The Future of Market Regulation

Market regulation is accomplished both by competition and by external government agencies, and the trend is toward greater reliance on competition. Economists have fostered this trend and have even invented markets to help overcome some externality problems. They have contributed to a steady improvement in antitrust policy, which currently reflects economic knowledge well. They diagnosed and demonstrated problems with external regulation of the airline industry and gave assurance that regulation by competition could work in its place. Success there led not only to deregulation of airlines but also deregulation of railroads, trucks, buses, and, in some ways, natural gas pipelines. Two other industries, telecommunications and electricity, are now following very ambitious paths toward less external regulation and greater dependence on competition. The Internet raises new issues, but there also, competition will play an important regulatory role.     

THE IMPACT OF DEMAND UNCERTAINTY AND CONFIGURATION CAPACITY ON CUSTOMER SERVICE PERFORMANCE IN A CONFIGURE‐TO‐ORDER ENVIRONMENT

This paper examines the simultaneous impact of demand variability, demand skew, and configuration capacity on customer service in a configure‐to‐order environment. Simulation is done in ARENA and data are analyzed using ANOVA and MANOVA. The findings indicate that the factors studied have differential impact on performance both individually and interactively.     

Business Cases and Corporate Engagement with Sustainability: Differentiating Ethical Motivations

This paper explores links between different ethical motivations and kinds of corporate social responsibility (CSR) activities to distinguish between different types of business cases with regard to sustainability. The design of CSR and corporate sustainability can be based on different ethical foundations and motivations. This paper draws on the framework of Roberts (Organization 10:249–265, 2003) which distinguishes four different ethical management versions of CSR. The first two ethical motivations are driven either by a reactionary concern for the short-term financial interests of the business, or reputational, driven by a narcissistic concern to protect the firm’s image. The third responsible motivation works from the inside-out and seeks to embed social and environmental concerns within the firm’s performance management systems, and the fourth, a collaborative motivation, works to bring the outside in and seeks to go beyond the boundaries of the firm to create a dialogue with those who are vulnerable to the unintended consequences of corporate conduct. Management activities based on these different ethical motivations to CSR and sustainability result in different operational activities for corporations working towards sustainability and thus have very different effects on how the company’s economic performance is influenced. Assuming that corporate managers are concerned about creating business cases for their companies to survive and prosper in the long term, this paper raises the question of how different ethical motivations for designing CSR and corporate sustainability relate to the creation of different business cases. The paper concludes by distinguishing four different kinds of business cases with regard to sustainability: reactionary and reputational business cases of sustainability, and responsible and collaborative business cases for sustainability.     

Corporate ownership and the theory of the multinational enterprise

This paper makes a contribution to the theory of the multinational enterprise (MNE) and, in particular, to why firms undertake foreign direct investment (FDI) rather than alternative strategies. We argue that FDI and its strategic alternatives involve different patterns of costs and returns over time, and hence different levels of risk and uncertainty. Traditional theories of the MNE conceptualize the firm as a risk-neutral decision-making entity with short-term efficiency objectives, and hence do not take these issues into account. This may be reasonable for firms with passive professional managers and widely-dispersed shareholders, operating in countries with the Anglo-American system of corporate governance. But many firms operate under quite different systems of corporate governance where concentrated shareholdings are commonplace and markets for corporate control are weak or non-existent. In these cases, shareholders exert considerable influence on all aspects of firm strategy including FDI. Furthermore, different groups of shareholders (State, family, institutions) are likely to have different objectives, different attitudes towards risk, and different decision-making time horizons. We thus suggest that the traditional theories of the MNE need to be extended to embrace consideration of corporate ownership (and other governance dimensions).     

Measuring intangible value in business-to-business buyer-seller relationships: An intellectual capital perspective

The value that resides in a firm's relationships has both tangible and intangible aspects and both need to be developed and managed carefully. Marketing managers need to be able to understand these dimensions of value to manage them and to argue for their share of the firm's resources to effectively develop the value of the firm's relationships. This paper describes a study that adds to current knowledge of relationship value by testing a hypothesized model of the intangible part of the value that is manifested in buyer-seller relationships and by developing a set of scales to measure the hypothesized dimensions. The focus of the research, which synthesizes a conceptual framework from the intellectual capital literature, is on business-to-business situations and on the value of the relationship to the seller, rather than to the buyer. The analysis of data from a survey of relevant managers, using structural equation modeling techniques, gives support to the model and scales.     

Are really new product development projects harder to shut down?

Just as a good houseguest knows when it's time to say good-bye, effective managers must recognize when it's time to terminate a new product development (NPD) project. As a product progresses toward commercialization, a manager's reluctance to terminate a failing project becomes increasingly expensive. Despite this growing expense, however, many managers are reluctant to shut down failing NPD projects. Jeffrey Schmidt and Roger Calantone hypothesize that this reluctance may be even more pronounced for innovative new products than for incremental NPD efforts. They suggest that perhaps the excitement that really new products engender within a company makes managers more reluctant to shut down the NPD project, even in the face of clear-cut evidence that the project is not a winner. To test these assumptions, they conducted a decision-making experiment in which managers were asked to make go/no-go decisions at each stage in a hypothetical NPD project. One project involved an innovative new product; the other project involved an incremental development—that is, a line extension that offered only marginal size and cost reductions compared to current models. At the outset of the experiment, participants were given market share and profit objectives for assessing the new product's performance. At each stage in the hypothetical NPD project, the participants then received updated performance data. The performance data provided to participants was identical for the two hypothetical projects, and fell increasingly farther below the performance objectives as the project progressed. The results of the experiment support the hypothesized relationship between product innovativeness and managers' reluctance to terminate a failing NPD project. Given identical, poor, performance forecasts, the managers who participated in this experiment were more optimistic about the likelihood of success, were more committed to the project, and were more likely to opt for continuing the project when it involved the more innovative product. In fact, the participants were more likely to allow the highly innovative NPD project to proceed all the way through commercialization, notwithstanding the progressively ominous performance feedback.     

How Banks Price Loans to Public‐Private Partnerships: Evidence from the European Markets

This article presents the findings of a recent analysis of the drivers of credit spreads in project finance loans to public‐private partnerships, or PPPs, an increasingly popular form of procurement worldwide. PPPs are project finance transactions in which project output is a function of government policy in fields such as health, transport, and education. Because of the controversy that now surrounds the use of private finance in PPPs, understanding the determinants of the cost of debt in such highly leveraged projects is of interest to policy makers as well as originators and participants in the transactions. Using a large sample of credit spreads on debt extended to PPP projects in Europe over the past 15 years, the authors' study reports that market risk is the only significant driver of PPP debt credit spreads in a large portfolio of PPP debt; at the same time, technical risks appear to be diversified “away” by the structuring of the projects. Most important, and contrary to standard debt pricing models, factors like loan size, maturity, and leverage do not show up as significant determinants of the cost of debt in PPPs, reflecting a high degree of confidence by lenders that loans will be repaid or recovered. These results support the view that the use of project finance in PPPs is premised on effective risk management as well as confidence in the private sector's ability to manage public projects.     

Bank shareholder wealth effects of California's proposition 103

Proposition 103, approved by California voters on November 8, 1988, allows California state-chartered banks to become vendors of life, health, and property-liability insurance products. It is hypothesized that such a regulatory realignment should have resulted in a wealth increase for California state-chartered banks. An examination of the market response among these banks indicates a statistically significant positive stock price response on the dates of passage of Proposition 103 and a subsequent Supreme Court ruling upholding its constitutionality.