Importers,Exporters and Multinationals: Exploring the Hierarchy of International Linkages

The purpose of this paper is to empirically explore two dimensions of the firm hierarchy of international market-specific linkages, using data on Swedish manufacturing firms from 1997 to 2007. First, we investigate the productivity ordering with respect to three international linkages; importing, exporting and investing abroad. Second, we explore whether differences in the productivity ordering across industries correlates with industry and country characteristics. Our findings support a general productivity hierarchy from importing to exporting and from exporting to investing abroad, as well as from a low to a high number of linkages (measuring the complexity of firms’ international linkages). However, an industry-by-industry examination shows that the hierarchical structure is only generally upheld when it comes to the number of international linkages, while the ordering of import, export and investment linkages does not exhibit the same regularity across industries. Extending the analysis, we find that the lack of a hierarchical structure is more likely in industries focusing on larger and less distant markets.     

Strategic Commitment and Timing of Internationalization from Emerging Markets: Evidence from China,India, Mexico,and South Africa

In a study of 257 new ventures from China, India, Mexico, and South Africa, we find support for the mediating effect of strategic early internationalization on international sales intensity. We argued that when new ventures from emerging markets internationalize early and with commitment, the legitimacy they acquire helps them overcome liabilities of newness and foreignness. We develop a typology of international new ventures that, based on strategic intent and timing of internationalization, distinguishes strategic early internationalizers from persistent, serendipitous, and long‐term internationalizers. We show that strategic early internationalization accounts for over half of the explained variance in international sales intensity and either fully or partially mediates the effects of managerial knowledge and market orientation on international sales intensity.     

The emerging oligopoly of pay-TV in the USA

The pay-television industry in the USA has been developing very rapidly in the past five years and is providing network quality alternatives to the mass taste programming of commercial television. However, the industry has been developing along lines very similar to the early history of radio in the USA with the emergence of strong distributor networks, restrictive affiliation contracts, and wide-spread vertical integration across all stages of production. History and economic efficiencies suggest that the result will be a strong oligopoly market structure. The proper public policy, then, is to insure that the unavoidable degree of concentration is not greater than that needed for efficiency reasons.     

The self‐presentation and self‐development of serious wildlife tourists

The notion of self‐concept and choice of tourism products has yet to be applied to wildlife tourism. The question of how consumers perceive themselves is considered fundamental to understanding purchase and consumption behaviours. This ethnographic study is based upon ‘serious’ wildlife tourism participants, for whom studying fauna and flora is the primary motivation for travel. The findings demonstrate how the ‘culture’ of ‘serious’ wildlife tourism is made up of individuals who differentiate themselves from other tourists in terms of dress, behaviour, development of skills, equipment and intellectual capital, illustrated by their desire to scope, identify and photograph wildlife. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Non-parametric and parametric bootstrap techniques for age-to-age development factor methods in stochastic claims reserving

In the literature, one of the main objects of stochastic claims reserving is to find models underlying the chain-ladder method in order to analyze the variability of the outstanding claims, either analytically or by bootstrapping. In bootstrapping these models are used to find a full predictive distribution of the claims reserve, even though there is a long tradition of actuaries calculating the reserve estimate according to more complex algorithms than the chain-ladder, without explicit reference to an underlying model. In this paper we investigate existing bootstrap techniques and suggest two alternative bootstrap procedures, one non-parametric and one parametric, by which the predictive distribution of the claims reserve can be found for other age-to-age development factor methods than the chain-ladder, using some rather mild model assumptions. For illustration, the procedures are applied to three different development triangles.     

Hero shots: involved fathers conquering new discursive territory in consumer culture

ABSTRACT

In this paper, we explore how visual expressions of culture offer new discursive territory within which consumer cultural ideals can be negotiated on a global scale. Through a critical visual analysis of the revelatory case Swedish Dads, we find hero shots depicting involved fathers where children’s needs and the hermetic confines of the home take center stage, as opposed to the traditional fatherhood ideals portrayed in western contemporary advertising, media, and popular culture. We demonstrate how the Swedish state’s gender ideology was encoded into a communicative event in the form of hero shots and subsequently dispersed by visual consumers as well as political and commercial stakeholders pushing this particular agenda and/or capitalizing on its tendencies. This in such a way that the event conquered new discursive territory fostering new types of consumer cultural negotiations on fatherhood ideals also in other cultural settings.     

Pricing Critical Illness Insurance from Prevalence Rates: Gompertz versus Weibull

The pricing of critical illness insurance requires specific and detailed insurance data on healthy and ill lives. However, where the critical illness insurance market is small or national commercial insurance data needed for premium estimates are unavailable, national health statistics can be a viable starting point for insurance ratemaking purposes, even if such statistics cover the general population, are aggregate, and are reported at irregular intervals. To develop a critical illness insurance pricing model structured on a multiple state continuous and time-inhomogeneous Markov chain and based on national statistics, we do three things: First, assuming that the mortality intensity of healthy and ill lives is modeled by two parametrically different Weibull hazard functions, we provide closed formulas for transition probabilities involved in the multiple state model we propose. Second, we use a dataset that allows us to assess the accuracy of our multiple state model as a good estimator of incidence rates under the Weibull assumption applied to mortality rates. Third, the Weibull results are compared to corresponding results obtained by substituting two parametrically different Gompertz models for the Weibull models of mortality rates, as proposed previously. This enables us to assess which of the two parametric models is the superior tool for accurately calculating the multiple state model transition probabilities and assessing the comparative efficiency of Weibull and Gompertz as methods for pricing critical illness insurance.     

Harnessing Innovation for Change: Sustainability and Poverty in Developing Countries

To date, a well‐developed business perspective on how to promote sustainability for those in poverty is sorely lacking. For sustainability enhancing innovations in developing countries, poverty presents unique challenges. In this paper, we argue that if sustainability enhancing innovations introduced in developing countries are to stick, they need to be designed with local customers, networks, and business ecosystems in mind. We illustrate this view using case examples from mobile telephony, fuel efficient stoves, clean drinking water, and household electrification. Our paper underscores the need for today's managers to understand poverty as an integral part of the sustainability nexus and the new international business equation.     

British Wildlife Tourism Operators: Current Issues and Typologies

The UK wildlife outbound tourism sector is a relatively uncharted area of academic study both in terms of demand and supply. The purpose of this paper is first, to move towards a typology of British wildlife tour operators and their favoured destinations, and secondly, to introduce the relationship between satisfying the consumer and sustainable product/destination management. A systematic review of wildlife tourism brochures and in-depth interviews with key stakeholders indicate a gradual shift from a specialised market offering high involvement in a particular species (usually birds) to a more general market looking for an interesting, but pleasant and relaxing holiday based around a general interest in nature and the environment. Both markets coexist in a complex product and tourist spectrum with neither market being entirely inclusive. Instead there is a degree of movement between one and the other which has led to operators offering a wider range of products to suit the hard-core expert and the novice enthusiast. However, product development and satisfying the consumer implies some difficult management dilemmas such as the use of tape recordings, food provisioning and the constant search for new destinations to offer experienced tourists something different.     

Deconstructing the indigenous in tourism. The production of indigeneity in tourism-oriented labelling and handicraft/souvenir development in Northern Europe

ABSTRACT

In literature on tourism in northern or ‘Arctic’ areas and on regions and places in northern areas, terms such as ‘indigenous’ and ‘non-indigenous’ are often used to distinguish people and places from each other. The aim of this paper is to deconstruct the ‘indigenous’/‘non-indigenous’ categories as well as the geographical categories to which they are linked, using examples from tourism in northern Fennoscandia and northwest Russia, selected as areas with circumstances that vary greatly both locally and regionally. Specific focus is on the construction of labels and restrictions of use, particularly regarding handicrafts/souvenirs as a specific object of indigeneity to separate it from other objects. The study reviews the processes in tourism for constructing, labelling, and valuing – and thereby also exerting power upon – specific conceptions, and thereby also on the contesting of such processes amongst broader, but often unacknowledged, local groups.