Glaubwürdigkeit in der CSR-KommunikationCredible CSR communication

Credibility is a central and well-established concept in communication science, particularly in public relations (PR) research. When it comes to the communication about their corporate social responsibilities (CSR), companies are under public scrutiny and should therefore be eager to communicate in a credible fashion with their stakeholders. However, existing concepts of credibility in PR research do not account for the specific demands of ethical CSR theory. Thus, this article develops a concept of credibility that embraces sender, message, and recipient and the central concept of corporate legitimacy at the same time. Based on the political-normative approach to CSR, this concept builds on the theory of communicative action and the validity claims of the ideal speech situation. This novel approach to credibility in CSR communication is normative, but also opens promising paths for future empirical research in the field.     

Assessing the greenness of environmental advertising claims made by multinational industrial firms

Growing skepticism about green advertisements calls for a thorough investigation of the environmental claims made by firms. This is particularly important in the context of industrial and international markets, where research on the subject is virtually non-existent. By employing legitimacy theory, this article develops several research hypotheses linking various dimensions of environmental claims made in green advertisements (i.e., focal points, evaluation areas, leverage aspects, driving forces) with advertising greenness (i.e., shallow, moderate, deep). It then tests these hypotheses with data obtained from a content analysis of 383 green magazine advertisements by multinational firms producing industrial goods. In accord with legitimacy theory, the results indicate that, the stronger the greenness of an advertisement: (a) the greater the use of focal points relating to a product, processes, image, and facts; (b) the more specific, strong, substantive, and acceptable are the issues raised; (c) the higher the employment of rational, emotional, and moral points to leverage environmental matters; and (d) the sharper the driving forces relating to the planet and its flora, fauna, and human entities. Several important conclusions, managerial implications, and directions for future research are derived from these findings.     

Individual versus companion visitors' willingness-to-pay for the theater tickets: The case of Perm opera

Business-like approaches are applied more and more widely in nonprofit organization contexts, and theaters are no exception. Revenue generation, customer segmentation, and personalized marketing are becoming the key managerial concerns. Our study focuses on two relevant aspects of theater attendees' behavior. We examine visitors' willingness-to-pay (WTP) for theater seats (to derive revenue drivers), and its difference between two segments – single and couple visitors (to uncover the social motivation effect). These aspects taken together have never been previously studied in the nonprofit marketing context. We model WTP using the actual purchase data from Perm Opera and Ballet Theatre in Russia. Unlike most marketing studies which use stated preference for WTP evaluation, we employ the revealed preference approach. The results verify that single and couple visitors may be treated as separate segments, allowing for personalized promotion and other marketing decisions.     

Can social spending cushion the inequality effect of globalization?

This paper examines whether social spending cushions the effect of globalization on within‐country inequality. Using information on disposable and market income inequality and data on overall social spending, and health and education spending from the ILO and the World Bank/WHO, we analyze whether social spending moderates the association between economic globalization and inequality. The results confirm that economic globalization—especially economic flows—associates with higher income inequality, an effect driven by non‐OECD countries. Health spending is strongly associated with lower inequality, but we find no robust evidence that any kind of social spending negatively moderates the association between economic globalization and inequality.     

Consumer foresight,customer data,and investment in targeting technology

We analyze competing firms’ incentives to adopt a technology that allows making refined targeted offers to returning customers. Consumer foresight is crucial for firms’ decisions. Although our setup is symmetric, when consumers are myopic, the unique equilibrium is asymmetric in firms’ technology adoption decisions. Contrary to conventional wisdom, consumers may be better off being myopic than sophisticated. Light privacy policy may benefit consumers if it reduces the costs of handling customer data and avoids strict obligations on firms to inform consumers about data use, which would erode investment incentives into targeting technology.     

Correction to: A multi-country,multi-sector replication challenge to the validity of the cultural tightness-looseness measure

Asia Pacific Journal of Management - The original version of this article unfortunately contained mistakes. Appendix heading was misplaced and first entry of the Appendix table was incorrectly...     

Education and family health care spending

Michael Grossman's seminal work on the demand for health extended the concept of a household production function to the commodity “good health.” In this framework, education represents an “environmental variable” that enhances the monetary returns to investments in health through the use of time and medical care in health production. Using data from the 2004 to 2012 Medical Expenditure Panel Survey (MEPS), we examine the association between parental education and family health care spending in single-mother and two-parent families. We estimate one- and two-part expenditure models for total family health care spending, for specific components of such spending, and also examine the impact of parental education on selected measures of family health. Controlling for family income and health insurance status, we find consistent evidence that parental education beyond 12 years of schooling is associated with increases in family health care spending and with reductions in the likelihood of adverse health conditions.     

Financial Misrepresentation and Its Impact on Rivals

This paper examines how the announcement of an accusation of fraudulent financial misrepresentation affects industry rivals of the accused firm. Consistent with the importance of the industry competition effect, we find that rivals in less competitive industries benefit from the event. However, in competitive industries, the information spillover effect dominates the competition effect, resulting in negative returns to rival shareholders following the event. The spillover effect increases in importance with the severity of the accusation and is more important for opaque rivals and for rivals that had positive stock price reactions to past positive earnings surprises of the accused firm.     

Risk assessment for uncertain cash flows: model ambiguity, discounting ambiguity, and the role of bubbles

We study the risk assessment of uncertain cash flows in terms of dynamic convex risk measures for processes as introduced in Cheridito et al. (Electron. J. Probab. 11(3):57–106, 2006). These risk measures take into account not only the amounts but also the timing of a cash flow. We discuss their robust representation in terms of suitably penalised probability measures on the optional σ-field. This yields an explicit analysis both of model and discounting ambiguity. We focus on supermartingale criteria for time consistency. In particular, we show how “bubbles” may appear in the dynamic penalisation, and how they cause a breakdown of asymptotic safety of the risk assessment procedure.     

Towards a General Theory of Good-Deal Bounds*

We consider an incomplete market in the form of a multidimensional Markovian factor model, driven by a general marked point process (representing discrete jump events), as well as by a standard multidimensional Wiener process. Within this framework, we study arbitrage-free good-deal pricing bounds for derivative assets, thereby extending the results by Cochrane and Saá Requejo (2000) to the point process case, while, at the same time, obtaining a radical simplification of the theory. To illustrate, we present numerical results for the classic Merton jump-diffusion model. As a by-product of the general theory, we derive extended Hansen-Jagannathan bounds for the Sharpe Ratio process in the point process setting. *We gratefully acknowledge financial support from the Jan Wallander and Tom Hedelius foundation. We thank Anders Forsgren, Krister Svanberg, and Jan Kallsen for a number of very helpful comments. We are very grateful to Mathias Stolpe for providing us with the optimization code used in our numerical example. A number of very helpful comments from the editor and an anonymous referee has greatly improved the paper.