Analyzing the Memory Impact of Advertising Fragments

Marketers are making increasing use of very brief messages that mention just a brand name or a brand name with a short headline, as in event sponsorship and program endorsements. There has been debate over the effectiveness of these advertising fragments. This paper introduces an approach for controlled testing of the effects of advertising fragments. Using a reaction-time based procedure, we show that a key effect of advertising fragments is to revive established brand associations, even though these associations are not explicitly communicated. This reactivation occurs not only when these names receive focal attention, but also when they receive nonfocal attention.     

Corporate Environmental Disclosure: Contrasting Management's Perceptions with Reality

This paper's purpose is to assess how management's perceptions regarding certain aspects of environmental reporting relate to the firm's actual reporting strategy. Toward that end, we propose a model where a firm's environmental disclosure is conditional upon executive assessments of corporate concerns. The study relies on a survey that was sent to environmental management executives from European and North American multinational firms enquiring about the determinants of corporate environmental disclosure. Responses from these executives were then contrasted with their firms' actual environmental reporting practices, which was measured using a comprehensive multi-criteria grid. Results show that there is a relationship between environmental managers' attitudes toward various stakeholder groups and how those managers respond to the stakeholders via the decision to disclose and the actual disclosures made. Our model provides a perspective as to how a firm responds to the numerous stakeholders to whom it must be accountable. This accountability in turn relates to how the company communicates its actions to society in order to achieve or maintain its social legitimacy.     

Shopping online for goods vs. services: where do experiential features help more?

This study investigates how the type of offer sold online (goods vs. services) moderates the relationships between perceived experiential values and customers' attitudes towards the website. A sample of 107 e‐shoppers of services and 110 e‐shoppers of physical goods responded to a survey on their most recent e‐shopping experiences. Results support the majority of hypotheses. It was found that although offering experiential values on the site improves customers' attitudes for both physical goods and services websites, the impact is much stronger in the case of services. Theoretical and managerial contributions are discussed.     

An internal control perspective on the market value consequences of IT operational risk events

IT internal controls are an important component of an organization's arsenal of internal controls. Upon conceptualizing failures of operational IT systems, or what we call IT operational risk events, as signals of IT internal control weaknesses, we theorize about these events' impact on internal control objectives in general and about how this impact is influenced by the regulatory environment in particular. We then perform an event study to examine the economic impact of a diversified sample of IT operational risk events from the U.S. financial services industry during 1985–2009. We specifically test the impact of contextual factors on the degree of this effect, including the events' target (confidentiality, integrity, or availability of IT assets), the source of disclosure (regulatory or voluntary), the enactment of the Sarbanes–Oxley Act, and firm-specific attributes. We find that investors penalize firms most strongly for experiencing events that compromise the availability of IT systems, consistent with our prediction that these events more negatively impact the reliability of financial reporting and the efficiency and effectiveness of operations. This result contrasts extant empirical studies that are predominantly concerned with information and security breaches. We find also that investors' penalty is the strongest for firms experiencing IT operational risk events that occurred after the passing of the Sarbanes–Oxley Act or were disclosed by a regulatory body. Finally, the market reaction is shown to be stronger for firms with high growth potential, firms that are larger, riskier, and are in the banking sector. Implications for research and practice are discussed along with directions for future research.     

Demutualization and customer protection at self‐regulatory financial exchanges

In the past decade, many of the world's largest financial exchanges have demutualized, i.e., converted from mutual, not‐for‐profit organizations to publicly‐traded, for‐profit firms. In most cases, these exchanges have substantial responsibilities with respect to enforcing various “trade practice” regulations that protect investors from dishonest agents. We examine how the incentives to enforce such rules change as an exchange demutualizes. In contrast to oft‐stated concerns, we find that, in many circumstances, an exchange that maximizes shareholder (rather than member) income has a greater incentive to aggressively enforce these types of regulations. © 2010 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Jrl Fut Mark 31:126–164, 2011     

The contractual and value relevance of reported earnings in a dividend-focused environment

This study investigates the relevance of reported earnings in the context of an institutional environment, i.e., Switzerland, in which investors focus on dividends. In conjunction with a dividend focus, the financial reporting environment faced by Swiss firms provides their managers with more accounting discretion than managers of Anglo-Saxon firms typically have. From a contractual perspective, dividendbased earnings management is expected since Swiss corporate law explicitly states that dividends, which must be voted on by stockholders, are to be based upon a firm's reported earnings. From a value perspective, thin trading conditions and a long-term investment horizon are expected to increase the importance of dividend payments and to influence the informativeness of reported earnings. Results indicate that Swiss managers do engage in dividend-based earnings management, that earnings quality signals are used by managers to voluntarily constrain their accounting choices and that the value relevance of earnings is conditional upon dividend payments.     

Charts and demand: Empirical generalizations on social influence

Social influence on consumer behavior has long been a subject of academic research in various scientific fields. According to research by Salganik, Dodds, and Watts (2006), music demand is a function of social influence between consumers. Market concentration tends to increase when information on demand becomes publicly available. In addition, stochastic agglomeration caused by social influence decreases the predictability of market success. These heavily cited findings challenge traditional market research and provide important insights on the impact of social media and sales charts. We test the stability of their results by replicating the study on music demand in a slightly different setting. We further investigate the generalizability of findings by probing other product categories and different phases of purchase decisions, i.e., interest, consideration, and actual demand. Across all categories and across all dependent variables, we are able to replicate the direction of the effects. We do, however, consistently obtain smaller effect sizes than reported in the original paper.     

“It's not Easy Being Green”: Exploring Green Creeds,Green Deeds,and Internal Environmental Locus of Control

The authors report on the development of a novel construct, internal environmental locus of control (INELOC), which captures consumers’ multifaceted attitudes pertaining to personal responsibility towards and ability to affect environmental outcomes. Using data gathered from a sample of consumers, the linkages between INELOC and a wide array of environmental behaviors were investigated. Exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses revealed four first‐order dimensions (“green consumer,” “activism,” “advocate,” and “recycling attitudes”) embedded within a second‐order INELOC factor. Structural equations modeling techniques showed that INELOC was a strong positive predictor of many behaviors. However, the nature of the attitude–behavior relationship varied considerably across behavioral contexts, implying that people do not consistently behave in a proenvironmental manner. © 2012 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.     

A stochastic dominance approach to the measurement of discrimination

This note suggests a bridge between stochastic dominance (Rothschild and Stiglitz, 1970 [17], 1973 [18]), inequality measurement (Atkinson, 1970 [1]) and discrimination measurement (Gastwirth, 1975 [10]). Discrimination orderings are defined and illustrated through discrimination curves, in the same spirit as stochastic dominance analysis. The main result, which links the second order discrimination curve and the Gastwirth discrimination index, also generalizes the equivalence between Generalized Lorenz dominance and second order stochastic dominance.     

Come Rain or Shine: Evidence on Flood Insurance Purchases in Florida

This article provides a detailed analysis of the operation of the National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP) in Florida, which accounts for 40 percent of the NFIP portfolio. We study the demand for flood insurance with a data set of more than 7.5 million NFIP policies‐in‐force (the largest ever studied) for the years 2000–2005, as well as all NFIP claims filed in Florida. We answer four questions: What are the characteristics of the buyers of flood insurance? What types of contracts (deductibles and coverage levels) are purchased? What are the determinants of claims payments? How are prices determined and how much does NFIP insurance cost?