Intraurban residential mobility: The role of transactions costs, market imperfections, and household disequilibrium

This paper presents a model of household residential search and mobility that focuses on microeconomic elements of household behavior and incorporates housing market features. The model is cast explicitly in terms of a rigorous model of housing demand, allowing the benefits from moving to be measured as the compensating income variation of the potential change in consumption. The empirical results indicate that large changes in economic variables, such as income and prices produce only small potential gains from moving and that a major factor in the moving decision is the magnitude of search and moving costs.     

Functional equivalence in cross-cultural consumer behavior: Gift giving in Japan and the United States

The functional equivalence of products and consumer activities across cultures is a largely unexplored area. Yet, the lack of functional equivalence that exists may suggest the need for modification of some concepts and theories of consumer behavior. The study reported in this paper explores the functional equivalence that exists between U.S. and Japanese consumers in an important consumer activity—gift giving. The results suggest a lack of functional equivalence of this activity and illustrate how researchers should give explicit consideration to this issue in the development and testing of consumer concepts and models.     

Guest editorial

In the corporate world, leadership development programs are standard fare. Such programs often include well‐defined competencies and performance metrics, as well as regularly scheduled feedback and mentoring sessions, especially for those employees designated “high potential” performers. Not so in the public sphere. There are no defined career paths or standardized training curricula for heads of state. There are, however, requisite competencies for effective public sector leadership. As Gardner (1990) observed, “Leadership is not a mysterious activity. It is possible to describe the tasks that leaders perform....[But] we have barely scratched the surface in our efforts toward leadership development” (p. xix). The learning curve is steep for a newly elected leader, and fraught with potential landmines. Speaking with the candor of someone no longer seeking public office, former UK Prime Minister Tony Blair said recently, “When I came to office, prime minister was the only job I'd ever held; I'd never been a government minister before....The business of running a government is like anything else: You get better the longer you do it. And there are lessons out there that, had they come to me in an identifiable form, would have been useful to know” (talk given on December 16, 2010b). Both Gardner and Blair are emphatic that leadership is not something one is born with but something learned over time. And as Blair (2010a) put it, “Government is a race between expectations and capability.” In the essays that follow, several leadership coaches discuss the unique challenges and effective approaches they are using to help government leaders build the competencies that will enable them to govern effectively—and win that race between their constituents's expectations and their own capabilities.     

Internetization as the necessary condition for internationalization in the newly emerging economy

The internationalization of entrepreneurship is becoming increasingly facilitated through the use of the internet. This article introduces the term “internetization” to refer to the process of increasing adoption, diffusion, and deployment of internet-based technologies and processes that increasingly serve as the back bone of internationalization, especially in the innovative entrepreneurial firms. This process may be compared to the firm’s adoption and use of the internet and the internet-based processes in transforming the firm to a hybrid network internally and externally within the firm’s home and international markets, especially when the members of its external network have already internationalized. Internationalization of the firm, which has been much studied in the international business literature may provide a parallel analogy for study of internetization. Based on these analogies and within the context of previous literature in internationalization, a brief examination of a typical rapidly-internationalizing firm through the use of the Internet, and the user-generated provisions of Web 2.0 in particular, points to the impact of internetization on internationalization. Various theoretical and research issues are highlighted and discussed, including the important interactions that exist between the processes of internetization and internationalization. Conclusion suggests that internetization may have become the necessary condition for internationalization. The paper calls upon the IE scholars to respond to the theoretical challenge of integrating internetization processes into internationalization, especially for the smaller, entrepreneurial and innovative firms.     

Service recommendations and customer evaluations in the international marketplace: Cultural and situational contingencies

As the international service market continues its phenomenal growth, understanding the nature of effective interpersonal interactions between service providers and their customers is increasingly important. However, cross-national theory and research on this topic remain limited. In response, the following study employs data from China and the United States to test whether the cultural congruency of benefits emphasized by the service provider interacts with the customer's value orientation and/or consumption objective to affect evaluations of service quality. Results indicate that the cultural congruency of provider recommendations affects evaluations. Preliminary evidence also suggests that this effect is moderated by consumption objective.     

Exploring the relationships among liminal transitions,symbolic consumption,and the extended self

Integrating Belk's (1988) notion of the “extended self” with van Gennep's (1960) framework of “liminal transitions,” a model of symbolic consumption activities and psychological phenomena that occur during major life transitions is developed. In an initial investigation, the transition from high school to college is used to explore the nature of the liminal experience, the role that symbolic consumption assumes in the process, and the effects of both on consumers' psychological states. The results suggest that certain negative psychological consequences are indicative of existence in a liminal state. Further, consumers in transition appear to rely on possessions that symbolize the past, as well as those that represent the new role, to help facilitate a major life transition. Directions for future research are offered. © 1997 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.     

Approximate equilibria in microeconomic rational expectations models

For general equilibrium models in which prices transmit information among asymmetrically informed traders, strict rational expectations approximate equilibria are defined. A state-dependent price function is an ε-equilibrium if, when agents use their own information and that conveyed by prices, aggregate excess demand (in each state of the world) does not exceed ε. For any positive ε, existence requires only very mild assumptions—continuity and compact support. Moreover, there are revealing ε-equilibria for all smooth economies satisfying a dimensionality condition. In an open neighborhood of this case, existence of maximally revealing ε-equilibria holds.