Efficiency and the trading system: The case of SETSmm

This paper studies the impact that a change from a dealer system to a market-maker supported auction system has on market quality. We study the impact that the introduction of SETSmm at the London Stock Exchange had on firm value, price efficiency and liquidity. We discover a small SETSmm return premium associated with the announcement that securities are to migrate to the new trading system. Moreover, securities that migrate to SETSmm are characterized by improvements to liquidity and pricing efficiency. We find that these changes are related to the return premium.     

Modelling user perception of bus transit quality

This article evaluates how bus users perceive the quality of their public transport service. In particular it looks at how perception of quality varies according to the available information. The experiment compares an overall evaluation of service quality before and after making passengers reflect on the importance of certain fundamental system variables which they may not have previously considered.Focus groups were used to individualise the most relevant variables. A quality survey was carried out both on-board buses and at bus stops and the overall service quality was related to the aforementioned variables using ordered probit models. The perception of quality is shown to change with the category of user and that there tends to be more criticism towards variations in overall quality until the users are stimulated into thinking more deeply about other influential variables. The application of this methodology may provide operating companies with valuable information for planning marketing policies aimed at different categories of user, in order to improve the service quality and attract more passengers to using public transport.     

DEFINING AND OPERATIONALIZING SUPPLY CHAIN PROCESS INTEGRATION

Integration has been recognized as critical to successful supply chain management. However, an extensive literature review revealed no consensus in its conceptualization. The current study attempts to address this research gap by providing a better definition and operationalization of supply chain process integration. With empirical support, it is proposed that internal and external supply chain process integration should be treated as two separate constructs, each comprised of two dimensions: connectivity and simplification.     

Maintaining a Reputation for Consistently Beating Earnings Expectations and the Slippery Slope to Earnings Manipulation

This paper investigates whether maintaining a reputation for consistently beating analysts' earnings expectations can motivate executives to move from “within GAAP” earnings management to “outside of GAAP” earnings manipulation. We analyze firms subject to SEC enforcement actions and find that these firms consistently beat analysts' quarterly earnings forecasts in the three years prior to the manipulation period and continue to do so by smaller “beats” during the manipulation period. We find that manipulating firms beat expectations around 86 percent of the time in the 12 quarters prior to the manipulation period (versus 75 percent for control firms) and that manipulation often ends with a miss in expectations. We document that executives of manipulating firms face strong stock market and CEO pressure to perform. Prior to the manipulation period, these firms have high analyst optimism, growing institutional interest, and high market valuations, along with powerful CEOs. Further, we find that maintaining a reputation for beating expectations is more important than CEO overconfidence and is incremental to CEO equity incentives for explaining manipulation. Our results suggest that pressure to maintain a reputation for beating analysts' expectations can encourage aggressive accounting and, ultimately, earnings manipulation.     

Breakthrough thinking from inside the box

Companies often begin their search for great ideas either by encouraging wild, outside-the-box thinking or by conducting quantitative analysis of existing market and financial data and customer opinions. Those approaches can produce middling ideas at best, say Coyne, founder of an executive-counseling firm in Atlanta, and Clifford and Dye, strategy experts at McKinsey. The problem with the first method is that few people are very good at unstructured, abstract brainstorming. The problems with the second are that databases are usually compiled to describe current--not future--offerings, and customers rarely can tell you whether they need or want a product if they've never seen it. The secret to getting your organization to regularly generate lots of good ideas, and occasionally some great ones, is deceptively simple: First, create new boxes for people to think within so that they don't get lost in the cosmos and they have a basis for offering ideas and knowing whether they're making progress in the brainstorming session. Second, redesign ideation processes to remove obstacles that interfere with the flow of ideas--such as most people's aversion to speaking in groups larger than ten. This article offers a tested approach that poses concrete questions. For example, what do Rollerblades, H?agen-Dazs ice cream, and Spider-Man movies have in common? The answer: Each is something that adults loved as children and that was reproduced in an expensive form for grown-ups. Asking brainstorming participants to ponder how their childhood passions could be recast as adult offerings might generate some fabulous ideas for new products or services.     

Onboarding: delivering on the promise

The nursing workforce continues to age and exit the workplace. U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics studies indicate as many as 40% will retire or are considering retirement. Fewer qualified graduates are in place to replace aging baby boomers, leading to a knowledge and skills gap as well as a numbers gap. Globalization of the nursing workforce has increased competition for all employers to find, hire, and retain good employees.     

The emergence, advance and future of international entrepreneurship research — An introduction to the special forum

Since its genesis over twenty years ago, research in International Entrepreneurship has emerged as a field of study, and moved through the process of differentiation, mobilization and legitimacy building. Generally referred to as IE, research in this area is conducted by scholars worldwide and supported by various community structures, conferences and journals. In recognition of IE, this Special Forum was initiated to help clarify its parameters and history of development, the areas of research pertinent to it and critically, directions for future research.     

Social Constructivism,Mental Models,and Problems of Obedience

There are important synergies for the next generation of ethical leaders based on the alignment of modified or adjusted mental models. This entails a synergistic application of moral imagination through collaborative input and critique, rather than “me too” obedience. In this article, we will analyze the Milgram results using frameworks relating to mental models (Werhane et al., Profitable partnerships for poverty alleviation, 2009), as well as work by Moberg on “ethics blind spots” (Organizational Studies 27(3):413–428, 2006), and by Bazerman and Chugh on “bounded awareness” (Harvard Business Review, 2006; Mind &; Society 6:1–18, 2007) Using these constructs to examine the Milgram experiment, we will argue that the ways in which the experiments are framed, the presence of an authority figure, the appeal to the authority of science, and the situation in which the naïve participant finds herself or himself, all create a bounded awareness, a narrow blind spot that encourages a climate for obedience, brackets out the opportunity to ask the moral question: “Am I hurting another fellow human being?” and may preclude the subject from utilizing moral imagination to opt out of the experiment. We will conclude that these forms of almost blind obedience to authority are correctable, but with difficulty. We will argue that linking the modification of mental models to an unbinding of awareness represents an important synergistic relationship and one that can build effectively on the lessons learned from our experience with moral imagination.     

Semi-quantitative risk assessment method for product management

The workshop presented a semi-quantitative risk assessment technique that can be used to judge the total risk on all undesired consequences/events for a product manufacturing operation. The technique requires an experienced team to judge risk utilizing a numerical rating system that, although arbitrarily chosen, is self consistent and provides a relative assessment of product manufacturing risk. Once calculated, the risk is compared to the product's net income for making risk management and product planning decisions. The workshop included an exercise where all participants could try the technique.     

A Question of Integrity: Variants of Bt Cotton,Pesticides and Productivity in Pakistan

Bt cotton remains one of the most widely grown biotech crops among smallholder farmers in lower income countries, and numerous studies attest to its advantages. However, the effectiveness of Bt toxin, which depends on many technical constraints, is heterogeneous. In Pakistan, the diffusion of Bt cotton occurred despite a weak regulatory system and without seed quality control; whether or not many varieties sold as Bt are in fact Bt is also questionable. We utilise nationally representative sample data to test the effects of Bt cotton use on productivity. Unlike previous studies, we invoke several indicators of Bt identity: variety name, official approval status, farmer belief, laboratory tests of Bt presence in plant tissue, and biophysical assays measuring Bt effectiveness. Only farmer belief affects cotton productivity in the standard production model, which does not treat Bt appropriately as damage‐abating. In the damage control framework, all Bt indicators reduce damage from pests. Biophysical indicators have the largest effect and official approval has the weakest. Findings have implications for impact measurement. For policy‐makers, they suggest the need, on ethical and productivity grounds, to improve variety information and monitor variety integrity closer to point of sale.