The Impact of Early Childhood Nutritional Status on Cognitive Development: Does the Timing of Malnutrition Matter?

This article uses longitudinal data from the Philippines toexamine whether the timing of malnutrition in early childhoodis a critical factor in determining subsequent cognitive development.Although some observers have argued that the first six monthsof life are the most critical in the sense that malnutritionduring that time period harms cognitive development more thanmalnutrition later in life, analysis of the Philippines datadoes not support this claim. To the contrary, the data suggestthat malnutrition in the second year of life may have a largernegative impact than malnutrition in the first year of life.     

Lateral influences and vertical authority in organizational buying

Eight hypotheses are developed to guide research on the prediction of two structural dimensions of organizational buying behavior. The structural dimensions examined are: (1) the extent of lateral influence on buying decisions; and (2) the distribution of vertical authority for buying decisions. Predictor variables include organizational size, environmental diversity, environmental uncertainty, and the scope, complexity, and newness of the purchases themselves. Some implications of the hypotheses for industrial marketing management are also developed.     

Teaching the Implicit Assumptions Underlying Firm Behavior in the Neoclassical Model

The neoclassical model imposes narrow assumptions on firm behavior and in the process hides implicit assumptions regarding the behavior of individuals. Although the firm is a complicated organization composed of many individuals, the neoclassical model simplifies its behavior to one objective—the maximization of profits. This assumption implicitly assumes that individuals within the firm subordinate their own self-interest for the firm’s benefit. A classroom activity is described which assists students in discerning whether the assumption of profit maximization fits reality.     

What's next in key account management research? Building the bridge between the academic literature and the practitioners' priorities

This research contrasts the academic literature on key account management (KAM) with the topics in this subject that are most critical to practitioners. Sixty four academic articles published in 17 journals, and ninety practitioners' articles appearing in the Velocity Magazine — published by the Strategic Account Management Association — were content analyzed and classified under ten ‘topic’ categories. Similarities and differences in the results for academics and practitioners are discussed. In addition, two specific topics were identified as being extremely important to managers but still under-researched by academics: the role of senior management in KAM, and the importance of internal alignment in determining KAM success.     

Heterogeneous ambiguity attitudes: a field experiment among small-scale stock investors in China

We conducted quasi-field experiments in Chinese brokerage houses to investigate how investors react to ambiguity relative to quantifiable risks and the degree of heterogeneity in these reactions. Our experiment consists of three sections; a background survey; individual self-reports of emotional states; and a series of individual portfolio choice questions involving ambiguous assets and assets with a known probability of success. We calculate an index of ambiguity aversion that controls for risk aversion through a series of simple choices and demonstrate its outside validity. We find a significant degree of heterogeneity in ambiguity attitudes and discuss some demographic or emotional factors that might contribute to this heterogeneity. We also discuss the correlation between ambiguity attitudes and risk attitudes. By conducting these experiments in China, we were able to measure the degree of ambiguity aversion among a sample of experienced and accessible investors who face ambiguous decisions on a daily basis.     

Digging deeper or piling it higher? Implicit measurement in organizational behavior and human resource management

Organizational researchers can dig deeper into peoples' thoughts, attitudes, and self-concepts to understand how automatic processes may impact judgment and social behavior in organizations. Measures of these automatic processes, including the Implicit Association Test (e.g., IAT; Greenwald, McGhee, & Schwartz, 1998), Semantic Priming (e.g., SP; Wittenbrink, Judd, & Park, 1997), Affect Misattribution Procedure (e.g., AMP; Payne, Cheng, Govorun, & Stewart, 2005), Word Completion Tasks (e.g., WCT; Johnson & Saboe, 2011), among many others, deserve greater attention as alternatives or supplements to traditional self-report measures of variables important in organizations (e.g., job satisfaction, personality and trait measurement, diversity attitudes). In this paper, we first provide a primer on implicit social cognition and its relationship to automatic and controlled cognitive processes, discussing major types of implicit measures, how these might operate, criticisms of this approach, and how these implicit constructs may give rise to behavior in organizations. Second, we discuss models of automatic processes and explore their validity and how these may predict behavior. Third, we offer advice for selecting, constructing, and improving implicit measurements when used in organizational research to enhance human resources and organizational functioning.     

The limits of the wage impact of discrimination

In spite of almost 40 years of active enforcement efforts by the EEOC, as well as the strong intervention by the plaintiff bar, the most popular benchmark by which we measure the influence of prejudice on wages paid to female and minority workers has changed very little. This paper maintains that to a large extent this seeming immunity of discriminatory wage gaps to the legal remedies provided by Title VII results from the mismeasurement of those effects. An alternative to the standard Oaxaca decomposition of the wage gap is offered which allows us to put plausible ranges around the true impact of antidiscrimination laws. Not only does this reduce the residual impact of the discrimination that appears to withstand Title VII remedies, it also suggests that the pre‐Title VII impact of discrimination on wages accounted for little of the gap observed at the time of its passage. Copyright © 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Strategic and Business Planning Practices of Fast Growth Family Firms

Fast-growth family firms were surveyed about their business and strategic planning practices. Of the 65 fast-growth family firms surveyed, the majority prepare written formal plans. The business plans are in sufficient detail to enable the business to tie planning to actual performance and to adjust management compensation accordingly. The majority of the firms regularly share information with employees regarding comparisons between actual company performance results and goals or planned performance. Further, the majority of the firms describe their business strategy as a high quality producer strategy rather than as a low-cost or time-based strategy. Further, when bringing new products to market, these fast-growth family firms adopt a first mover or early follower strategy. Implications of these findings for growth-oriented family firms are presented.     

Discussion of “biases in multi-year management financial forecasts: Evidence from private venture-backed U.S. companies”

Armstrong, Dávila, Foster, and Hand (“ADFH”) use a proprietary venture capital database of revenue and profit projections submitted by young firms seeking financing to attempt to address a number of questions related to forecasts by managers of early stage, venture-backed, private entrepreneurial firms. The proprietary dataset together with the creative use of a “historically-grounded conditional projections” methodology are the most interesting features of ADFH’s study. However, these same aspects give rise to empirical design constraints that the study does not fully overcome. In addition, there are numerous leaps of logic required to arrive at some of ADFH’s conclusions and there are alternative explanations for ADFH’s findings that have not been entirely refuted. This leaves the reader with some doubt as to whether all of ADFH’s conclusions are fully substantiated. Nevertheless, the evidence presented makes an interesting contribution to our understanding of the forecasting behavior of young, private, rapidly growing, VCbacked firms, and provides some natural economic and methodological leads into further studies of these issues.