Entrepreneurial orientation in sports entrepreneurship - a mixed methods analysis of professional soccer clubs in the German-speaking countries

In recent years, sports entrepreneurship has emerged as a promising discipline in the field of sports management research. However, the research field is still fragmented. This study gives an overview of sports entrepreneurship and coopetition research and is the first work analyzing EO and performance in professional sports. First, quantitative results about EO, organizational performance and coopetition of 22 professional soccer clubs were obtained. Following the mixed method approach, the data was then extended by qualitative expert interviews. Entrepreneurial orientation had a significant positive relationship with both financial and sporting performance of professional soccer clubs in German-speaking countries during the 2017/18 season. We suggest coopetition as a promising strategy for professional soccer clubs to succeed. Hence, our study fosters the concept of sports entrepreneurship and offers evidence that entrepreneurial orientation is a well-suited managerial approach to enhance organizational performance in professional soccer.

     

A systematic approach for ranking football players within an integrated DEA‐OWA framework

The ranking of players has always been an important input for key decisions in the football industry. This paper introduces a systematic methodology for ranking football players through objective performance factors within a framework that integrates data envelopment analysis and ordered weighted averaging operators. Players from European Premier League Football clubs are selected and ranked under a decision setting that involves the players' desirable and undesirable performance factors alongside the attitude of the decision maker. The robustness of the proposed methodology is evaluated using different levels of optimism of the decision maker.     

Making the ‘Invisible’ Visible: Redevelopment‐induced Displacement of Migrants in Shenzhen,China

Gentrification in China is intertwined with urban redevelopment, which causes the large‐scale displacement of rural–urban migrants from ‘villages in the city’ (ViCs). Because of the informality of ViCs, migrant renters have very insecure tenancy and during redevelopment they are treated as a negligible (‘invisible’) social group. As they are very difficult to locate after displacement, they are also literally invisible to researchers. To make the invisible visible, this study traced a sample of displaced migrants from Huangbeiling village in Shenzhen. The focus was on the displacement process and on identifying the consequences for the displaced. We found various forms of displacement during the redevelopment process. Nearby ViCs were prioritized by displaced migrants to minimize as much utility loss as possible. However, they generally suffer from decreased proximity, increased living costs, and the loss of social networks and job opportunities. Remarkably, some choose to return to the gentrifying village, enduring displacement in situ caused by increasing rents, drastic physical neighbourhood changes and declining liveability, in exchange for retaining their original social and economic networks. Large‐scale urban redevelopment is causing the rapid shrinkage of informal housing. Recognizing and addressing the housing needs of this impoverished social group is a matter of urgency.     

China''s State-Owned Enterprises in the First Reform Decade: An Analysis of a Declining Monopsony

We study the evolution of employment and wage outcomes in Chinese SOEs during the first decade of economic reforms, using a panel of data for almost 1000 enterprises covering the years 1980–90. Unlike the 1990s, which were marked by growing labor redundancy in the SOE sector, we find that CPE-fostered capital-intensity remained so extreme during the 1980s that workers' marginal products exceeded their full wages, just as in a classical monopsony outcome. Consistent with reasoning about the impact of competition upon monopsony, however, we find the marginal product-wage gap declined in the face of market-oriented reforms, and that monopsony was weakest where the state sector's shares of industrial output and enterprises were lowest, and for smaller enterprises and enterprises managed by lower levels of government. Our analysis also supports Xu and Zhuang's (1996) finding that bonus payments increased enterprises' revenues by more than it did their costs.     

Learning strategic cooperative behavior in industrial symbiosis: A game‐theoretic approach integrated with agent‐based simulation

This paper investigates the negotiation phase of industrial symbiosis relationships, where companies exchanging wastes for inputs need to develop strategies on how to share the additional costs to operate the industrial symbiosis business. The business behavior is approached as a “coopetition” problem where companies need to cooperate to reduce waste discharge costs and traditional input purchase costs and dive into competition to pay a minimum share of additional costs (i.e., waste treatment, waste transportation, and transaction costs) of operating industrial symbiosis. A noncooperative game‐theoretical model for sharing the additional costs is proposed that highlights the two strategies that companies can adopt aimed at sharing costs: a fair strategy and an opportunistic strategy. Then, an agent‐based model is used to simulate the game iterated over time and investigate how the players can adapt their strategies according to their past experience. Simulation results show that players learn that playing the fair strategy is beneficial in the long period, despite in the short period they can gain more benefit by playing the opportunistic strategy. Findings of the paper are critically important to reduce the business and managerial barriers against the formation of industrial symbiosis networks and to stimulate innovative thinking of company managers to foster the development of the circular economy. The paper proposes theoretical, managerial, and policy implications, which are discussed in detail in a comparative manner between linear and circular economy.     

The Optimal Size of a Religious Congregation: An Economic Theory of Clubs Analysis

The economic theory of clubs model is applied to determine the optimal size of a religious congregation. The optimal size is specified to be where total contributions are maximized. This occurs where the marginal benefits of adding a new member (in terms of contributions gained from that new member) equal the marginal costs of that new member (in terms of contributions lost from existing members). Benefits from adding members include enhanced fellowship opportunities and the spreading of fixed costs across a broader base. Costs include the congestion of facilities and a greater tendency to free ride. The model is empirically tested for four denominations. The average Catholic parish is found to be much larger than its optimal size, while the average Episcopalian, Lutheran, and Methodist congregations are all found to be smaller than their optimal size.     

Reconciling user costs and rental equivalence: Evidence from the US consumer expenditure survey

Previous research [Verbrugge, Randal, 2008a. The puzzling divergence of aggregate rents and user costs, 1980–2004. The Review of Income and Wealth 54(4), 671–699] demonstrated that housing rents and ex ante user costs diverge markedly for extended periods of time, a finding with profound implications for income and inflation measurement. But the primary data sources in that study were various indexes, based upon largely disjoint data sources, constructed using different aggregation techniques, and each subject to various criticisms. This raised doubts about the quality of the comparison. The relationship between user costs and rents might well be much tighter at the micro level; after all, house prices and rents (and their growth rates) can vary dramatically within cities, and rents are notoriously sticky. Furthermore, the use of indexes precludes both cross-sectional and dollar cost comparisons. In this study, we use Consumer Expenditure Interview Survey (CE) data to examine the relationship between user costs and rents at the individual unit-level, in dollars, using unit-level information on house value, rent, taxes, and the like. This allows us to accurately estimate unit-specific user costs and to control for unobservables like structure and neighborhood quality. We also make the point that in theory, after-tax user costs should equal net rent, i.e., expected rental income, rather than gross rent.Our findings are striking. In keeping with most previous research, we find tremendous divergence between conventional measures of user costs and net rents, thus ruling out index construction errors as a possible explanation. This divergence does not result from a faulty rent measure: we find that reported rents are sensible, in that they move similarly to official rent indexes, and are not simply out-of-pocket expenses. Instead, and most perplexing, we find a surprisingly close correspondence between net rents and a particular estimate of user costs, one implicitly assuming zero transactions costs and constructed using an appreciation measure that is both theoretically suspect and empirically a poor predictor of actual appreciation.     

An Analysis of Consumer Response to Corruption: Italy's Calciopoli Scandal

The Calciopoli episode affecting Italian football in the 2005–6 season serves as an opportunity for an empirical investigation into consumer (fan) behavior, following league‐imposed punishments on clubs whose officials were found guilty of corrupt practices. Using a difference‐in‐differences estimation method, we find that home attendances for convicted teams fell by around 16%, relative to those clubs not subject to punishment. We show further that the fall in attendances resulted in non‐trivial gate revenue reductions. Our results suggest that a sizeable number of fans of the punished clubs were subsequently deterred from supporting their teams inside the stadium.     

Real‐time forecast combinations for the oil price

Baumeister and Kilian (Journal of Business and Economic Statistics, 2015, 33(3), 338–351) combine forecasts from six empirical models to predict real oil prices. In this paper, we broadly reproduce their main economic findings, employing their preferred measures of the real oil price and other real‐time variables. Mindful of the importance of Brent crude oil as a global price benchmark, we extend consideration to the North Sea‐based measure and update the evaluation sample to 2017:12. We model the oil price futures curve using a factor‐based Nelson–Siegel specification estimated in real time to fill in missing values for oil price futures in the raw data. We find that the combined forecasts for Brent are as effective as for other oil price measures. The extended sample using the oil price measures adopted by Baumeister and Kilian yields similar results to those reported in their paper. Also, the futures‐based model improves forecast accuracy at longer horizons.     

Social welfare,corruption and credibility

Abstract

Economic development requires that investments by entrepreneurs are not subject to expropriation by government. Unfortunately, public agencies often serve as the instruments by which political elites engage in corruption and extracting rents from the economy. The question is how to design institutions that credibly commit to a stable system of guarantees of property rights and contract enforcement.

Principal agent theory and the new public management favor greater accountability of public managers to elected officials or eliminating public agencies through privatization. We argue for institutional designs that provide a degree of public agency autonomy. We show that public agency autonomy is a by-product of the competition between elites in democracies with multiple veto players. We show that transparency, professionalism, and legality help ensure that public managers do not engage in rent-extraction. The institutional design problem is how to induce public managers to serve the public interest without being fully responsive to elected political officials.     

Do governments tax agglomeration rents?

Empirical evidence suggests that firms receive rents from locating in economic agglomerations and industry clusters. Using the German local business tax as a testing ground, we empirically investigate whether these agglomeration rents are taxable for local governments. The analysis exploits a rich data source on the population of German plants to construct measures for the communities’ agglomeration characteristics. The findings indicate that economic agglomerations and industry clusters exert a positive impact on the jurisdictional tax rate choice. Further analysis moreover suggests that a municipality’s potential to tax agglomeration rents depends on its firm and industry agglomeration relative to neighboring communities. To account for potential endogeneity problems, our analysis exploits long-lagged population and infrastructure variables as instruments for the agglomeration measures.     

Privileged Accumulation Spaces and Restrictions on Development of State‐Business Relations in Argentina (1966–1989)

The aim of this work is to explain how the state‐business relation has influenced economic development in Argentina. I will make a historical and systemic analysis of the Argentinian case to illustrate how and why state‐business relations supporting privileged accumulation spaces (PAS) increased development restrictions from 1966 to 1989. During this period, successive governments shared a common view about the central role the state had to perform for industrialization, especially by supporting the growth of big domestic industrial companies. This view would only radically change in 1989, when neoliberal structural reforms were implemented. To support this hypothesis, I suggest a methodological strategy that combines several techniques and sources in order to analyze the evolution of three complex variables and their multiple relations: state economic intervention, business behavior, and performance by large corporations.     

Rents,resources, and multiple technologies; Ricardian mechanisms in input-output modelling

ABSTRACT

To allow for ‘multiple technologies’ to produce a homogeneous output in input–output models, Duchin and Levine [(2011) Sectors may use Multiple Technologies Simultaneously: The Rectangular Choice-of-technology Model with Binding Factor Constraints, Economic Systems Research, 23(3), 281–302] propose an optimization model constrained by primary resources. We show that the Duchin–Levine model contains two different mechanisms by which multiple technologies can arise. If a factor in short supply is shared by the original and the newly entering technology, the output of the original, lower-cost technology will be reduced to make room for the higher-cost technology which is less intensive in that factor. In contrast, if the factor in short supply is technology-specific, a higher-cost technology supplements the original lowest-cost one, which stays fully active. Either mechanism implies a mechanism-specific set of prices, quantities and rents. We relate these results to classical views on comparative advantage, fixed output levels and the origin of rents.     

Henry George and Jane Jacobs on the Sources of Economic Growth

Henry George and Jane Jacobs shared a remarkably similar vision of the economic functioning of cities and of the sources of the economic growth of cities, despite having differing primary objectives. George wrote Progress and Poverty and subsequent works to persuade the public of the equity and efficiency of public capture of economic rents of land and other natural resources and elimination of taxes on labor and capital. Jacobs acquired fame for The Death and Life of Great American Cities in which she challenged the prevailing orthodoxy of the urban planning profession. Both saw the density and diversity of economic and cultural activities in cities as a facilitator of innovation and entrepreneurship in all aspects of civilization. Both also recognized the power of the price system in coordinating the activities of independent decision makers and the importance of trade for economic growth.     

The Performance Implications of Financial and Non‐Financial Rewards: An Asian Nordic Comparison

This study empirically investigated culture's consequences on employee perceptions of the performance implications of financial and non‐financial rewards. Using a sample (n = 568) drawn from the banking industry in Finland and Hong Kong, we found that although the effects and predictive capability of culture (i.e. masculinity–femininity, individualism–collectivism, uncertainty avoidance, and power distance) offered some important insights, a range of other contextual factors (i.e. organizational, institutional, economic) wielded influence over and shaped reward–performance values, preferences, and behaviours. The emergence of these new paradigms necessitates that the US centric economic and behavioural theories (e.g. exchange) that underpin reward–performance be revisited and extended if they are to be applicable in the international context. Understanding the influence of a range of contextual forces is therefore critical to multinational organizations attempting to implement effective reward strategies aimed at achieving a diverse set of performance priorities. In addition to these novel theoretical and practical contributions, this study also paves the way for future research in this promising area of management studies.     

Circular economy to enhance sustainability of small and medium‐sized enterprises

The circular economy (CE) represents a major paradigm shift of moving from the concepts of linear to circular supply chains across multiple industries. Although some aspects of CE adoption within industrial supply chains have been researched extensively (particularly addressing challenges of design, implementation, and operations), the research that relates CE practices with sustainability performance to reveal the current state of CE practices within small and medium‐sized enterprises (SMEs) is scant. The aim of this research was to facilitate SMEs to achieve greater sustainability through CE implementation. This research addresses three research questions—How are CE fields of action related to sustainability performance? What are the issues, challenges, and opportunities of adopting CE in SMEs? And what key strategies, resources, and competences facilitate effective implementation of CE in SMEs? This study adopts a mixed method approach (qualitative and quantitative) using survey research, focus group, and case studies; 130 randomly selected SMEs within the Midlands of the United Kingdom have been surveyed, and the responses are analysed using statistical tools along with findings from focus groups and case studies. The study reveals that all CE fields of action (take, make, distribute, use, and recover) of SMEs are correlated to economic performance, but only make and use are related to environmental and social performance. The study further derives strategies, resources, and competences for achieving sustainability across all the CE field of actions. Additionally, this research reveals the issues and challenges, strategies, resources, and competences required for implementing CE in SMEs.     

Corporate venturing and the rent cycle

This study views entrepreneurial rents as renewable opportunities and explores how firms can effectively utilize corporate venturing to create and sustain economic rents. Schumpeterian entrepreneurs create rents by harnessing corporate venturing to exploit attractive economic opportunities. The Schumpeterian rent is composed of Ricardian and Austrian rents. Ricardian rents result from unique and non-reproducible characteristics or competencies of the firm, and hence, are not appropriable by imitators. Conversely, Austrian rents, or economic profit, are subject to dissipation by imitators and attract entry by competitors or Austrian entrepreneurs until they are bid to zero or destroyed by another Schumpeterian innovation. In this formulation, Austrian entrepreneurs are modeled as infra-marginal rent seekers. Consequently, to sustain rents, firms must cycle between using corporate venturing to create or discover Schumpeterian entrepreneurial opportunities and using venturing as a mechanism to exploit existing rent generating opportunities.     

Rent-seeking in a unionised monopoly

A unionised monopoly firm, benefitting from some kind of anti-competitive regulation, and its corresponding trade union have a common interest in spending resources to protect the monopoly rents created by the regulation. In the present paper, a situation in which the unionised monopoly is challenged by a consumer organisation fighting for deregulation is analysed as a standard Tullock rent-seeking contest. With unequal sharing of monopoly rents, the free-riding incentives among the rent-defending players turn out to be overwhelming, in the sense that the unique Nash equilibrium is characterised by zero effort contribution by the player with the lower valuation of the contested prize. This implies that being “strong”, in terms of bargaining strength, is not necessarily an advantage for neither player in a unionised monopoly that is threatened by deregulation. Received: June 2000 / accepted: January 2001     

High‐Performance Work Systems in Professional Service Firms: Examining the Practices‐Resources‐Uses‐Performance Linkage

Professional service firms (PSFs) play an important role in the knowledge‐based economy. Their success is highly dependent on their people, the knowledge resources they possess, and how they use these resources. However, how to systematically manage human resources to attain high performance is not fully understood. This study addresses this issue by investigating the linkage mechanisms through which high‐performance work systems (HPWS) influence the performance of PSFs. We integrate resource‐based and dynamic capability theories in order to identify and investigate two intervening mechanisms that link HR practices to firm performance. The first mechanism is the intellectual capital resources comprising the human, social, and organizational capital that HPWS create. The second mechanism is the uses to which both HPWS and resources can be applied, operationalized as organizational ambidexterity, the simultaneous exploitation of existing knowledge and exploration of new knowledge. These mechanisms are hypothesized to link HPWS to firm performance in the form of a practices‐resources‐uses‐performance linkage model. Results from a longitudinal study of 93 accounting firms support this linkage model. © 2015 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.     

On the Choice of Risk and Effort in Tournaments—Experimental Evidence

We investigate a simple two‐person tournament in a controlled laboratory experiment. Each player chooses between two distributions of random shocks. After observing the overall risk, both players decide simultaneously on their effort. Theory predicts both players should choose the distribution with the higher variance of random shock, as this minimizes equilibrium effort. We show that the effort exerted is sensitive towards risk. The agents exert less effort if the random shock is high. However, agents do not learn to commit themselves by choosing a high risk in our experiment.