Developing measures for performance excellence: is the Baldrige criteria sufficient for performance excellence in higher education?

The implementation of the education criteria for performance excellence (ECPE)—the education version of the Baldrige criteria—is driven by the growing need for performance excellence in higher education. Ironically the criteria meant for performance excellence have no theoretical underpinning and are based on normative performance improvement requirements. The lack of content and internal validity is reflected in some critical weaknesses in the criteria. Based on a critical review, this paper highlights potential improvements in the areas of aligning processes with the organisational mission, operations focus, customer focus, workforce focus, and performance measurement. To help enhance the ECPE, the paper develops performance measures for systematic implementation of the criteria. This is discussed in terms of defining desired outcomes, developing key measures, identifying specific indicators to track performance, and choosing methods to assess performance. The discussions provide a basis for future revisions to the ECPE.     

Pioneering Versus Incremental Innovation: Review and Research Propositions

Marketing's role in supporting a company's efforts to develop pioneering and incremental products can be quite different. Abdul Ali examines published articles and offers a set of propositions to show how several factors influence the product development decision. He cites examples from the business world to illustrate these propositions. This article suggests that a firm should take into account several factors relating to its capabilities, along with various project and market characteristics, in order to decide what products it should develop.     

Fiscal dependence on trade taxes and economic development: additional results and a reconciliation of the empirical evidence

Using Brazilian data spanning the period 1910–75,new evidence is presented on the hypothesis that a country's fiscal dependence on trade taxes is inversely related to her level of economic development, at least once the latter passes a certain threshold. Unlike previous studies, this study uses methods which highlight the dynamic and temporal nature of the underlying relationships. The results indicate strong support for the hypothesis and also suggest that the conflicting time-serious evidence can be reconciled.     

Islamic tourism: an empirical examination of travel motivation and satisfaction in Malaysia

The objectives of this study are to test the relationship between tourism motivations and tourist satisfaction, and to test how ‘Religion’ moderates the relationship. The variable ‘Religion’ is represented by the availability of Islamic norms and practices relevant to tourism at the destination. The results of the partial least square indicate that tourism motivations are significantly and positively related to tourist satisfaction. The results also showed that Religion significantly moderates the relationship between pull motivation and tourist satisfaction. However, the moderating effect of Religion on the relationship between push motivation and tourist satisfaction was not supported.     

Bridging bargaining theory with the regulation of a natural monopoly

Review of Economic Design - In this paper, we integrate the bargaining theory with the problem of regulating a natural monopoly under symmetric information or asymmetric information with complete...     

Are good financial advisors really good? The performance of investment banks in the M&;A market

The study examines whether prestigious investment banks deliver quality gains to their clients in a sample of 6,379 US M&A deals. It finds that acquirers advised by tier-one advisors lost more than $42 billion, whereas those advised by tier-two advisors gained $42 billion, whereas those advised by tier-two advisors gained 13.5 billion at the merger announcement. The results were mainly driven by the large loss deals advised by tier-one advisors. The evidence indicates that investment banks might have different incentives when they advise on large deals vs. small deals. The results imply that market share based reputation league tables, could be misleading and therefore, the selection of investment banks should be based on their track record in generating gains to their clients. The findings were consistent with the superior deal hypothesis as tier-one target advisors outperformed tier-two advisors and the existence of a prestigious advisor on at least one side of an M&A transaction resulted in higher wealth gains to the combined entity. Target advisors were able to extract more wealth gains for their clients, which led to higher combined gains at the expense of the acquirer.     

Diffusion of environmental business practices: A network approach

The purpose of this research is to build a conceptual foundation that examines network effects on the diffusion of environmental business practices (EBP) among suppliers. This research extends a network perspective to adoption of an environmental business practice across a large network of suppliers. The context of EBP is used to better understand adoption of a complex business practice, with perceived costs that are often greater than the perceived benefit. Variation in the level of structural and relationship embeddedness affect network diffusion of environmental business practices differently. Increased levels of structural and relational embeddedness are proposed to be positively associated with diffusion of EBP. From a practical standpoint, firms that leverage embeddedness may facilitate higher diffusion and adoption of environmental business practices. This facilitation may lead network actors to engage in EBP, and leverage benefits that may stem from these practices. This research introduces the concept of embeddedness to the environmental supply chain literature. Practicing managers can use the findings in this research to better position themselves within a network to diffuse EBP. This research also helps managers understand how supply chain members that are weakly connected to the primary network are important for introducing new ideas and innovations.