Client loyalty and defection in the corporate legal industry

As the legal service industry matures and becomes saturated, more traditional forms of marketing may need to be replaced by the adoption of newer relationship concepts. This article reports on a research investigation among corporate clients of UK law firms. The findings reveal that satisfaction with the service is the key factor that influences corporate clients to stay loyal to a particular law firm. The quality of legal advice, trust and honesty were also found to be important factors that drive client loyalty. Conversely, poor quality, as an outcome of the client – legal firm interaction, is perceived to be a significant contributor of client defection. Overall, the findings emphasise the need for legal firms to focus on client retention for survival and profitability.     

Bringing Britain Together? The limitations of area-based regeneration policies in addressing deprivation

This paper is concerned with the extent to which the new tranche of area-based policy initiatives from New Labour can address deprivation. We argue that such policies are likely to meet the failures of previous initiatives as they continue to simplify the complex processes underlying regeneration: they arbitrarily draw boundaries around regeneration areas; they represent a continuation of place commodification; and, they continue to represent accountability structures which rest with statutory bodies rather than the community. Without reinventing the wheel, urban policy needs to revisit conventional wisdom relating to territorial development: namely, that local regeneration is determined by factors inside and outside particular localities.     

The Effect of Deadline Pressure on Pre‐Negotiation Positions: A Comparison of Auditors and Client Management

This study compares auditors' and chief financial officers' pre‐negotiation judgments and considers the potential differential impact the end of the audit (deadline pressure) has on each party. General negotiation literature suggests that individuals change their behaviors as deadline pressure increases (i.e., when there is less time in which to conduct a negotiation) in order to increase the probability of reaching an agreement. In an audit context, the end‐of‐engagement deadline is often based on regulatory filing deadlines (e.g., SEC filings for public companies), which are not determined by either negotiating party. The audit context is also unique in that there are asymmetric consequences for each party (the auditor and client management) for failing to reach an agreement and different negotiation tactics used by the two parties potentially leading to differing levels of concessions. We predict that auditors, who are in a stronger negotiation position, will generally concede less than client management when determining their pre‐negotiation position and will tend to use more contentious strategies. However, such contentious strategies require time. Thus, we expect, based on negotiation theory, that as deadline pressure increases, auditors' concessionary behavior will be more affected than that of client management. Consistent with expectations, results of our experiment suggest that CFOs concede more than auditors in general; however, auditors are more reactive to deadline pressure and increase concessions when faced with high deadline pressure, while CFOs do not. We also measure planned strategy use and find results to be consistent with theory: when deadline pressure is high, auditors are less likely to use contentious tactics, while CFOs' strategy choices are unaffected by deadline pressure. These results suggest that characteristics of the unique auditor–client negotiation environment, such as deadline pressures, have potentially differential effects on both parties due to the differing negotiation strategies employed by these parties.     

Estimating youth training wage differentials during and after training

We compare wages between school leavers who participate in government-fundedyouth training and those who do not. Using a subset of all schoolleavers in Lancashire between 1988 and 1991, we find that wagedifferentials are large and negative for all types of participantwhen training. Once training finishes, differentials are smallbut still negative. There is no evidence that participants havesteeper wage profiles. A ranking of lifetime wages suggeststhat the occupations chosen by participants may offer positivereturns compared to occupations with no training. The largestimpact comes at the firm level: training providers pay lowerwages to both ex-participants and non-participants.     

Organizing for peace operations

There have been two general approaches to organizing for peace operations: an ad hoc approach, in which entities independently intervene and operate on the basis of their unique expertise and interest; and a top?–?down approach, in which all entities are directed and controlled by a single authority. Using the UN experience in Afghanistan, we demonstrate how this view of the organizing problem is limited. Instead, we develop a typology that distinguishes among three systems for organizing peace operations-Command, Market and Community?–?on the basis of their differences on four analytic dimensions (agency, social attachment, social control and inter-organizational relations). Our analysis of the UN experience in Afghanistan demonstrates the utility of our framework for both theory and practice.     

An examination of IPO secondary market returns

IPO stock prices increased approximately 2.3% on the first day of secondary market trading over the period 1993 through 2003. While these aftermarket returns are accentuated during 1999 and 2000, they persist after the bubble burst and even increase as a percentage of total underpricing. We explore several non-mutually exclusive hypotheses to explain our findings including price support, laddering, retail sentiment, and information asymmetry. Our results are most consistent with the view that higher secondary market returns accrue to IPOs with more information asymmetries possibly due to price and aggregate demand uncertainty.     

Work costs and nonconvex preferences in the estimation of labor supply models

Works costs have not been adequately handled in labor supply estimation, likely due to their complexity. We show that, if work costs are not accounted for in the budget and time constraints in a structural labor supply model, they will be subsumed into the data generating preferences. Even if underlying preferences over consumption and leisure are convex, the presence of unobservable work costs can make these preferences appear nonconvex. However, we show that, under plausible conditions, policy relevant calculations, such as estimates of the effect of tax changes on labor supply and deadweight loss measures, are not affected by the fact that estimated preferences incorporate work costs.     

Protest Responses in Contingent Valuation

A significant number of respondents to contingent valuation surveys tend to either state a zero bid, or refuse to state a bid at all, for reasons associated with the process of valuation. These protest responses are routinely removed from contingent valuation samples because it is assumed that they are not indicative of respondents true values. The censoring of protest responses has led to the emergence of a definitional controversy. One view is that the definition of protest responses and the rules for censoring them are dependent on whether the practitioner conceives of the contingent valuation survey as a market or as a referendum. However, what is not acknowledged is the possibility that protest responses and their meaning may vary according to the type of good being valued, the elicitation format, and the interaction between these elements and external factors. This potential renders the development of unambiguous rules for censoring protest responses difficult. Moreover, when willingness to pay is viewed as a behavioural intention, it becomes important to determine what the responses actually mean. This approach does not assume an interpretative position a priori against which the responses should be judged, but seeks to inform an existing understanding which is inadequate.