The effect of obedience pressure and authoritarianism on managers' project evaluation decisions

This study examines the effects that obedience pressure and the personality trait of authoritarianism have on managers' project evaluation decisions. A laboratory experiment was conducted to test the various hypotheses formulated in this study. The results suggest that project managers have a higher inclination to escalate their commitment to a failing project in the presence of obedience pressure. The results further reveal that project managers' tendency to escalate is most prominent in a private information situation and in an obedience pressure condition. In addition, the results suggest that low authoritarian project managers exhibited a greater tendency to continue a failing project regardless of the extent of obedience pressure under private information conditions. Furthermore, high authoritarian project managers exhibited a greater tendency to continue a failing project only when obedience pressure was present under private information conditions.     

Individual and organizational learning from inter‐firm knowledge sharing: A framework integrating inter‐firm and intra‐firm knowledge sharing and learning

Literature has highlighted but not explored links between knowledge sharing and learning at inter‐firm and intra‐firm levels. Using the single case of an aviation refuelling company as the basis for our research methodology and collecting data through 34 semi‐structured interviews, we develop a framework that integrates knowledge sharing and learning at inter‐firm and intra‐firm levels. We show that intra‐firm knowledge sharing capabilities facilitate the diffusion of inter‐firm learning within organizations. Moreover, inter‐firm trust manifests in different forms that affect individual and organizational learning. The purpose of collaboration determines what a firm learns or discards. The findings are important for organizations facing a shortage of skills. © 2018 ASAC. Published by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The right metrics for marketing-mix decisions

This study addresses the following question: For a given managerial, firm, and industry setting, which individual metrics are effective for making marketing-mix decisions that improve perceived performance outcomes? We articulate the key managerial takeaways based on testing a multi-stage behavioral framework that links decision context, metrics selection, and performance outcomes. Our statistical model adjusts for potential endogeneity bias in estimating metric effectiveness due to selection effects and differs from past literature in that managers can strategically choose metrics based on their ex-ante expected effectiveness. The key findings of our analysis of 439 managers making 1287 decisions are that customer-mindset marketing metrics such as awareness and willingness to recommend are the most effective metrics for managers to employ while financial metrics such as target volume and net present value are the least effective. However, relative to financial metrics, managers are more uncertain about the ex-ante effectiveness of customer-mindset marketing metrics, which attenuates their use. A second study on 142 managers helps provide detailed underlying rationale for these key results. The implications of metric effectiveness for dashboards and automated decision systems based on machine learning systems are discussed.     

Economic freedom and migration: A metro area-level analysis

We examine the determinants of intra-U.S. population migration at the metropolitan area level (MSA), with an emphasis on the presence of policies that are consistent with economic freedom. We are the first to produce a multivariate regression analysis of migration and economic freedom at the local level. Combining a 1993–2014 unbalanced panel of MSA-to-MSA migration data from the Internal Revenue Service with a new economic freedom index for U.S. metropolitan areas, we find that a 10% increase in economic freedom of a destination MSA, relative to the economic freedom of an origin MSA, was associated with a 27.4% increase in net migration from the origin MSA to the destination MSA. If we use mean net migration flows as a benchmark, we would expect a 10% increase in relative economic freedom to increase net migration to the destination MSA by 22 workers per year from each other MSA.     

Correction to: Determinants of agricultural entrepreneurship: a GEM data based study

International Entrepreneurship and Management Journal - The original article has been corrected. The spelling of author name Amit Kumar Dviwedi was incorrect and has now been corrected to Amit...     

How should Central Banks Respond to Non-neutral Inflation Expectations?

This paper investigates the net real inflation effect on output in ten countries, comprising both advanced and developing countries. An indicator is introduced to compute the net inflation effect on output (NIEO) based on the difference between two concepts of core inflation, where both are computed using the decomposition of VAR residuals. We find that for all countries, when inflation is increasing the NIEO is significantly positive and is negative during periods of decreasing inflation. Typically, countries which follow anti-inflationary policies if the NIEO is of small magnitude suffer relatively minimal damage in output, whereas if the same policies are undertaken when the NIEO is large the damaging effects on output could be much greater. This suggests that the NIEO could be a useful indicator of the likely effects of policy, especially for countries which have frequent episodes of high inflation, and in those countries which employ inflation-targeting policy, as the timing of monetary policy actions could be optimized to take account of this real effect of inflation.     

Virality of Social Change Messages on Facebook: A Study of Advocacy and Relationship Building Strategies of LGBTQ Advocacy Organizations

ABSTRACT

The communicative affordances of Facebook transformed the way nonprofit organizations communicate with publics. However, the connection between advocacy and virality received limited scholarly scrutiny. This study extends our knowledge of advocacy by examining the relationships between advocacy strategies, tactics, and virality. For this study, Facebook posts of LGBTQ advocacy organizations from January 2016 to December 2018 were collected. Content analysis of 1,500 Facebook posts revealed advocacy and relationship building strategies of LGBTQ nonprofit organizations. MANOVA analyses signaled that advocacy strategies and tactics are significant predictors for virality. Furthermore, LGBTQ advocacy organizations predominately utilized affective and cohesive social presence strategies on Facebook to build relationships with publics.     

A ROle-Oriented Filtering (ROOF) approach for collaborative recommendation

In collaborative filtering (CF) recommender systems, existing techniques frequently focus on determining similarities among users’ historical interests. This generally refers to situations in which each user normally plays a single role and his/her taste remains consistent over the long term. However, we note that existing techniques have not been significantly employed in a role-oriented context. This is especially so in situations where users may change their roles over time or play multiple roles simultaneously, while still expecting to access relevant information resources accordingly. Such systems include enterprise architecture management systems, e-commerce sites or journal management systems. In scenarios involving existing techniques, each user needs to build up very different profiles (preferences and interests) based on multiple roles which change over time. Should this not occur to a satisfactory degree, their previous information will either be lost or not utilised at all. To limit the occurrence of such issues, we propose a ROle-Oriented Filtering (ROOF) approach focusing on the manner in which multiple user profiles are obtained and maintained over time. We conducted a number of experiments using an enterprise architecture management scenario. In so doing, we observed that the ROOF approach performs better in comparison with other existing collaborative filtering-based techniques.     

Determinants of agricultural entrepreneurship: a GEM data based study

The aim of this study is to explain the determinants of entrepreneurship in agriculture industry. What are the drivers of early stage entrepreneurial activity of agri-business entrepreneur and how it is influenced by various cognitive and social capital factors? To answers these questions various driving factors of entrepreneurial activity have been explored from the literature. To achieve the objective, the study uses APS (Adult Population Survey) 2013 data of 69 countries provided by GEM (Global Entrepreneurship Monitor). Total number of respondents 1470, those who are alone or with others, currently trying to start a new business, including any self-employment or selling any goods or services to others in Agriculture Industry, were selected from the data set. To measure the influence of cognitive and social capital factors on early stage entrepreneurial activity logistic regression was employed. The findings show that those who see entrepreneurial opportunities, are confident in their own skills and ability, having personal relationship or social networks with existing entrepreneurs, and have invested in others business as business angels are more likely to become an entrepreneur. Additionally, fear of failure or risk perception does not prevent people to become entrepreneur. Policy implications have been discussed. This is one the first study of its kind and contributes to the existing literature by explaining agricultural entrepreneurship through an integrated approach of entrepreneurial cognition and social networking.

     

Financial Analysts’ Forecasts and Unprecedented Events: The Case of German Reunification

We use the chain of events from the fall of the Berlin Wall to the reunification of Germany to examine how capital market participants respond to momentous and unprecedented events. Our examination measures the impact of these events on analysts’ forecasts for the earnings of West German firms. Our results show a significant decrease in analysts’ ability to accurately forecast earnings. Contrary to the public’s euphoria, the sense of the market was generally negative about the implications of unification for West German firms. This negative sentiment was spread across most of the broad sectors, but within those sectors the results were significantly positive for select groups of industries. It appears that, in the face of this extraordinary event, financial analysts were detached from the emotions it engendered and were discriminating in their assessment of its impact.