Innovation in retail internationalisation: Tesco in the USA

This paper examines the market entry of the UK's largest retailer (Tesco) into the USA. Tesco's launch of a new brand – Fresh & Easy Neighborhood Markets – in virgin territory is a bold move, notwithstanding the firm's considerable success with its overseas investment strategy (which within ten years has resulted in more than 50% of the firm's operating space being outside its ‘home’ market). The paper contextualises the study by taking a historical view of innovation in the retail industry, which reveals that generally - and certainly for the most part of the twentieth century – innovations have dominantly flowed from the US to the UK. The paper suggests that Tesco's US experiment is unusual both in terms of the innovatory aspects of its market entry and the reversal in that conventional direction of knowledge transfer. The Fresh & Easy story is then examined in terms of ten ‘dimensions of innovation’ involved in the market entry. The paper concludes by drawing out from these ‘dimensions of innovation’ a number of important issues for management scholarship raised by the study, stressing the need to incorporate insights from a wider social science literature.     

The Effects of Individual Difference Factors on the Acceptability of Ethical and Unethical Workplace Behaviors

The purpose of this paper was to determine whether the individual attributes of locus of control, gender, major in college and years of job experience affect the acceptability of certain workplace behaviors. A total of 198 college students of a mid-sized southeastern university formed the sample for this study. Locus of control, gender and years of job experience were found to have some affect on whether an individual considered a certain behavior acceptable or unacceptable.     

Stradin: A Strategic Dynamic and Interactive Decision-Making Process

This article proposes a new strategic decision-making process: Stradin. Stradin uses recent developments in computerized network systems and user-friendly interfaces in order to address management challenges of corporations of the 1990s. Five strategic challenges are addressed: (1) finding the right balance in the centralization-decentralization dilemma; (2) conciliating strategic decisions and their operational implementation; (3) finding a balance between role differentiation and integration; (4) using conflict constructively in order to improve decision making; (5) conciliating emerging strategies and continuity. The article below discusses each of these challenges and shows how Stradin can help in meeting them.     

A rose by any other name …: Color‐naming influences on decision making

Companies dealing in colors (e.g., paint companies, the cosmetic industry) spend enormous amounts of time and money selecting names to accompany their various product lines in an attempt to maximally appeal to and lure in consumers. In two experiments, the current research examines the extent to which such naming strategies have an impact on consumer behavior. Across both experiments, participants rated either color swatches (Experiment 1) or products (Experiment 2) that had either generic names (e.g., brown) or fancy names (e.g., mocha) attached to them. The results of each experiment revealed that names significantly influence how colors are perceived, and that fancy names result in significantly more favorable ratings than do generic names. Both theoretical and applied implications of this phenomenon are discussed. © 2006 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.     

The use of multi-criteria decision-making methods in the integrated assessment of climate change: implications for IA practitioners

Integrated assessment (IA) considers interactions of physical, biological, and human systems in order to assess long-term consequences of environmental and energy policies such as limits on greenhouse gas emissions, and other strategies to negate climate change. Users of IA face the daunting task of interpreting large amounts of data and uncertainties. Multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM) methods can help users process IA data, understand policy tradeoffs, and learn how their value judgments affect decisions. We held a workshop during which climate change experts tested several MCDM methods for using IA outputs to rank hypothetical policies for abating greenhouse gas emissions. Participants also evaluated several methods for visualizing tradeoffs under both certainty and uncertainty cases. This paper explores potential roles for MCDM in IA identified during the workshop, along with implications for IA design and implementation. We summarize the workshops’ results regarding intertemporal discounting (a type of MCDM weighting judgment), visualization of impacts, how MCDM methods can help users to incorporate their background knowledge, and how MCDM can improve understanding of tradeoffs and the importance of value judgments. A key result is that the interest rates IA experts recommend for discounting future impacts depend strongly on what type of impact is being discounted, as well as upon the exact phrasing of questions used to elicit rates from the experts.     

The effects of city size and moving costs on public project benefits

This paper uses a simulation model to investigate the benefits of an urban public project when the size of the system of cities (or regions) in which migration occurs can vary and when moving costs impede migration. The model captures the range of possibilities between the perfectly open and closed city cases. We find that the total number of households migrating between cities declines sharply as moving costs rise. Also the level and distribution of project benefits between renters and landowners in the project city and other cities is sensitive to both the level of moving costs and the size of the urban system. The total benefits of the project fall by half or more when moving costs are introduced, even when moving costs themselves are netted out.     

The relationship between FSI advertising style and coupon redemption

We investigate the relationship between free-standing insert advertising style and coupon redemption. Results from two experiments indicate that the propensity to clip a coupon can be enhanced by matching ad tone (emotional vs rational) to the nature of a consumer’s primary motivation with respect to coupon usage. Moreover, this result appears to hold for consumers with both procoupon and anticoupon inclinations.

Gender,Organizational Justice Perceptions,and Union Organizing

The authors examine the relationship between gender and organizational justice perceptions and the implications of this relationship for organizing women. They employ a survey study design to confirm expectations associated with the anecdotal literature on this topic, namely that women place greater value on interactional justice than on distributive or procedural justice. Results indicate that gender leads to valuing interactional justice more highly only in interaction with race. Specifically, in contrast to white women and both white and black men, black women give greater weight to being treated with dignity and respect than to the other two organizational justice dimensions.