The “value” effect and the market for Chinese stocks

A long literature in empirical finance has isolated both a “value” and a small-capitalization effect in asset pricing. This study confirms the existence of these “style” effects both in new types of equity indexes and in the stocks of Chinese companies traded in international markets. We then present a new nonparametric method of portfolio construction that enables investors to extract the predictive power of these style effects, without diluting their efficacy through an unintended weighting distribution that closely resembles capitalization weighting. We then develop a simple method to isolate periods where style tilts are likely to be particularly effective.     

Do tech products have a beauty premium? The effect of visual aesthetics of wearables on willingness-to-pay premium and the role of product category involvement

Does design, not technology, affect consumers' valuation of wearable devices? This study empirically examines the impact of the visual product aesthetics of wearables on consumers’ willingness-to-pay (WTP) premium, along with the relevant intervening consumer psychology of perceived benefits. The results of an online survey revealed a significant and positive association between the visual product aesthetics of wearables and WTP, perceived product quality (PQ), and perceived enjoyment (PE) of wearables. In addition, PE mediated the relation between visual aesthetics and WTP, while PQ did not. Meanwhile, consumer involvement moderated the relation between visual aesthetics and WTP. Implications and limitations were discussed.     

University spin-offs and the “performance premium”

The creation of spin-off companies is often promoted as a desirable mechanism for transferring knowledge and technologies from research organizations to the private sector for commercialization. In the promotion process, policymakers typically treat these “university” spin-offs like industry start-ups. However, when university spin-offs involve an employment transition by a researcher from the not-for-profit sector, the creation of a university spin-off is likely to impose a higher social cost than the creation of an industry start-up. To offset this higher social cost, university spin-offs must produce a larger stream of social benefits than industry start-ups, a performance premium. This paper outlines the arguments explaining why the social costs of entrepreneurship are likely to be higher for academic entrepreneurs, and empirically investigates the existence of a performance premium using a sample of German start-up companies. We find that university spin-offs exhibit a performance premium of 3.4 % points higher employment growth over industry start-ups. The analysis also shows that the performance premium varies across types of academic entrepreneurs and founders’ academic disciplines.     

The “WOW” effect: How one restaurateur continues to delight customers

Restaurants come and go—sometimes with astonishing speed. What distinguishes the restaurants that come and stay? For starters, they continually delight their customers.     

The “Oil Crisis” — a crisis for LDCs

It is the group of LDCs whose reserves of indigenous energy are so small that they desperately need sizeable imports of oil, but which do not have sufficient other resources to earn the necessary foreign currency for their oil imports, that is suffering most under the economic changes which came over the world economy as a sequel to the oil crisis. Its future destiny is now literally a difficult balancing on “a knife’s edge”.     

The location effect: how some atlanta clubs won the “olympic ring”

The surge of visitors to Atlanta for the 1996 summer Olympic games brought different amounts and types of business to private clubs, depending chiefly on each club's location. The downtown city clubs, located near the Olympic venues, forecasted more business, while suburban country clubs anticipated a drop-off in business. The expectations of both sets of clubs—favorable and unfavorable—were essentially fulfilled. Dinner business at the downtown clubs exceeded the managers' optimistic forecasts, while the golf and food-service receipts at the suburban clubs generally did not even meet those clubs' scaled-back expectations.     

Book review for “The High Cost of Good Intentions”

Business Economics -     

The Mourning Ceremony for The Victims

At 14:28 on the afternoon of May 19,CCPIT held the Mourning Ceremony for the victims of the May- 12 Wenchuan 8.0-magnitude earthquake.Over 300 .people including all staff members of CCPIT offices     

Effort justification for fun activities?: The effect of location-based mobile coupons using games

Based on the effort justification explanation, this study tested whether consumers perceive the value of mobile coupons differently depending on how they received them. A 3 (activities to receive a coupon: none vs. online survey vs. game) x 2 (product type: hedonic vs. utilitarian) between-subject design experiment (N = 200) was conducted. Findings suggested that game condition, compared to others, resulted in a higher perceived coupon value. A significant conditional indirect effect was found such that games enhance positive affect especially when the product type was utilitarian, and enhanced positive affect results in further boosting the perceived coupon value.     

The latent demand for bank debt: characterizing “discouraged borrowers”

Concerns that small firms encounter credit constraints are well entrenched in the literature, despite widespread empirical evidence that a relatively small proportion of small firms have their loan applications rejected. However, many firms may be discouraged from applying for fear of rejection. These businesses are the focus of this paper. Based on responses to a large-scale postal survey of UK small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), we find that twice as many businesses were discouraged from applying for a bank loan than had their loan request denied. More particularly, we observe a number of distinguishing characteristics of “discouraged borrowers” (relative to applicants). These include: strategy, sector, prior entrepreneurial experience and banking relationships. The implications of our findings for policy and future research are briefly discussed.     

“The Pool”印象

《红灯记》里李铁梅有这么一句唱词,＂我家的表叔数不清＂,这句话完全可以套用在中国的互联网广告上,我们的网络广告形式永远数不清!事实的确如此。     

Value versus growth stock returns and the value premium: The Canadian experience 1985–2005

This paper provides further evidence on the value premium using Canadian data from 1985–2005 and a search process involving both price to earnings (P/E) and price to book value (P/BV) ratios. The study documents a consistently strong value premium over the sample period, which persisted in both bull and bear markets, as well as in recessions and recoveries. Moreover, the paper shows that a P/E based search process did a better job of identifying value stocks and arriving at more consistent and sizeable value premium than did a search process based on P/BVs. Copyright © 2009 ASAC. Published by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

“Seeing is being”: Consumer culture and the positioning of premium cars in China

Researchers recognize the indispensable role of inwardly vs. outwardly-focused social identities as predictors of consumers' attitudes toward local vs. global brand positioning. Extant studies typically report symmetric assimilative identity effects, meaning that consumers high on national/ethnic identity favor brands with a local (vs. global) consumer culture positioning, and vice-versa for consumers high on an outward (e.g., cosmopolitan) identity disposition. Such identity outcomes may not be generalizable, but rather, be affected by the specific consumption context as well as the individual trait of consumer need for uniqueness (NFU). Focusing on the Chinese premium car market, our experimental study consistently supported assimilative effects for the role played by ethnic identity. For cosmopolitanism however, such effects only held for low NFU consumers, whereas contrastive identity effects emerged for high NFU consumers. These results challenge some findings reported in the literature. Implications of these asymmetric identity effects for marketing theory and practice are discussed.