Determinants of Consumer’s Willingness to Purchase Gray-Market Smartphones

The study analyzes the influential factors of consumers’ willingness to purchase gray-market smartphones by considering the model of novelty seeking, status consumption, integrity, and perceived risk. Attitude toward counterfeit is used as mediation in the model. The causalities in the model of problematic willingness of consumer to purchase gray-market smartphones are hypothesized. A total sample of 350 respondents with 238 effective samples is collected by interviewing with questionnaires at the service counters of telecommunications operators. Structure equation modeling (SEM) is adopted in the analysis. Consumers’ attitude toward counterfeit goods is found to be positively related to the willingness of consumers to purchase gray-market smartphones, but perceived risk is negatively related to consumers’ willingness to purchase. As for personality constructs, integrity and status consumption are found to be negatively related to consumers’ attitude toward counterfeit goods, but novelty seeking is positively related to the attitude. Further, managerial implications for branded smartphone manufacturers and telecommunications regulators are provided by the research.     

Regulatory changes and information competition: The case of Taiwan index futures

This article examines the cross‐border competition in price discovery between the Taiwan Futures Exchange (TAIFEX) and the Singapore Exchange Derivatives Trading (SGX). We focused on the impact of market reforms on the information leadership of similar contracts traded on the two exchanges. Utilizing synchronized transaction data, it was found that reducing the futures transferring tax was the only policy change that enhanced TAIFEX's information role. Evidence supported the trading‐cost hypothesis that a lower transaction cost is associated with better price discovery. A brief linkage between trading volume and price discovery was found when data were broken down into subperiods according to the relative volume of TAIFEX and SGX. Evidence suggested that the SGX's information advantage reported in previous research had diminished as the rival market progressed. It also indicated that exchanges seeking to improve information efficiency should adopt policies that will reduce transaction costs or increase trading volume. © 2004 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Jrl Fut Mark 24:399–412, 2004     

Beyond Bank Competition and Profitability: Can Moral Hazard Tell Us More?

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the relation between competition, profitability, and risk. The investigation uses bank-level panel data from 171 Chinese banks during 1993 to 2007. Throughout the whole sample, the empirical results divulge that increased bank concentration in China improves the profitability and the risk of its banks. These results support the structure-conduct-performance and the moral hazard hypotheses. In terms of persistence, both the profit and the risk of the banks rise significantly by showing the enhancement of profit and risk from one period to the next. When different types of banks are considered, joint-stock banks have the highest persistence in profit and risk, and therefore more stable profits. City banks support the moral hazard hypothesis. They have entrenched managers that tend to take on more risk when the bank’s charter value falls in a very competitive (less concentrated) environment. Further, deregulation which in 2003 China allowed foreign banks to formally enter China has a negative impact on the structure of China’s banking sector.     

Strategy and process of value creation and appropriation in service clusters

Service-oriented networks and clusters of firms have increasingly become prevalent in recent decades. This new form of service clusters is different from the traditional industrial clusters in which the focus is primarily on costs, production, and channel distributions. We extend the research on service innovation, alliance networks, and industrial clusters to analyze the strategy and the process of value creation and appropriation in service clusters. Higher perceived customer value is created and delivered by a network of agglomerate firms dynamically engaged in value networking and service innovation. The proposed theoretical framework and innovation mechanism provide new insights for firms located in the service clusters to gain and sustain competitive advantages. It also offers a new perspective for policymakers to advance regional and global competitiveness.     

An assessment of world-wide research productivity in production and operations management

Journal publications are important to facilitate knowledge sharing among production and operations management (POM) academics and practitioners. The purpose of this study was to explore the global POM research performance based on papers published in 20 core POM journals in the past half century. The data for the study were obtained from Thomson Reuters’ Web of Science/Knowledge databases, from 1959 to 2008, when 63,776 papers were published in POM journals. The annual distribution of papers published shows a significant growth in POM research productivity over the time period 1959 to 2008. The most productive authors in these five decades were T.C. Edwin Cheng from The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hong Kong; Gilbert Laporte from HEC Montréal, Canada; S.K. Goyal from Concordia University, Canada; S. Eilon from the University of London, UK; and Oded Berman from the University of Toronto, Canada. The five most productive institutions were as follows: Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Georgia Institute of Technology, Columbia University, Purdue University, and the University of Michigan. The countries found to have the highest outputs were the USA, the UK, Canada, the Netherlands and Taiwan.     

Bed and Breakfast operators’ work and personal life balance: A cross-cultural comparison

Bed and Breakfasts (B&B) represent a unique sector in the tourism industry. This study expands on previous hospitality work and life balance studies by investigating the cultural influences on B&B operators’ work and personal lives. The results indicated that Taiwanese B&B operators, who are in the collective culture, perceive less difficulty in their balancing work and personal lives, and they receive more family and social support compared to their American counterparts, who are within an individualistic culture. Both groups experienced equally satisfactory levels of successful balance. The implications and limitations of this study are discussed, and future studies are proposed.     

Public employees’ psychological climates and turnover intention: evidence from Korean central government agencies

The psychological climate has been argued to influence employees’ work attitudes. However, despite the abundance of recent empirical studies on turnover intention, multiple psychological climate types as predictors of turnover intention have rarely been explored in the public management domain. This study used the four types of psychological climates – clan, developmental, hierarchical and rational – of the competing values framework, which is typically used to analyse organizational effectiveness. Challenging the assumption held in prior studies of linear associations between the psychological climate and turnover intention, this study examined U-shaped associations. Curvilinear associations are based on the rarely tested assumption that an overly biased psychological climate has a deleterious effect on turnover intention. The regression results corroborated a U-shaped association of clan and rational (market) climates with turnover intention but revealed a linear association for the hierarchical climate. These findings, determined using large-sampled data from Korean central government agencies, can advance the understanding of the psychological climate and turnover intention in public management.     

A Social Interactions Model with Endogenous Friendship Formation and Selectivity

This paper analyzes the endogeneity bias problem caused by associations of members within a network when the spatial autoregressive (SAR) model is used to study social interactions. When there are unobserved factors that affect both friendship decisions and economic outcomes, the spatial weight matrix (sociomatrix; adjacency matrix) in the SAR model, which represents the structure of a friendship network, might correlate with the disturbance term of the model, and consequently result in an endogenous selection problem in the outcomes. We consider this problem of selection bias with a modeling approach. In this approach, a statistical network model is adopted to explain the endogenous network formation process. By specifying unobserved components in both the network model and the SAR model, we capture the correlation between the processes of network and outcome formation, and propose a proper estimation procedure for the system. We demonstrate that the estimation of this system can be effectively done by using the Bayesian method. We provide a Monte Carlo experiment and an empirical application of this modeling approach on the friendship networks of high school students and their interactions on academic performance in the Add Health data. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Market structure, pigouvian taxation, and welfare

Using a short-run partial equilibrium model of social welfare, this paper examines the social welfare implications of changing Pigouvian taxes under three markets: perfect competition, monopoly, and Cournot oligopoly. The result for perfect competition supports the earlier finding that Pigouvian taxation increases social welfare [Buchanan, 1969]. However, in contrast to the previous result that Pigouvian taxes lower welfare under monopoly, the authors show that if the noncompetitive distortion is small, these taxes might still be useful in correcting monopoly-generated externalities and in improving social welfare. Cournot firms react to the tax depending upon their individual perceptions of the gain in post-tax marginal revenue. Policy implications of the study's results are discussed.