Improving Attitude toward Corporate Strategy with Visual Mapping： Scale Development and Application in Europe and China

Companies operating across borders face greater challenges in ensuring compliance with company strategy in different cultural contexts. Recent research shows the cognitive and emotional benefits of utilizing visual representations of knowledge in organizations. This study aims to test if mapping a corporate strategy visually can improve attitudes toward firm strategy and the intention to comply with it. An experiment is conducted comparing two knowledge maps to a textual version of the same company strategy. In order to measure attitudes toward the strategy, a scale was developed and tested in Europe and China. The study outcome provides a parsimonious and effective tripartite scale of attitude with cognitive, affective and behavioral components. The scale was then applied to a different sample to test the effect of mapping a company strategy visually on attitude toward the strategy, and to test if the effect is persistent in Europe and China. The results of the experiment show that subjects exposed to the visual conditions had significantly more positive affective and cognitive attitudes toward the content.     

Determinants of the Willingness to Use Mobile Location-Based Services

This article develops 11 hypotheses on impacts of six customer characteristics on an individual’s willingness to use mobile location based services (LBS). Hypotheses are tested in a sample of 217 mobile communications customers in Germany who participated in a standardized online-survey. PLS analysis suggests that reported frequency of “on the move” information needs, perceived assessment of LBS in a customer’s social environment and extent of past use of other mobile data services have statistically as well as practically significant effects on adoption intentions for pull LBS. Data privacy risks and cost/bill size concerns are only weakly or not related to such intentions.     

Wages and the City. Evidence from Italy

We analyze empirically the impact of urban agglomeration on Italian wages. Using micro-data from the Bank of Italy's Survey of Household Income and Wealth for the years 1995, 1998, 2000 and 2002 on more than 22,000 employees distributed in 242 randomly drawn local labor markets, we test whether the structure of wages varies with urban scale. We find that every additional 100,000 inhabitants in the local labor market raises earnings by 0.1 percent. The use of a geographical approach enables us to state that this effect decays very rapidly with distance, losing significance beyond approximately 12 kilometers. We also find that urbanization does not affect returns to experience and that it reduces returns to education and to tenure with current firm, while providing a premium to worker supervisors.     

Good guy vs. bad guy: the influence of parasocial interactions with media characters on brand placement effects

Although brand placements are frequently associated with media characters within movies or TV series, and viewers are well known to relate to such characters, previous research has scarcely dealt with media characters’ influence on brand placement effects. Addressing this, two studies investigate the influence of parasocial interactions with media characters on perceptions of brands related to media characters. The first study applied a 1 × 2 between-subjects design, assuming that positively represented characters elicit greater parasocial interaction and, subsequently, more favourable brand attitudes compared with negatively represented characters. The results confirm the assumed indirect effect. A second study was able to replicate the first study's findings in a different setting and to introduce brand familiarity as an important moderator of the mediation found in the first and second study (moderated mediation). The underlying mechanism and implications are discussed.     

Choosing project risk management techniques. A theoretical framework

The pressure for increasing quality while reducing time and costs places particular emphasis on managing risk in projects. To this end, several models and techniques have been developed in literature and applied in practice, so that there is a strong need for clarifying when and how each of them should be used. At the same time, knowledge about risk management is becoming a matter of paramount importance to effectively deal with the complexity of projects. However, communication and knowledge creation are not easy tasks, especially when dealing with uncertainty, because decision-making is often fragmented and a comprehensive perspective on the goals, opportunities and threats of a project is missing. With the purpose of providing guidelines for the selection of risk techniques taking into account the most relevant aspects characterising the managerial and operational scenario of a project, a theoretical framework to classify these techniques is proposed. Based on a literature review of the criteria to categorise risk techniques, three dimensions are defined: the phase of the risk management process, the phase of the project life cycle and the corporate maturity towards risk. The taxonomy is then applied to a wide selection of risk techniques according to their documented applications. This work helps to integrate the risk management and the knowledge management processes. Future research efforts will be directed towards refining the framework and testing it in multiple industries.     

Assessment of the Regional Landscape Plan of Sardinia (Italy): A participatory-action-research case study type

The planning activity of the regional administration of Sardinia (Italy) has undergone a deep change after the approval of the Regional Landscape Plan (RLP), which establishes the directions for nearly any future planning activity in Sardinia, and requires that actual sectoral and local plans, as well as plans for protected areas, be changed to comply with its directions. This mandatory adjustment process can be conflictual, if the administrations responsible for these plans disagree with the rules established by the RLP.     

Optimization of Monte Carlo Procedures for Value at Risk Estimates

This paper proposes a methodology which improves the computational efficiency of the Monte Carlo simulation approach of value at risk (VaR) estimates. Principal components analysis is used to reduce the number of relevant sources of risk driving the portfolio dynamics. Moreover, large deviations techniques are used to provide an estimate of the minimum number of price scenarios to be simulated to attain a given accuracy. Numerical examples are provided and show the good performance of the methodolgy proposed.
(J.E.L.: C15, G1).     

Teenager–peer interaction and its contribution to a family purchase decision: the mediating role of enduring product involvement

The influencing roles of teenager–peer interaction and enduring product involvement on a teen's contribution to a family purchase decision are examined using survey data from 1008 Tunisian teens. Results demonstrate that enduring product involvement mediates the relationship between teenager–peer interaction and the teenager's contribution. A structural equation model with supporting Bootstrap procedure is presented. Implications, limitations and suggestions for future research are discussed.     

You Support Diversity,But Are You Ethical? Examining the Interactive Effects of Diversity and Ethical Climate Perceptions on Turnover Intentions

Efforts to identify antecedents of employee turnover are likely to offer value to organizations through money saved on recruitment and new-hire training. The authors utilized the stakeholder perspective to corporate social responsibility to examine the effects of a perceived climate for ethics on the relationship between diversity climate and voluntary turnover intentions. Specifically, they examined how ethics climate (employees’ perceptions that their organization values and enforces ethically correct behavior) affected the diversity climate–turnover intentions relationship. Results indicated that ethics climate moderated the diversity climate–turnover intentions relationship. Turnover intentions were lowest among workers perceiving both a pro-diversity and highly ethical climate. These results reinforce the need to communicate both diversity values and ethical standards to employees.