The sales recovery audit: Learning to walk the talk

Little research attention has been devoted to the impact of salesperson failure and recovery management on customer relationship development. This paper develops a theoretically anchored and externally validated sales recovery audit for the purpose of assessing sales organization performance in these matters. Results based on a survey of 177 sales managers indicate that practice of sales recovery efforts lags behind their perceived importance as they relate to organizational success. The sales recovery audit presented here can be a useful tool to continuously evaluate and enhance sales recovery efforts for the purpose of building a stronger relationship selling organization.     

Mortgage Brokers,Origination Fees,Price Transparency and Competition

This article examines the dynamics between mortgage broker competition, origination fees and price transparency. A reverse first‐price sealed‐bid auction model is used to motivate broker pricing behavior. Confirming the model predictions, our empirical analysis shows that increased mortgage brokerage competition at the Metropolitan Statistical Area level leads to lower fees. The findings are robust to different measures of fees as well as different measures of competition. We also provide evidence that broker competition reduces mortgage origination fees on retail (nonbrokered) loans as well. In addition, our results indicate that pricing complexity is an important determinant of fees, and increased broker competition is associated with a higher probability of a loan being priced with transparency. Our results suggest that mortgage brokers increase competition and lower fees in the mortgage market.     

Enhancing Stock Market Return with New Product Preannouncements: The Role of Information Quality and Innovativeness

To advance development and application of signaling theory in the new product preannouncement literature while seeking to resolve ambiguity regarding the influence of innovativeness on stock market return, the role of information quality is examined. Specifically, this study investigates the effect of innovativeness across low and high levels of information quality. The results, ascertained using event study methodology on a sample of 243 new product preannouncements collected over a nine‐year period, indicate that higher information quality increases the strength of the positive relationship between innovativeness and stock market return. The findings offer managers insight into what role information quality plays in new product preannouncements that can help their firms generate higher stock market return.     

基于像素级估计的视频显著性检测

为了减少背景噪声干扰,准确地从复杂视频中提取显著目标,提出一种具有时空一致性的视频显著区域检测算法。将视频帧划分为超像素,以超像素为基本单元提取光流特征,在时空一致性原则指导下动态融合颜色、边界信息和光流特征,获取视频显著图。在此基础上,借助视频帧的细节和区域特征对视频显著图进行细化增强。实验结果表明,算法的准确率[CD*2]召回率曲线在复杂图像数据库中高于传统经典算法,具有足够高的鲁棒性,能够减少相机运动和背景运动以及突变情况对跟踪检测的影响。所提方法能够在各种运动模式下和外观复杂场景中较为完整地提取显著目标,可作为预处理技术,改善目标跟踪、行为检测、视频压缩等的性能。     

A social network supported CAI model for tacit knowledge acquisition

Freehand sketching is one of the most important and commonly used methods of generating and sharing budding ideas during the conceptual development portion of the preliminary phase of design. To develop one’s skills, prolonged practice, acquiring instant feedback and suggestions while practicing are invaluable. The two key and indispensable parts of learning draftsmanship are viewing and commenting on large numbers of free hand sketches. However, due to insufficient educational resources, instructors must spend most of their time engaged in class-room teaching, reducing the time allotted for one-on-one discussion and specialized assistance. Furthermore, the lack of sketch grading criteria can prevent students from developing proper insights into the essentials of sketching. As a result, students neither receive personalized feedback nor acquire adequate training in critiquing freehand sketching skills. These factors decrease learning effectiveness and negatively impact learning motivation. In order to solve this problem, this research has created a discussion platform on Facebook that utilizes the learning characteristics essential to developing proficiency in freehand sketching. It includes practice, observation, and comments. It has been found that this cultivates the subjects’ ability to judge freehand sketch quality and increases learning motivation and effectiveness through the process of peer-assessment. After participating in the one-semester teaching experiment, the abilities of the experimental group were significantly better than those of the control group, demonstrating that the online sketch discussion platform has a significant impact on freehand sketch learning.     

Issues in the relationship between theory and practice in management accounting

In recent decades the interest of academic researchers in the practical aspects of management accounting has waned. This editorial explores some of the reasons of this development. Over the past few decades we have witnessed the establishment of management accounting in academia as a social science. This has increased the credibility of the accounting academics. However, it has also meant that academic researchers have neglected the technical core of their discipline and its problems and issues which have a direct practical relevance. It is concluded that there is a need for academic researchers to have a stronger focus on the technical core of the subject and to harness the findings of empirical research so that they can be used to develop and support practice.     

Earnings Management Surrounding New Debt Issues

We examine whether firms manage earnings before issuing bonds to achieve a lower cost of borrowing. We find significant income‐increasing earnings management prior to bond offerings. We also find that firms that manage earnings upward issue debt at a lower cost, after controlling for various bond issuer and issue characteristics. Our results are consistent with studies that report earnings management around equity issuance. The results indicate that, like equity holders, bondholders fail to see through the inflated earnings numbers in pricing new debt.     

Evaluating the state of competition of the Greek banking industry

The present paper uses three different New Empirical Industrial Organization (NEIO) approaches (Panzar–Rosse, Bresnahan–Lau and Hall–Roeger models) to investigate competitive conditions in the Greek banking sector over the period 1995–2004. One important event which has taken place in the Greek banking industry, especially after 1998, is a wave of mergers and acquisitions. This study also measures and compares the degree of banking competition in two sub-periods, 1995–1998 and 1999–2004, in order to investigate the effect of mergers and acquisitions on the competitive structure of Greek banking. The empirical results of the three models indicate a shift from competitive to non-competitive conditions when moving from the first to the second sub-period. This finding suggests that mergers and acquisitions have affected the level of completion of Greek banking, rendering the industry less competitive. Furthermore, taking into consideration the negative effects of mergers and acquisitions on technical efficiency and the total factor productivity of Greek banking (Rezitis, 2008), the empirical findings of the present study provide some indications that one of the outcomes of the Greek banks’ merging activities, at least in the short run, might be to attain market power and thus higher profits, rather than higher efficiency and lower costs.     

Examining bank SEOs: Are offers made by undercapitalized banks different?

Despite extensive monitoring, banking operations are often considered opaque, and despite explicit capital adequacy regulation, banks may have substantial discretion in their financing. Both monitoring and capital regulation have changed substantially over time, with the adoption of FDICIA being one important breakpoint. This article empirically studies seasoned equity offerings (SEOs) by banks to understand how opacity and capital regulation interact to determine the timing of bank SEOs and their market valuation. SEOs both by banks that are undercapitalized relative to regulatory standards and also well-capitalized banks are fully discretionary when it comes to SEOs, even before FDICIA. Both undercapitalized and well-capitalized banks experience similar and significantly negative stock price reactions to SEO announcements, and also have similar prior patterns of insider trading and similar economic drivers of the issuance decision. Moreover, post-SEO abnormal stock returns are similar to benchmark returns for both types of issuers in the long run, suggesting that, contrary to the well-documented evidence for industrial SEOs, investors understand the value implications of bank SEOs upon announcement. The evidence implies that undercapitalized banks' SEOs are more discretionary and that all bank SEOs are less opaque than implied by earlier studies.