Erin Anderson and the Path Breaking Work of TCE in New Areas of Business Research: Transaction Costs in Action

This review article synthesizes Erin Anderson's academic contribution, with an emphasis on two path breaking aspects of her work, namely the operationalization of TCA in different contexts and the refinement of the theory. We review the measures that she developed to reflect key TCE constructs, and identify five contexts in which Erin Anderson's application of TCE concepts broke new paths. These are employee or representative salesforces, choice of foreign entry mode, new market entry and innovation, countertrade, and ethics. We highlight a number of ways in which her research integrates other theories to transaction cost economics, thereby deepening our understanding of key issues involving make or buy decisions. Finally, we draw attention to directions for future research identified through her work.     

Are Audit-related Ethical Decisions Dependent upon Mood?

This study explores the impact of mood on individuals’ ethical decision-making processes through the Graham [Graham, J. W.: 1986, Research in Organizational Behavior 8, 1–52] model of Principled Organizational Dissent. In particular, the research addresses how an individual’s mood influences his or her willingness to report the unethical actions of a colleague. Participants’ experienced an affectively charged, unrelated event and were then asked to make a decision regarding whistle-blowing intentions in a public accounting context. As expected, negative mood was associated with lower intentions to report the unethical actions of others to a superior within the organization. The Graham model, which proposes that reporting intentions are impacted by the three determinants of seriousness, personal responsibility and cost, was employed to more clearly understand the nature of the affect–reporting intention relationship. The role of affect was explained by demonstrating that two determinants mediate the relationship between mood and whistle-blowing intentions. Specifically, as seriousness and responsibility have a positive impact on reporting intentions, the reduction of these perceptions by negative mood reduces the intent to report. The negative impact of personal cost on reporting intentions was significant, although not as a mediator of mood.Mary Curtis is an Associate Professor of Auditing and Accounting Information Systems in the Department of Accounting at the University of North Texas. Her research interests include Judgment and Decision-making in accounting and issues related to Information Systems Auditing.     

Prevalence of mortality in cannabis consumer motorcyclists: meta-analysis of international studies

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to estimate prevalence of mortality in cannabis consumer motorcyclists across the world. A systematic review was conducted from publications PubMed/Medline, ISI Web of Knowledge, EMBASE, Scopus, and Google Scholar from August 2010 to March2019. The variances of each study were calculated using the binomial distribution formula and the heterogeneity among the studies was analyzed by Q-Cochran test with a significant level less than 0.1 and the index of changes attributed to I² heterogeneity. The prevalence of mortality in cannabis consumer motorcyclists was estimated 0.15 (95% CI = 0.08–0.22). Subgroup analysis based on country type showed that the mortality rate of cannabis consumer motorcyclists in developed countries is 16% (0.08–0.24) and in developing countries is 8% (0.04–0.10). These findings have implications for developing interventions through presenting appropriate solution, educating people and raising awareness to address the changing nature of drug use among motorcyclists in the world.     

Corporate Disclosures: Strategic Donation of Information*

In this paper, we model a corporate insider's motivation of truthful pre‐trade disclosure of her private payoff‐relevant information. In a model in which disclosure has no efficiency gains like reduced cost of capital, no legal implications, and no signaling motivations, we show that a corporate insider may choose to disclose payoff‐relevant information as a means of maximizing her trading profits. This truthful disclosure is done pre‐trade and is beneficial to the corporate insider as it erodes the informational advantage of other traders with private information. This new rationale for public disclosure needs to be empirically tested by examining the trades of corporate insiders after, and not before, public disclosures.     

Corporate Social Responsibility Practices and Environmentally Responsible Behavior: The Case of The United Nations Global Compact

The aim of this paper is to shed some light on understanding why companies adopt environmentally responsible behavior and what impact this adoption has on their performance. This is an empirical study that focuses on the United Nations (UN) Global Compact (GC) initiative as a Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) mechanism. A survey was conducted among GC participants, of which 29 responded. The survey relies on the anticipated and actual benefits noted by the participants in the GC. The results, while not conclusive, indicate that companies have more than one reason for adopting environmentally responsible behavior and that ethical and economic reasons co-exist. In terms of performance, the impact of participation in the GC seems to be particularly high in securing network opportunities and improved corporate image. The results indicate that companies that have participated many years in the GC, have submitted the most projects and have attended the most GC meetings also regard their CSR involvement as having had a strong, positive influence on their market performance. GC participation does not result in significant cost advantages, but this does not seem to have been regarded as a goal anyway. Costs seem to be affected to a␣large extent by existence of in-house research and␣development and the capability of developing environmentally sound technologies. Overall, the company receives both ethical and economic benefits from joining the GC. Dilek Cetindamar received her B.S. degree from Industrial Engineering Department at Bogazici University (BU), her MA degree from Economics Department at BU, and her Ph.D. degree from management Department at Istanbul Technical University in 1995. Before her appointment to the Faculty of Management at Sabanci University in 1999, she worked in the following universities: BU, Case Western Reserve University (USA), Portland state university (USA),and Chalmers University of Technology (Sweden). She has seven books, 15 book chapters, and 22 papers published in various international journals. She received an encouragement award from Turkish Science Academy in 2003. Her main interest and research topics are Technology Management, Development Economics and Entrepreneurship. Kristoffer Husoy has a Master of Arts in European Studies of Society, Science and Technology from the University of Oslo and a Master of Science in Engineering Cybernetics from the Norwegian University of Science and Technology. Research interests are Corporate Social Responsibility, environmental, technology and human-computer interaction. He currently holds a scientist position at ABB Corporate Research in Oslo Norway.     

Gender differences in the importance of personality traits in predicting leadership self‐efficacy

Our goal in this study was to investigate antecedents to formation of leadership self‐efficacy (LSE) for men versus women. We used a relative importance analysis, which allows more precise identification of important predictors without concern of multicollinearity effects on R². Using a sample of 325 business students, we found that extraversion, conscientiousness and openness to experience each explained significant variance in LSE. Conscientiousness and openness to experience were stronger predictors of LSE for women than men, whereas extraversion was a stronger predictor of LSE for men than women. We provide a literature review with hypotheses, methods and analysis. We discuss the results with respect to the role congruency and leadership self‐perceptions and provide implications for future research and practice of leadership development.     

The double helix effect: Catch-up and local-foreign co-evolution in the Indian and Chinese automotive industries

The rapid development of emerging market firms and their foray into global value chains has attracted significant attention. In this perspectives paper, we draw on case studies from the automotive industries in India and China, to describe the coevolution of domestic firms and advanced economy multinational enterprises (AMNE) entrants. We first show that domestic firms that used catch-up strategies such as capability upgradation, investments into internal R&D and globalization through mergers & acquisitions have managed to succeed in local markets as well as climb into global value chains. We next illustrate that the strategy adopted by the most successful AMNEs involves combining the formation of vertical partnerships with local sub-assembly suppliers and horizontal collaborations with local network orchestrators. Simultaneously weaving together embeddedness in these two cortical sides of the local business eco-system on the one hand and within its global corporate value chain networks on the other – generates a “double helix” effect, whereby its local and global capabilities reinforce each other. The double helix improves cost competitiveness and pushes the product innovative envelope in both local and global markets.     

The Impact of User Review Volume on Consumers' Willingness-to-Pay: A Consumer Uncertainty Perspective

Numerous studies have investigated the impact of review volume and review variance on product price, but their findings are mixed. The perspective of mismatch cost framework (e.g., Sun 2012) argues that, at the market level, the impact of review variance on product price varies with review valence due to diverse product tastes across individuals. The perspective of classic expected utility framework (e.g., Wu and Ayala Gaytán 2013; Wu et al. 2013) further argues that heterogeneous risk attitudes across individuals directly drives the varying impact of both review volume and variance on willingness-to-pay, regardless of review valence. Although both frameworks have gained good empirical support, neither of them probed whether the impact of review volume or review variance varies within an individual.We extend the current research by focusing on the varying impact of review volume on consumers' willingness-to-pay. Combining economic and behavioral theories of decisions under uncertainty, we argue that consumers' preferences of uncertainty can vary both across and within individuals. The extended framework thus concludes that the impact of review volume on consumers' willingness-to-pay not only varies across individuals with different types of uncertainty preferences, but may also change with review valence within an individual of some types of uncertainty preferences. The framework is tested using an experimental study and an empirical study. Results from both studies provide good support for this broader framework.     

Research note: A cost‐benefit analysis of letter prenotification and follow‐up

Conflicting findings for two of the most commonly used, cost‐incurring mail survey inducement techniques encouraged a re‐examination of the effectiveness of letter prenotification and letter follow‐up. An expanded cost‐benefit analysis, which considered response rate, time, quality and cost, was conducted on a sample of university academics in a 2 × 2 experimental design with control. Both letter prenotification and letter had no significant effect on response rate. Cost‐benefit analysis showed the control group was the most cost‐effective, followed by the follow‐up group, the interaction group and the prenotified group; although this ordering depends on the researcher's priorities. The results suggest that the use of prenotification letters to improve response from organisational respondents may be misguided and questions the use of follow‐up letters.     

Contracting Under Endogenous Risk

Agents make decisions by trading off cost, return and risk. The literature, however, does not consider the impact of risk on action choice. We show that this tradeoff has important implications for the firm. First, the firm may provide no insurance in the salary. Since the agents action choice will determine her risk, the salary cannot compensate her for it. Second, the firm may not be able to design an incentive scheme to implement particularly risky actions. Finally, the firm may not be able to design a scheme in which the agent splits her effort across multiple tasks. This is particularly problematic for tasks that are technological substitutes.     

Would You Like to be a Prosumer? Information Revelation,Personalization and Price Discrimination in Electronic Markets

Electronic commerce and flexible manufacturing allow personalization of initially standardized products at low cost. Will customers provide the information necessary for personalization? Assuming that a consumer can control the amount of information revealed, we analyze how her decision interacts with the pricing strategy of a monopolist who may abuse the information to obtain a larger share of total surplus. We consider two scenarios, one where consumers have different tastes but identical willingness to pay and another with high and low valuation customers. In both cases full revelation may only result if the monopolist can commit to a maximum price before consumers decide about disclosure.     

Chinese dietary culture influences consumers' intention to use imported soy‐based dietary supplements: an application of the theory of planned behaviour

The over‐saturated dietary supplement (DS) market in developed countries such as the US spurs the need for foreign market expansion, and the Chinese market provides a great potential for the foreign soy‐based DS industry. This study examined Chinese consumers' intention to use imported (US‐made US‐brand) soy‐based DS based on the Theory of Planned Behavior (TPB). Two alternative models were also examined in which Chinese dietary culture variables, including soyfoods favourability and dining‐out sociability, as well as their interactions with attitudes, were integrated into the TPB model. A cross‐sectional, self‐administered survey was conducted with a sample of 215 subjects (137 females; 78 males) in Shanghai, China. The TPB variables attitude, subjective norm, perceived behaviour control and behavioural intention, as well as the Chinese dietary culture variables: soyfoods favourability and dine‐out sociability were measured. Multiple linear regressions were used to analyze the three models. The statistical results indicated that all three models were statistically significant to predict intention (Model 1: R² = 0.473, P < 0.001; Model 2: R² = 0.505, P < 0.001; Model 3: R² = 0.525, P < 0.001). The results also showed that attitude, perceived behavioural control, and dine‐out sociability were significant (positive) determinants of intention. Soyfoods favourability acted a significant (negative) moderator of the relationship between attitude and intention. Subjective norm had no significant impact on intention. In conclusion, the TPB model was useful to predict Chinese consumers' intention to use imported soy‐based DS, but not all the TPB components weighed significantly in exploring DS consumption in China. The selected Chinese dietary culture variables were much more important predictors than subjective norm. This study makes a significant contribution in the application of the TPB model and in market strategy development for imported dietary supplements in China.     

Designing the content of advertising in a differentiated market

In many markets, consumers use attribute information to assess the value they expect from purchasing a product or service. This includes many low involvement experience goods including take-out food, many packaged good categories and restaurants. In these markets, quality differences exist but many differences are horizontal in nature: the consumer is interested in finding a product that meets her unique tastes. Beyond ensuring that consumers know the brand, the category and the price; it seems advertising should provide consumers with attribute information. However, a significant proportion of advertising does not provide it. In fact, within the same category, competitors respond to messages that emphasize detailed attribute information with messages that are devoid of attribute information. These messages are uninformative about product attributes. We explore how competition in a differentiated market is affected by the ability of a firm has to choose uninformative messages. We construct a model to investigate the factors that affect a firm’s decision to use advertising with detailed attribute information or advertising that does not provide it. The model demonstrates that content decisions about advertising are affected by the differences between products, the range of heterogeneity in consumer tastes and the degree to which costs increase as a function of the quantity of information in advertising. Surprisingly, even when the cost to increase the quantity of information in advertising is low, uninformative campaigns can be more profitable than campaigns with attribute information. The analysis also demonstrates that firms can be more likely to provide attribute information when there are less consumers that are attribute-sensitive. Finally, the model shows that uninformative messages can create “artificial differentiation” in some situations.     

Understanding and Profitably Serving the ‘Close-Contact’ Consumer

Abstract

According to many recently published accounts, systems for food creation and distribution are consistently providing inferior foods. For example, at this writing prepackaged spinach distributed in the U.S. has been found tainted with E-coli bacteria. We briefly review and discuss a few of these published accounts. We define and discuss the concept of the Close-Contact consumer segment that has arisen at least partially in response to perceived weaknesses in domestic and international food creation and distribution systems. The Close-Contact consumer is termed Close-Contact because s/he seeks to have a higher than average level of knowledge about the source of his/her food and the policies of his/ her food suppliers. Thoughts about the Close-Contact consumer arose after dozens of conversations and informal small group discussions with customers. We view the characteristics of Close-Contact consumers and describe marketing programs targeted to this growing consumer group. The Close-Contact consumer responds particularly well to personalized service and full information disclosure regarding food suppliers and food products. Whether in restaurants or grocery store environments, the Close-Contact consumer expects high information availability about the food that s/he consumes.     

What Shapes Assessment of Ability to Pay for Children's College Education?

Many parents have concerns about the cost of their child's college and lack information about preparing for those expenses. Parents' assessment of ability to pay for college are likely to influence their investments in a child's education, and may in turn affect the child's educational commitment and attainment. These potential outcomes lead us to investigate what accounts for parents' assessment. We use logistic regression to analyze data collected from mothers with newborn children (N = 2,566). The findings demonstrate that the mother's assessment of ability to pay for the child's education are significantly associated with material hardship experiences, financial management skills, educational expectations, and her education level. We discuss research and policy implications of promoting positive financial assessment for college early.     

会计信息披露实际与内幕交易——基于年报首季披露时差与异常超额交易量的实证研究

Considering the cost of capital, systematic risk and the probability of being monitored and punished, informed traders are most likely to conduct informed trading at the small time gap between the disclosure of annual report of year t and 1^st quarter reports of year t+1 because the gap is the best and safest time for informed trading. Meanwhile, due to the high cost and risks of informed trading, traders need huge trading volumes to gain abnormal returns. Based on these characteristics of informed trading, a research sample and a control sample are found for this paper. The former refers to companies with loss annual report in year t and profit-making 1^st quarter financial report in year t+1 in tandem. The latter refers to companies announced loss in the previous year and and profit-making 1^st quarter financial report in year t+1 simultaneously or companies with loss annual report in the year t and loss 1^st quarter financial report in year t+1 in tandem. Results confirm the existence of informed trading by measuring “extra abnormal trading volume”. Therefore, authors suggest that a good disclosure policy should not only consider the timeliness and accuracy of the financial reports, but also the overall information disclosure process to prevent potential informed trading. Translated and revise from Zhongguo Kuaiji Pinglun 中国会计评论 (China Accounting Review), 2008, 6(2): 207–222     

Credit cards,new technology and consumer debt*

There has been a rapid expansion in consumer indebtedness in the U.K. The amount of consumer debt has doubled in real terms during the last 10 years. The majority of consumers are able to cope with their debt repayments, but there are a significant number of credit casualties, often burdened with multiple debts. Credit cards have played a significant but not overwhelming part in this increase in debt. There are now 62 bank credit cards for every 100 adults in the U.K., a much higher incidence than in any other European country. Credit cards have been aggressively marketed and sold, and it is possible that they will now move downmarket, to consumers in lower income groups. This possibility highlights the need for a major consumer education campaign on the cost of credit. U.K. consumers' knowledge of and ability to compare credit interest rates is poor, especially among lower income consumers who are most at risk.     

Counting the cost of healthy eating: a Swedish comparison of Mediterranean‐style and ordinary diets

The aim of this research was to examine the cost of a diet generally regarded as healthy, a Swedish version of the Mediterranean diet, and to compare it with the cost of an ordinary Swedish diet. A total of 30 individuals provided detailed dietary data collected in a randomized intervention study, examining the effect of dietary change to a Mediterranean‐style diet in patients with rheumatoid arthritis (Mediterranean group, n = 16, control group, n = 14). The data, covering 1‐month dietary intake, were examined with three different diet quality indicators to see whether the Mediterranean group consumed a healthier diet than the control group. All diet quality indicators showed that the Mediterranean group consumed a healthier diet than the control group. Consumer food prices were used to analyse the cost of the different diets. In immediate consumer cost terms, eating a healthier diet was more expensive when differences in energy intake were discounted. However, non‐energy adjusted costs showed no significant difference between the groups. Hence, if one of the reasons for choosing a healthier diet is to achieve weight loss – by consuming less energy – it is possible that healthier eating is not more expensive.     

The Effect of Extrinsic Cues on Imported Wine Evaluations: An Experimental Approach

ABSTRACT

This paper reports the results of an experimental study conducted to assess the effect of expert reviews, price, and country of origin, on consumers' evaluations of imported wine quality and value. The study revealed a main effect of expert reviews on quality and value perceptions, and that the effect of expert review is higher than the effects of price and country of origin. The study also revealed that country of origin effect is significant on perceived quality but not on perceived value. Moreover, the study revealed that the effect of country-of-origin information is significant when price information is also present, but becomes not significant when expert review information is added.     

Explaining the Role of Perceived Risk,Knowledge, Price,and Cost in Dry Fish Consumption Within the Theory of Planned Behavior

ABSTRACT

The general purpose of this study is to explore the influence of perceived risk, knowledge, price, and cost of dry fish consumption in Bangladesh using the general framework from the theory of planned behavior (TPB). The field experiments were performed in Bangladesh with a convenience sample of 558 respondents. Multiple regression analysis was used to investigate the relationship among perceived risk, knowledge, price, and cost and TPB constructs. The findings showed that attitude, norms, and procedural knowledge emerge as the key determinants of intention, whereas intention, attitude, norms, and perceived risk have effects on the dry fish consumption frequency. Perceived behavioral control, price, and cost had no significant effect on intention and consumption behavior. The proposed TPB and the extended model both fit the data well and proved the expectations of this study in a promising way. The study found that people are more concerned about potential long-term risk to their family and others. Therefore, management attention should focus on reducing risks which consumers may face through producing safe and hazard-free dry fish.