Online brand communities: constructing and co-constructing brand culture

Consumers act and interact via social media networks and online brand communities, collectively generating brand culture. In this context, organisations have the opportunity to develop a cultural following. The respective task for brand managers and marketers is to understand how consumers collectively generate online brand culture? Using active and overt netnography and investigating the specific context of the Behance Network, the findings presented here demonstrate that online brand community members collectively generate brand culture in variant ways: through construction of self, emotional relationships, storytelling and ritualistic practices. Pragmatically, this work demonstrates that online brand community members are curators of online brand culture and netnography offers a window through which to identify what actions and interactions need to be facilitated and fostered.     

Size effect,methodological issues and ‘risk-to-default’: evidence from the UK stock market

The hedging effectiveness of dynamic strategies is compared with static (traditional) ones using futures contracts for the five leading currencies. The traditional hedging model assumes time invariance in the joint distribution of spot and futures price changes thus leading to a constant optimal hedge ratio (OHR). However, if this time-invariance assumption is violated, time-varying OHRs are appropriate for hedging purposes. A bivariate GARCH model is employed to estimate the joint distribution of spot and futures currency returns and the sequence of dynamic (time-varying) OHRs is constructed based upon the estimated parameters of the conditional covariance matrix. The empirical evidence strongly supports time-varying OHRs but the dynamic model provides superior out-of-sample hedging performance, compared to the static model, only for the Canadian dollar.     

Canonical sectors and evolution of firms in the US stock markets

Unsupervised machine learning can provide an objective and comprehensive broad-level sector decomposition of stocks     

Partnership to build research capacity

Today's nursing leaders are setting the stage for the next evolution--bringing together skilled clinicians and administrators with peers in education to create new approaches to leading the profession forward. Partnerships share goals, common purpose, mutual respect, willingness to negotiate and compromise, informed participation, information giving, and shared decision making. The shared practice academia effort between a public university and a private health care system situated in the island state of Hawai'i is described. The medical center and school of nursing pursued individual strategic efforts to build research capacity and used the opportunity to fund academic practice research projects. The mutual need and recognition of the high stakes involved, in concert with stable, committed leaders at all levels, were key to the early success of their efforts. Through the formal research partnership mechanism, a discrete focus was created for efforts and used to move to tactical, operational, and interpersonal integration in this relationship.     

Developing-island economies — tourism v agriculture

During the peak years of international tourism in developing countries, 1960–1974, the anti-tourism literature claimed that tourism was destroying other sectors, particularly agriculture, by competing for labour and land resources, and by increasing their reserve prices. Evidence is derived mainly from islands where movement of food, and labour supplies, were restricted, and many were suffering from the long-term decline in the sugar and copra trades. The article casts doubt on Bryden's proof by cost-benefit analysis that tourism had a poor social return, and even questions whether agriculture did decline in the critical period. Labour and land competition are shown to be inherently implausible, although the reserve price of labour may have been raised by the construction industry.     

A Computational Model of Coordination for the Design of Organizational Decision Support Systems

The Information Technology (IT) for realizing Organizational Decision Support Systems (ODSS) is in a nascent stage of development. This is particularly true in the area of coordination, which is a critical element of ODSS, and which distinguishes ODSS research from earlier research in Group DSS and individually oriented DSS. As a first step in ODSS coordination research, alternative representation schemes need to be examined in terms of both their match with the prevailing needs of organizations and of existing IT approaches that can be brought to bear. Matching ODSS needs with coordination representation requirements is examined by using several supporting reference disciplines including foundational DSS and recent ODSS research frameworks/architectures. Existing IT approaches are adapted from the reference disciplines of Active DSS, Distributed Artificial Intelligence (DAI), and Mathematical/Computational Organization Theory (MCOT) to operationalize a computational model of coordination that: (1) embodies the philosophies of Active DSS—including the idea that automated intelligent agents can play a significant role in supporting decision makers by independently carrying out rudimentary tasks to support the various phases of a decision making process; (2) adapts DAI and IT approaches to reflect practical human organizational realities including what we refer to as the ‘Open-Ended Knowledge World‘, and the evolutionary nature of organizations—whereby ODSS coordination representations will be subjected to almost constant revision due to both external environment disruptions and internal events that require adjustments to a preliminary plan; and (3) reflects the fact that organizational goals are often vague, which implies that a coordination representation should be sufficiently robust to reflect ad hoc analysis accommodating of strategy changes.     

Practical issues to consider when working with big data

Review of Accounting Studies - Increasing access to alternative or “big data” sources has given rise to an explosion in the use of these data in economics-based research. However, in...     

Digital highways and firm turnover

We study the impact of ultra-broadband (UBB) internet connections on firm entry and exit dynamics. These connections are based on optical fiber cables that link telecommunication operators to final users, allowing a significantly higher performance compared with traditional copper-line networks. We leverage on a unique comprehensive dataset collecting municipality-level information on broadband diffusion and firm turnover in Italy for the period of 2012–2019. Our empirical strategy exploits the staggered roll-out of UBB, starting from 2015. Our identification strategy is based on an instrumental variable approach that exploits plausibly exogenous variation in the physical and geographical peculiarities of the telecommunication infrastructure. Results suggest that UBB increases firm exit, particularly for small firms. On the contrary, firm entry rises only in digital intensive sectors and in the most developed geographical areas. Our findings have important implications for the ongoing debate around the massive investments in high-speed digital infrastructures, as they argue against the conventional idea that business activities equally benefit from last-generation broadband technologies.