The impact of national culture and communication on exporter–distributor relations and on export performance

Interorganizational relations have been a major focus of marketing scholars in the past 2–3 decades. In this study, we explore the impact of national cultural differences, a factor that is unique to international relations, on behavior variables in exporter–foreign middleman relations. Furthermore, we argue that communication has an extended role in international channel relationships, and that it influences relationship variables in a different manner than in domestic relationships. The study supports that national cultural distance and communication have significant impact on trust and commitment, that communication may influence variables differently than in domestic relations, and that the degree of commitment toward the foreign distributor or agent is directly related to the financial performance in that market.     

Firm heterogeneity and international trade in services

This study, using panel data on Japanese firms, analyses the relationship between services trade and firm heterogeneity. It finds that the number of firms engaged in services trade is far less than that engaged in goods trade. Further, the productivity of services traders is higher than that of domestic firms and goods trading firms, whereas the productivity of firms that export services beyond the boundary of their firm groups is higher than that of those that export services only to their affiliate firms. These results suggest that only productive firms can engage in services trade by incurring the relatively large fixed costs.     

Insider trading laws and price informativeness in emerging stock markets: The South African case

We test the view that insider trading deters informativeness and, thereby, provide empirical evidence on the ramifications of insider trading legislation, particularly in an emerging market, that has hitherto received no research attention. Using the difference-in-differences identification strategy, we find that “effective insider trading law” improves stock price informativeness, a reflection of market efficiency, and that this efficiency is robust to both economic factors that affect market efficiency and the choice of control. Importantly, our results support the hypothesis that prohibition of insider trading elicits efficiency enhancement, particularly in emerging markets which are often characterized by weaker requisite institutional infrastructure than developed markets.     

Non-Conscious Influences on Consumer Choice

While consumer choice research has dedicated considerable research attention to aspects of choice that are deliberative and conscious, only limited attention has been paid to aspects of choice that occur outside of conscious awareness. We review relevant research that suggests that consumer choice is a mix of conscious and nonconscious influences, and argue that the degree to which nonconscious influences affect choice is much greater than many choice researchers believe. Across a series of research domains, these influences are found to include stimulus that are not consciously perceived by the consumer, nonconscious downstream effects of a consciously perceived stimuli or thought process, and decision processes that occur entirely outside of awareness.     

Feel Good,Do-Good!? On Consistency and Compensation in Moral Self-Regulation

Studies in the behavioral ethics and moral psychology traditions have begun to reveal the important roles of self-related processes that underlie moral behavior. Unfortunately, this research has resulted in two distinct and opposing streams of findings that are usually referred to as moral consistency and moral compensation. Moral consistency research shows that a salient self-concept as a moral person promotes moral behavior. Conversely, moral compensation research reveals that a salient self-concept as an immoral person promotes moral behavior. This study’s aim was to integrate these two literatures. We argued that compensation forms a reactive, “damage control” response in social situations, whereas consistency derives from a more proactive approach to reputation building and maintenance. Two experiments supported this prediction in showing that cognitive depletion (i.e., resulting in a reactive approach) results in moral compensation whereas consistency results when cognitive resources are available (i.e., resulting in a proactive approach). Experiment 2 revealed that these processes originate from reputational (rather than moral) considerations by showing that they emerge only under conditions of accountability. It can thus be concluded that reputational concerns are important for both moral compensation and moral consistency processes, and that which of these two prevails depends on the perspective that people take: a reactive or a proactive approach.     

Estimating financial distress likelihood

This study develops an ex-ante model for estimating financial distress likelihood (FDL), and contributes to the literature by presenting a financially-based definition of distress that is independent of its legal consequences, a theoretically supported model for the FDL, and an appropriate methodology that uses panel data to eliminate the unobservable heterogeneity. The model is then estimated cross-sectionally to obtain an indicator of the likelihood of financial distress that incorporates the specificity of each company. In doing so, this study provides a well-specified model that is stable in terms of magnitude, sign and significance of the coefficients and, more importantly, that yields a measure of the FDL that is more robust to time and the international context than the estimates of FDL that are based on seminal models. This measure could be appropriate for use in future research that deals with FDL, such as capital structure and the prevention of financial distress.     

Cognitive competence of older consumers

Older adult memory performance declines with age. However, memory for newly learned material is only one measure of cognitive competence. This article reviews research that measured older adult cognitive performance using tasks that tap crystallized abilities, everyday problem solving, and those that used older expert subjects. The results indicate that many cognitive functions remain stable from middle age onward. This suggests that cognitive decline is not an inevitable result of aging per se. This implies that antecedents of cognitive decline, such as health, should be used as a segmentation variable for the older adult market. © 1995 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.     

Contextualizing the categorical imperative: Category linkages,technology focus,and resource acquisition in nanotechnology entrepreneurship

This paper examines the role of category affiliations in entrepreneurial resource acquisition. Pace existing studies, we suggest category spanning will cause firms to be overlooked or discounted because evaluators assume that they have less expertise than their category-focused competitors; a phenomenon known as the ‘categorical imperative’. We suggest, however, that categories can be related both vertically and horizontally, and that this has important implications for understanding how the actors that span between them are evaluated. Studying startup ventures in nanotube technology, we show that venture capital investments were affected by a firm's position across patent classes that were related at both of these levels of analysis and that the interaction between them had implications for which firms received the largest investments.     

A Basket-mix Model to Identify Cherry-picked Brands

Extreme cherry pickers, those shoppers who visit a target retailer infrequently and buy only a few promoted items when they do visit, reduce that retailer's profitability. If the retailer could identify a particular brand that draws extreme cherry pickers, the retailer could use that information when negotiating with the brand's manufacturer to obtain wholesale promotional support that compensates the retailer for extreme-cherry-picker-related losses. Researchers have been successful in developing methods to identify those shoppers who are extreme cherry pickers, but they have been less successful in developing methods that identify the brands’ that draw extreme cherry pickers. In this paper, we present a method that can determine whether a brand, when promoted, draws extreme cherry pickers.     

Mexico's integration into the North American capital market

We explore a model of time varying regional market integration that includes three factors for the North American equity market, the local Mexican equity market and the peso/dollar exchange rate. We argue that a useful instrument for the degree of integration is the sovereign yield spread. Applying our methodology to Mexico over the 1991–2002 period, we show that the degree of market integration was higher at the end of the period than at the beginning but that it exhibited wide swings that were related to both global as well as local events. We also discover that Mexico's currency risk is priced. Further, the currency returns process reveals strongly significant asymmetric volatility that is strongly related to the asymmetric volatility of the Mexican equity market returns process. A plausible reason for these results is that currency devaluations in emerging markets like Mexico can cause default-risk crises in local banking systems that mismatch local-currency assets and hard currency liabilities, whereas appreciations produce no such problems. Devaluations that destabilize banking systems are, therefore, more likely than appreciations to increase the volatilities of both the currency's and the equity market's returns.     

Entrepreneurial actions and optimistic overconfidence: The role of motivated reasoning in new product introductions

Optimistic overconfidence (OO), that is, being certain of success only to end up disappointed, represents a potentially catastrophic error. However, few studies have identified which entrepreneurial actions are associated with it. To explore this issue, we examined 55 small companies and found that OO of product success was positively related to introducing products that required more resources and were more pioneering. Furthermore, satisfaction with company performance had a curvilinear (U-shaped) relationship with overconfidence. Both high and low levels of satisfaction were associated with greater OO in product introductions. In addition, the bias was positively correlated with entering hostile environments; that is, environments that are characterized by intense competition that threatens a firm and its introductions. Contrary to expectations, however, OO was negatively associated with environmental dynamism; defined as environments that embody frequent and large changes. The research also compared general knowledge overconfidence to OO, concluding that each represents a distinct bias with distinct effects.     

OPTIONS AND EFFICIENCY IN MULTIDATE SECURITY MARKETS

This paper extends the work of Ross (1976; Q. J. Econ. (90)1, 75–89) to multidate security markets. First, we show that if a primitive security separates states at the terminal date, then there exist multiperiod European options on that security generating dynamically complete markets. Second, we show that if a primitive security conditionally separates states at the terminal date, then there exist multiperiod European options on that security generating generically dynamically complete markets provided that certain conditions hold. Third, we show that there are economies for which the minimum number of multiperiod European options on a primitive security generating generically dynamically complete markets is relatively large. Finally, we show that in these economies, a relatively small number of multiperiod European options on possibly different portfolio strategies of primitive securities generates generically dynamically complete markets.     

Generic strategies and firm performance in SMEs: a longitudinal study of Austrian SMEs

This paper studies the impact of generic strategies on firm performance using a longitudinal study of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in Austria. In two surveys, data on the strategic behavior and performance of the same group of firms were gathered for the period from 1992 to 2002. The study expands existing literature, which provides little evidence whether the persistent commitment to a generic strategy over a longer period pays off or whether strategic change is the rule in SMEs, reflecting their flexibility as a potential competitive advantage. We consider the traditional generic strategies of cost-efficiency and differentiation, but also examine the group of firms that have no clear strategy or are “stuck in the middle.” Within this group, we distinguish between those companies that deliberately combine traditional low cost production and differentiation, i.e., follow a combination strategy, firms that change their strategy and those that have no strategy. We argue that a combination strategy is a viable strategic choice for SMEs in the long run. We found that the majority of firms pursued a persistent strategy over a 10-year period, but that companies that changed their generic strategy did not produce inferior results to those that adhered to a single strategy over the entire period. Our results reveal that firms that follow a combination strategy outperform companies with no generic strategy in terms of profitability and growth and achieve higher profitability than companies that follow a differentiation strategy.     

Towards a comprehensive model of entry timing in the ICT industry: Direct and indirect effects

We propose and contrast a model that integrates the factors influencing entry timing and the way entry timing influences firm performance, using a sample of firms that carry out international activities from the Information and Communications Technology Industry (ICT) in Spain. We found that capabilities are the main factor influencing firm performance. We also demonstrate that entry timing plays a significant mediator role in this relationship. Furthermore, we found that the utility strategy, which combines efforts in costs and differentiation, is a basic factor that explains and reinforces sustainable competitive advantages for those firms that enter early into the market. Managers need to analyse the implications of entry timing at length. In this sense, managers should evaluate if they have a suitable configuration of capabilities for entering the market successfully. They should also try to consolidate first mover advantages (FMAs), developing hybrid strategies that combine low cost and differentiation.     

Friendships of Virtue,Pursuit of the Moral Community,and the Ends of Business

It is argued here that business firms can and do provide an incubator that enables the Aristotelian category of friendships of advantage to develop into friendships of virtue. This contradicts other literature that views acquaintances of utility as the business norm, and expresses pessimism concerning more advanced virtuous development of friendship within the business firm. It is argued here, however, that this virtuous development is integral to the Kantian social aim of pursuing a moral community, an aim which declares the appropriate moral motivation for business, and that certainly should incorporate a role for developing virtuous relations as a component of that pursuit. An atmosphere that encourages the development of relations of virtue is feasible, exists in real business, and is optimal for pursuit of moral business communities.     

When Online Visibility Deters Social Interaction: The Case of Digital Gifts

One of the defining features of online social networks is that users' actions are visible to other users. In this paper, we argue that such visibility can have a detrimental effect on users' willingness to exchange digital gifts. Gift giving is an intimate activity that comes with social risk, and the public nature of online environments can deter interactions that usually occur in smaller, more intimate settings. To study the effects of online visibility on the decision to give, we analyze a unique dataset from a large online social network that offers users the option of buying a digital gifting service. We find that purchase rates of the service increased with the number of ties that users kept on the network, but decreased with the extent to which those ties were connected to each other. We argue that the latter effect is due to the fact that, when a user's ties are connected, any gift sent between the user and one tie is visible to their mutual contacts. We explore how characteristics of users' networks moderate the effect of online visibility, and argue that firms should take consumer network structure into account when designing digital products and promoting engagement online.     

Nine to Five: Skepticism of Women’s Employment and Ethical Reasoning

Previous work suggests that gender attitudes are associated with different individual and organizational factors. At the same time, ethics research suggests that many of these same variables can influence ethical reasoning in companies. In this study, we sought to combine these streams of research to investigate whether individual skepticism of women’s employment is related to ethical reasoning in a gender-based ethical situation. The results of the hierarchical regression analysis indicated that skepticism of women’s employment was negatively related to the recognition that the gender-based dilemma involved an ethical problem, and that skepticism was also negatively related to judgments that the situation was unethical. These findings imply that companies should advance policies that increase tolerance for women’s employment, such as diversity training codes of conduct, and ethics training.     

Ads aimed at dads: exploring consumers’ reactions towards advertising that conforms and challenges traditional gender role ideologies

Employing gender role ideology theory, this research investigates Australian consumer attitudes towards current advertisements portraying males as caregivers. Results of an experiment demonstrate that consumers perceive in-ad gender role portrayals of males as caregivers as atypical of the current advertising environment. Consumers who, in particular, hold a non-traditional (egalitarian) gender role ideology report a more positive attitude towards advertising that challenges traditional gender role ideologies (i.e., advertising that depicts males as caregivers). We suggest that non-traditional advertising that challenges traditional gender roles provides advertisers with an opportunity to stand out; however, advertisers must ensure that their key product-related message components are not overshadowed.     

Institutional Impediments to Voluntary Ethics Measurement Systems

In this paper, we argue that calls for widespread implementation of ethics measurement systems would be better informed by institutional economic analysis. Specifically, we assert that proponents of such systems must first recognize and understand the institutions that potentially impede such efforts. We identify two potential institutional impediments to measuring ethics and social responsibility. First, we suggest that neoclassical economics, supported by traditional business education and legal precedent, serves to reinforce the notion that shareholders are the primary corporate constituency group. Such an emphasis on the needs of shareholders severely hinders implementation of measurement systems that address the needs of multiple stakeholder groups. Second, we argue that the threat of litigation may constrain corporate managers from measuring and considering ethics and corporate social responsibility matters. In particular, managers may be reluctant to quantify various ethical concerns if the resulting measurements could be used as evidence against the corporation in a lawsuit.     

The Relationship between Family Firms and Corporate Governance*

This paper contributes to the agency theory literature by identifying relations between family control and corporate governance structure. Emerging literature supports the notion that family control creates strong incentives that have potentially competing influences on the manner in, and extent to, which internal corporate governance mechanisms are utilized. A sample of 100 listed companies (evenly divided between family and nonfamily firms) is used to test the hypotheses that corporate governance structures are different between family and nonfamily firms; and that family firms adopt optimal corporate governance structures. This research finds evidence that suggests that family firms utilize substantially different corporate governance structures from nonfamily firms and that these differences lead to performance differentials. Indeed, results suggest that family control creates, rather than negates, agency costs and future research may be well rewarded by pursuing this latter notion further.