Communicative skills that support value creation: A study of B2B interactions between customers and customer service representatives

Although interaction has been acknowledged as central in value creation there is still a lack of empirical studies on how value creation is accomplished in practice, and in particular how communicative skills support customers' value creation. The purpose of this paper is therefore to generate a deeper understanding of how customer service representatives' communicative skills in conversations with customers support customers' value creation. We argue that value creating processes correspond to customers' roles as “feelers”, “thinkers” and “doers”. Accordingly, value creation involves three interdependent elements, an emotional, a cognitive and a behavioral. Based on a qualitative research design, drawing on an empirical study of 80 telephone conversations between customers and customer service representatives in a business-to-business context, the paper demonstrates three communicative skills that are essential in supporting customers' value creation: attentiveness, perceptiveness and responsiveness. The findings show how employees, by means of these communicative skills support customers' value creation. Attentiveness supports cognitive elements of the customers' value creating processes, whereas perceptiveness supports value creation in terms of cognitive, behavioral and emotional aspects. Finally, responsiveness supports the customer's cognitive as well as behavioral value creation.     

The effect of uncertainty on pollution abatement investments: Measuring hurdle rates for Swedish industry

We estimate hurdle rates for firms’ investments in pollution abatement technology, using ex post data. The method is based on a structural option value model where the future price of polluting fuel is the major source of uncertainty facing the firm. The empirical procedure is illustrated using a panel of firms from the Swedish pulp and paper industry, and the energy and heating sector, and their sulfur dioxide emissions over the period 2000–2003. The results indicate that hurdle rates of investment vary from 2.7 to 3.1 in the pulp and paper industry and from 3.4 to 3.6 in the energy and heating sector depending on econometric specification.     

Swedish CO<Subscript>2</Subscript> Emissions 1993–2006: An Application of Decomposition Analysis and Some Methodological Insights

This study undertakes a decomposition analysis to identify the drivers of carbon dioxide emissions change in the Swedish business and industry sectors 1993–2006. On aggregate, energy intensity decreased, but this does not seem to have been very important for reducing emissions. Rather, fuel substitution seems to have been more important, which is in line with findings from the decomposition literature on Sweden. However, at the sectoral level, we find no clear pattern of the effect of fuel substitution and energy intensity on emissions. We also draw some methodological conclusions: decomposition analysis should be undertaken at the most disaggregate level possible; assessing decomposition results by summing results over several time periods leads to biased results; and decomposition analysis should not be based only on some initial and final years of a long time period. Furthermore, we address the problem of double counting energy flows in decomposition analysis of aggregate effects when the energy sector is included, and point out potential problems related to output measured in monetary terms.     

中国大陆社会保障支出水平与效率评价——基于DEA模型的实证分析

运用聚类分析和数据包络分析方法对中国大陆中的27个省份地区的社会保障支出水平与效率进行实证研究，结果表明：中国大陆社会保障支出水平相似的地区，社会保障支出效率呈现出了明显的差异性，一般情况下，社会保障支出效率高的地区多集中在经济水平较高的地区。因此，应运用经济手段，建立相应的激励机制，不断完善中国大陆多层次的社会保障制度体系。     

Health system reform in China: What role for private insurance?

The purpose of the present paper is to show that much of the literature on health economics and on the international experience with different forms of health system organization can be interpreted as supporting the idea that reliance on an unregulated market mechanism for organizing the production and financing of health services is likely to result in major problems both with respect to efficiency and equity. However, reliance on a centralized “command-and-control” model managed by government has also been shown to entail problems in practice. For this reason I argue that the best option at China's current state of development may be a compromise model in which competing private providers are given an important role, both for the production of health services and in the provision of health insurance, but in which the government intervenes (through regulation and direct provision) in such a way as to attain both a high degree of equity of access to health care, and to avoid the most significant forms of “market failure” that would arise in an unregulated private system.     

武汉东湖新技术开发区行政体制与职能问题研究

武汉东湖新技术开发区建立以来成效显著,但管委会也面临法律缺失、示范效应不突出、行政体制运作不畅、政企不分等问题。这是立法缺乏顶层设计、行政职能越位错位、社会中介组织不发达等造成的。因此,应加强开发区法治建设、转变政府职能、强化示范效应、培育社会中介组织、处理好与同级政府职能分工等。管委会应将下属国有企业交付国资委,自身做好市场监管和企业服务。     

Caring for her: the influence of presumed influence on female consumers’ attitudes towards advertising featuring gender-stereotyped portrayals

ABSTRACT

This study investigates how presumed influence on others affects women's evaluations of advertising featuring gender stereotypes. Previous research has largely overlooked the social context of the reactions to gender stereotypes. Addressing that gap, this study draws on the influence of presumed influence model to proposed that female consumers believe that other women are negatively affected by advertising that contains gender-stereotyped portrayals. This perception is hypothesized to influence ad and brand attitudes as consumers ‘punish’ the brand for hurting others. The results of two experimental studies featuring stereotyped and non-stereotyped advertising portrayals indicate that the hypothesis holds for two types of stereotype components (physical characteristics and role behaviour). This new theoretical perspective to the literature on gender stereotypes in advertising, one that helps to explain why many women dislike gender stereotypes in advertising even though those stereotypes often have limited impact on them personally.     

Profitable Advice: the Value of Information Provided by Canada's Inventor's Assistance Program

Inventors who are considering whether and how to commercialize their inventions. can often avail themselves to evaluations and advice provided by government supported programs initiated to encourage innovation. In Canada. such a service is provided by the Canadian Innovation Centre. through its Inventor's Assistance Program. In its twenty years of operations the IAP has evaluated 11,000 inventions. The fee charged for an invention evaluation was Cdn. $262 in 1995, and these fees covered about half the program's expenses. We compute the expected value of the information the IAP's evaluation provides under different assumptions and scenarios. Under plausible conditions, the value of the information to the inventor is found to be higher than both the fee and the social cost of the program. The implications of some inventors not following the advice given to them by the IAP are briefly explored.     

FDI,taxes and agglomeration economies in the EU15

This article provides an empirical analysis of the impact of tax differentials and agglomeration economies on Foreign Direct Investment (FDI). The article departs from most previous work on FDI and tax competition in a number of ways. First, it incorporates several measures of agglomeration in order to investigate whether agglomeration economies mitigate the downward spiral in tax rates. As the strength of agglomeration economies may vary with the degree of integration, we use a panel of bilateral FDI flows for a highly integrated region including countries with similar economic structure – the EU15 – from 1986 to 2004. Second, the empirical analysis explicitly deals with the problem of selection bias by using the Heckman sample selection approach. Also, by focusing on the EU15, we are able to provide additional information on the determinants of FDI between similar, higher-income countries. The empirical analysis provides some evidence of corporate marginal effective tax rates having an impact on FDI. This result, however, is sensitive to the inclusion of agglomeration economies. In particular, we find both Marshall types of technological externalities and overall concentration of economic activity to have an influence on FDI flows and, moreover, mitigating the negative impact of taxes.     

CALCULATING THE EXPECTATION AND VARIANCE OF THE PRESENT VALUE FOR A RANDOM PROFIT STREAM OF UNCERTAIN DURATION

We derive the mean and variance of the random discounted sum when Nis uncertain, as are the X_n's. This quantity arises in applications involving random cash-flows over an uncertain number of years. One such application is R&D projects, where both the magnitude and duration of cash-flows are uncertain at the time of investment decision. Previous models have assumed cash-flow duration to be certain. We relax this assumption. We then specialize these results to geometric, mixed-geometric and Poisson distributions of the cash-flow duration.