Reassessing marketing boards as hybrid arrangements: evidence from Canadian experiences

In this article, we reassess the role of marketing boards and similar arrangements that have played an important role in numerous agro‐food sectors of developed countries over almost a century. Referring to transaction cost economics and to more recent contributions on the allocation of decision and property rights, we interpret these arrangements as hybrid modes of governance. We hypothesize that uncertainty is the leading force pushing toward these organizational solutions and we explore forms of uncertainty at stake and their impact in shaping various types of hybrids. We also explore the role of institutional embeddedness in providing marketing boards and the like their legitimacy. Using numerous examples from Canadian marketing boards, we discuss the benefits and point out flaws of these arrangements. We conclude on the need to assess comparatively the role of these solutions with respect to, for example, a system of bilateral contracts.     

Optimal production of transplant care services

Most organ transplants are from dead donors. National transplant organizations exhibit considerable differences in terms of their donor population rates. Spain's organization is by far the most efficient in this respect. We argue that much of the productivity advantage of Spain's transplant organization proceeds from an efficient organization of the production chain, from organ procurement to transplantation. Transplants from dead donors are analogous to a common resource for the transplant community. Their circulation through the national transplant organization creates public good externalities between the care units in charge of organ retrieval and those in charge of transplantation. A socially efficient production of transplant care services obtains through an optimal control, by the national transplant agency, of both the circulation and the production of transplants. In particular, transplant shortage makes the rotten kid theorem fail in this context. The analysis also produces a natural measure of public good externalities, evaluated from the standpoint of care units.     

Democracy across Gender Diversity and Ethnicity of Middle Eastern SMEs: How Does Performance Differ?

This paper examines the relationship between boards of directors' demographic diversity and firms' financial performance. In particular, we highlight how women and ethnic minorities can affect Middle Eastern SMEs' financial performance. Using an unbalanced panel of 1,855 firm‐year observations of 371 boards of directors from nine Middle Eastern countries, our results support the positive impact of women and ethnic minority group members on Middle Eastern firms' performance. However, our evidence implies that when Western ethnic minority members increase, firms' performances tend to decrease, because these board members are appointed for regional and international board reputation legitimacy, personal business agendas, and links to the external corporate environment.     

Migrants' Home Town Associations and Local Development in Mali

We explore the impact of migrants' Home Town Associations (HTAs) on the provision of public goods in Mali. We combine an original dataset on all the HTAs created by Malian migrants in France from 1981 with census data on public goods in all Malian villages since 1976, and we run double‐difference estimations to compare villages with and without an HTA, before and after the creation of the HTAs. We find robust evidence that the provision of schools, health centers, and, to a lesser extent, water amenities has increased significantly faster in villages targeted by an HTA between 1987 and 2009 than in control villages.     

中国上市公司营运资金管理调查:2009

本调查从营运资金管理绩效的行业分析、企业分析、地区比较分析和外向型行业专题分析等方面对中国上市公司营运资金管理进行了分析,研究发现:金融危机对我国上市公司营运资金管理的负面影响仍然十分显著,经营活动营运资金管理绩效持续降低或总体持续降低的行业数量显著多于持续提高或总体持续提高的行业数量;生产渠道控制是经营活动营运资金管理的重点和难点;我国上市公司营运资金管理水平波动较大、管理风险较高;大多数上市公司采用延长付款期的方式来解决营运资金短缺问题,采购渠道营运资金管理绩效逆势回升的原因不在于存货管理水平的大面积改善,应付账款延期支付是其主要原因。此外还发现,营运资金管理绩效在地区之间不平衡、纺织服装和电子两个外向型程度较高的行业外销比例较大的样本组与外销比例较小的样本组营销渠道营运资金管理绩效差异明显。     

青岛海滨度假旅游产品深度开发研究

本文结合度假旅游的特点、我国旅游度假区的客源市场情况及世界旅游度假区的发展趋势,针对青岛海滨度假旅游资源特点和开发现状,提出了深度开发青岛地区海滨度假旅游产品的设想。其主要的开发对象为4个国家级、省级旅游度假区及市区的几处海水浴场。     

There are no Codes,Only Interpretations. Practical Wisdom and Hermeneutics in Monastic Organizations

Corporate codes of ethics, which have spread in the last decades, have shown a limited ability to foster ethical behaviors. For instance, they have been criticized for relying too much on formal compliance, rather than taking into account sufficiently agents and their moral development, or promoting self-reflexive behaviors. We aim here at showing that a code of ethics in fact has meaning and enables ethical progress when it is interpreted and appropriated with practical wisdom. We explore a model that represents an uncommon organizational code of ethics: the monastic Rule of St. Benedict, written in the sixth century and still used today. Our empirical study—conducted in several monasteries living under this rule—shows that organization members interpret this rule, both hermeneutically and ethically, to adapt it to situations. They also appropriate this rule as a way of life and treat it as a dynamic framework that helps them to follow their purpose within their organization. This exceptional code actually offers an alternative model for practicing codes of ethics, in a virtue-ethical manner, beyond mere compliance with the text. The way in which reflexive and active agents practice the code, both individually and collectively, shapes their organizational experience and fosters their moral development.     

Is energy storage an economic opportunity for the eco-neighborhood?

In this article, we consider houses belonging to an eco-neighborhood in which inhabitants have the capacity to optimize dynamically the energy demand and the energy storage level so as to maximize their utility. The inhabitants’ preferences are characterized by their sensitivity toward comfort versus price, the optimal expected temperature in the house, thermal loss and heating efficiency of their house. At his level, the eco-neighborhood manager shares the resource produced by the eco-neighborhood according to two schemes: an equal allocation between the houses and a priority based one. The problem is modeled as a stochastic game and solved using stochastic dynamic programming. We simulate the energy consumption of the eco-neighborhood under various pricing mechanisms: flat rate, peak and off-peak hour, blue/white/red day, peak day clearing and a dynamic update of the price based on the consumption of the eco-neighborhood. We observe that economic incentives for houses to store energy depend deeply on the implemented pricing mechanism and on the homogeneity in the houses’ characteristics. Furthermore, when prices are based on the consumption of the eco-neighborhood, storage appears as a compensation for the errors made by the service provider in the prediction of the consumption of the eco-neighborhood.     

The Effectiveness of Distributive Policy in a Competitive Economy

I consider an abstract social system made of individual owners endowed with nonpaternalistic interdependent preferences, who interact by means of individual gifts and by exchanges on competitive markets. The existence of equilibrium is established. I identify the set of allocations that are decentralizable in the sense that they are general equilibria for some vectors of market prices and initial endowments. This set is characterized in a simple way from the social endowment and individual market and distributive preferences. Decentralizable allocations are all accessible to distributive policy, unless public transfers are confined to some neighborhood of 0. In the latter case, distributive policy remains free to perform local redistributions of wealth across the components of the graph of equilibrium gifts.