Quaker Business Ethics as MacIntyrean Tradition

Journal of Business Ethics - This paper argues that Quaker business ethics can be understood as a MacIntyrean tradition. To do so, it draws on three key MacIntyrean concepts: community,...     

On the quest for supply chain transparency through Blockchain: Lessons learned from two serialized data projects

The ability to look into the supply chain has long enticed SCM scholars and practitioners. The possibilities created by such visibility are endless—from risk reduction and continuity planning to inventory management and cost reduction, nothing is off the table when end‐to‐end visibility is a possibility. Because of such enticements, there is usually much buzz in the industry every time a new technology that promises visibility and transparency is brought forward. Yet, years later, stories sometimes emerge that said technologies either failed to deliver or were not everything they were made out to be. Blockchain is yet another emerging technology in this space. Some consultants promise that it will be the final answer to the transparency and visibility woes that companies currently face. Yet, there is little empirical investigation regarding how the technology may benefit adopters, what the bottlenecks may be, and to what extent it may be able to deliver on these promises, without massive system‐wide upgrades of extant hardware and computing prowess. The current study takes a step in this direction by investigating a blockchain‐driven proof of concept across an industry consortium to identify promises, possibilities, and challenges of blockchain.     

The effects of crowdsourcing contribution type and temporal consistency on new product development success

Extant literature suggests that individuals contribute to crowdsourcing programs in various ways but offers few insights about whether participants' creative contributions (original new product submissions) or their evaluative contributions (scoring or commenting on others' submissions) have a greater impact on their ability to create commercializable new products. Using a large-scale data set obtained from the crowdsourcing website Threadless.com, our study examines the relative impact of participants' creative and evaluative contributions and the effects of different types of evaluative contributions on submission success (i.e., a participant's ability to generate a commercializable new product). Our findings reveal that submission success is enhanced when participants generate both creative and evaluative contributions. In addition, we find that submission success depends not only on the volume of the creative contributions that a participant makes but also on the temporal consistency with which said contributions are made (i.e., adopting a consistent vs. a sporadic submission pattern). Specifically, our findings show that a participant's creative contribution consistency enhances their submission success, especially when creative contribution volume is high. This research extends the existing crowdsourcing literature by offering new insights about how contribution type and contribution consistency in a crowdsourcing program impact submission success.     

INDIFFERENCE PRICES AND IMPLIED VOLATILITIES

We consider a general local‐stochastic volatility model and an investor with exponential utility. For a European‐style contingent claim, whose payoff may depend on either a traded or nontraded asset, we derive an explicit approximation for both the buyer's and seller's indifference prices. For European calls on a traded asset, we translate indifference prices into an explicit approximation of the buyer's and seller's implied volatility surfaces. For European claims on a nontraded asset, we establish rigorous error bounds for the indifference price approximation. Finally, we implement our indifference price and implied volatility approximations in two examples.     

How do successful scholars get their best research ideas? An exploration

We interview 24 marketing professors to ask how they got the ideas for 64 of their papers. More than three-quarters of the papers were inspired by holes in the literature, by a “stylized fact” that the current literature cannot explain, or by an interaction with a manager. The rest fall into several smaller categories that to a large extent can be seen as special cases of the three big ones. We describe how papers from each of the three big categories help move the literature forward. We also illustrate the range of situations contained in each category by way of several examples. Among the authors we interview, most do not use a single source. As these authors become more senior, managerial contacts play an increasing role, while the balance between literature and stylized facts appears to be unchanged.

     

Varieties of paternalism and the heterogeneity of utility structures

A principal source of interest in behavioral economics has been its advertised contributions to policies aimed at ‘nudging’ people away from allegedly natural but self-defeating behavior toward patterns of response thought more likely to improve their welfare. This has occasioned controversies among economists and philosophers around the normative limits of paternalism, especially by technical policy advisors. One recent suggestion has been that ‘boosting,’ in which interventions aim to enhance people’s general cognitive skills and representational repertoires instead of manipulating their choice environments behind their backs, avoids the main normative challenges. A limitation in most of this literature is that it has focused on relatively sweeping policy recommendations and consequently on strong polar alternatives of general paternalism and strict laissez faire. We review a real instance, drawn from a consulting project we conducted for an investment bank, of a proposed intervention that is more typical of the kind that economists are more often actually called upon to offer. In this example, the sophistication of current tools for preference attribution, combined with philosophical externalism about the semantics of preferences that makes it less plausible to attribute their literal self-conscious representation to people as propositional attitude content becomes more tightly refined, blocks applicability of the distinction between nudging and boosting. This seems to call for irreducible, context-specific ethical judgment in assessing the appropriateness of the forms of paternalism that economists must actually wrestle with in going about their everyday business.     

China's one belt one road initiative: The impact of trade facilitation versus physical infrastructure on exports

The One Belt One Road (OBOR) project is perhaps China's most significant international relations initiative in recent times. It is based on openness, harmony, inclusivity, mutual benefit and market operations and aims to connect the economically vibrant East Asia and the developed Europe by land and by sea, and in the process, it brings growth and development to tens of countries along the modern Silk routes. In this paper, we compare the impact of the main initiatives of OBOR, namely enhancements in physical infrastructure and improvements in border administration, on the trade of countries that have signed on to this project, especially countries along the six economic corridors. We find overwhelming evidence that shows improvements in border administration has the greatest impact on exports of corridor countries. Although physical infrastructure is important for trade, the Chinese government should place equal attention to improvements in trade facilitation to ensure trade routes operate seamlessly across the various corridors.     

Enhanced Special Drawing Rights: How China Could Contribute to a Reformed International Monetary Architecture

Since the end of the Bretton Woods era, the world has operated on a de facto system of free‐floating exchange rates, with the US dollar as the dominant international currency. The system, characterized by large pro‐cyclical capital flows and chronic imbalances, is inherently unstable, and has contributed to repeated crises, recessions and geopolitical tensions. One potentially “least‐difficult” line of reform would be to allow the evolution of a multi‐currency system, underpinned by an expanded role for Special Drawing Rights (SDRs). Attempts to promote wider use of the SDR have foundered on the liquidity premium. However, for Chinese corporations and institutions, at present restricted in their capital account activities, the SDR liquidity premium would appear less daunting. The Chinese authorities could provide policy encouragement for the use of SDRs by their institutions. This initiative, supported by China's Special Administrative Region Hong Kong, would kick‐start an international SDR ecosystem, and encourage even broader use of SDRs, to the benefit of international monetary stability.     

Equilibrium Effects of Superstition in the Housing Market

We investigate the interaction of product quality differentiation and consumer preference heterogeneity in durable goods markets, focusing on the effects of secondary market liquidity and consumer heterogeneity on equilibrium prices. We build an infinite‐horizon dynamic model of the apartments housing market that captures the above features. Some apartments are considered lucky, and some consumers are superstitious. Lucky apartments are valued more highly than non‐lucky ones only by superstitious consumers. Results show that the difference between the lucky apartment price and the non‐lucky apartment price becomes smaller when the secondary market becomes less liquid and when consumers’ preference heterogeneity becomes more persistent as opposed to time‐varying.