Dispelling some myths: Uncertain and multiple paths to globalization

Brink Lindsey. 2002. Against the Dead Hand: The Uncertain Struggle for Global Capitalism. New York: John Wiley & Sons. 336 pages; ISBN 0‐471‐44277‐1. Peter Hall & David Soskice (Eds.). 2001. Varieties of Capitalism: The Institutional Foundations of Comparative Advantage. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 540 pages; ISBN 0‐199‐24775‐7.     

Economic malaise in Japan: Changing economic order and the future of the U.S.–Japan economic relationship

B. Gao. 2001. Japan's Economic Dilemma: The Institutional Origins of Prosperity and Stagnation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 300 pages; ISBN 0‐521‐79025‐5. F. Bergsten, T. Ito, & M. Noland. 2001. No More Bashing: Building a New Japan‐United States Economic Relationship. Washington, DC: Institute for International Economics. 328 pages; ISBN 0‐88132‐286‐5.     

China—The new paradox

Ian Rae and Morgan Witzel. 2004. Singular and Different: Business in China, Past, Present and Future. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. 173 pages. ISBN: 1‐4039‐1722‐1. Sheila Oakley. 2002. Labor Relations in China's Socialist Market Economy. Westport, CT: Quorum Books. 231 pages. ISBN: 1‐56720‐589‐5. Ilan Alon (Ed.). 2003. Chinese Culture, Organizational Behavior, and International Business Management. Westport, CT: Praeger. 270 pages. ISBN: 1‐56720‐456‐1.     

Book Reviews

Books reviewed: PETER NOLAN, China at the Crossroads. HUBERT STRAUSS, Demand and Supply of Aggregate Exports of Goods and Services: Multivariate Cointegration Analyses for the United States, Canada, and Germany. HORST SIEBERT (ed.), Macroeconomic Policies in the World Eco‐nomy. JAMES R. MARKUSEN, Multinational Firms and the Theory of Inter‐national Trade.     

Europe and the world

Michelle Egan. 2001. Constructing a European Market. Standards, Regulation and Governance. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 362 pages; ISBN 0‐9‐24405‐7. Brigid Gavin. 2001. The European Union and Globalization; Towards Global Democratic Governance. Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar. 242 pages; ISBN 1‐84064‐005‐7. Patrick A. Messerlin. 2001. Measuring the Costs of Protection in Europe: European Commercial Policies in the 2000s. Washington: Institute for International Economics. 370 pages; ISBN 0‐88132‐273‐3.     

Foreign investment in Russia and China: A long way to go,but reason for optimism

D. LeBaron, with D. Carpenter. 2002. Mao, Marx, and the Market: Capitalist Adventures in Russia and China. New York: John Wiley & Sons, Inc. 303 pages; ISBN: 0‐471‐15315‐X. B. Granville & P. Oppenheimer (Eds.). 2001. Russia's Post‐Communist Economy. Oxford, England: University Press. 538 pages; ISBN 0‐19‐829525‐1. H. Fung & K.H. Zhang (Eds.). 2002. Financial Markets and Foreign Direct Investment in Greater China. New York: M.E. Sharpe, Inc. 302 pages; ISBN: 0‐7656‐0804‐9.     

Book Reviews

Book reviews INTERNATIONAL MONETARY FUND, Fiscal Adjustment in IMF‐Supported Pro‐grams: Evaluation Report. MAGNUS BLOMSTRÖM (ed.), Structural Impediments to Growth in Japan. EDWIN M. TRUMAN, Inflation Targeting in the World Economy.     

Doing business in China: Culture and practice

Ming‐Jer Chen. 2001. Inside Chinese Business: A Guide for Managers Worldwide. Boston: Harvard Business School Press. 234 pages. John B. Stuttard. 2000. The New Silk Road: Secrets of Business Success in China Today. New York: John Wiley & Sons. 144 pages. Yadong Luo. 2000. Strategy, Structure, and Performance of MNCs in China. Westport, CT: Quorum Books. 302 pages. Maria Lai‐Ling Lam. 2000. Working With Chinese Expatriates in Business Negotiations: Portraits, Issues, and Applications. Westport, CT: Quorum Books. 188 pages.     

Learning from the implementation of the internet strategy at the Guayaquil stock exchange

This article examines how an Ecuadorian stock exchange pioneered a strategy to use the Internet to educate its local market and reach investors worldwide. The findings suggest that in the initial phase of its strategy development the actions that contributed the most were benchmarking and training, learning from past experience/history, and developing a shadow organization. Actions that helped during the middle phase were providing focus, experimenting, and developing, co‐opting, and securing the resources. In the final phase, actions that contributed the most were gaining internal commitment, investing in infrastructure, and appealing to existing relationships. These findings should be useful for organizational and information technology researchers and practitioners in developed and less‐developed countries. © 2004 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.     

THE CANONICAL MODEL SPACE FOR LAW‐INVARIANT CONVEX RISK MEASURES IS L1

In this paper, we establish a one‐to‐one correspondence between law‐invariant convex risk measures on L^∞ and L¹. This proves that the canonical model space for the predominant class of law‐invariant convex risk measures is L¹.     

Global business in the Middle East

W. Abdallah. 2001. Managing Multinationals in the Middle East: Accounting and Tax Issues. Westport, CT: Quorum Press. 279 pages. ISBN 1‐56720‐267‐5. M. Kavoossi. 2001. The Globalization of Business in the Middle East: Opportunities and Constraints. Westport, CT: Quorum Press. 161 pages. ISBN 1‐56720‐203‐9.     

Entrepreneurship and international business

Henry Wai‐chung Yeung. 2002. Entrepreneurship and the Internationalisation of Asian Firms: An Institutional Perspective. Northampton, MA: Edward Elgar Publishing Limited. 311 pages. ISBN 1‐84064‐734‐5. Victoria E. Bonnell & Thomas B. Gold (Eds.). 2002. The New Entrepreneurs of Europe and Asia: Patterns of Business Development in Russia, Eastern Europe and China. Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe. 357 pages. ISBN 0‐7656‐0775‐1.     

Online/offline (hybrid) consumers and the attention economy

Yoram (Jerry) Wind, Vijay Mahajan, & Robert Gunther. 2002. Convergence Marketing: Strategies for Reaching the New Hybrid Consumer. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall. 368 pages. ISBN 0‐13065‐075‐7. Thomas H. Davenport & John C. Beck. 2001. The Attention Economy: Understanding the New Currency of Business. Boston, MA: Harvard Business School Press. 272 pages. ISBN 1‐57851‐871‐7.     

An Investigation of Decision‐Making Styles of Consumers in China

This study investigates Chinese consumers' decision‐making styles. The Consumer Style Inventory (CSI) is administered to 387 adult consumers in China. Both an exploratory factor analysis and a confirmatory factor analysis are adopted to validate the CSI inventory. This results in an eighteen‐item and seven‐factor solution. Findings indicate that five decision‐making styles are valid and reliable in Chinese culture: perfectionistic, novelty‐fashion conscious, recreational, price conscious, and confused by overchoice. Cluster analysis is employed to identify prominent market segments. Based on the findings, three segments are formed: trendy and perfectionistic consumer, traditional and pragmatic consumer, as well as confused by overchoice consumer. Marketing and management implications are discussed.     

MULTIVARIATE RISK MEASURES: A CONSTRUCTIVE APPROACH BASED ON SELECTIONS

Since risky positions in multivariate portfolios can be offset by various choices of capital requirements that depend on the exchange rules and related transaction costs, it is natural to assume that the risk measures of random vectors are set‐valued. Furthermore, it is reasonable to include the exchange rules in the argument of the risk measure and so consider risk measures of set‐valued portfolios. This situation includes the classical Kabanov's transaction costs model, where the set‐valued portfolio is given by the sum of a random vector and an exchange cone, but also a number of further cases of additional liquidity constraints. We suggest a definition of the risk measure based on calling a set‐valued portfolio acceptable if it possesses a selection with all individually acceptable marginals. The obtained selection risk measure is coherent (or convex), law invariant, and has values being upper convex closed sets. We describe the dual representation of the selection risk measure and suggest efficient ways of approximating it from below and from above. In the case of Kabanov's exchange cone model, it is shown how the selection risk measure relates to the set‐valued risk measures considered by Kulikov (2008, Theory Probab. Appl. 52, 614–635), Hamel and Heyde (2010, SIAM J. Financ. Math. 1, 66–95), and Hamel, Heyde, and Rudloff (2013, Math. Financ. Econ. 5, 1–28).     

EVOLUTION IN IMPERFECT COMMITMENT BARGAINING—STRATEGIC VERSUS IGNORANT TYPES

To commit in bargaining is crucial: in the ultimatum game with its one‐sided commitment power the ‘proposer’ (almost) receives the whole pie while the ‘responder’ is left with (almost) nothing. When bargaining parties commit simultaneously the symmetric Nash (Econometrica, 1950, vol. 18, pp. 155–162) bargaining solution predicts equal shares. Continuously connecting these two games yields a one‐parameter family of games ( Fischer et al. , Experimental Economics, 2006, vol. 9, pp. 17–33) for which we distinguish two behavioral dispositions, namely (1) neglecting commitment power and (2) reacting to it strategically. Their pay‐off implications define the evolutionary set‐up for which we derive the evolutionarily stable behavioral disposition. Our analysis sheds light on the hypothesis that in experiments participants neglect strategic aspects such as commitment power.     

RECONSIDERING THE INVESTMENT–PROFIT NEXUS IN FINANCE‐LED ECONOMIES: AN ARDL‐BASED APPROACH

A Post‐Keynesian growth model is developed, in which financial variables are explicitly taken into account. Variants of an investment function are estimated econometrically, applying the ARDL (auto‐regressive distributed lag)‐based approach proposed by Pesaran et al. (Journal of Applied Econometrics, 16 (3), pp. 289–326). The econometric results are discussed with respect to a remarkable phenomenon that can be observed for some important OECD countries since the early 1980s: accumulation has generally been declining while profit shares and rates have shown a tendency to rise. We concentrate on one potential explanation of this phenomenon, which is particularly relevant for the USA and relies on a high propensity to consume out of capital income.     

THE UNEQUALIZING EFFECTS OF ICT ON ECONOMIC GROWTH

We analyse the effects of information and communication technology (ICT) on levels and growth of per capita GDP in two different ways: (1) by treating ICT as a specific type of physical capital and as a variable that helps to correct for quality existing physical capital measures, and (2) by considering that telephone lines, personal computers and internet hosts are ‘bottleneck‐reducing’ factors that increase the productivity of labour by making easier the diffusion and processing of (non‐rivalrous and almost non‐excludable) knowledge. We compare the relative significance of the two hypotheses in level and growth estimates and find that, when separately taken, both of them improve upon the classical Mankiw et al. (Quarterly Journal of Economics, Vol. 107 (1992), pp. 407–437)/Islam (Quarterly Journal of Economics, Vol. 110 (1995), pp. 1127–1169) framework. These findings show that our approach captures dimensions of time‐varying country‐specific technological progress that previous approaches in the literature did not take into account.     

Psychological drivers in the adoption of morally controversial innovations: the moderating role of ethical self‐identity

The present article conceptualizes morally controversial innovations as a category of innovations that raise ethical issues due to their potentially undesirable long‐term consequences on society or the natural environment. Then, it analyzes the case of biofuel crops by applying an extended version of the theory of planned behavior, which includes moral norm (i.e. the personal convictions of what is wrong or right for society) and ethical self‐identity (i.e. the extent to which one perceives himself/herself as an ethical person). The obtained results show that attitude and subjective norms are positively related to farmers' intention to grow biofuel crops. Yet the intention of those farmers with a higher ethical self‐identity is also influenced by perceived behavioral control and moral norm. In particular, moral norm negatively affects their intention to grow biofuel crops, thus restraining the adoption of this innovation. Implications for theory, as well as for policymakers interested in promoting the diffusion of morally controversial innovations, are discussed.     

A random walk down the options market

Under the efficient market hypothesis, option‐implied forward variance forms a martingale and changes in forward variance follow a random walk. In this study, we extract forward variance from option prices following a model‐free approach and empirically test the random walk hypothesis. Although results from standard orthogonality tests support the martingale restriction, further results from autoregressive regressions seem to reject the martingale restriction as daily changes in forward variance are found to exhibit negative autocorrelation. However, this anomalous pattern of negative correlation is fully explained by illiquidity effects. Overall, the findings support the random walk hypothesis and informational efficiency of the options market. © 2011 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Jrl Fut Mark 32:505–535, 2012