Lobbying as a potent political marketing tool for firm performance: A closer look

This study endeavors to enhance political marketing literature about the impact of lobbying on firm performance. Our sample is composed of 140 U.S. firms and spans the years 2007–2014 to encompass the 2007–2009 recession and the subsequent recovery period. Our findings indicate that lobbying expenses positively contribute to firm performance. Also, government contracts in both ways, dollar amount and number of government contracts, act as mediators between lobbying expenses and firm performance. In addition, organizational slack moderates the relationship between lobbying expenses and government contracts. The managerial implications suggest that lobbying expenses can be leveraged as a potent tool for firm performance. Firms with larger lobbying efforts acquired both, higher dollar amounts and a greater number of government contracts.     

Transmission of information within transnational social networks: a field experiment

Several studies have shown a relationship between the stocks of migrants and country-level investment in the home country; however the mechanism through which this relationship operates is still unexplored. We use a field experiment in which participants who are recent immigrants send information about risky decisions to others in their social network in their home country. The results demonstrate how this information influences decisions in the home country. We find that the advice given by family members and decisions made by friends significantly affects an individual’s risky decision-making.     

Understanding the trend to mobile-only internet connections:A decomposition analysis

A growing portion of internet users rely solely on mobile devices such as smartphones for their online access. The percentage of “mobile-only” households increased from 9% in 2011 to 20% in 2015, more than doubling in only four years. As this shift continues, it leads to the question of what factors are driving the rise in mobile-only adoption. Using nationally representative data, this study uses logistic regressions and a decomposition technique to understand the trend. The decomposition reveals that a significant portion (65%) of the growth was due to an increase in the download speeds of mobile networks. An increased acceptance of mobile-only access by households aged 55 and older was also partly responsible. Understanding (and developing a response to) the trend towards mobile-only adoption will be important as organizations and governments continue to work to close the digital divide.     

Entrepreneurship and knowledge spillovers from the public sector

A compelling body of research has found that investments in knowledge from other firms and universities spill over to enhance the performance of entrepreneurial firms. This literature has shown that firm performance is positively related to investments in new knowledge by other firms and research universities. This paper addresses a gap in the literature by positing that public sector knowledge is also conducive to enhancing performance by knowledge intensive entrepreneurial (KIE) firms. Our findings suggest that the public sector provides a fertile source of knowledge for enhancing KIE firm performance.

     

Financial Instruments and Promotional Banking in the EU are Growing — But is this Justified?

Institutions and the European Investment Bank are at the forefront of EU investment policy. Their role is expanding and it is now a widely-held position that an improvement in the economy will not eliminate the need for their intervention. The proposals for the 2021–2027 MFF launch more financial instruments and present ‘InvestEU’ as a larger more powerful version of the European Fund for Strategic Investments (EFSI). However, promotional banking is often misunderstood and so is the actual size of promotional banking in Europe in which InvestEU will operate.     

Characterization of the Row Geometric Mean Ranking with a Group Consensus Axiom

An axiomatic approach is applied to the problem of extracting a ranking of the alternatives from a pairwise comparison ratio matrix. The ordering induced by row geometric mean method is proved to be uniquely determined by three independent axioms, anonymity (independence of the labelling of alternatives), responsiveness (a kind of monotonicity property) and aggregation invariance, which requires the preservation of group consensus, that is, the pairwise ranking between two alternatives should remain unchanged if unanimous individual preferences are combined by geometric mean.     

Fixed-Term Contracts and Labor Market Duality in France

The French labor market is segmented between permanent and temporary workers. The second category has difficulty in getting an open-ended contract. This paper aims at depicting workers on short-term contracts and shows the consequences on their professional career are negative and significant. A large part of the wage gap between permanent and temporary workers remains unexplained by observable characteristics. They receive less on-the-job training and their likelihood of obtaining a stable job is lower than 30% after 1 year and a half. They have also a higher probability of being the adjustment variable in case of an economic negative shock. These different findings show the importance of using public policies to encourage transitions from fixed-term to permanent employment and reducing labor-market duality.     

Plausible versus implausible tensile price claim: Selective accessibility model approach

Retailers frequently use exaggerated price discount advertisements with a tensile price claim (TPC; e.g., “Save up to 70%”) to attract consumers because they expect that once consumers enter a store, they will purchase low‐ or medium‐discounted products. Drawing on the selective accessibility model, this study investigated the way in which an implausibly high maximum level of savings stated in a TPC influences consumers’ expected price discount (EPD) and perceptions of actual price discounts across different types of TPCs (i.e., TPC stating a maximum level and TPC stating a range of savings). This study also investigated two situations in which consumers have previous knowledge of a product’s price discount versus when they have less or no knowledge of the discount. For both conditions, a single‐anchor TPC (i.e., “Save up to Y%”) that stated an implausible maximum level of savings led to a higher EPD and lower perceptions of the deal (i.e., perceived savings, price fairness, and perceived value) with respect to the actual price discount than did a TPC with a plausible maximum level of savings. In contrast, when the TPC stated two anchors (i.e., “Save X–Y%”) and consumers had knowledge of the price discount, their EPDs assimilated only toward the plausible anchor (X), and ignored the implausibly high maximum price discount (Y), resulting in a lower EPD and higher perceptions of the deal of the actual price discounts than a TPC that stated a plausibly high maximum level of savings. In contrast, when consumers had no knowledge of the price discount, their EPDs only adjusted toward the more plausible anchor (X), regardless of whether they perceived the maximum anchor as plausible or implausible. Thus, there was no difference in consumers’ perceptions of “Save X–Y%” between implausibly and plausibly high Y%.     

Social media affordances in entry‐level employees’ socialization: employee agency in the management of their professional impressions and vulnerability during early stages of socialization

This study examined how entry‐level employees interacted with social media during three stages of organizational socialization. They navigated between four different media affordances (persistence, editability, visibility, and association) while experiencing them as both enabling and constraining in different socialization stages. Qualitative interview data analysis revealed during anticipatory socialization, job applicants realized visibility and persistence in relation to institutional and individualized socialization. During encounter, new employees managed personal and professional life boundaries carefully against the association and visibility affordances. Although some participants used both public and enterprise social media for obtaining job‐related information and understanding coworkers and company culture, during metamorphosis, most interviewees adopted passive information seeking strategies and experienced a paradoxical tension between the enabling and constraining affordances of social media. Findings are discussed with regards to employees’ exertion of agency in managing their professional impressions and coping with high levels of uncertainty and vulnerability during early stages of socialization.     

A New Regulatory Paradigm for the Digital Sector in Europe

The new regulatory framework in the digital sector in Europe is likely to fall short of expectations. A fragmented digital market with insuffi cient incentives for investment is the probable outcome. European regulators should abandon their approach in favour of a new and more flexible set of ideas discussed in this paper.