CEO career horizon,corporate governance,and real options: The role of economic short‐termism

Research Summary: Combining studies on real options theory and economic short‐termism, we propose that, depending on CEOs’ career horizons, CEOs have heterogeneous interests in strategic flexibility, and thus, have different incentives to make real options investments. We argue that compared to CEOs with longer career horizons, CEOs with shorter career horizons will be less inclined to make real options investments because they may not fully reap the rewards during their tenure. In addition, we argue that long‐term incentives and institutional ownership will mitigate the relationship between CEOs’ career horizons and real options investments. U.S. public firms as an empirical setting produced consistent evidence for our predictions. Our study is the first to theoretically explain and empirically show that a CEO's self‐seeking behavior will impact real options investments. Managerial Summary: This article helps to explain how a CEO's self seeking‐behavior may shape a firm's real option investment, which could result in different level of strategic flexibility. We argue that CEOs with short career horizons have less time to exercise their firms’ real options, which should lower the investments in the firms’ real options portfolios relative to CEOs with long career horizons. We study a sample of U.S. public firms and find strong evidence that a CEO's expected tenure in the firm is positively related to the real options investments at the firm level. We find that this agency issue can be mitigated by adopting appropriate corporate governance mechanisms such as long‐term incentives and institutional investors.     

Advance selling of new products to strategic consumers on flash sale platforms*

Flash sale (FS) is a new business model that offers discounted products in limited numbers over a short period. In this paper we discuss the impact of strategic consumers on advance selling (AS) of new products on FS platforms. We first study the impact of strategic consumers on competing retailers adopting AS to sell a homogeneous new product. And find that the retailers’ AS profits and inventory quantities decrease with the strategic customers’ valuation and valuation decreasing rate. Then we analyse whether FS can mitigate the impact of strategic customers on retailers adopting AS for new products. We consider a newsvendor model involving only one retailer adopting AS to sell a new product. We derive the results by comparing this model with two counterpart models, namely the classical newsvendor model with no strategic customers and a newsvendor model with strategic customers where the retailer does not use FS under AS.     

Local tax interaction and endogenous spatial weights based on quality of life

This paper studied the role of municipal quality of life as a driver of strategic tax interactions among local governments. A number of studies point out the existence of strategic interactions using spatial econometric models in which the spatial weights are mostly based on non-economic criteria or basic economic variables such as per capita gross domestic product (GDP). We propose the more sophisticated well-being indicator of municipal quality of life as the driver for these interactions. To deal with the potential endogeneity, we rely on instrumental variable estimators. The empirical analysis focuses on the main local tax in Spain (property) and on municipalities with more than 50,000 inhabitants, and it confirms the relevance of differentials in quality of life for the understanding of tax choices.     

The virtuous circle of human resource investments: A precrisis and postcrisis analysis

We propose a dynamic model of positive feedback between human resource (HR) investments and companies' economic performance. The model assumes that HR investment increases profitability through labor productivity and, in turn, profitability improves HR investment through organizational slack. Based on data from a sample of 2,497 industrial companies over a 7‐year period (2005–2011), longitudinal analysis corroborates the existence of a two‐way relationship between HR investment and profitability over time. However, the emergence of an economic crisis weakens this feedback, identifying the effect of organizational slack on HR investment as the weakest causal chain link. In a postcrisis period, HR investment is not such a high priority for managers.     

Alternative balanced scorecards built from paradigm models in strategic HRM and employment/industrial relations and used to measure the state of employment relations and HR system performance across U.S. workplaces

This paper constructs alternative balanced scorecards based on high‐performance work system (HPWS) and employment relations system (ERS) models. The models are depicted and compared in diagrams and used as framework skeletons for building separate HPWS and ERS scorecards, intended to provide a detailed data picture of the operational health and performance of an organization's employment/HR system and its operations, processes, and inputs/outputs. The scorecards are filled in with nationally representative data from 2,000+ U.S. workplaces using more than 50 employment/HR indicators, as reported by separate panels of managers and employees. The indicators for each workplace are aggregated into an overall HR/employment system score, ranked from low‐to‐high, and graphed as frequency distributions. These distributions provide a unique snapshot picture of the mean and dispersion of the state of employment relations and HR system performance for companies across the United State. They also reveal that “models matter” since the HPWS and ERS scorecards provide distinctly different evaluation assessments.     

Ratio-based design hour determination for airport passenger terminal facilities

To avoid both over-design and under-sizing of airport passenger terminal facilities such as security checkpoints, the infrastructure is designed for a specifically determined design load. As such, the design load is considered for a short period of time, usually an hour of operation, during which peak, though not necessarily maximum, demand occurs. For strategic planning applications, future design loads can be determined by either fictitious flight schedules or ratio-based models which forecast the relationship between design load and annual demand. This study presents two ratio-based methods which allow the direct determination of design hour loads (DHL) for passenger terminal facilities. The unsaturated DHL model considers the relationship between observed passenger flows in the terminal and aggregated annual demand data. The saturated DHL model includes several operational constraints which limit the actual DHL, such as limitations in the runway system or the fleet mix operating at an airport. Both models are applied to two real-world airports, for which the DHL of the security checkpoint facilities is estimated from large datasets covering multiple years. Results are significant at the 5 % level and suggest that the proposed ratio-based methods are appropriate for airport strategic planning applications.     

Beyond symbolic and substantive: Strategic disclosure of corporate environmental information in China

Under increasing regulatory pressure to disclose environmental impacts, corporate environmental information disclosure (EID) is becoming more prevalent. However, the motives for EID and disclosure approaches (i.e., symbolic or substantive) remain controversial. Using a sample of data for 742 listed manufacturing firms in China across 3 years, we provide evidence to show that the level of EID is significantly positively associated with a firm's advertising intensity and that firms in moderately competitive industries have a higher propensity for adopting an EID‐based differentiated strategy than firms in stronger or weaker competitive industries. We also find that firms that are more sensitive to environmental issues strategically understate their environmental impact when directly facing consumers. Our results suggest that the implementation of corporate EID is strategic and that firms have strong market motives, even under regulatory pressure to demonstrate legitimacy. We discuss this study's contributions to research on EID theory and implications for strategic EID management.     

Organisational regulatory legitimacy,entrepreneurial orientation,and SME innovation: an optimal distinctiveness perspective

The optimal distinctiveness perspective argues that firms face competing pressures to be both ‘like’ and ‘different from’ their peers. On the one hand, institutional scholars assert that firms need to be similar to peers in order to gain legitimacy. On the other hand, strategy scholars insist that firms need to strive to be different to gain competitive advantage. In order to enrich the optimal distinctiveness perspective, the present study builds a conceptual model that addresses the relationships among organisational regulatory legitimacy, entrepreneurial orientation, and SME innovation under the context of China’s transition economy. Our empirical results show that organisational regulatory legitimacy has an inverted-U relationship with SME innovation. Further, entrepreneurial orientation strengthens this inverse-U shaped relationship. That is, entrepreneurial orientation magnifies both the positive and the negative effect of organisational regulatory legitimacy on SME innovation. This study echoes to the call to conduct broader optimal distinctiveness research by integrating institutional theory and strategic management. Furthermore, our findings provide new evidence for the strategic balance perspective of optimal distinctiveness.