AN EXAMINATION OF EXPLANATION TYPOLOGY ON PERCEIVED INFORMATIONAL FAIRNESS IN THE CONTEXT OF AIR TRAVEL

Given humans' need to understand why things go wrong, “offering an explanation” is a type of service recovery effort that can be essential in the recovery process. Despite the importance of service failure explanations to academics and practitioners, research on this topic is scant. To bridge that gap, this study investigates the impact of various types of failure explanations on customer perceptions of informational fairness in the context of air travel. The results show that the type of explanation and the severity of the failure both result in different levels of perceived informational fairness. Moreover, different levels of perceived informational fairness can influence customer satisfaction through reduced attribution of responsibility for the failure to the service provider.     

The Organizational Implementation of Corporate Citizenship: An Assessment Tool and its Application at UN Global Compact Participants

The corporate citizenship (CC) concept introduced by Dirk Matten and Andrew Crane has been well received. To this date, however, empirical studies based on this concept are lacking. In this article, we flesh out and operationalize the CC concept and develop an assessment tool for CC. Our tool focuses on the organizational level and assesses the embeddedness of CC in organizational structures and procedures. To illustrate the applicability of the tool, we assess five Swiss companies (ABB, Credit Suisse, Nestlé, Novartis, and UBS). These five companies are participants of the UN Global Compact (UNGC), currently the largest collaborative strategic policy initiative for business in the world (www.unglobalcompact.org). This study makes four main contributions: (1) it enriches and operationalizes Matten and Crane’s CC definition to build a concept of CC that can be operationalized, (2) it develops an analytical tool to assess the organizational embeddedness of CC, (3) it generates empirical insights into how five multinational corporations have approached CC, and (4) it presents assessment results that provide indications how global governance initiatives like the UNGC can support the implementation of CC.     

Do innovation spillovers impact employment and skill upgrading?

So far, the research on impact of innovation on employment and skills focused on effects within firms and sectors. Little attention was paid to the influence of interlinkages between sectors as a source of employment change. The main contribution of this paper to the field refers to broadening the analysis of innovation impacts to innovation spillovers from vertically linked sectors on firms' employment and skill change in user industries. The empirical analysis conclusively demonstrates an important role of innovation spillovers in the economy. Firms' employment growth is shown to benefit significantly from spillovers of product innovations in manufacturing and knowledge-intensive services. Similarly, firms that are subject to increased spillovers of product innovations as well as marketing and organisational innovations are more likely to upgrade their skill composition. Conversely, employment growth and skill composition of firms seem to be negatively affected by spillovers of process innovations in vertically linked sectors.     

Internet advertising effectiveness

Online advertising has experienced phenomenal growth since its inception in 1994. This empirical study investigates the impact of seven creative characteristics of banner ads on the effectiveness of online advertising using a multiple regression model. A random sample of 209 banner ads was drawn from a sampling frame of advertisers, provided by an advertising agency specialising in internet advertising for the gaming industry. The findings of this study are broadly consistent with past research into online advertising efficiency, indicating that the creative characteristics of effective banner ads in the online gaming arena include: a larger size, absence of promotional incentives and the presence of information about casino games. In contrast, banner features such as animation, action phrase and presence of company brand or logo were ineffective in generating clickthroughs. Contrary to expectations, long messages on banners were associated with higher click-through rates.     

Framing biomimetics in a strategic orientation perspective (biopreneuring)

This paper discusses how design originally rooted in biology can be translated into applications outside its original domain (biomimetics), and thus become strategically important for commercial organisations. This paper will also discuss how concepts from organisation and management theory can help conceptualise opportunity exploration and exploitation of bio-inspired designs to commercial applications (biopreneuring). Until now, research on biomimetics has primarily focused on translating design from biology to technology, leaving the application of biomimetics for business purposes somewhat overlooked. This paper fills some of that void. Business orientation literature is applied to identify some of the key strategic aspects associated with commercial translations. In closing, this paper briefly sketches out some key implications for business research and for affected decision-makers.     

A comparative analysis of funding schemes for public infrastructure spending in Quebec

The economic literature has been investigating the positive relation between public infrastructure spending and the productivity of the private sector since Munnell (1992). We have introduced this relationship into a recursive dynamic computable general equilibrium model of the Quebec economy to investigate various funding schemes to scale up infrastructure spending in the province. We draw our assumptions from Estache et al. (2010) combined with sectoral elasticity parameters. We conduct a comparative analysis where the funding comes from debt alone, and debt with sales tax, income tax and business tax. Our main finding is that the income tax seems to produce the most positive effects and the businesses tax the most negative effects, though differences are small.     

The size and scope of government in the US states: does party ideology matter?

We investigate empirically how party ideology influences size and scope of government as measured by the size of government, tax structure and labor market regulation. Our dataset comprises 49 US states over the 1993–2009 period. We employ the new data on the ideological mapping of US legislatures by Shor and McCarty (Am. Polit. Sci. Rev. 105(3):530–551, 2011) that considers spatial and temporal differences in Democratic and Republican Party ideology. We distinguish between three types of divided government: overall divided government, proposal division and approval division. The main result suggests that Republican governors have been more active in deregulating labor markets. We find that ideology-induced policies were counteracted under overall divided government and proposal division.     

The evolution of death rates and life expectancy in Denmark

From 1835 to date Denmark has experienced an increase in life expectancy at birth of about 40 years for both sexes. Over the course of the last 170 years, life expectancy at birth has increased from 40 to 80 years for women and from 36 to 76 years for men, and it continues to rise. Using a new methodology, we show that about half of the total historic increase can be attributed to the sharp decline in infant and young age death rates up to 1950. However, life expectancy gains from 1950 to date can be primarily attributed to improvements in the age-specific death rates for the age group from 50 to 80, although there is also a noticeable contribution from the further decline in infant mortality over this period. With age-specific death rates up to age 60 now at a very low absolute level, substantial future life expectancy improvements must necessarily arise from improvements in age-specific death rates for ages 60 and above. Using the developed methodology, we quantify the impact of further reductions in age-specific mortality. Despite being one of countries with the highest life expectancy at the beginning of the 20th century, and despite the spectacular historic increase in life expectancy since then, Denmark is, in fact, lagging behind compared to many other countries, notably the other Nordic countries. The main reason is an alarming excess mortality for cause-specific death rates related to ischaemic heart diseases and, in particular, a number of cancer diseases. Age-specific death rates continue to improve in most countries, and a likely scenario is that in the future Denmark will experience improvement rates at the international level or perhaps even higher as a result of a catch-up effect.