Why standard modelling and evaluation procedures are inadequate for assessing traffic congestion measures

As traffic congestion in Hong Kong worsens with the growing use of motor vehicles, to determine what has to be done to achieve and maintain an acceptable level of mobility for persons and goods becomes the subject of intense debate by economists, planners and politicians. Although many traffic congestion measures have been suggested and investigated, they are mainly confined to expansion of transport infrastructure and measures to make effective use of roads. New roads and public transport improvements may encourage increases in traffic and changes in the patterns of trips, while traffic management and regulation measures may in turn lead to suppression in road traffic. In order to evaluate these measures, it is required to make use of a transport model in assessing their traffic impacts. However, there are always discrepancies between the traffic forecasts and the actual flows on the roads. This paper investigates why the standard modelling and evaluation procedures currently used by the Hong Kong Government are inadequate for assessing the traffic congestion measures. Empirical evidence is given together with discussion on modelling and evaluation issues raised by the existence of suppressed/induced traffic.     

Does Corporate Governance Matter in the Contractual Form of Fund Management Companies in China?

ABSTRACT

Operating under a regulatory environment with weak enforcement of investor protection, the contractual form of fund management companies (FMCs) in China’s emerging fund industry presents some complex governance issues in addition to the conventional agency problems of modern public corporations. Using 288 firm-year observations covering more than 98 percent of FMCs in China, this article presents the first systematic study on whether the quality of corporate governance mechanisms affects the performance of the contractual form of FMCs. Our results suggest that FMCs with good corporate governance do matter in generating favorable performance for fund investors in China.     

Facts-up-front: should food companies follow the FDA or industry label format? The effects of combining virtue and vice information on consumer evaluations

This research examines consumers’ processing of Facts-up-front food labels as implemented by the Grocery Manufacturers Association (GMA). Facts-up-front labels include both positive (virtues) and negative (vices) nutritional icons. The processing and relative efficacy of Facts-up-front labels are compared to the original FDA proposal of front-of-pack labels which only included vices. The results suggest heuristic processing of these labels, whereby consumers consider the nutritional icons on the front-of-pack labels similar to affective stimuli. The addition of virtues alongside vices on the label has a compensatory effect, i.e., the food item is evaluated as healthier when there are both virtues and vices on the label compared to when there are only vices. Such heuristic processing of Facts-up-front labels that allows nutritional virtues to compensate for nutritional vices has the potential for consumers evaluating harmful foods as relatively “healthy” thus compromising consumer well-being. These findings illustrate the importance of empirically testing changes to nutritional labels before large scale implementation. Since consumers process front-of-pack labels heuristically and not cognitively, it is not surprising that nutritional literacy does not moderate the effects of label design on healthiness evaluations. Furthermore, the order of the negative and positive information on Facts-up-front labels also has no effect.

     

Estimating global frontier shifts and global Malmquist indices

The Malmquist index is a measure of productivity changes, of which an important component is the frontier shift or technological change. Often technological change can be viewed as a global phenomenon, and therefore individual or local measures of technological changes are aggregated into an overall measure, traditionally using geometric means. In this paper we propose a way of calculating global Malmquist indices and global frontier shift indices which provides a better estimation of the true frontier shift and furthermore is easy to calculate. Using simulation studies we show how this method outperforms the traditional aggregation approach, especially for sparsely populated production possibility sets and for frontiers that also change shape over time. Furthermore, our global indices can be used for unbalanced panels without disregarding any information. Finally, we show how the global indices are meaningful for calculating differences between frontiers from different groups rather than different time periods as illustrated in a small case study of bank branches in different countries.      

An investigation into commitment in non-Western industrial marketing relationships

This paper reports an investigation into the antecedents of commitment in non-Western industrial marketing relationships. The authors draw the antecedents from extant literature and posit that commitment is related to trust (integrity and reliability), communication quality, conflict, and similarity (social, ethnic, and economic). It is further argued that trust mediates the effects of communication, conflict, and similarity on commitment. As an extension, the authors examine the moderating effects of normative contracts (an implicit understanding of roles and responsibilities) on the construct interrelationships. The hypotheses are tested using data collected from approximately 150 industrial marketing relationships sampled from overseas Chinese firms. The results generally support the authors' framework; however, the mediating hypotheses are not supported. There is evidence of systematic differences in the effects of the studied antecedents on commitment and trust. Furthermore, a multigroup analysis provides evidence of significant moderating effects due to contracting mode. The study provides new insights into the theory and practice of industrial marketing.     

A NEW COMPARATIVE STUDY ON THE FREE‐FLOATING AND CURRENCY BOARD REGIMES IN HONG KONG

This study aims to compare the performance of free‐floating and currency board regimes for Hong Kong by examining historical data of the two on the output growth and inflation rate. Structural vector autoregression has been applied in the empirical analysis. Without making a strong assumption of unit variance in the residual matrix, this study applies a more natural approach proposed by Cecchetti and Rich to recover the structural parameters. The study has further investigated the recovery of the economy under a demand shock under different exchange rate regimes, in order to provide some evidence to answer why Hong Kong's recovery process after the Asian financial crisis is relatively longer than that in other economies with a managed floating exchange rate regime. New evidence in this study indicates that output recovers much faster in a flexible exchange rate regime than in a fixed exchange rate regime after an aggregate demand shock. Furthermore, this study has applied a more robust method in the counterfactual analysis when comparing the two regimes. New evidence in this study suggests that a free‐floating regime may generate much smaller output variance in Hong Kong and deliver higher output and price levels to Hong Kong.     

Idiosyncratic deals and good citizens in China: the role of traditionality for recipients and their coworkers

The purpose of this study is to investigate the relationship between idiosyncratic deals and organizational citizen behavior (OCB). How traditional Chinese values moderate the relationship between idiosyncratic deals and OCB is examined from the perspectives of recipients and coworkers. Survey data were provided by 359 supervisor–subordinate dyads. Recipients of idiosyncratic deals are positively associated with their OCB-I, and the positive relationship between them is strongest for individuals with high perceived visibility and low traditionality. From the perspective of coworkers, the effect of coworker's beliefs in obtaining future idiosyncratic deals on OCB-I is strongest for individuals with high perceptions of others' idiosyncratic deals and low traditionality. This is the first study to provide evidence of the relationship between idiosyncratic deals and OCB from the perspective of recipients and coworkers. Additionally, the authors discuss the roles of perceived visibility and traditionality, thereby provide new insights into the outcomes of idiosyncratic deals based on cultural differences. The theoretical and practical implications are discussed.     

On the Effectiveness of Incentive Pay: Exploring Complementarities and Substitution between Management Control System Elements in a Manufacturing Firm

Abstract

Extant research already emphasises that complementarities and substitution involving incentive pay and other elements of an organisation's management control system play an important role in terms of explaining the effectiveness of incentive systems. Despite this awareness calls continue for more research addressing the need to better understand how interdependencies arise among management control system elements and how they affect organisational effectiveness. Based on an in-depth case study on the implementation of a new incentive system in a manufacturing firm, we seek to provide more research and insight into how incentive pay features in complementary and substitutional relationships in an individual organisational setting. Greater insight can help illustrate how complementary and substitutional relationships unfold in even more complex ways than current research indicates, as well as how the effectiveness of the incentive system in the individual organisational setting is determined by these relationships.     

The mixture index of fit and minimax regression

A measure of the fit of a statistical model can be obtained by estimating the relative size of the largest fraction of the population where a distribution belonging to the model may be valid. This is the mixture index of fit that was suggested for models for contingency tables by Rudas, Clogg, Lindsay (1994) and it is extended here for models involving continuous observations. In particular, the approach is applied to regression models with normal and uniform error structures. Best fit, as measured by the mixture index of fit, is obtained with minimax estimation of the regression parameters. Therefore, whenever minimax estimation is used for these problems, the mixture index of fit provides a natural approach for measuring model fit and for variable selection. Received: September 1997