Adding business value: a strategy for identifying and patenting environment‐related inventions and avoiding patent infringement

For many environmental companies, reaching financial goals is a function of identifying and protecting intellectual property assets, keeping those assets from falling into the hands of competitors and avoiding litigation disputes over the use of those assets. Recognizing that intellectual assets are valuable tangible and intangible assets of a company is the first step in maximizing the value of those assets. However, many environmental companies are not aware that some of their technologies, ideas, concepts and know‐how are potentially patentable and, therefore, fail to maximize the value of those assets by taking advantage of the limited monopolies that patent systems provide to the owners of patents. In the ever‐increasing competitive global market, companies should evaluate their intellectual assets to ensure they are adequately protecting those assets by obtaining patents for ideas that are patentable. As more patents for environmental technologies issue from patent offices around the world, however, the likelihood of infringing one of those patents can increase. Therefore, avoiding infringing others' patents while at the same time identifying and patenting the company's own technologies should be a key business strategy regardless of the size of the environmental company. Copyright © 2003 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. and ERP Environment     

Exchange rate regime verification: An alternative method of testing for regime changes

This work proposes a change in persistence test for identifying de facto exchange rate regime changes. The results from 25 African countries show that this approach is able to identify some regime changes not captured by existing methods.     

Editor��s note

Editorial

Editor’s note     

Toward a “theoretical toolbox” for sustainability research in marketing

This paper provides a foundation for future marketing research on sustainability through the application of nine prominent organizational theories. Specifically, we consider the implications for sustainability offered by transaction cost economics, agency theory, institutional theory, population ecology, resource dependence theory, the resource-based view of the firm, upper echelons theory, social network theory, and signaling theory. We consider how each theory can help researchers to better understand the ways that firms engage in sustainable marketing and business practices, and we develop insights that emerge from simultaneous examination of complementary or competing theoretical perspectives.     

The interaction between corporate tax structure and disclosure policy

When socially desirable behaviors are deemed difficult to legislate, tax code is often called upon to indirectly achieve the desired ends. Adjustments to tax policy have been employed to spark investment, encourage charitable donations, and discourage tobacco consumption, to name a few examples. This paper demonstrates that tax policy may also be an effective means of encouraging welfare enhancing disclosures by firms. Further, by inducing disclosures of the right types of information while discouraging revelation of other types, tax policy proves to be a more versatile instrument than direct regulatory attempts which can mandate (but not prohibit) disclosures. The intuition behind our results is that when firms make decisions to disclose (or withhold) pieces of private information, such a decision is often made with an eye on the potential for a large payoff. In such cases, progressive taxes can dampen the appeal of big payoffs and better align the incentives of firms with those of consumers. In short, while progressive taxes may be criticized for curbing aggressiveness, it is precisely such a decrease in aggressiveness that can prompt efficient sharing of information.     

Dimensions of CEO–Board Relations

Interactions between CEOs and their boards of directors are a prominent focus of management and strategy research. Despite the extensive literature on CEO–board relations, to date there has been limited integration of theoretical perspectives and measurement schemes. Through an extensive analysis of published studies, we hope to facilitate future research on CEO–board relations. We begin with a comparison of key theoretical approaches. Next, we conduct a content analysis of 51 empirical articles. We find that prior studies have an unbalanced focus regarding both topics and theoretical perspectives, and that there is limited consistency in the choice of measures. Based on this review, we lay out a number of promising directions for future research. We also find that, while there has been progress in international research on CEO–board relations, there are still many unanswered questions regarding the generalizability of governance theories across different geographic settings.     

Narcissism in organizational contexts

The literature on narcissism in organizational contexts is reviewed. We begin by describing the context of narcissism and several relevant theoretical approaches to understanding it. We next describe research on narcissism in a range of organizational topics, from leadership to meta-organizational issues. We conclude by highlighting several reoccurring themes involving the role of narcissism in organizational contexts, with an emphasis on articulating directions for future research.     

Exchange-rate volatility and industry trade between the U.S. and Malaysia

Previous research that investigated the impact of exchange rate volatility on the trade flows of Malaysia concentrated only on the aggregate exports of Malaysia to the rest of the world. In this paper we first concentrate on the trade flows between Malaysia and the U.S. After showing that exchange rate volatility has neither short-run nor long-run effect on the trade flows between the two countries, we disaggregate the trade data by industry and consider the experience of 101 U.S. exporting industries to Malaysia and 17 U.S. importing industries from Malaysia. While exchange rate volatility seems to have significant short-run effects on the trade flows of most industries, short-run effects translate into the long run only in a limited number of small industries.