Postservice Recovery Customer Satisfaction in Indian Retail Banking: Scale Development and Validation

The construct of postservice customer satisfaction with respect to Indian retail banking has been studied. Furthermore, the development and validation of the postservice recovery customer satisfaction scale in Indian retail banking is detailed. The scale development process was carried out over three stages (item generation, scale purification, scale validation) and comprised of conducting depth interviews and focus groups for item generation and three separate phases of data collection, involving a total of 851 individual respondents. The data provide evidence for face, content, discriminant and convergent validity, dimensionality, reliability, and generalizability of the customer satisfaction scale in Indian retail banking.     

Strengthening Stakeholder–Company Relationships Through Mutually Beneficial Corporate Social Responsibility Initiatives

Corporate social responsibility (CSR) continues to gain attention atop the corporate agenda and is by now an important component of the dialogue between companies and their stakeholders. Nevertheless, there is still little guidance as to how companies can implement CSR activity in order to maximize returns to CSR investment. Theorists have identified many company-favoring outcomes of CSR; yet there is a dearth of research on the psychological mechanisms that drive stakeholder responses to CSR activity. Borrowing from the literatures on means-end chains and relationship marketing, we propose a conceptual model that explains how CSR provides individual stakeholders with numerous benefits (functional, psychosocial, and values) and how the type and extent to which a stakeholder derives these benefits from CSR initiatives influences the quality of the relationship between the stakeholder and the company. The paper discusses the implications of these␣insights and highlights a number of areas for future research.     

Technology transfer, licensing and the speed of endogenous technological change

As licensing contracts usually require the licensee firm to purchase tied inputs from the seller of the technology, the licensee firm has an incentive to embark on an R&D program for development of substitutes for the tied inputs. This paper characterizes the licensee firm's optimal speed of R&D and the optimal expected date of switch-over to the substitute inputs in an infinite-horizon model under uncertainty about the timing of success of the R&D program. The effects of different government subsidies or taxes, changes in input prices and other parameters on the optimal speed of R&D and on the expected date of switchover to the substitute are also investigated. It is also shown that strategic behavior by the seller of the technology may delay the development of the substitute by the licensee firm.     

Specification and Testing the Profit-Concentration Relationship in Australian Manufacturing

Research in the mainstream of industrial organization has tested the relationship between profit rates (an index of performance) and concentration (an index of structure) including other variables (e.g., capital intensity, advertising intensity, growth, measures for barriers to entry, import and export intensity). Specification of this relationship is often largely ad hoc and its testing is subject to a number of statistical criticisms. Major criticisms that require attention are: i) omission of the relevant explanatory variables, ii) simultaneous causality among variables, and iii) measurement error in the variables. This paper derives a profit-concentration relationship from a well known oligopoly model. Empirical analysis is carried out against a sample of Australian manufacturing industries for 1984–85. The resulting estimates suggest the importance of dealing with each of the specification and testing issues in explaining the profit-concentration relationship.     

Bond yields compared to amortizing yields

A large amount of theoretical research has been conducted concerning the impact of debt instrument features such as callability, tax treatment, and default risk upon valuation and yield. Almost all this research has been performed on bond-like instruments; this is unfortunate since a large proportion of debt instruments is amortizing. This research develops a model for the spread between bonds and amortizing instruments with otherwise identical features. The shape of the term structure is crucial. Furthermore, the behavior of the spread is systematically related to the level of interest rates, tax rates, degree of default risk, and maturity where the maturity relation changes sign at intermediate maturities.     

本土保卫战的六大秘笈

根据《经济学人智库》预测，到2010年，新兴市场将占到全球GDP的45％，以及GDP增长的60％。中国、印度、东盟等市场都变得愈发重要，但这并不意味着这些市场将自然地归属本土企业，他们必须面对跨国公司来势汹汹的挑战。跨国公司无论在实力还是经验上，通常都更胜本土企业一筹，但也并不总是大获成功。Yahoo!和eBay在中国市场上就因百度与淘宝的抵抗而止步。许多西方汽车制造商在印度试图建立业务，也步履艰难。NEC和松下退出中国的手机市场。日本零售商八佰伴放弃了其在中国的运营。     

International acquisitions and emerging market firms' performance—a structural contingency perspective

Entry modes have impact on firms' performance in international markets. Using an organizational structural contingency perspective, we assert that firms with mechanistic structure can enhance their performance in international markets if they choose acquisitions as an entry mode. Mechanistic structure limits organizations' learning capability, which can be managed through acquisitions but not through other entry modes such as joint ventures. For managing limitations associated with the poor knowledge absorption capability of mechanistically structured organizations, firms should not follow the standard integration procedures associated with acquisitions aiming to achieve economies of scale or scope. Rather, they should provide corporate parenting advantage to the newly acquired unit by (a) granting complete autonomy and (b) contributing required resources for future growth, thus treating the acquired business as a strategic business unit. Since mechanistic structures are more common in emerging markets, we explain our perspective using illustrative caselets from these markets.     

Determinants of Innovation

The study examines how firm size, market structure, profitability and growth influence innovative activity in small to medium sized Australian manufacturing businesses, using the recently released Confidentialised Unit Record File drawn from the Business Longitudinal Survey of the Australian Bureau of Statistics. Regression analysis is conducted to determine the factors that effect subsequent innovative activity for the full sample of businesses, as well as for sub-samples of firms from high and low-technological opportunity industries. Most variables, including size, R&D intensity, market structure and trade shares are found to be conducive to further innovative activity for the full sample and for high-tech firms. For low-tech industries, fewer variables are significant.