Keeping Teams Together: How Ethical Leadership Moderates the Effects of Performance on Team Efficacy and Social Integration

Journal of Business Ethics - Prior research has demonstrated a strong relationship between team performance and team members’ team efficacy beliefs and perceptions of social integration....     

Perceived product creativity and mental contrasting: Desired future on consumers’ product replacement decisions

Consumers often imagine what it would be like to own a new product. Does engaging in such thoughts on desired future impact consumers’ purchase intentions, and if so, what is the underlying process? This study sets out to investigate the posed questions by assessing self‐regulatory strategies consumers employ upon pondering on a desired future. Based on Oettingen’s fantasy realization model, the authors take a comparative approach of two modes on desired future—mental contrasting and indulging—en route to purchase intentions. In mental contrasting, an individual juxtaposes a desired future with his/her present reality, whereas, indulging is simply envisioning a desired future. Contingent upon the perceived likelihood of fantasy realization, consumers in the mental‐contrasting condition adjust their level—that is, high (low) for high (low) feasibility case—in goal commitment as well as in energization to achieve the desired future. In contrast, consumers in the indulging condition engage in moderate level of goal commitment—irrespective of the likelihood of fantasy realization. In a series of experiments, this study scrutinizes the fantasy realization model in context of attribute alignability/nonalignability, uncertainty in attribute meaningfulness and novelty, technological and psychological obsolescence en route to affecting the consumers’ product purchase/upgrade intentions. Conceptually, this study is the first to adapt the fantasy realization model to the marketing context, and the authors provide managerial implications of their key findings.     

The effect of consumer food creation on the food consumption experience

Two experiments show that the role the consumer plays in the creation of their food can affect the consumption experience. When guilt is present in the consumption of the food item, namely an unhealthy food item, having someone else create the food item increases taste evaluations, attitudes, and behavioral intentions. However, when guilt is not present, as in the case for healthy foods, there is no difference in food evaluations when the end consumer or another creates the food. These results have important implications for food retailers, food service establishment, and food delivery companies.     

Effects of broadband availability on total factor productivity in service sector firms: Evidence from Ireland

While broadband is widely believed to augment productivity, there is little firm-level evidence of a generalised causal effect. In this paper we examine whether the introduction of digital subscriber line (DSL) broadband services increased firms' productivity in nine sub-sectors within the services and distribution sector in Ireland from 2006 to 2012. Firm-level panel data on firms' characteristics are linked to spatial information on the rollout of DSL. While we do not find significant productivity effects in the services sectors taken together, we do find positive and significant effects on firm's total factor productivity in Information & Communication and Administrative & Support Services.     

Effectiveness of harvest strategies in achieving multiple management objectives in a multispecies fishery

Fisheries management is characterised by multiple objectives, some of which may be complementary, while others may require trade‐offs between outcomes. Balancing these objectives is made more complex in the case of multispecies and multigear fisheries. In this paper, we develop a bioeconomic model that captures the key elements of such a fishery to test a range of potential harvest strategies to provide insights into how economic target reference points could lead to both desirable and undesirable management outcomes (e.g. discards). The model is developed as a long‐run optimisation model to identify target reference points to achieve multispecies maximum economic yield, and a dynamic recursive optimisation model, which includes more realistic representation of fishers’ behaviour, such as discards and trading of under‐caught species quotas. The potential economic, social and ecological impacts are evaluated using data envelopment analysis (DEA). The results suggest that the use of proxy target reference points can result in short‐term economic benefits at the cost of slower stock recovery and higher discarding. Limiting the number of species subject to quota controls may also prove beneficial in multispecies fisheries, while ensuring quota markets are efficient is likely to produce benefits irrespective of the harvest strategy adopted.     

Forecasting Foreign Exchange Markets Using Google Trends: Prediction Performance of Competing Models

Abstract

Foreign exchange markets affect a variety of humans and businesses worldwide and there is a wide array of literature aimed at providing more accurate forecasts of their movement. In an attempt to quantify human expectations, Google query search terms related to foreign exchange markets are used to help explain and predict foreign exchange rates between the United States’ dollar and ten other currencies during the time period of January 2004 and August 2018. We find evidence that, while Google Trends can be helpful in prediction, it is necessary to implement some sort of shrinkage or sparsity scheme on the coefficients.     

Demand for fair value accounting: The case of the asset revaluation boom in Korea during the global financial crisis

When the fair value accounting (FVA) option for property, plant, and equipment was introduced in the midst of the global financial crisis, a significant proportion of Korean firms elected FVA. We attribute this unusual boom in asset revaluations to the nation's culture of government intervention and civilian compliance, which was particularly espoused during this period of financial turmoil, and a foreseeable option to switch back to historical cost accounting. We find that among those firms whose debt‐to‐equity ratios are low, public firms opt for the FVA option more often than private firms, suggesting that the need to communicate fair value information with diversified equity holders is more important than the need to do so with creditors. In contrast, among those firms whose debt‐to‐equity ratios are high enough to warrant such unfavorable dispositions as new debt freezes and monitoring by regulators, we find no difference in the FVA choice between private and public firms. These findings imply that during the global financial crisis, private firms that rely heavily on debt financing have a strong incentive to utilize FVA to comply with government guidelines for the debt‐to‐equity ratio and to ease a potential hold‐up problem by influential creditors.     

Does insider trading explain price run‐up ahead of takeover announcements?

This study empirically examines the impact of changes in substantial shareholdings ahead of 450 Australian takeover offers between the years 2000 and 2009. Previous studies have attributed a significant proportion of the price run‐up effect in takeover targets to insider‐trading behaviour. This study examines the contribution of a broad range of public information sources that are known to typically generate market anticipation, including the acquisition of toeholds ahead of takeover announcements. Our findings show no significant pre‐bid run‐up for takeover targets after considering these sources. We conclude from these results that previous findings attributing pre‐bid share price run‐up to illegal insider trading may overstate the existence of such conduct.