The relationship between legitimacy,reputation, sustainability and branding for companies and their supply chains

This paper aims at filling a gap that we perceive to exist in the scientific literature as to legitimacy, reputation and sustainability and their interrelationship to corporate and supply chain branding. A series of innovative theoretical frameworks are provided interrelating companies and their value (supply) chains with legitimacy, reputation, and branding which are essential conditions to achieve sustainability and competitive advantage based on dyadic and social context consonance to the benefit of society and all stakeholders involved. An urgently required better understanding of the concepts and their interrelations is enhanced by a synthesized explanatory basis entailing an eclectic mosaic of interdisciplinary theories (institutionalist, neo-institutionalist theories, the viable system approach, isomorphism and identity) to improve corporate and supply chain performance. To better inform managerial practice the theoretical considerations are spiced with case studies among which especially the currently debated supply chain case of the European horse meat scandal is illuminated suggesting concrete managerial cross-functional implications in the food industry. The paper culminates in the call for a newly to-be-established marketing stream we call ‘Sustainable and Curative Marketing’.     

Anticipatory algorithms for same-day courier dispatching

This paper describes anticipatory algorithms for the dynamic vehicle dispatching problem with pickups and deliveries, a problem faced by local area courier companies. These algorithms evaluate alternative solutions through a short-term demand sampling and a fully sequential procedure for indifference zone selection. They also exploit an unified and integrated approach in order to address all the issues involved in real-time fleet management, namely assigning requests to vehicles, routing the vehicles, scheduling the routes and relocating idle vehicles. Computational results show that the anticipatory algorithms provide consistently better solutions than their reactive counterparts.     

Obsolescence risk in advanced technologies for retailing: A management perspective

In recent years, a great deal of research focused on the introduction of advanced technologies for making traditional stores more appealing and attractive, with several benefits for the retail process. Since the introduction of these innovative systems involves several risks that can have a negative impact on business profitability, this paper aims at investigating to what extent it is possible to reduce these risks by proposing an explorative framework for a successful risk management strategies in retail context. Key results of this research concern the importance of the risk management also for retail sector, with emphasis on the introduction/adoption decision of innovative technologies in the points of sale, with consequences for retail-oriented industries. To achieve this task, the current study synthesizes findings from several fields such as management, marketing, and computer science.     

The Sunrise Economy: 24-hour Drinking Legislation in Leeds

ABSTRACT

As the growth of the public houses has become static within the UK the government has been looking at different ways in which they can strategically expand the market, of which one is the 24-hour drinking legislation.

The 24-hour drinking legislation has been operative in the United Kingdom for just over one year now and this article looks at how a chain of public houses has adopted this legislation into their day-to-day running of the business. The paper also discusses the types of consumer's who frequent the public houses at the new trading times and in particular, with the aid of consumer behaviour theory and in particular the PIECE model, discusses the process in which these consumer's go through.

The main conclusions denote that shift workers, the unemployed, and blue collar workers all use these premises at the new trading times.     

Profit sharing regulation and repeated bargaining with a shut-down option

We analyze the behavior of a firm where workers share profits with shareholders by using a model cast in an Aoki framework. There are two sorts of uncertainties: one relates to the market price, assumed to follow a random path in continuous time, while the other concerns internal organization, i.e. the share of profits to be distributed between workers and shareholders. In the institutional setting we adopt the firm is flexible, since it has the possibility of shutting down, by paying laid off workers a bonus, which represents a sunk cost. The distributive share is determined in the firm's internal labor market through a bargaining that takes place at two occasions: at the beginning of the firm's life and when profits reach a threshold level. The second bargaining is endogenized according to a procedure imposed upon shareholders and workers by a regulator who may use profit distribution as a way to intervene in the firm's internal labor market. Specificities make this market highly imperfect. Different share parameter patterns result, owing to a shut down option, according to whether (a) the regulator calls for renegotiation when profits are increasing or decreasing, (b) the regulator's rule is announced in advance or is discretionally set.     

What Drives Price Differentials of Consumables in Europe? Size? Affluence? Or Both?

Prices of many consumables differ substantially across the European Union (EU) due to natural segmentation and to the survival of residual man-made barriers. However, we do not know much about the direction and the cause of deviations among countries differing mainly in size and income of their citizens. Here, we wish to fill this gap. We go through some simple theoretical analysis and show that, in the presence of mild barriers to trade, as those persisting among EU countries, prices should be lower in large countries. On the contrary, prices will be higher where people enjoy better standards of living which translate into higher marginal willingness to pay by consumers. We perform a parallel empirical investigation to assess the relative weight of the two main forces driving prices apart across countries and we test our theoretical proposition through a simple econometric analysis of prices of consumables across the EU. Country size and affluence explain price differentials in a convincing manner. However, the relative importance of the two variables changes as we consider the EU after the establishment of the Single Market or when we analyse a subsample of fast growing EU members.

How can biases affect entrepreneurial decision making? toward a behavioral approach to unicorns

International Entrepreneurship and Management Journal - How can cognitive biases affect the birth and evolution of entrepreneurial ventures? In Entrepreneurial Decision Making (EDM), this lively...     

Roger B. Porter, Pierre Sauvé, Arvind Subramanian and Amerito B. Zampetti (eds) (2001) Efficiency, Equity, Legitimacy: The Multilateral Trading System at the Millennium

Book reviewed in this article:
Roger B. Porter, Pierre Sauvé, Arvind Subramanian and Amerito B. Zampetti (eds), Efficiency, Equity, Legitimacy: The Multilateral Trading System at the Millennium     

Current account composition and sustainability of external debt

This paper presents and tests a model of expectations of retirement, using data from a developing country. Using three stage least-squares, the expected amount of labour force participation at age 55 is shown to be positively related to current hours worked per week and to education. Current illness has little effect on quantity of employment at age 55. The effects of non-labour income sources are variable in sign and significance. The lack of significance is probably due to differences in the relevant time periods.     

Threat of entry and debt maturity: Evidence from airlines

I explore the effect of the threat posed by low-cost competitors on debt structure in the airline industry. I use the route network expansion of low-cost airlines to identify routes where the probability of future entry increases dramatically. I find that when a large portion of their market is threatened, incumbents significantly increase debt maturity before entry occurs. Overall, the main findings suggest that airlines respond to entry threats trading off the benefits of short-term financing for lower rollover risk. The results are consistent with models in which firms set their optimal debt structure in the presence of costly rollover failure.