Volunteerism,compassion and religiosity as drivers of donations practices

• The topic of donations is one of high relevance and has been widely covered in contemporary marketing literature. It is a topic of interest to both theoreticians and practitioners alike, particularly due to its implicit links to fundraising activities and research. The reality of what makes an individual donor ultimately part with his money and give it away to a nonprofit organization is a hot contemporary topic. This study looks into the role of religiosity as a predictor of donations practices. Also volunteerism and compassion, two acts of pro‐social behaviour are analysed as predictors of donations practices. Using data collected from a survey of 612 charity donors in Portugal, the results show unequivocally that religiosity does influence donations practices, and so being a predictor of donations practices. Moreover, pro‐social behaviour is a predictor of donations practices when in the case of volunteerism, but not in the form of compassion.
• The findings are particularly useful for nonprofit organizations that want to attract and retain individual charitable donors and may also help to increase donation regularity, to obtain higher amounts, and donations both to religious and to secular organizations. Finally, it can be stated that the understanding of religiosity sheds light on knowledge about donations practices, and that this study also makes an important contribution to academia, as it is the first study conducted in Portugal that assesses the drivers of donations practices.

Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Participants' perceptions on the role of facilitators using Group Decision Support Systems

The impact of facilitation upon group meetings has been a topic of research and debate for over 40 years. However, with the emergence and increasing usage of Group Decision Support Systems (GDSS), the role of facilitators is once more being addressed. Facilitators aim to substantially increase the effectiveness of group working, making meetings more productive and efficient through the management of both content and process. However, while the benefit that facilitators can bring is acknowledged, developing the necessary skills and techniques is more problematic. There are few manuals for would-be faciliators to draw upon, and much of their ability is acquired through experience. This article therefore attempts to increase the knowledge available and to provide facilitators with some practical suggestions. The research focuses on a series of interviews with group members (participants) who had used a particular GDSS—Strategic Options Development and Analysis (SODA)—for organizational decision making. From the analysis of the interviews, a number of reoccurring issues were identified which are presented as a set of learning points. These cover not only the workshop/meeting itself, but also the pre-workshop and post-workshop stages. The article also reflects on the impact which these identified learning points have on design and future GDSS development.     

China’s direct investment in the European Union: challenges and policy responses

The dramatic rise of Chinese direct investment into the European Union (EU) has sparked a debate about the control that China may be seeking to take over European economies. Quite naturally, these concerns have led to repeated calls that action be taken to slow down, if not to halt entirely, this growing trend. The objective of the article is to shed light on this debate. Following a thorough analysis of Chinese direct investment in the EU, this article suggests that the challenges posed by these inflows are widely overblown. Despite this, the article concludes that it is necessary to have a systematic approach to regulating inbound foreign investment (including from China) in the EU. Such an approach may help guard against the risk of a protectionist drift inside the EU, as well as the possibility that some investors may one day pose a threat to national security. This article concludes that although the current fragmented regulatory approach is unsatisfactory, because of the difficulties associated with a unified EU-wide review process, the most realistic option is to promote a more systematic and coordinated use of existing mechanisms such as competition policy. Also, pushing for the negotiation of a China–EU BIT is certainly a promising avenue to enhance the EU’s bargaining leverage based on the principle of positive reciprocity.     

Monopolistic competition and income dispersion

We develop a model of monopolistic competition that accounts for consumers’ heterogeneity in both incomes and preferences. This model makes it possible to study the implications of income redistribution on the toughness of competition. We show how the market outcome depends on the joint distribution of consumers’ tastes and incomes and obtain a closed-form solution for a symmetric equilibrium. Competition toughness is measured by the weighted average elasticity of substitution. Income redistribution generically affects the market outcome, even when incomes are redistributed across consumers with different tastes in a way such that the overall income distribution remains the same.     

Climate Change,Heterogeneities, and Stability of International Fiscal Harmonization

This paper analyzes the instability introduced into multilateral agreements by two types of heterogeneity: heterogeneity of countries (size and number of producing members) and heterogeneity of lobbies (asymmetric influence at the national versus the international level). The work extends theoretical prospective analyses on environmental taxation, as illustrated by the harmonization of fuel taxes. We show that the acceptability of the tax set at the multilateral level depends on the type of coalitions that participate in the multilateral negotiation (size and number of producing countries) and the asymmetry in the local (state-level) power of lobbies during negotiations.     

Service quality,scale economies and ownership: an econometric analysis of water supply costs

Issues related to service quality are crucial for water utility management and regulation. Omitting these aspects, especially when they are treated as exogenous, can lead to large biases in estimating cost functions as well as to misleading information concerning technology. In this article, we integrate the output multi-dimension in the cost function, considering delivered water volume and service quality as being endogenous. Network-related scale measures and private versus public ownership are investigated with the objective of evaluating how endogenous quality may affect their impact on costs. A translog cost model is estimated from a dataset of US water utilities. It is shown that including the quality level of the delivered services has a significant impact on scale economies and ownership effects. Significant economies of scope confirm the existence of trade-offs between water production and service quality.     

Do young firms owned by recent immigrants outperform other young firms?

This study compares the performance of new businesses owned by recent immigrants with that of other new firms. It addresses an on-going unresolved discussion in the academic and professional literatures by drawing on a large sample of Canadian business owners whose firms began trading between 2000 and 2004 and using taxation data to track 2004 to 2008 performance. The results provide empirical evidence that young immigrant-owned exporter firms outperformed young domestically-founded firms whether or not they exported; however, immigrant-owned young enterprises that did not export underperformed other young firms. Owner-level factors such as gender, growth intentions and experience also influenced growth performance among young SMEs. The results provide evidence that suggests that immigrants have resources such as access to international networks that provide competitive advantage over non-immigrant owners that export or aspire to export. Not all immigrant business owners, however, are able to lever such advantages. The implications of the findings for research and policy are discussed.     

Verti-zontal differentiation in export markets

Many trade models of monopolistic competition identify cost efficiency as the main determinant of firm performance in export markets. To date, the analysis of demand factors has received much less attention. We propose a new model where consumer preferences are asymmetric across varieties and heterogeneous across countries. The model generates new predictions and allows for an identification of horizontal differentiation (taste) clearly distinguished from vertical differentiation (quality). Data patterns observed in Belgian firm–product level exports by destination are congruent with the predictions and seem to warrant a richer modelling of consumer demand.     

THE REVOLUTION WITHIN: ICT AND THE SHIFTING KNOWLEDGE BASE OF THE WORLD'S LARGEST COMPANIES

This empirical article analyses the importance of information and communications technologies (ICT) in the technological diversification trend among the world's largest manufacturing firms during the 1980s and 1990s. The objective of the research is twofold: first, to emphasise the emerging differences among technologies when companies from different industries patent outside their traditional technological capabilities; secondly, to investigate whether the tendency among large companies from all industries to patent in ICT is distinctive when compared with the tendency to patent in other technologies. We find that technological diversification in large companies has clearly occurred in ICTs. Non-ICT specialist industries increasingly develop, rather than just utilise, the cluster of ICT-related technologies. We conclude that the development of corporate capabilities in the key technologies of the emerging ICT paradigm is more widespread than previously emphasised in the literature. One implication of this observation is that technological diversification and the information revolution may be related phenomena.