Resources prospectively: How actors mobilize resources in business settings

Actors work with resources in putting their business plans into practice, some of which are close-at-hand and some at arm's length to that business. Furthermore, actors can transform and translate resources in more or less complex ways in bringing them into the realm of a business activity, for instance through a single transactional market exchange or a series of social exchanges, the economic dimensions of which are very much in the background. The IMP group's framings of resources in the Actors, Resources and Activities (ARA) approach and in the Resource Interaction approach form this paper's conceptual focus. The paper examines three cases of actors mobilizing resources and emphasizes: (1) The prospective or future-oriented quality of resources, in connection with actors' business plans and activities; (2) The distinct rules, customs and practices in settings that individuals recognize to be more or less economic and more or less social; and (3) The roles and identities of individuals alongside their business units.     

Deutschlands Exportüberschuss auf dem Weg zu neuen Höchstständen — eine Projektion bis 2017

The economic and fi nancial crisis in 2009 triggered a stronger collapse in German exports compared to imports, with the high external surplus falling considerably. By now, global trade has recovered. The authors have calculated trends in German foreign trade, using a gravitation model. Based on IMF forecasts of global economic performance, the projections show that Germany’s export surplus looks set to reach new highs in the medium term.     

Modeling defaults of companies in multi-stage supply chain networks

The interest in supply chain networks and their analysis as complex systems is rapidly growing. The physical approach to the topic draws on the concept of heterogenous interacting agents. The interaction among agents is considered as a repeated process of orders and production. The dynamics of production in the supply chain network which we observe is nonlinear due to the random failures in processes of orders and production. We introduce an agent-based model of a supply chain network which represents in more detail the real economic environment in which firms operate. We focus on the influence of local processes on the global economic behavior of the system and study how the proposed modifications change the general properties of the model. We observe collective bankruptcies of firms, which lead to self-emerging network structures. Our results give insight into the dynamics of default processes in supply chain networks, which have important implications both for risk managers and policy makers. Based on the simulations we show that agent-based modeling is a powerful tool for optimization of supply chain networks.     

Measuring customer experience in service: A systematic review

The aim of this systematic review is to identify how customer experience in the service sector has been measured in relevant publications in the marketing field. A sample of 33 papers was collected from two electronic databases—the Web of Science (Thomson Reuters) and Scopus (Elsevier)—covering a large number of publications. After analyzing the articles and reviewing the customer experience literature, the following are our main contributions: (i) clarification of the concepts that appear in the literature review of customer experience in the service sector; (ii) classification of the variables, scales, and constructs related to customer experience in service; (iii) demonstration of the service experience as the preponderant construct that is used to measure customer experience in service; and (iv) proposal of a new dimension—the concept of ‘pre-experience’—to measure customer experience in service. These contributions can provide a more solid basis for measuring customer experience in service.     

An assessment of the psychometric properties of the Perceived Stress Scale-10 (PSS10) with a U.S. public accounting sample

Utilizing a convenience sample of 305 professional staff from seven public accounting firms, this study examined: a) the factor structure of the Perceived Stress Scale-10 (PSS10; Cohen & Williamson, 1988); b) the invariance of its factor structure; c) the scale's reliability; and, d) its convergent and divergent validity. Our analyses support a structure with two primary factors, (General Distress and Ability-to-Cope), which load on a single second order factor, Perceived Stress, regardless of gender. Spearman–Brown reliability coefficients, item-total correlations, and coefficient alphas each supported the reliability of the items loading on the full scale as well as on each of the two primary factors. Collectively, these findings provide compelling evidence in support of the PSS10 as a perceived stress measure for accounting professionals. However, more research is warranted to investigate the efficacy of a reduced six-item version of the instrument.     

DISCRETE CHOICE AND RATIONAL INATTENTION: A GENERAL EQUIVALENCE RESULT

This article establishes a general equivalence between discrete choice and rational inattention models. Matějka and McKay (2015) showed that when information costs are modeled using the Shannon entropy, the choice probabilities in the rational inattention (RI) model take the multinomial logit form. We show that, for one given prior over states, RI choice probabilities may take the form of any additive random utility discrete choice model (ARUM) when the information cost is a Bregman information, a class defined in this article. The prior information of the rationally inattentive agent is summarized in a constant vector of utilities in the corresponding ARUM.     

Phase transition in the S&P stock market

We analyze the returns of stocks contained in the Standard & Poor’s 500 index from 1987 until 2011. We use covariance matrices of the firms’ returns determined in a time windows of several years. We find that the eigenvector belonging to the leading eigenvalue (the market) exhibits a phase transition. The market is in an ordered state from 1995 to 2005 and in a disordered state after 2005. We can relate this transition to an order parameter derived from the stocks’ beta and the trading volume. This order parameter can also be interpreted within an agent-based model.