Business Crisis and Management Fashion: Korean Companies,Restructuring and Consulting Advice

The concept of management fashion has become increasingly common in studies of management knowledge diffusion, although rarely applied outside of Western economic settings. In this article we examine the activities of one group of management fashion setters, global management consultancies, and their role in the restructuring of Korean industry following the 1997 economic crisis. We find that large Korean companies made significant use of Western consultancies in the aftermath of the 1997 crisis. However, while the engagement of Western management experts provided an impression of reform, the adoption of consultant-directed change has been variable and consultants faced considerable client resistance to the adoption of new practice. The article explores the reasons underlying the limited embrace of Western consulting expertise in Korea and highlights the implications of the Korean case for management fashion theory.     

Royalties vs. upfront lump-sum fees in data communication environments

Mobile communications markets worldwide, today, are saturated, the number of mobile network operators (MNOs) in market is declining, mobile revenues are stagnant or falling, MNOs are becoming wireless Internet service providers, and economies of scope are strengthening. This paper challenges existing dominant views on spectrum assignment and license fee payments, estimates spectrum fees that MNOs would have paid under royalties and then compares them with upfront lump-sum fees actually paid by 3G licensees. This paper further proposes that governments need to consider assigning additional spectrum to incumbents as needs arise without using auctions and adopting royalties as a way of collecting spectrum fees should they collect them.     

Spatial heterogeneity of country-of-origin effects within a country: analysis of online review ratings in the US car market

We investigate spatial heterogeneity of country-of-origin effects (COEs) within a country and its determinants. Drawing on the literature of COEs and information economics, we maintain that COEs are heterogeneous across regions within a country, which bears important implications to better understand subnational heterogeneity of consumer preferences. We employ a geographically weighted regression model, a spatial analysis to estimate varying COEs across regions in the USA, and analyze online review ratings of US and foreign car bands in the US market during the 2008–2014 period. The results show that (1) COEs of car brands from Germany, Japan, Korea, and the UK are heterogeneous across regions in the USA; (2) geographic distance from the country-of-origin exerts negative influences on COEs; and (3) the proportion of population born in the country-of-origin positively influences COEs.     

Price bundling presentation and consumer's bundle choice: The role of quality certainty

As bundling has become a prevalent marketing strategy, the existing literature has focused on how to present price discount information for bundled products. To further understand bundling in restaurant operations, this study examined the moderating role of consumer quality certainty on the relationship between the effects of price bundling and consumers’ bundle choices. This study analyzed different bundling phenomena from an acquisition–transaction utility theory perspective in order to investigate the effects of price presentation and quality certainty manipulation on consumers’ bundle choices. Hierarchical regression analyses showed that quality certainty had a significant moderating effect. The less confident a consumer is about the quality of the bundled food products, the more likely it is that price presentation strategies will affect his or her willingness to order a bundle menu. The results also showed that transaction utility becomes significant as price discount information is segregated and as consumers are more certain of the quality of the bundled products. Managerial implications for restaurant operations are also discussed.     

Monopoly capital and capitalist inefficiency

This paper examines the arguments and assertions of Baran’s and Sweezy’s Monopoly Capital: An Essay on the American Economic and Social Order (1966) by assessing the degree of economic efficiency or inefficiency in how surplus value and economic surplus were created by 16 major capitalist economies during the 2000s using data envelopment analysis (DEA). After assigning a score to the degree of economic efficiency/inefficiency for each country, one can then assess which factors influence the degree of efficiency/inefficiency. This paper finds empirical support for many of the arguments put forth by the authors, Baran and Sweezy, as well as others regarding the inefficiency of the use of some forms of economic activity to help absorb economic surplus and to create surplus value.     

The structure of production in South Korea's manufacturing sector

This paper estimates a model of producer behavior for South Korean manufacturing that simultaneously identifies substitution elasticities and scale economies. A non-homothetic translog function is employed which takes on various other functional forms (i.e., Cobb–Douglas, Homothetic, Homogeneous) as special or limiting cases. Four significant conclusions are: (a) there is potential scale economies in each subsector of South Korean manufacturing, (b) the substitutabilities between factor inputs are relatively low, (c) factor demands are price elastic, (d) the scale economies are correlated with the factor intensity.     

Asymmetric sensitivity of executive bonus compensation to earnings and the effect of regulatory changes

Review of Quantitative Finance and Accounting - In this paper we examine the sensitivity of CEO bonus to earnings in the cases of good news and bad news, and compare these relationships in the...