The differing roles of success drivers across sequential channels: An application to the motion picture industry

In several product categories, it is typical to release products sequentially to different markets and customer segments. Conventional knowledge holds that the roles of various product success drivers do not differ significantly across these sequential channels of distribution. The authors examine sequential distribution channels within the motion picture industry and develop a model that proposes that such differences exist between a primary (short- and long-term theatrical box office) and a sequential (video rental) channel. The authors test their model with a sample of 331 motion pictures released in theaters and on video during 1999–2001 using partial least squares. Results reveal differences in the impact of success factors across channels. For example, cultural familiarity enhances box office success but relates negatively to video rental success, and distribution intensity and date of release enhance box office outcomes but have no impact on rental revenues. Thorsten Hennig-Thurau (tht@medien.uni-weimar.cie) is a professor of marketing and media research at Bauhaus-University of Weimar’s Media School and Honorary Visiting Professor of Movie Marketing in the Faculty of Management of Cass Business School, City University London. He has published articles in theJournal of Marketing, theJournal of Service Research, theInternational Journal of Electronic Commerce, theJournal of Interactive Marketing, Psychology & Marketing, and theJournal of Consumer Affairs, among others. He is author of the monograph Relationship Marketing, which has been translated into Chinese. He is member of the editorial board of three journals and serves as reviewer for theJournal of Marketing andMarketing Science. He has won eight Best Article and Best Paper Awards, including the Overall Best Paper Award of the 2005 American Marketing Association Summer Educators’ Conference and the 2002JSR Excellence in Service Research Award. Mark B. Houston (houstonmb@missouri.edu) (PhD, Arizona State University) is the David and Judy O’Neal MBA Professor at the University of Missouri-Columbia. His research on strategy, interfirm relationships, and innovation has been published in leading journals, including theJournal of Marketing, theJournal of Marketing Research, theJournal of Consumer Research, Marketing Science, theJournal of the Academy of Marketing Science, and theJournal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis. He cochaired the 2005 American Marketing Association (AMA) Summer Educators’ Conference and served for two terms as vice president of the AMA’s Technology and Marketing Special Interest Group. Gianfranco Walsh (g.walsh@strath.ac.uk) received his MPhil degree from UMIST (England) and PhD (2001) and Habilitation (2004) degrees from Hanover (Germany). His research focuses on consumer behavior, corporate reputation, and e-commerce. He has presented numerous papers at international conferences. His work has been published in, among others, theAcademy of Marketing Science Review, the International Journal of Electronic Commerce, theJournal of Consumer Affairs, theJournal of Interactive Marketing, theJournal of Macromarketing, and theJournal of Marketing Management. He is the Chair of Marketing and Electronic Retailing at the Institute for Management, University of Koblenz-Landau.     

Strategic profiles and performance: An empirical test of select key propositions

Competing theories on internal orientation versus external orientation are examined. The relevant theories are amalgamated and condensed into a number of competing propositions that are empirically tested. The findings suggest that the internally oriented businesses as well as the externally oriented businesses underperform the efficient, marketing oriented businesses.     

Economic Valuation of Health for Environmental Policy: Comparing Alternative Approaches. Introduction and Overview

Protecting human health is a primary goal of environmental policy and economic evaluation of health can help policy-makers judge the relative worth of alternative actions. Economists use two distinct approaches in normatively evaluating health. Whereas environmental economists use benefit-cost analysis supported by monetary valuation in terms of willingness-to-pay, health economists evaluate interventions based on cost-effectiveness or cost-utility analysis (CEA), using quality-adjusted life-years (QALY) or similar indexes. This paper provides background on the controversy about the relative merits of these approaches and introduces the remaining papers in the special issue. These papers (with one exception) were presented at a conference sponsored by the Department of Economics at the University of Central Florida with support from the US Environmental Protection Agency. Although CEA might not lead to substantially different implications for environmental policy than benefit-cost analysis, and QALY may provide a benefit transfer tool to fill gaps in the morbidity valuation literature, the papers in this issue raise serious concerns about the suitability of QALY-based CEA for environmental regulatory analysis. QALY does not in general appropriately represent individual preferences for health and CEA is neither independent of income distribution nor adequate to assess efficiency.     

Promise and peril in implementing pay‐for‐performance

Why would managers abandon pay‐for‐performance plans they initiated with great hopes? Why would employees celebrate this decision? This article explores why managers made their decisions in 12 of 13 pay‐for‐performance “experiments” at Hewlett‐Packard in the mid‐1990s. We find that managers thought the costs of these programs to be higher than the benefits. Alternative managerial practices such as effective leadership, clear objectives, coaching, or training were thought a better investment. Despite the undisputed instrumentality of pay‐for‐performance to motivate, little attention has been given to whether the benefits outweigh the costs or the “fit” of these programs with high‐commitment cultures like Hewlett‐Packard was at the time. © 2004 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.     

Arbitrage opportunities and immunization

It is often argued that an immunization strategy violates arbitrage-free equilibrium. Because immunization is a static concept, we contend that this argument is not valid. This paper examines the immunization strategy in a dynamic setting, and shows that global immunization is feasible for any arbitrage-free affine term structure model, including the parallel shift model. Further, we show that immunization does not violate arbitrage-free pricing because the cost of immunization over time is positive. Consequently, immunization strategies based upon commonly used duration, measures are not theoretically unsound.     

On recalls, layoffs, variable hours, and labor adjustment costs

The paper analyzes the employment policy of a firm that can vary both hours and the level of employment. The analysis differs from previous work in the adjustment cost literature in that the firm is able to change its employment not only through hires, layoffs, and quits, but also by recalls of employees who were previously laid off. Thus, we introduce the possibility of the firm inventorying the labor input. It is shown that this labor inventory potential is necessary if the firm is to ever lay off workers. Further, it is demonstrated that linear rather than strictly convex adjustment costs are then required if the firm is to always recall employees who were previously laid off prior to hiring new workers.     

The contracting value of tainted reports in cost reduction settings

While cost accounting is a well-developed discipline with a rich institutional past, it is criticized for being manipulable. This criticism is due, in part, to the existence of multiple, yet equally accepted cost allocation procedures or cost estimation techniques. Employing a principal-agent model, cost accounting is modeled as a menu of alternative methods which, conditional on agent effort, produce noisy, unbiased and independently distributed (i.e., equally defensible) measures from which a single realization is selected ex post as the report used to contract with the agent. Assuming that the report does not indicate which method produced it, the report modeled is “tainted” in that the lowest (most favorable to the agent) outcome is reported, where the “amount” of tainting corresponds to the menu's size. The paper identifies bright-line conditions where the principal's expected net payoff is independent of the amount of tainting, demonstrating that tainting does not necessarily affect the report's incentive value.