Marking your trade: Cultural factors in the prolongation of trademarks

Trademarks protecting the brand name and associations are crucial in a brand's strategy, but little is known about the factors that determine a trademark's prolongation. To explain the prolongation of trademarks, the research estimated a multilevel hazard model accounting for trademark characteristics, firm's characteristics, and firm's country of origin national culture. The dataset comprises a census of 2911 trademarks in the US software security industry across an eight-year period, belonging to firms originating from 11 countries. The results indicate that a firm's culture of origin has a systematic effect on the types of trademark the firm is more likely to prolong and on the length of the prolongation. The age of the trademark, the number of categories where a particular trademark is present, and the age of the firm increase the likelihood of a trademark's prolongation. Larger and more innovative firms tend to terminate their trademarks earlier.     

Would you mind completing this survey: Assessing the state of survey research in supply chain management

In supply chain management, survey research is one of the primary methodologies used by researchers to generate empirical data. Critical to its effectiveness is an acceptable response rate. Recently, concerns have been raised regarding perceived falling response rates. Using data taken from 464 survey-based studies, as drawn from five representative journals that publish survey-based supply chain studies, this study assesses whether these concerns are valid. Furthermore, it assesses whether the various tactics recommended for improving response rates have been successful. The findings indicate that (1) responses rates have been falling (with a significant decrease beginning in 2001); (2) it is difficult to evaluate the effectiveness of the various techniques because of unevenness in reporting of techniques used; and, (3) response rates are significantly influenced by factors such as the number of questions, source of survey population, method of survey delivery, specific respondents targeted, and use of prequalification/pre-notification.     

Make me special: Gender differences in consumers’ responses to loyalty programs

Current literature on loyalty programs emphasizes the importance of psychological rewards and special treatment. However, it is not clear if male and female customers respond to these incentives in a similar way. We explore the differential effect for female versus male consumers of two psychological rewards that are provided through a loyalty program (a) high status (e.g., Gold membership), and (b) personalization, at different levels of visibility to other consumers. Across three experiments and a field study, we find a coherent pattern of gender differences in the way customers respond to different types of psychological rewards in the context of loyalty programs. The results show that men respond more positively than women to loyalty programs that emphasize status, but only when their higher status is highly visible to others. In contrast, women respond more positively than men to loyalty programs that emphasize personalization, but only for personalization in private settings. We discuss managerial implications for the design of loyalty programs.     

Small‐cost asymptotics for long‐term growth rates in incomplete markets

This paper provides a rigorous asymptotic analysis of long‐term growth rates under both proportional and Morton–Pliska transaction costs. We consider a general incomplete financial market with an unspanned Markov factor process that includes the Heston stochastic volatility model and the Kim–Omberg stochastic excess return model as special cases. Using a dynamic programming approach, we determine the leading‐order expansions of long‐term growth rates and explicitly construct strategies that are optimal at the leading order. We further analyze the asymptotic performance of Morton–Pliska strategies in settings with proportional transaction costs. We find that the performance of the optimal Morton–Pliska strategy is the same as that of the optimal one with costs increased by a factor of . Finally, we demonstrate that our strategies are in fact pathwise optimal, in the sense that they maximize the long‐run growth rate path by path.     

The State Against Teachers?

State monopoly in education and medicine is paradoxically supported by many teachers and doctors. Andrew Melnyk argues that they should use the insights of 'public choice'to push for the removal of state domination of their employment.     

Born-Again Socialism?

The socialist espousal of markets must lead to the abandonment of insistence upon equality of outcome. Andrew Melnyk, Corpus Christi College, Oxford, compares socialism in theory, old and new, with socialism in practice, and warns of the dangers to efficiency front equalising incomes through the state.     

How to use the Internet

The Internet is the fastest growing new information service, but it is still an unknown territory to many production and inventory control (PIC) managers. It should not be, and by reading this article they can get a rough idea what it is, how to use it, why it should be used, and where to start.     

Volatility of industrial production growth and characteristics of optimal currency areas in EU-12 countries

This paper investigates how the introduction of the euro in the EU-12 countries influenced the short-term volatility of output, measured by the volatility of industrial production growth. It assesses whether more favorable criteria of optimum currency areas keep the volatility of industrial production growth constant. Finally, it investigates the impact of the global financial crisis on the volatility of industrial production growth and on the characteristics of the optimum currency areas of the EU-12 countries. This paper uses the Chow breakpoint test and the Quandt-Andrews test to check for structural breaks in the volatility obtained from ARMA (p,q) and AR(p)-EGARCH(1,1) models. The results suggest that after the introduction of the euro, the volatility of industrial production growth has not significantly changed in Austria, France, Luxembourg, the Netherlands and Spain. However, the volatility of industrial production growth did increase in Finland, Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg and Portugal after the adoption of the common currency. In Germany and Greece the volatility of industrial production increased after 2002 and 1997 respectively. This observation cannot be connected directly to the introduction of the euro. After the beginning of the financial crisis, the volatility of industrial production growth increased in all EU-12 countries except France and Greece. Criteria for optimum currency areas fail to explain why the volatility of some EU-12 countries remained unchanged after the introduction of the euro and after the start of the financial crisis. Those countries, where the volatility of industrial production has not changed significantly after the introduction of the euro, had a long history of fixed or pegged exchange rate regimes. This group of countries recovered faster after the financial crisis.