Alleviating job stress to improve service employee work affect: the influence of rewarding

Firms strive to identify interventions that promote customer contact employee (CCE) well-being by mitigating job stress to encourage better service experiences for customers. Drawing on equity theory, this research examines the influences of alternative rewarding approaches on CCE job stress and work-related attitudes, by assessing the effects of intrinsic (social recognition) and extrinsic (monetary) rewarding on CCE job stress, commitment to the organization, and customer orientation. Results of a survey of 220 CCEs from multiple service organizations indicate that social recognition reduces CCE job stress but that, contrary to expectations, monetary rewarding increases it. Moreover, satisfaction with pay has a greater influence on CCE customer orientation than social recognition.     

OVERVALUED: SWEDISH MONETARY POLICY IN THE 1930s

The article discusses Sweden's monetary policy in the 1930s, which has been hailed as the first and only example of successful price‐level targeting. Our contribution is twofold. First, we argue that the crucial measure that immediately ended deflationary expectations and enabled a swift recovery was a strong and involuntary devaluation of the currency, not the adoption of a new monetary policy framework. Second, starting from the recent literature on monetary policy at the zero‐lower bound, we conclude that Sweden's exchange rate policy is more relevant for the current discussion than its tentative experience with price‐level targeting.     

Program trading and intraday volatility

Program trading and intraday changes in the S&P 500 Indexare correlated. Futures prices and, to a lesser extent, cashprices lead program trades. Index arbitrage trades are followedby an immediate change in the cash index, which ultimately reversesslightly. No reversal follows nonarbitrage trades. The cumulativeindex changes associated with buy-and-sell trades and with arbitrageand nonarbitrage trades all are similar. Price decompositionssuggest that the results are not due to microstructure effects.Program trades in this 1989-1990 sample do not seem to havecreated major short-term liquidity problems. The results arestable within the sample.     

Space–time economies under free mobility:: Competitive Equilibria and efficiency

In this paper, a space–time sequence economy with money, storage and transaction /transportation costs of mobile commodities will be considered. Conditions on technologies and households′ characteristics will be derived to establish the existence of competitive equilibria under locational choice. The notion of Pareto efficiency under costly trading will be discussed and the question of (in-)efficiency of equilibria examined using a separation theorem. The model extends earlier work of the author [Karmann (1981), Karmann (1982)] and others [see Schweizer et al. (1976), Castello-Ruiz (1978)] to include time and extends also the model in Kurz (1974) to include space.     

R&D management through network mapping: using the Internet to identify strategic network actors in cooperative research networks

Most R&D management techniques to date have emphasized the immediate organizational context or the internal structure and process of the R&D project. Recently however attempts have been made at situating R&D management in a wider context of inter‐organizational R&D activities. This paper presents the technique of R&D network mapping as a means of providing strategic intelligence to the R&D manager. The paper backgrounds this technique with a discussion of the general issue and significance of R&D networks. A methodology for R&D network mapping is then exemplified by outlining how a network database of cooperating projects and institutes in the telecom research sector was built by utilizing the World Wide Web. Finally a number of suggestions are made as to how and when network mapping should be applied in strategic R&D management.     

New developments in east-west economic relations

The past four years have witnessed a marked increase in the economic activity between East and West. The volume of foreign trade rose strongly; but as Eastern exports showed only slight increases while their imports from the West went up by leaps and bounds, the deficits of the Comecon countries became ever greater — an imbalance which has given rise to a number of problems.