Cross-national differences in stakeholder management: Applying institutional theory and comparative capitalism framework

Drawing upon the research in institutional theory and comparative capitalism, the present study investigates how cross-national differences in the political, business, and economic institutional contexts of the United States, Italy, and Japan are associated with the ways in which companies in each of these countries prioritize and engage in their stakeholder engagement activities (SEAs). Using Porter and Kramer's framework, which classifies corporate social responsibility (CSR) activities as falling into four categories (good citizenship, mitigating harm from value chain, transforming value chain activities, and strategic philanthropy), we investigate how companies in the United States, Japan, and Italy prioritize and engage in these four SEAs. An analysis of data collected from 340 companies across these countries reveals that while companies in each of these three countries undertake the four types of SEAs, the prioritization and prevalence of the four types of SEAs vary from one country to the other, in ways that align with the prevailing institutional contexts of each country. The results contribute to a more nuanced understanding of why and how companies' approaches to CSR differ across countries. From a practitioner's perspective, the findings highlight the cultural specificity of CSR, implying that despite the global nature of CSR, the implementation of CSR needs to be tailored to a country's context.     

The initiation of audit committee interlocks and the contagion of accounting policy choices: evidence from special items

Review of Accounting Studies - We document that the initiation of audit committee interlocks is associated with contagion in reported special items. We argue that this is, in part, attributable to...     

Brand love: development and validation of a practical scale

Batra et al. (Journal of Marketing 76, 1–16, 2012) created a new conceptualization of brand love but did not develop a pragmatically useful measure for studies where questionnaire length is a constraint. The current research develops a more parsimonious brand love scale, with three nested versions of 26, 13, and 6 items, respectively. This research also validates the scales, and in so doing conducts several important validity tests not considered by Batra et al. The 26-item scale is able to predict consumer loyalty, word of mouth, and resistance to negative information, with an R ² of .90, after correcting for measurement error.     

A near Pareto optimal auction with budget constraints

In a setup where a divisible good is to be allocated to a set of bidders with budget constraints, we introduce a mechanism in the spirit of the Vickrey auction. In the mechanism we propose, understating budgets or values is weakly dominated. Since the revenue is increasing in budgets and values, all kinds of equilibrium deviations from true valuations turn out to be beneficial to the auctioneer. We also show that ex-post Nash equilibrium of our mechanism is near Pareto optimal in the sense that all full winners? values are above all full losers? values.     

Frontiers of the marketing paradigm in the third millennium

The domain and theories of marketing have been expanding since the origins of the discipline. Since the 1970s marketing science has been organized around the exchange paradigm. Marketing concepts apply to all forms of exchange, whether it is goods, services, personages, places or ideas, and whether it is between individuals, for-profit and nonprofit firms, governments and NGOs. Marketing theories evolved from a firm oriented view to encompass the exchanging dyad. More recently the paradigm expanded to a network level of explanation, and relational theories have come to the fore. But even as the field struggles to grasp its new fields of explanation, there is a Kuhnian shift happening at its boundaries. The shift significantly bends the marketing worldview as well as the theoretical tools and methodologies we use to study it. In this paper we develop a three-tiered explanation of the emerging field of marketing—its subphenomena (consumer experiences and sensory systems), its phenomena (marketing networks), and its superphenomena (sustainability and development).     

Price Limits, Information Acquisition, and Bid–ask Spreads: Theory and Evidence

A number of futures markets use price limits which, in effect, preclude trade from occurring at prices outside certain exogenous bounds. Noting that such markets are characterized by heterogeneously informed traders, whereas previous work on price limits assumes symmetrically informed traders, we examine the effects of price limits in a setting where market participants are asymmetrically informed. We find that imposing price limits generally lowers the quality of information acquired in equilibrium, but lowers bid–ask spreads as well. Thus, depending on the relative weights placed by society on liquidity versus price efficiency, there may exist a set of price limits that are most efficient in achieving a trade-off between liquidity and informational efficiency. We perform empirical tests of some implications of the model using cross-sectional data on price limits. We find that price limits are strongly negatively related to both price volatility and trading volume. Though other explanations for our empirical findings cannot be ruled out, these results are not inconsistent with the model's implication that price limits should be tighter for contracts which offer greater profit potential for informed traders.     

Which Regional Inequality? The Evolution of Rural–Urban and Inland–Coastal Inequality in China from 1983 to 1995

This paper develops a unified empirical framework for describing the relative contribution of rural–urban and inland–coastal inequality to overall regional inequality in China during the 1980's and 1990's. The framework assesses rural–urban and inland–coastal inequalities from the same data set, presents results for a sufficiently long time period to transcend short-term fluctuations, allows for differential price changes, and applies a consistent notion of the contribution to inequality using a decomposition analysis. While the contribution of rural–urban inequality is much higher than that of inland–coastal inequality in terms of levels, the trend is very different. The rural–urban contribution has not changed very much over time, but the inland–coastal contribution has increased by several fold. The paper ends by investigating the role of labor migration in this outcome. J. Comp. Econom., December 1999, 27(4), pp. 686–701. Department of Agricultural, Resource, and Managerial Economics, 309 Warren Hall, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York 14853; International Food Policy Research Institute, 2033 K Street, NW, Washington, DC 20006.