Recall and recognition effects of brand name imagery

The strategic marketing decision regarding the selection of a brand name has long been an area neglected by academic researchers. This study attempts to apply psychological theory to this important strategic decision area. Specifically, the applicability of a dual-coding theory of memory to brand name recall/recognition is tested in an experimental setting. Results indicate, on average, a significant one hour and two day recall/recognition advantage of high imagery over low imagery brand names across a variety of product categories.     

Earnings on the Information Technology Roller Coaster: Insight from Matched Employer-Employee Data

This article uses matched employer-employee data for the State of Georgia to examine workers' earnings experience through the information technology (IT) sector's employment boom of the mid-1990s and bust in the early 2000s. The results show that even after controlling for pre-boom individual characteristics, transitioning out of the IT sector to a non-IT industry generally resulted in a large wage penalty. However, IT service workers who transitioned to a non-IT industry still fared better than workers who took a non-IT employment path. For IT manufacturing workers, there is no benefit to having been touched by technology, likely because of the nontransferability of manufacturing experience to other industries.     

Information processing and innovative choice

In this paper we examine how the information processing of subjects who make an innovative choice (innovators) differs from that of subjects who make a noninnovative choice (noninnovators). The task involves selection of an alternative within a range of prerated product category innovativeness. We propose that subjects who seek 1) impersonal/uncontrollable sources, 2) higher levels of information, 3) more detailed (versus summary) data, and 4) noncomparative (versus comparative) data are more likely to make innovative choices. The research method is a computerized process tracing experiment utilizing Search Monitor (Brucks 1988).The authors wish to express their gratitude to Merrie Brucks for the use of and help with Search Monitor and to Eric Johnson, Dave Schmittlein, and Mita Sujan for helpful comments on an earlier version of this paper.     

Hospitals and material management in the coming decade

The 1990s will be a decade of increasing dramatic and traumatic change for hospitals. Reimbursement, technology, and consumers, either alone or in concert, will be the forces that will shape hospitals in the future. At the end of the 1990s we will have hospitals that offer technology to the critically ill, outpatient surgical services, and comforting care for those in the late years of life. Material management will be important to hospitals because expense control will be as important as ever. However, I believe the role of a material manager will diminish as the services provided change and as the role is folded into the responsibilities of those who manage one of the three critical business areas hospitals will be in. This new hybrid of today's manager will still apply all of the concepts to the distribution of supplies in a hospital as today's material managers do but will use them as only a part of their overall management responsibility.     

Optimal investment and pricing in the presence of defaults

We consider the optimal investment problem with random endowment in the presence of defaults. For an investor with constant absolute risk aversion, we identify the certainty equivalent, and compute prices for defaultable bonds and dynamic protection against default. This latter price is interpreted as the premium for a contingent credit default swap, and connects our work with earlier articles, where the investor is protected upon default. We consider a multiple risky asset model with a single default time, at which point each of the assets may jump in price. Investment opportunities are driven by a diffusion X taking values in an arbitrary region . We allow for stochastic volatility, correlation, and recovery; unbounded random endowments; and postdefault trading. We identify the certainty equivalent with a semilinear parabolic partial differential equation with quadratic growth in both function and gradient. Under minimal integrability assumptions, we show that the certainty equivalent is a classical solution. Numerical examples highlight the relationship between the factor process, market dynamics, utility‐based prices, and default insurance premium. In particular, we show that the holder of a defaultable bond has a strong incentive to short the underlying stock, even for very low default intensities.     

A Five-Year Review, Update, and Assessment of Ethics and Governance in Strategic Management Journal

Although business ethics has a long history as a core theme within the realm of strategic management it has not received considerable attention in top strategy journals until recently. In this paper, we assess the state of business ethics research published over a 5-year period (2006–2010) in Strategic Management Journal to ascertain whether there has been an increase in business ethics research published in the top strategy outlet. The results of our content analysis reveal that ethics research in SMJ is indeed on the rise yet this research stream is still underrepresented with only 5.8 % of all articles published over the five-year period having an ethics theme. Moreover, the link between Corporate Social Performance and Financial Performance was identified as the top theme during the review period.     

PRICING FOR LARGE POSITIONS IN CONTINGENT CLAIMS

Approximations to utility indifference prices are provided for a contingent claim in the large position size limit. Results are valid for general utility functions on the real line and semi‐martingale models. It is shown that as the position size approaches infinity, the utility function's decay rate for large negative wealths is the primary driver of prices. For utilities with exponential decay, one may price like an exponential investor. For utilities with a power decay, one may price like a power investor after a suitable adjustment to the rate at which the position size becomes large. In a sizable class of diffusion models, limiting indifference prices are explicitly computed for an exponential investor. Furthermore, the large claim limit arises endogenously as the hedging error for the claim vanishes.     

The Dutch East-India Company and accounting for social capital at the dawn of modern capitalism 1602–1623

Capitalism’s profound effect on society has encouraged economic and accounting historians to hypothesise about the importance of double entry bookkeeping to its development. According to Sombart the continual reinvestment of the profits earned depended on the existence of a capitalist form of double-entry bookkeeping that would allow investors and managers to measure the return on investments as a means of making rational business decisions. More recently, with particular reference to the English East-India Company Bryer has argued that the adoption of the capitalist form of double-entry bookkeeping was essential to resolving the social conflict between investing capitalist classes that arose with the rise of industrial capitalism in England in the late 17th and 18th centuries by providing the means to calculate the rate of return on socialised capital. This paper widens the historical context of these debates to The Netherlands in the early 17th century by examining accounting practices of the Dutch East-India Company, the epitome of modern capitalism in motives, organization and funding. It establishes that, although the 17th century Dutch were pre-eminent in Europe in their knowledge of the capitalist form of double-entry bookkeeping, at no time during the period covered by the first charter (1602–1623) of the Dutch East-India Company, or thereafter, did the domestic operations of the Company use this form of bookkeeping across all chambers. This meant that the investors did not have the necessary information that would have allowed them to calculate the return on their investments. Indeed, the Company’s investors neither expected nor demanded information to calculate the return on their investments and, hence, double-entry bookkeeping was not a necessary condition for Dutch capitalism in the manner suggested by Sombart, Weber and Bryer. Instead, the form which capitalism developed in The Netherlands recognised the social and economic impact of its unique geography which produced a society characterised by a monetary economy, a long tradition of joint ownership, and a free market for assets and capital rights.     

The service sector of Cuba: An analysis and critique

The Cuban economy has experienced a significant increase in foreign direct investment over the past decade due to the end of the Soviet Union and the establishment of more liberal trade policies. Although the U.S. embargo of trade with Cuba still exists, there has been movement lately that suggests the end of the four‐decades‐old policy. The purpose of this article is to analyze the current Cuban business environment and to identify potential entrepreneurial opportunities in the service sector. Major trade partners are also reviewed and managerial implications discussed. © 2006 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.