Die Wirkung der Positionierung eines Zulieferunternehmens auf das Vertrauen des Kunden

Zusammenfassung Aus bisherigen Studien lassen sich kaum Handlungsempfehlungen ableiten, welche Positionierung eines Zulieferunternehmens sich besonders vorteilhaft auf das Vertrauen eines Kunden auswirkt. Im vorliegenden Beitrag werden die Wirkungen von vier Positionierungsstrategien, die Zulieferunternehmen zur Verfügung stehen, auf das Vertrauen ihrer Abnehmer aus der Automobilindustrie untersucht. Diese Strategien bestehen in der Anpassung an Kundenprozesse, in Serviceorientierung, in Flexibilit?t und in der Verwendung von Kompetenzsignalen gegenüber dem Markt. Wir zeigen, dass die Anpassung an Kundenprozesse auf Grund der hohen Spezifit?t der damit verbundenen Investitionen die st?rkste positive Wirkung auf das Vertrauen des Kunden aufweist und dass Kompetenzsignale gegenüber dem Markt kein geeignetes Instrument zur F?rderung des Kundenvertrauens sind, wenn das Zulieferunternehmen für den Abnehmer eine hohe Bedeutung besitzt.

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The effects of a supplier’s positioning strategy on buyers’ trust

Summary Many studies have identified measures that are able to enhance partners’ trust in business-to-business relationships. However, it is not known which measures are more effective than others or under which conditions certain measures might be helpful or not. In the present study the effects of four possible positioning strategies on buyer’s trust are examined. The positioning strategies considered here are the supplier’s adaptations regarding its customer’s processes, its service orientation, its flexibility, and market-signals stressing the supplier’s competence. We found that, due to the high specificity of the required investments, adaptations of the supplier’s processes are the strongest instrument to enhance buyers’ trust relative to the other three strategies. We could also show that investments in market signals stressing the supplier’s competence are not effective if the supplier is of high importance to the customer.

     

Socially Responsible Investing and Climate Change: Contradictions and Challenges

This article explores the contradiction between the articulated investment policies, screening criteria or ethical charters of socially responsible investment funds and their actions demonstrated by their portfolio selection practice. The paper provides a background to socially responsible investment and Australia's contribution to greenhouse gas emissions. A discussion of renewable energy options lays the foundation for our main assertion: that this set of possible alternatives provides some new and more environmentally robust options that will better complement the underlying philosophy of funds in the socially responsible investment sector.     

UNIT MANAGEMENT BUYOUTS, STOCKHOLDER WEALTH, AND SELLING FIRMS' CHARACTERISTICS

Previous research on unit management buyouts, UMBs, has shown that selling firms benefit from the selloff transaction. The current research demonstrates that when the selling firm has either poor liquidity or poor earnings, selling firm shareholders do not benefit as much. We hypothesize that the unit managers have knowledge about the selling firm's difficulties so they do not pay as large a premium for the assets. Since the unit managers technically are employed by the selling firm shareholders, their bargaining to achieve a better price is an agency cost. Finally, selloff frequency does not affect seller abnormal returns.     

Common Stock Returns in Corporate Takeover Bids: The Case of Brokerage House Acquisitions

This paper examines the common stock returns of three groups of bidders that purchased brokerage houses. Only in the cases of horizontal mergers, one brokerage house purchasing another, are there abnormal returns associated with the purchase. Neither bank holding company bidders nor non-financial bidders gain significantly when purchasing a brokerage house. Bank holding company bidders face considerable regulatory delays, and these economic disturbances may eliminate their gains. Bank holding company expansion into these non-bank activities does not appear, at the time of announcement, to either hurt or benefit them; hence, this expansion does not appear to further the loss exposure of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation.     

小额贷款能扫多少“钱荒”

总是有那么多诱人的概念，小额信贷的创始人尤努斯把他的发明上升到“让乞丐都能赚钱”的功能。如果说真是如此，那世界上还有穷人吗？可是，凡是存在必然有他的道理，小额信贷存在着，而且还在扩张着。按照尤努斯的说法，在小额贷款的帮助下，中小企业解决个把融资问题应该不成问题，如果乞丐都能靠此转变，那么中小企业总不会连乞丐都不如，小额信贷真的能够救赎那些缺钱缺得心慌的企业吗？     

Voting Rights and Market Reaction to Dual Class Common Stock Issues

This paper examines the return of the original class of common stock around the announcement of the creation of a second class of stock. As in previous studies, this one finds a generally ambiguous market reaction on the first public announcement. However, this paper offers new evidence that both the voting rights and the compensation for loss of voting rights are important determinants of the market's reaction. Specifically, it demonstrates that a second class stock issue that contains no compensation for the lost voting rights results in negative returns. When the original stockholders are compensated for lost voting rights, they experience positive abnormal returns.     

Knowledge Content and Worker Participation in Environmental Management at NUMMI

ABSTRACT This paper looks at, within the context of lean production, how and in what ways employees participate in environmental improvements. The paper uses data from an automobile plant well known for its participative work structures, New United Motor Manufacturing (NUMMI), to look more closely at the dynamics of worker participation in environmental management (i.e. management of pollution and waste). Findings show that while workers possess important contextual knowledge, the importance of process, intra‐organizational and external knowledge make the role of specialist staff (both internal and external to the environmental function) critically important for environmental improvements. Additionally, environmental improvements often required a combination of more than one knowledge type. The paper discusses how the culture and management structure at NUMMI and other lean plants encourage this combination. Implications for environmental management, lean production, and future research on worker participation are discussed.     

Environmental Innovations in Small and Medium Sized Enterprises

Supporting and accelerating the adoption and diffusion of environmental innovations amongst small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs) is a major challenge to environmental policy makers. Research suggests that whilst SMEs possess high flexibility, their innovative capacity may be limited to incremental changes within their existing technology system and network. Twenty case studies examining the innovation adoption process in SMEs in four sectors and in five countries within the ENVIS project (commissioned by the EU) revealed great variety in factors driving this process. Findings indicate that this variation can be attributed to the character of the environmental innovation, the specific business opportunity, the regulatory setting and pressure experienced by the sector. Based on these findings an analytical framework is suggested, whereby the environmental innovative capability of SMEs is conceived as the result of an interplay between the competencies, the network relations and the strategic orientation of the company (the 'dynamic triangle'). This indicates that policy to support SME's adoption of environmental innovations has to take an integrated form, i.e. addressing and developing competence, networks and strategic orientation of SMEs simultaneously whilst remaining systemic and context sensitive.     

Policy options for afforestation in Flanders

This paper analyses current and alternative afforestation policy instruments in Flanders. First we select forest sites that maximize net social benefits given a constraint on the total area of new forests and then we select policy instruments that yield this optimal combination of sites. For each policy option, we calculate the associated costs for landowners and government as well as net social benefits for society. Our empirical illustration shows that the welfare gain is considerable if the afforestation subsidy is conditioned on an objective criterion rather than a case-by-case approach. Our results also show that it is worthwhile to consider alternative policy instruments, such as auctions, not previously used in Belgian legislation.     

Distribution Dynamics and Cross‐Country Convergence: A New Approach

Distribution dynamics is a method for studying the evolution in time of an entire cross‐section distribution and has been initially employed to assess cross‐country convergence of per capita incomes. It has subsequently seen a widespread application in many different economic areas. When describing the law of motion of the distribution as a Markovian stochastic process, working in a discrete state‐space set up has several advantages, but the arbitrary discretisation of a continuous state‐space process has the undesired effect of removing the Markov property. This paper outlines a rigorous method for discretising a continuous state‐space Markov chain. The method is then applied to the distribution of per capita income across countries to reassess the (non‐) convergence phenomenon. It is found that the long run polarisation of per capita incomes across countries emerges even more dramatically than in previous studies.