation

Much scholarship has been devoted to identifying barriers that prevent the advancement of communication measurement and evaluation. This research focuses on the characteristics, objectives, and practices of chief communication officers (CCOs) with successful measurement and evaluation programs. Three key dimensions of practice emerged from in-depth interviews: communication executives’ measurement practices and evaluation programs were used to adjust communication strategies; were aligned with other business units; and were integrated with business priority plans. Interviewees also focused on the ability of communication measurement practices and evaluation programs to provide insights for executives, to align communication with the work of other business units, and to connect the organization with the outside environment and stakeholders. This study extends strategic communication scholarship by discussing how overcoming barriers and advancing measurement and evaluation work relates to roles adopted by organizational leaders. This article also offers a preliminary, scalable maturity model that aids in the development, formalization, and optimization of strategic communication measurement and evaluation. This study demonstrates the capacity for communication evaluation to overcome perceived barriers, realize appropriate stature with organizations, and grow communication functions accordingly.     

Private value perturbations and informational advantage in common value auctions

We analyze the value of being better informed than one's rival in a two bidder, second price common value auction. Standard models of these auctions do not pin down relative bidding postures, but we show that by adding small amounts of private value information, a unique equilibrium can be restored. Additional common value information affects a bidder's payoff both directly, by increasing his information rent, and indirectly, by shifting the relative bidding posture of his opponent. Although the latter effect need not be positive, we establish broad conditions under which bidders with more information do better than their rivals. We turn to information acquisition and release and show that the desire to influence relative bidding postures can lead sellers to create new information rents (by releasing information privately to only one bidder) and bidders to forego information rents (instead choosing to gather information that a rival already has).     

Conceptualizing executive hubris: the role of (hyper‐)core self‐evaluations in strategic decision‐making

Researchers have long been interested in how an executive's self‐concept affects his or her behaviors, but have lacked a theoretically grounded, validated construct for conducting systematic inquires. The concept of ‘core self‐evaluation’ (CSE), which has been recently validated in the psychology literature, concisely encompasses and consolidates the common, overlapping portions of four previously unconnected personality dimensions: self‐esteem, self‐efficacy, locus of control, and emotional stability. CSE has great potential to provide substantial leverage for research on executive self‐concept. We review and reconcile prior research on related constructs in executive settings (including narcissism, hubris, and overconfidence) and argue that CSE should be adopted as a robust, well‐validated umbrella construct for research on executive self‐concept. Indeed, a very high level of CSE, or hyper‐CSE, aligns closely with what is often colloquially called ‘hubris.’ We anticipate that hyper‐CSE executives—who possess supreme levels of self‐confidence, self‐potency, and conviction that they will prevail—will manifest this trait in their job behaviors. We develop a set of integrated propositions that describe the implications of CSE for strategic decision processes, strategic choices, and organizational performance. Finally, we propose additional avenues for research. Copyright © 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Retail investors and financial advisors: New evidence on trust and advice taking heuristics

This paper investigates factors that influence trust and advice taking among retail investors when consulting with financial advisors and making real-world portfolio decisions. The data reveal that non-expert retail investors trust their advisors a lot. Trust formation appears to be well described by a simple heuristic that relies substantially on the advisor's communication style when deciding how much to trust and delegate investment decisions. Portfolio decisions appear to depend more on investors' perceptions about the investor–advisor relationship than on the risk and return characteristics of investments comprising the portfolio choice set. This evidence supports Pentland's (2008) “honest signals” as a more powerful mechanism underlying investor trust than standard metrics based on past performance. Trust and advice-taking heuristics can be interpreted as well adapted to the environment of the non-profit bank cooperatives in which they are observed, implying that trusting based on simple honest signals, although vulnerable to exploitation, can be interpreted as ecologically rational. Features of the investor's environment typical of non-profit cooperative banks imply that the heuristics investors use can perform rather well without requiring investment experience or financial sophistication, which most investors in our sample are well aware they lack.     

Public service motivation and performance: The role of organizational identification

Although the association between public service motivation (PSM) and job performance has received increased attention, there is limited knowledge of the mechanisms underlying its effects. Utilizing data from Chinese civil servants and their supervisors, the authors found that PSM results in higher levels of organizational identification and leads to higher levels of job performance because civil servants perceive the organization’s fate and results as their own.

IMPACT

Our study demonstrates that organizational identification is a key mechanism that explains how public service motivation (PSM) leads to higher levels of performance. To improve performance, public agencies should create an environment that helps employees identify with the organization, for example by highlighting the distinct services that the organization provides for the public and by establishing socialization practices for newcomers.     

Climate policy in Western Europe and avoided costs of air pollution control

Abatement of CO₂ emissions will be accompanied by reduced air pollutant emissions such as particulate matter (PM), SO₂, and NO_x. This, in turn, will reduce the need for end of pipe (EOP) pollution control technologies to meet future air quality targets. This dynamic could put more stringent air quality goals within reach, and increase the political feasibility of climate policy. This paper presents a CGE model that has been modified to include the emissions and EOP abatement of PM, SO₂, and NO_x from stationary sources in the EU-17. Emissions of pollutants are modeled as fixed-factor complementary inputs to their associated source. Abatement in each sector is modeled as a substitution between the pollutants and discrete abatement technologies, each of which is sector-specific and characterized by a marginal abatement cost and technical capacity constraint. Scenarios are run to 2020, to assess the costs and co-benefits of simultaneous air quality and climate policies. We find that under the Kyoto Protocol in 2010, the welfare cost of pollution control is reduced by 16% compared to the baseline, effectively offsetting the cost of CO₂ abatement by 15%. The co-benefit results depend heavily on policy choices, and their magnitude relative to total costs is likely to decline as greenhouse targets become more ambitious. In our scenarios, pollution control cost savings range from 1.3 to 20% in 2020, yielding a climate cost offset range of 0.2 to 3.9%. The CO₂ credit imports allowed by the EU via the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) offer a total savings of $9.7bn in 2020, but only need to be compensated by an additional $0.3–0.4bn in domestic pollution control from stationary sources.