Understanding the role of marketing-purchasing collaboration in industrial markets: The case of Russia

This study aims to investigate the role of interfunctional collaboration between marketing and purchasing functions in industrial companies. Interfunctional collaboration is considered as a measure of the internal alignment and partnership between departments in the firm, which in turn contributes to the creation of sustainable advantages via improved external partnerships and facilitating demand chain integration. We test the impact of customer orientation as well as the interactions between departments (specifically marketing and purchasing) as collaboration antecedents, and analyze the direct impact of marketing-purchasing collaboration on business performance. The model is tested on a sample of 148 industrial companies in Russia with two key respondents in each firm, incorporating the purchasing as well as the marketing perspective. The results show that marketing-purchasing collaboration mediates the effects of interfunctional interaction as well as customer orientation on business performance. Alternative model testing shows that the direct effects of these antecedent constructs on performance are non-significant in the context of Russian industrial companies.     

Rationalizing the International Coffee Agreement virtually

From 1963 to 1989, the International Coffee Agreement controlled world trade in coffee. Like an export cartel, the organization included coffee exporters and importers as members. This paper seeks to understand the behavior of the ICA by treating it as an optimizing entity, which from social choice theory we know to be inherently troublesome. A social choice rule is specified for the ICA that is virtually implementable in Nash equilibrium. The empirical results provide arationalizing argument for the ICA, in the sense that if it sought to maximize the specified criterion function, we would expect it to behave precisely as it did behave.     

Assessing the contribution of public capital to private production: Evidence from the German manufacturing sector

Using time-series cross-section data from the manufacturing sector of the 11 West German 'Bundesländer' (Federal States) from 1970 to 1996, I examine the impact of public capital on private production. My econometric analysis explicitly takes into account four of the most frequent specification issues in the context of time-series crosssection data analysis: serial correlation, groupwise heteroscedasticity, cross-sectional correlation and non-stationarity of data. For all approaches and tested specifications, I find that public capital is a significant input for production in the manufacturing sector. Moreover, I find that differences in public capital endowment can explain long-term differences in productivity across the Bundesländer. One tentative conclusion that can be drawn from this finding is that differences in public capital endowment might also explain a part of the still-existing productivity gap between manufacturing in East and West Germany. However, I emphasise that the existence of positive effects of public capital on private production is a necessary, but not a sufficient condition for concluding that public investments should be boosted in the future.     

Social entrepreneurship: towards conceptualisation

The marketing in strategy dialogue and the emerging marketing/entrepreneurship interface paradigm stress the need for marketers to research entrepreneurship. Social entrepreneur‐ship, the entrepreneurship leading to the establishment of new social enterprises and the continued innovation in existing ones, is much discussed but little understood and given the increasing importance of such organisations should be addressed. This paper conceptualises social entrepreneurship as a multidimensional construct involving the expression of entrepreneurially virtuous behaviour to achieve the social mission, a coherent unity of purpose and action in the face of moral complexity, the ability to recognise social value‐creating opportunities and key decision‐making characteristics of innovativeness, proactiveness and risk‐taking. The paper discusses implications for policy and practice and concludes with a consideration of theoretical issues and directions for future research. Copyright © 2003 Henry Stewart Publications     

Factors Influencing NCQA Accreditation Decisions of HMOs

This paper describes how National Committee for Quality Assurance (NCQA) accreditation of a managed care plan can be used as a signal of plan quality. A model is then developed examining the factors affecting the probability that a plan will be accredited. Larger and older plans are more likely to be accredited. For-profit plans are also more likely to be accredited. Competition in the marketplace from other accredited plans increases the probability of a plan being accredited. The results indicate that plans that have lower costs of accrediting as proxied by size and age are more likely to be accredited.