Trading between agents for a better match

This paper studies externalities that arise when agents can trade outcomes ex post. I show that when agents can trade outcomes ex post, principals are incentivized to contract with agents ex ante to reduce ex post transfers to outside agents with whom the principals do not directly contract. This causes principals to offer agents piece-rates that are inefficiently low and lower than the piece-rates they would offer if trading was not allowed. Although trading reduces an agent's effort and could increase the agent's outside option of rejecting a principal's ex ante contract, principals ultimately gain from allowing ex post trading because such trading results in outcomes that better match their tastes.     

《乐记》中的礼乐文化在构建和谐社会中的现实指导意义

《乐记》是我国古代一部全面系统地论述＂乐＂与＂礼＂的专论。《乐记》中的礼乐文化涉及个体、群体、社会等诸多层面,其核心是＂报情章德、别宜敦和＂。在新的历史时期,赋予礼乐文化以新的时代精神,可以增强建设社会主义和谐文化的民族自信心,增加建设社会主义和谐文化的内在原动力。     

Discount pricing for a family of items: The supplier's optimal decisions

Consider a family of SKUs for which the supplier will offer a quantity discount, according to the aggregate purchases of the product group. Management of those items is based on the modified periodic policy. From the supplier's point of view, what are the optimal parameters (breakpoint and discount percentage)? For deterministic demand, we discuss the cases in which demand is both constant and price-sensitive. First as a noncooperative Stackelberg game, and then when the two parties make the discount and replenishment decisions jointly, we illustrate the impact of price-sensitivity and joint decision making on the supplier's discount policy.     

Growth, Technology, and the Demand for Scientists and Engineers

This study decomposes changes in science and engineering employment into their growth and technological change components, using an input-output approach. The analysis is based on highly disaggregated industy-occupation employment data and reveals that approximately 30 per cent of the change in total science and engineering employment can be attributed to technological change. This contrasts with the 54 per cent figure found in earlier research. The difference in these findings is due to the highly aggregated data employed in the earlier research.     

Technologists talk: making the links between design, problem-solving and experiences with hard materials

Design and problem-solving is a key learning focus in technology education and remains a distinguishing factor that separates it from other subject areas. This research investigated how two expert designers considered experiences with hard materials contributed to their learning design and problem-solving with these materials. The research project used a qualitative approach and conducted semi-structured interviews with two mechanical engineers. They identified their experiences under three key headings that provided them with much of the essential knowledge and understanding they employ today to design and problem-solve with hard materials. These included experience of seeing outcomes that provided feedback on their designs, experiences that informed about materials and material selection and accessing others’ experiences from communities of practice.     

A classification of business-to-business buying decisions: risk importance and probability as a framework for e-business benefits

Business-to-business (B2B) markets have been considered an attractive e-business venue for the realization of cost reduction and exchange creation utilities. However, as marketers have long argued, there are different types of buying situations, and the benefits sought in each may vary substantially. The present work builds on the thinking of previous industrial buying typologies by integrating perceived risk concepts into the business buying decision. Specifically, we develop a classification grid of industrial buying situations and then explicitly link likely e-business benefits to the various situations. The proposed framework holds implications for management and research related to supply chain relationships.     

Corporate spinoffs and analysts' coverage decisions: The implications for diversified firms

Research summary: This paper investigates how spinoffs improve the quality of analysts' research about diversified firms, theorizing that these deals may induce analysts to revisit their earlier coverage decisions. The gains resulting from these shifts are expected to be more pronounced when a firm undertakes a legacy (rather than a non‐legacy) spinoff, which removes the business that may be constraining analysts' coverage decisions in the first place. Consistent with this argument, firms that undertake legacy spinoffs experience greater improvements in the composition and quality of their analyst coverage than their non‐legacy counterparts, and in their overall forecast accuracy and stock market performance. Taken together, these findings shed light on the relationships among the scope decisions, analyst coverage, and valuations of diversified firms. Managerial summary: Existing research has established that when companies undertake spinoffs, analysts produce more accurate forecasts about the divesting firms than they did prior to those deals, and the stock market performance of those firms also improves relative to pre‐spinoff levels. This paper explores the effects of legacy spinoffs (the spinoff of a firm's original or “legacy” business) for forecast accuracy and stock market performance. Firms that undertake legacy spinoffs are found to enjoy greater improvements in forecast accuracy and stock market performance than their non‐legacy counterparts. These findings are driven by the fact that legacy spinoffs induce analysts to revisit their existing coverage decisions to a greater extent than non‐legacy spinoffs, contributing significantly to the economic benefits of these deals for shareholders. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The value of formal planning for strategic decisions: Reply

In Armstrong (1982a), I examined alternative explanations to the empirical findings that supported the use of formal planning. In considering the possibility that researcher bias might lead to such results, I used Terpstra's (1981) evaluation scheme. Based on this test, poor methodology did not seem responsible for the conclusions on the value of formal planning.     

Stocking decisions for repairable spare parts pooling in a multi-hub system

This paper presents an analytical model for determining spare parts stocking levels in a single-item, multi-hub, multi-company, repairable inventory system in which complete pooling of stock is permitted among the hubs and companies. The objective is to minimize the total system cost which consists of inventory holding cost, downtime cost and transshipment cost. We develop an approximation method to compute the logistical system performance measures needed for calculating the cost function. To find the optimal stocking levels, a two-stage solution is proposed. In the first stage, the demands at all hubs are aggregated and treated as if occurring at a single location. The optimal number of total spare parts is determined by minimizing the sum of inventory holding cost and downtime cost. In the second stage, a heuristic procedure is developed to find the optimal allocation of the total spare parts to minimize the total transshipment cost.     

Toward a better comprehension of Lean metrics for research and product development management

This paper presents a compilation and empirical survey‐based evaluation of the metrics most commonly used by program managers during product development management. This work is part of a bigger project of Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Project Management Institute (PMI) and International Council on Systems Engineering (INCOSE). Three methodological procedures were applied: systematic literature review, focus‐group discussions, and survey. The survey results indicate the metrics considered to be the most and least useful for managing lean engineering programs, and reveals a shift of interest towards qualitative metrics, especially the ones that address the achievement of stakeholder values, and the absence of useful metrics regarding the lean principles People and Pull.     

Patent-based inventor profiles as a basis for human resource decisions in research and development

Profiles of inventors' technological competence are a valuable source of information for decision-making in research and development (R&D) management, e.g. concerning inventor assessment, human resource development and R&D team-building. In the following exposition, a new method of inventor profiling will be put forward, which is based in particular on semantic patent analysis and multidimensional scaling. First, in the course of semantic patent analysis, specialized software, equipped with a natural language processor, reads the patent text transferring the contents into a subject–action–object–format (SAO). The extracted SAO structures are then used to create similarity matrices for patents or patent sets, respectively, according to a specific similarity value. Subsequently, an inventor competence map can be produced by means of multidimensional scaling.
The benefits of this method for R&D-related issues in human resource management will be illustrated by the example of a German mechanical engineering company. Two distinct types of profiles were generated and tested: (i) the profile of a single key inventor and (ii) a profile of key inventor sets. The single key inventor profile gives information on the range of competence, i.e. the homogeneity or heterogeneity of a certain inventor's competences, providing far more detailed insights than resorting to bibliographic data like international patent classification (IPC) classes or citations, whereas the latter kind of profile establishes the position of a certain key inventor in relation to others, helping to highlight specific groups of inventors and their domains. These results are clearly apt to support human resource management.     

The value of formal planning for strategic decisions: A comment

In an earlier paper in the SMJ, Armstrong (1982) conducted a review of the empirical evidence relating to the question of whether formal planning for strategic decision-making pays off, or more concisely whether strategic planning pays. Armstrong found that the evidence was equivocal. He also found that the methodological purity of a number of the 12 studies, which he claimed to constitute the totality of the evidence, was in doubt. For that reason he assessed the rigour of the studies relative to a framework previously proposed by Terpstra (1981). Using this framework he found that the studies rated poorly.     

Financial reporting quality and investment decisions for family firms

This study investigates the association between investment decisions and financial reporting quality in the context of family firms versus non-family firms. Building on the classic agency theory and the behavioral agency theory, we argue that financial reporting quality may play a different role on investment decisions for family and non-family firms. We address our research question by using a sample of listed firms in Taiwan from 1996 to 2011. Consistent with the behavioral agency theory, our findings suggest that family firms are more likely to under-invest than non-family firms in order to protect their socioemotional wealth, and financial reporting quality is more negatively associated with family firms’ under-investment behavior. The existence of internal financing channels attenuates this negative association. However, this study does not find a significant role on such association when a family member serves as the chief executive officer. These results are robust after controlling for the potential endogeneity issue of financial reporting quality, alternate measures of inefficient investment as well as internal financing channels, family firm subsample, and different industry groups. This study contributes to the literature on the relation between financial reporting quality and investment decisions by highlighting the unique characteristics of family firms.     

Real-time big data processing for instantaneous marketing decisions: A problematization approach

The collection of big data from different sources such as the internet of things, social media and search engines has created significant opportunities for business-to-business (B2B) industrial marketing organizations to take an analytical view in developing programmatic marketing approaches for online display advertising. Cleansing, processing and analyzing of such large datasets create challenges for marketing organizations — particularly for real-time decision making and comparative implications. Importantly, there is limited research for such interplays. By utilizing a problematization approach, this paper contributes through the exploration of links between big data, programmatic marketing and real-time processing and relevant decision making for B2B industrial marketing organizations that depend on big data-driven marketing or big data-savvy managers. This exploration subsequently encompasses appropriate big data sources and effective batch and real-time processing linked with structured and unstructured datasets that influence relative processing techniques. Consequently, along with directions for future research, the paper develops interdisciplinary dialogues that overlay computer-engineering frameworks such as Apache Storm and Hadoop within B2B marketing viewpoints and their implications for contemporary marketing practices.