Flight Delays and Passenger Preferences: An Axiomatic Approach

The U.S. Department of Transportation (DOT) defines a flight as “delayed” if it arrives 15+ minutes late. The DOT “flight counting” delay definition is used to rank airline/airport service quality. An obvious caveat of counting flight delays is that the duration of delay plays no role in the delay count. The purpose of this article is to propose an aggregate delay measure that is sensitive to the distribution of time delayed among passengers. The importance of this work is that our derived delay measure reflects passenger preferences rather than the arbitrary delay cutoff established by the DOT. We model passengers' preference ordering using the criteria that passengers prefer fewer, shorter, and more equal delay times.     

Integrating Results from Children's Television Advertising Research

Children's television advertising is rapidly becoming a major concern to government agencies, citizens' groups and researchers in many areas of the social sciences. To this point there has been little integration of research efforts. This article presents a model of the processing of television advertising by children in order to organize and integrate previous research results and to act as the basis for suggesting future directions for research. The authors indicate that more involvement by advertisers is needed.     

British relative economic decline revisited: The role of competition

This paper examines the role of competition in British productivity performance over the period from the late-nineteenth to the early twenty-first century. A detailed review of the evidence suggests that the weakness of competition from the 1930s to the 1970s undermined productivity growth but since the 1970s stronger competition has been a key ingredient in ending relative economic decline. The productivity implications of the retreat from competition resulted in large part from interactions with idiosyncratic British institutional structures in terms of corporate governance and industrial relations. This account extends familiar insights from cliometrics both analytically and chronologically.     

Trade openness and government size of small developing countries

This paper examines the causal effect that trade openness has on government size in small developing countries (SDCs). We use the construction of the trade cost variables based on Baltic Dry Index in primary goods as instruments of trade openness to address the endogeneity issue. We find that the increase in trade openness leads to an increase in government size: a 1 percent expansion in trade openness (trade GDP ratio) raises government consumption over GDP ratio by approximately 0.1–0.2 percentage points on average. Its quantitative significance emphasizes the importance of rethinking the costs and benefits of trade openness for SDCs.     

Strategic Research Partnerships: A Managerial Perspective

Private sector incentives to participate in research partnerships can be grouped roughly into two categories: cost-economizing incentives and strategic incentives. This paper summarizes the argument in two streams of thought that are often identified with these two sides: the transaction-cost/incomplete contracts approach and the strategic management approach. The paper recounts business motives to engage in research partnerships in each and points out that differentiating between more traditional economic perspectives (transaction costs, incomplete contracts) and strategic management/organizational theory perspectives (strategic networks, resource-dependent view, dynamic capabilities, knowledge-based view, organizational learning, options approach) may not be as sharp as one might suppose at first. The complementary nature of these perspectives should be encouraging for theoreticians looking for a more integrated model of collaboration.     

Gibbs posterior inference on value-at-risk

ABSTRACT

Accurate estimation of value-at-risk (VaR) and assessment of associated uncertainty is crucial for both insurers and regulators, particularly in Europe. Existing approaches link data and VaR indirectly by first linking data to the parameter of a probability model, and then expressing VaR as a function of that parameter. This indirect approach exposes the insurer to model misspecification bias or estimation inefficiency, depending on whether the parameter is finite- or infinite-dimensional. In this paper, we link data and VaR directly via what we call a discrepancy function, and this leads naturally to a Gibbs posterior distribution for VaR that does not suffer from the aforementioned biases and inefficiencies. Asymptotic consistency and root-n concentration rate of the Gibbs posterior are established, and simulations highlight its superior finite-sample performance compared to other approaches.     

Decomposing the effects of organizational memory on marketing implementation

There is limited evidence to explain the effect of organizational memory on marketing implementation. This paper addresses this gap by identifying multiple components of organizational memory and examining how each affects marketing implementation. Organizational memory is a collective recollection of the past that is embedded within firm culture, procedures, and expertise. The findings demonstrate potential tradeoffs to linking versus locking into the firm’s past, particularly in turbulent environments. By decomposing organizational memory’s effects, this paper explains how organizational memory can both enable and constrain marketing implementation.     

Disaggregated Earnings and Stock Prices: Evidence from International Listed Shipping Firms

The goal of this study is to investigate the impact of earnings from vessel sales on stock prices for international listed shipping firms. The empirical findings show that operating income from vessel sales has a higher power in explaining stock prices than operating earnings only as a sole piece of accounting information for future profitability, investment opportunities, and firm valuation. The testing period is from 2000 to 2009. The methodologies are those of panel cointegration and panel causality tests. The implications are very crucial, since managers may manipulate annual earnings by such non-operating activities.     

Writing the differences: Poststructural ist pluralism,retextualization, and the construction of reflexive ethnographic narratives in consumption and market research

Representing social realities in a narrative form is central to the interpretive processes by which market‐oriented ethnographies are constructed. In recent years, the process of textualization has shifted from a taken‐for‐granted aspect of the ethnographic enterprise to a central focus of ethnographers’ reflexive considerations. This shift reflects the realization that textualization poses dilemmas of representation that can not be resolved through additional fieldwork or other methodological procedures. This paper addresses these workbench problems by devising an alternative narrative formretextualization‐based on a poststructuralist version of critical pluralistic analysis. We first discuss how non‐realist genres of ethnographic writing have emerged in response to a heightened sensitivity toward ideological positions embedded in research narratives. We then discuss how the use of retextualization can facilitate the development of reflexivity in consumption research by destabilizing the representational authority of the ethnographic text through expressions of divergence, dissensus, and contested interpretations.