On the Validity of the “Importance Minus Performance” Construct—A Genuine Contribution of the Tourism Literature or a Mishap?

Measuring service quality in a reliable and valid manner is crucial. Accordingly, this study explores whether the tourism-oriented Importance-Performance construct is a theoretically sound measure of service quality. The conceptual analysis is followed by an empirical test of the construct's prediction capability within the realm of service quality/satisfaction framework in the tourism context of a large festival. Both the conceptual and empirical results clearly indicate that the validity of the Importance-Performance construct should be strongly doubted, and that tourism and hospitality managers as well as researchers would be better off avoiding the use of the Importance-Performance construct.     

Institutional Investment Patterns in Troubled Corporations: A Sociological analysis

A bstract . Classical or neo-classical economic theories do not adequately explain institutional investment patterns in troubled corporations. Macroeconomic perspectives contend that abstract market forces direct investment capital away from troubled companies, and that bankruptcy weeds weak firms out of the economy for the general good. Microeconomic perspectives focus on the seemingly autonomous decisions of firms and their managers, where bad management leads to troubled and bankrupt firms and a corresponding loss of investment in these companies. Neither perspective is useful for understanding recent patterns of institutional investment. A more critical, sociological perspective for understanding these investment patterns has two main threads. First, investment activity is embedded in more general social relationships and cannot be understood strictly on "economic" grounds and with "economic" ideas. Second, social power—rather than abstract market forces —is critical in fostering specific investment patterns. More specifically, the organizational power of large financial firms may be the pivotal factor shaping investment patterns in troubled companies. Recent case studies of troubled and bankrupt corporations demonstrate the usefulness of this more sociological perspective, and suggest areas for future research.     

中国金融创新和技术进步的前景展望--2001年中国金融国际论坛发言集萃

首先,我想谈谈金融在促进技术进步方面的历史地位。然后我想讲讲它在为新企业融资方面所起的作用及其形式。其中的主要观点是美国现代风险投资公司只是发挥为新企业创建初期提供资金的功能的一种组织形式。这种功能就是为新企业提供资金。有许多途径可以实现这种功能,从使用个人储蓄到使用家庭储蓄等等。所以在讨论金     

Job and wage mobility with minimum wages and imperfect compliance

We propose a job search model with minimum wage regulations and imperfect compliance to explain the doubling of the mean and variance of hourly earnings of white males during the first 18 years of labor market experience. The model encompasses job mobility and on‐the‐job wage growth as sources of wage dynamics, and is estimated by simulated generalized method of moments using data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youths 1979. Our estimates provide a good fit for the observed levels and trends of the main job and wage mobility data, and for the increase in the mean and variance of wages over the life cycle, as well as for the fall in the fraction of workers paid below the minimum wage. Job mobility explains 40–50% of the observed wage growth. Increases in the minimum wage and/or compliance deliver small effects on the wage distribution and the nonemployment rate. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Existence and Uniqueness of Ordinal Nash Outcomes

In this paper we present necessary and sufficient conditions for existence and uniqueness of ordinal Nash outcomes. These outcomes are derived from the ordinal Nash solution—a reinterpretation and an extension of the Nash bargaining solution that allows bargainers to have preference relations that are more general than expected utility. Our task is undertaken by the construction of a new notion called “induced utilities”. Journal of Economic Literature Classification Number: C78.     

Stakeholders and the composition of the voting rights of the board of directors

We propose a new approach to dynamic representation of different groups of stakeholders on the board of directors. This approach is based on a simple economic model of the firm, with an objective function to maximize its market value. We look at the marginal claim of each stakeholder on the assets of the firm. It divides the voting rights based on the change in value of each stakeholder with a one dollar change in the value of the firm as a whole. We translate these conditions to relative voting powers on the board. While there are many claims in the academic and popular literature on sharing voting rights on the board, our paper is the first to propose a quantitative dynamic model of the power sharing in the corporation.