Service Guarantee Strength: The key to service quality

While most authors describe a service guarantee as a “zero-one variable” indicating the presence or absence of an explicit written service guarantee, this paper develops a construct called “Service Guarantee Strength” (SGS) that is a continuous variable. This construct measures the degree to which a firm sets clear service quality standards for itself on dimensions that customers care about, and has an formal policy for quickly giving meaningful compensation to customers when these standards are not met.The paper builds upon established micro-level behavioral theory to develop the “Service Guarantee Strength Framework”. This framework posits that high Service Guarantee Strength leads to improved service quality, customer satisfaction, and loyalty through three intervening variables—marketing communications impact, employee motivation and vision, and learning through service failure.An empirical investigation was conducted to test the SGS Framework using both employee and customer data from three pairs of firms, with each pair in a different industry. None of these firms had an explicit service guarantee. Unlike many behavioral research studies, this study measured both employee and customer perceptual data and compared the two. The research finds that Service Guarantee Strength is positively related to customer perceptions of service quality, customer satisfaction, and loyalty.     

The Social Economics of Work Time: Introduction

How do social economists conceptualize and analyze time, particularly time spent in paid employment? In this symposium regarding this quite “timely”" issue, it is evident that social economics views work time as something more than its presentation in neoclassical economics. For neoclassical economists, time is a scarce resource that, when commodified as labor, serves as a factor of production and means to the end of consumption for optimizing firms, individuals, and families. It is also more than the radical political economics understanding of time as the yardstick measuring the value created by labor. Instead, time spent on the job is all at once a source of income, personal identity, and relative status within society, the workplace and household, and a constraint on individuals' ability to pursue self-directed activities and social reproduction. Work time is determined within a complex web of evolving culture and social relations, as well as traditionally conceived market, technological, and macroeconomic forces and institutions such as collective bargaining and government policy.     

A Comparison of Neural Network, Statistical Methods, and Variable Choice for Life Insurers' Financial Distress Prediction

This study examines the effect of the statistical/mathematical model selected and the variable set considered on the ability to identify financially troubled life insurers. Models considered are two artificial neural network methods (back‐propagation and learning vector quantization (LVQ)) and two more standard statistical methods (multiple discriminant analysis and logistic regression analysis). The variable sets considered are the insurance regulatory information system (IRIS) variables, the financial analysis solvency tracking (FAST) variables, and Texas early warning information system (EWIS) variables, and a data set consisting of twenty‐two variables selected by us in conjunction with the research staff at TDI and a review of the insolvency prediction literature. The results show that the back‐propagation (BP) and LVQ outperform the traditional statistical approaches for all four variable sets with a consistent superiority across the two different evaluation criteria (total misclassification cost and resubstitution risk criteria), and that the twenty‐two variables and the Texas EWIS variable sets are more efficient than the IRIS and the FAST variable sets for identification of financially troubled life insurers in most comparisons.     

A Brief History of Long Work Time and the Contemporary Sources of Overwork

What are some of the key historical trends in hours of work per worker in US? What economic, social-psychological, organizational and institutional forces determine the length of individuals’ working hours? How much of the trend toward longer working hours among so many workers may be attributable to workers’ preferences, workplace incentives or employers’ constraints? When can work become overwork or workaholism – an unforced addiction to incessant work activity which risk harm to workers, families or even economies? The first part of this article traces the history of the length of working hours and its recent polarization. The second part develops a multi-disciplinary model to identify motivations behind working longer hours. Individuals' desired work hours will stem from the weighted contribution of five sources: (1) current real wage rates; (2) forward-looking, wage trajectories; (3) relative status associated with hours of labor; (4) intrinsic rewards, process benefits or amenities acquired through work; (5) hours demanded by the employer and other structural constraints, to which workers may adapt. Employers and their established conditions of work have influenced the course of long run trends labor supply and in work time structures. The final section suggests policies that might address the persistence of long hours.     

Managerial ability,forecasting quality,and open-market repurchase program completion

Review of Quantitative Finance and Accounting - We examine how the US and EU antidumping (AD) cases against Chinese firms affected their stock prices and long-term financial performance during...     

Determinants of Agricultural Economic Faculty Salaries: A Quarter of a Century Later

This research studies factors that influence the salary level of university agricultural economists. Comparisons to previous work suggest that the impact of a single publication on salary has declined over the past twenty-five years; however, the return to relative publications is the same. The impact of years of experience has increased. Analysis of a different model specification suggests that the number of publications, advisees, and grants obtained positively impact salaries, while undergraduate course load has a negative impact. Results show that mobility and marketability significantly increase salary. Analysis suggests that there is a significant negative impact associated with an extension appointment and a significant positive impact associated with employment at a Ph.D.-granting university. Finally, the Wilcoxon matched-pairs signed rank test indicates that most universities' average salaries follow the market.     

Working Time and the Impact of Policy Institutions: Reforming the Overtime Hours Law and Regulation

This paper analyzes implications for worker well-being if legislation in the U.S. Congress is passed permitting employers and non-supervisory employees who agree to substitute future compensatory time off in lieu of premium pay for overtime work, calculated over an 80-hour two-week standard. The impact on worker welfare is predicted applying augmented worker utility and employer demand for hours functions. Plausible inter-temporal scenarios suggest that unless workers gain more control over the timing of their overtime and comp time hours, they are likely to experience a net loss in welfare. This will occur to the extent employers use the new overtime regulation to vary work hours and schedules more closely with fluctuations in output demand as opposed to better customizing work hours to fit workers' needs to balance work with competing demands on their time, that is, adopting a short rather than longer-run time horizon regarding the restraint of labor costs. Alternative policies are more likely to raise welfare.     

The Interpretation And Resolution Of Resource Allocation Issues In Professional Organizations: A Critical Examination Of The Professional-Manager Dichotomy*

Professional organizations have long been depicted as rife with conflict between professionals, who are assumed to represent the interests of their profession, and managers, who are assumed to represent the potentially competing interests of the organization. This study examines the validity of this assumption. Based on past research on both professional organizations and knowledge structure development, we predict that to the extent that professionals and managers conflict, they may do so because they interpret 'identical' issues differently. The results of a study of resource allocation decision preferences with 350 chief financial officers, chief medical officers, and physicians revealed strong support for our issue interpretation predictions, and virtually no support for the simple professional–manager dichotomy. Specifically, using structural equation modeling, we found that: (1) single resource allocation issues could be interpreted in multiple ways; (2) issue interpretations were strong predictors of decision preferences; (3) professionals and managers tended to interpret issues differently, although many of the differences were not consistent with past theorizing about professionals; (4) the interpretations and decision preferences of professionals who occupied management positions were like those of other professionals but different from those of managers; and (5) decision maker status (i.e., professional and/or manager) was only modestly related to decision preference. Our findings suggest that the sources and manifestations of a professional–manager dichotomy are more complex than previously reported.