Toward Financial Capability—Empowering the Young

The importance of enhancing financial capability is widely recognized. However, the learning outcomes from educational programs directed at young people are mixed, indicating that we may not yet have discovered the best practices. Previous studies have established that merely providing information is not the most effective way to help consumers. This study examines empowerment thinking through the dimensions of financial empowerment as a top‐down and bottom‐up approach. The article highlights two routes toward empowerment, context change, and cognition change, and their roles and potential in improving financial capability among the young. This study suggests a novel framework for promoting financial capability that is based on the dimensions of empowerment and offers tools for increasing financial capability. The study employs data from focus groups and interviews to illustrate the possible strengths and problems of empowering young people in the Finnish context.     

Decision delegation: A conceptualization and empirical investigation

This paper examines a purchase context in which consumers, instead of deciding on their own, delegate either a part of or the entire purchase decision to a surrogate. A path model linking the antecedent variables and delegation is tested in the context of personal computer purchases. It was found that the factors that ensure decision quality emanating from the surrogate's expertise differentials, trustworthiness, accountability, and willingness to customize increase the likelihood of decision delegation. In addition to its direct positive effect on delegation, trustworthiness mediates the effect of expertise difference, surrogate accountability, and customization on delegation. Perceived loss of control inhibits delegation, but only at the stage when the final choice decision is made. Also, if a decision task is repeatable, the high return on effort has a negative effect on delegation, but only at attribute set and choice set delegations. Contributions of the study and directions for future research are discussed. © 2008 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.     

Restorative experiences and online tourists’ willingness to pay a price premium in an augmented reality environment

This study examined the effects of the restorative experience triggered by empowerment features in augmented reality (AR) on online tourists’ immersion and willingness to pay a price premium in the pre-purchase phase. The study focused in particular on the coherence and compatibility perspectives of the restorative experience. A scenario survey was conducted to validate the research framework. The research findings clarified the psychological mechanism behind the willingness to pay a price premium in AR-empowered online travel experiences. They indicated that the two AR empowerment features namely environmental embedding and simulated physical control generate restorative experience, which further fostered immersion and ultimately resulted in the willingness to pay more. The results may help online tourism services select appropriate AR empowerment features that will incite tourists to pay a premium price and also help create an effective AR tourism destination experience in the pre-purchase phase. This study focused on the attention restoration theory, empowerment paradigms, and AR-based service technology to develop an integrated conceptual framework of the relationship among AR empowerment features, restorative experience, immersion, and pre-purchase decision-making behavior.     

Input Pricing and Market Share Delegation in a Vertically Related Market: Is the Timing Order Relevant?

This paper adds to the literature on the strategic use of managers’ contracts in competition by examining whether market‐share delegation, in which managers receive rewards based on a combination of profits and market share, and the order of moves affect input pricing in a vertically related market. It shows that: (i) input pricing is not affected by delegation form and the order of moves between upstream and downstream firms under quantity competition; (ii) downstream firms obtain the same profit as in the simple Nash equilibrium regardless of delegation forms in a delegation–input price–quantity competition game; and (iii) the upstream monopolist will set input price beforehand regardless of the delegation form. Since the outcomes in our model create higher quantity and lower price in a Cournot product market, it lessens the double‐marginalization problem in such a vertically separated industry.     

Stakeholder engagement through empowerment: The case of coffee farmers

While most studies on stakeholder engagement focus on high‐power stakeholders (typically, employees), limited attention has been devoted to the engagement of low‐power stakeholders. These have been defined as vulnerable stakeholders for their low capacity to influence corporations. Our research is framed around the engagement of low‐power stakeholders in the coffee industry who are, paradoxically, critical resource providers for the major roasters. Through the case study of Lavazza—the leading Italian roaster—we investigate empowerment actions addressed to smallholder farmers located in Brazil, India, East Africa, Haiti, and the Dominican Republic. We contribute to the theoretical discussion around engagement and empowerment by developing a framework linking together areas of empowerment (defined in the literature) and specific empowerment actions (emerging from our interviews). Our insights shed light on how organizations can design empowerment strategies leading to more effective stakeholder engagement and how empowerment actions can contribute to turn low‐power stakeholders into active business partners. We demonstrate that moving from a traditional competitive view of corporate–stakeholder relationships to a stakeholder theory view based on a logic of cooperative partnerships reinforces the idea that stakeholder engagement and empowerment are both entangled with the value creation process.     

Rhetoric versus Reality: Exploring Consumer Empowerment in a Maternity Setting

This study explores consumer empowerment in a maternity setting in the Republic of Ireland. Our results indicate that empowerment is a complex phenomenon influenced by many variables. While the current health services literature is focusing on active consumers of health services, our study shows that not all pregnant women have the same needs for and attitudes toward empowerment: some women do indeed seek to be overtly empowered in the maternity setting and equate empowerment with a high level of control over the service provision; others pursue a more passive role but may still experience such a role as empowering. A theoretical discussion focusing on the complexities of empowerment and issues of power and authoritative knowledge in cultural systems concludes this paper.     

Entrenchment of New Governance in Consumer Policy Formulation: A Platform for European Consumer Citizenship Practice?

Consumer typologies reveal categories of the consumer that stretch from the vulnerable to the empowered notion of the consumer citizen. At the empowered end of this spectrum, consumers in Europe have a developing, normative, organisational structure that provides channels for the consumer voice to influence consumer policy at the European level. This is an organisational structure with mechanisms for developing an effective consumer empowerment and enforcement framework across all EU Member States. It is a framework that forms a coherent whole with the European-level consumer institutions. This paper examines the integrated nature of these institutions and their role in influencing the development of consumer policy through a multi-level platform of new governance. It discusses the normative processes that, through empowerment and engagement, are encouraging a consumer citizenship practice to exploit these channels of communication in order to influence policy development.     

Consumer Control and Empowerment: A Primer

This paper introduces consumer empowerment as a promising research area. Going beyond lay wisdom that more control is always better, we outline several hypotheses concerning (a) the factors that influence the perception of empowerment, and (b) the consequences of greater control and the subjective experience of empowerment on consumer satisfaction and confidence.     

Consumer empowerment: global context,UK strategies and vulnerable consumers

Globalization has created new consumer needs and wants, and resulted in consumer confusion regarding the increasing complexity of products and services. This has stimulated global interest in educating and empowering consumers. The UK government has made a very ambitious commitment to ensure that the framework for consumer empowerment and support is at the level of the best in the world by 2008. The government, many consumer organizations and regulators believe that empowered consumers are key to the success of competitive markets. Two national strategies to co‐ordinate activities in the UK have been developed by the Office of Fair Trading (OFT) and the Financial Services Authority (FSA). The OFT consumer education strategy aims to deliver targeted, effective consumer education by increasing co‐ordination and making the best use of available resources. The FSA is leading a financial capability strategy designed to deliver change to improve the UK's financial capability. Both strategies share a vision of educated and confident consumers making informed choices about the products and services they buy, and both aim to empower vulnerable consumers. Given the global interest and the development of national strategies, it is useful to consider what is meant by the term consumer empowerment. Is there a shared view of consumer empowerment internationally? Does the education of consumers result in empowered consumers? To what extent do the national strategies address the empowerment of vulnerable, disadvantaged, excluded or susceptible consumers? These questions will be addressed in this article which reviews the global context for the consumer education and empowerment agenda and considers key UK developments, with particular reference to the needs of vulnerable consumers. The study found that the language of consumer empowerment is gaining prominence in policy and strategy documents at the highest levels internationally in the Organisation of Economic Cooperation and Development and the European Community, and nationally in the UK.     

COMPETITION AND THE STRATEGIC CHOICE OF MANAGERIAL INCENTIVES: THE RELATIVE PERFORMANCE CASE

We investigate how market competition affects the incentive to adopt a non‐profit‐maximizing behaviour. The analysis is developed in a strategic delegation framework in which owners delegate output decisions to managers interested in firm's relative performance. We study how the optimal delegation scheme is affected by market concentration and the elasticity of market demand. We prove that the distortion from a profit‐maximizing rule decreases as market becomes less concentrated, while it increases as demand becomes more elastic. Finally, we discuss the impact of market competitiveness on the welfare‐enhancing ability of delegation contracts.     

Comparing Innovation Capability of Small and Medium‐Sized Enterprises: Examining the Effects of Organizational Culture and Empowerment

This study analyzes the impact of organizational culture and empowerment on innovation capability, and examines the peculiarities of these effects. The study's hypotheses are tested by applying both individual and firm‐level analyses to survey data collected from 743 employees from 93 small and medium‐sized firms located in Turkey. For medium‐sized enterprises on both the individual and firm level of analysis, results suggest that collectivism and uncertainty avoidance are positively associated with empowerment, whereas power distance is negatively related to empowerment. Assertiveness focus has no relations with empowerment and innovation capability, yet among cultural dimensions, only uncertainty avoidance is related to innovation capability. For small‐sized enterprises, findings suggest that both power distance and uncertainty avoidance are linked to both empowerment and innovation capability on the individual level, whereas two new paths between collectivism and innovation capability and between assertiveness focus and empowerment are found on the firm level. Also, empowerment is found to be positively related to innovation capability for both small and medium‐sized enterprises (SMEs) on both the individual and firm level. In terms of managerial practice, our study helps clarify the key role played by cultural dimensions in the process of shaping an empowering and innovative work environment. Findings also reveal that managers should focus on participative managerial practices (e.g., empowerment) to promote innovation capability of SMEs.     

如何加强对承包企业的经营管理

承包经营责任制作为合作经营的一种形式,与公司制企业相比具有操作简便、见效快的显著优点,但同时也存在对承包者过分放权给发包方带来潜在风险的弊端。在赋予承包者自主经营权的同时,应对承包企业实施有效控制和加强经营管理,最大限度地规避风险,以期实现承包企业的良性发展。     

Effects of transactional leadership,psychological empowerment and empowerment climate on creative performance of subordinates: A cross-level study

This research surveyed 101 teams, involving 497 team members and 101 team leaders, in a large multinational company in China. A hierarchical linear model is used to examine the hypothesized mediated moderation model. It is found that: (1) individual psychological empowerment is positively related to creative performance; (2) the relationship between transactional leadership and subordinates’ creative performance is moderated by team empowerment climate; (3) individual transactional leadership behavior is positively related to subordinates’ creative performance in teams with higher empowerment climate, but negatively related to subordinates’ creative performance in lower empowerment climate; and (4) the relationship between transactional leadership, team empowerment climate and creative performance is partially mediated by subordinates’ psychological empowerment perception. Theoretical contributions and practical implications are also discussed.     

Delegation,Skill Acquisition and Turnover Costs

The delegation of tasks to a subordinate and his access to key firm resources allow an organization to make optimal use of his knowledge and ability, but at the same time, thanks to on‐the‐job learning and the possibility of expropriation of these resources, this might increase the agent’s outside options. We model these risks as an increase in the quit propensity of the agent which determines higher turnover costs for the firm. The choice of the degree of delegation a principal offers to her subordinate is analyzed taking into account its benefits and costs. We show that the level of delegation is influenced by the principal’s and the agent’s abilities, but it is lower the higher turnover costs are and the lower the degree of specificity of human capital is or the higher the degree of expropriability of resources is. Finally, bureaucratic rules establishing the documentation of the agent’s activity are seen as a device to reduce turnover costs and to allow more delegation.     

Moderating effects of consumer empowerment on the relationship between involvement in eco‐friendly food and eco‐friendly food behaviour

This study investigates the moderating effect of consumer empowerment on the relationship between involvement in and purchase behaviour towards eco‐friendly food. It uses the generalized linear model, with data from the 2017 Research on Food Consumption. The results showed that gender is related only to involvement in eco‐friendly food and this involvement is higher for women than for men. Moreover, involvement in eco‐friendly food, purchase empowerment, engagement empowerment and frequency of buying eco‐friendly food increase as age increases, with the highest increases observed at ages 40–49 and 50–59; the score for those older than these age groups was much lower, resembling an inverted U shape. Groups with high education and income levels presented high scores for involvement in eco‐friendly food, purchase empowerment, engagement empowerment and frequency of buying eco‐friendly food. Regarding the effects of involvement in eco‐friendly food, purchase empowerment and engagement empowerment on the frequency of buying eco‐friendly food, the main effects of involvement in eco‐friendly food and purchase empowerment as well as the interactive effects between involvement in eco‐friendly food and engagement empowerment were statistically significant.     

Partner Empowerment and Relationship Failure in Franchising

Franchisors must empower franchisees to take decisions on a package of peripheral elements in response to pressure for local adaptations and for entrepreneurial autonomy. However, little is known about which specific elements should be decentralized and to what extent adaptation of such elements affects disputes between franchisor and franchisees. This study explores these issues by analyzing which decision rights should be franchisees’ responsibility to reduce early terminations instigated by the franchisor. The results show that delegating decision rights on local advertising and personnel reduces early terminations while delegation of pricing tends to increase them, regardless of the size of the system. Interestingly, successful delegation in other decision‐areas is contingent on the brand‐name value. More specifically, only larger chains seem to benefit from delegating assortment and decoration decisions.     

Market Share Delegation and Strategic Trade Policy

Strategic delegation analysis has been limited to sales delegation cases, until Jansen et al. (International Journal of Industrial Organization 25:531–539, 2007) presented the case of market share delegation. In international trade theory, export rivalry and import protection have always attracted considerable attention. This paper assesses the influence upon optimal trade policy of introducing market share delegation in a trade duopoly context. It shows that delegation matters, and different forms of delegation coupled with asymmetric costs will imply different degrees of government intervention.

The golden mean: Research on the mechanism of customer participation in employee service innovation

Service innovation is of importance in achieving business success. This study aims to understand how customer participation affects employees' service innovation through zhongyong thinking and verify the moderating role of leadership empowerment in the service section. Data were collected through a paired questionnaire survey with 352 valid frontline employees and their superiors in the starred hotel industry. Multiple linear regressions and bootstrap analysis were performed to examine the hypotheses. The results indicate that customer participation is positively related to zhongyong thinking and service innovation, and zhongyong thinking partially mediates the main effect. In addition, service innovation is more substantial when leadership empowerment is high, and customer participation has a weaker impact on zhongyong thinking when leadership empowerment is low. This study contributes to the employee service innovation literature by confirming that customer participation and employees' zhongyong thinking play vital roles in the Chinese service context. This study also helps service managers understand that empowering their subordinates can facilitate employees' service innovation.     

Relocating empowerment as a management concept for Asia

Management theories, especially those in the area of human resource management, are predominantly Western-centric in origin and in the empirical testing that underpins them. The purpose of this paper is to explore perceptions of one such theory, employee empowerment, in an Asian context. Information gathered from an open ended questionnaire and focus groups provide an in-depth examination of hotel managers' perceptions and practice of empowerment in the workplace. This study provides tentative indicators of significant culturally-driven differences in the understanding and application of employee empowerment (in terms of both research and practice) between Western and Asian contexts. The results of this study indicate that empowerment in Asian cultures relates much more to the individual and his/her merits, in contrast to organizationally-driven empowerment in Western countries. The findings also indicate that empowerment by hotel managers is related to the level of personal trust the manager has in an employee.     

Transparency and empowerment in an investment environment

In a laboratory-controlled environment we provide experimental evidence on the effects of transparency (complete over incomplete information) and empowerment on trust and trustworthiness. We implement a simple version of the standard two-person investment game in a repeated game context with multiple treatments under two information environments. We find that when principals are empowered by being able to penalize agents who may not act in a way the principal believes is in the principal's best interest, the level of trust and investment increases over that which is realized in the absence of empowerment regardless of the degree of transparency. In transparent environments the effect of empowerment is about the same regardless of whether empowerment is introduced or removed. However, in opaque environments, the loss of empowerment has a substantially greater negative effect on trust than the positive effect associated with the introduction of empowerment.