Data accuracy's impact on segmentation performance: Benchmarking RFM analysis,logistic regression,and decision trees

Companies greatly benefit from knowing how problems with data quality influence the performance of segmentation techniques and which techniques are more robust to these problems than others. This study investigates the influence of problems with data accuracy – an important dimension of data quality – on three prominent segmentation techniques for direct marketing: RFM (recency, frequency, and monetary value) analysis, logistic regression, and decision trees. For two real-life direct marketing data sets analyzed, the results demonstrate that (1) under optimal data accuracy, decision trees are preferred over RFM analysis and logistic regression; (2) the introduction of data accuracy problems deteriorates the performance of all three segmentation techniques; and (3) as data becomes less accurate, decision trees retain superior to logistic regression and RFM analysis. Overall, this study recommends the use of decision trees in the context of customer segmentation for direct marketing, even under the suspicion of data accuracy problems.     

Comparing employment interviews in Latin America with other countries

This study compares job interviews (n = 11,667) in Mexico with those in the following countries: Belgium, Russia, Taiwan, and the U.S. The findings support our hypotheses, which are based on a meta-cultural framework. The results reveal that in Mexico and Taiwan women are less likely to conduct interviews. In addition, interviewers asked different questions. Outside the U.S., interviewers asked applicants about their family, marital status, and children. In Russia and Taiwan, they asked about applicants' reasons for quitting their last job. In Belgium, Russia, and Taiwan, they asked about applicants' wage and salary expectations. In Belgium and Russia, they less often asked about applicants' values, opinions, and beliefs. This study suggests that in some countries employment interviews are more than a test of job-related knowledge, skills, and abilities. This report provides a taxonomy that is useful for comparing interview questions in Latin American and other countries as well as directions for future research.     

Der deutsche Stahlmarkt nach der Krise: Eine wettbewerbspolitische Untersuchung

Der deutsche Stahlmarkt unterlag in der Vergangenheit heftigen Funktionsst?rungen. Lassen sich diese St?rungen mit Hilfe des Koordinationsm?ngel-Diagnosekonzepts erkl?ren? Wie entwickeln sich das Stahlangebot und die Stahlnachfrage und wie reagiert der Stahlpreis auf Ungleichgewichte? Ist die europ?ische Stahlpolitik zukünftig in der Lage, die Funktionsf?higkeit des Stahlmarkts zu gew?hrleisten?     

The Swedish nonprofit sector in international comparison

The previous picture of the nonprofit sector in Sweden has been biased by a narrow US perspective. Mainstream nonprofit literature seems to neglect work carried out in the important but more complex tradition of the civil society. In this article, recent cross-national data reflecting both these paradigms are presented. This gives us a better picture of the Swedish sector and highlights limitations of earlier approaches, not only for our understanding of the Swedish sector but also of the sector elsewhere. To continue the quest for the raison d'être of the sector, not only are more cross-national data needed but we must also develop a multidisciplinary framework in which to understand the data.     

Legal Regime and Financial Reporting Quality

This article uses the Canadian environment, where French civil law (FCL) in the province of Quebec coexists with common law (CL) in the Rest of Canada (denoted as bijural), to test the thesis of the neutrality of the legal system with regard to financial reporting quality (FRQ). This single‐country design allows for a better control over other factors that influence FRQ. The FCL environment appears to encourage firms to publish accounting data of better quality due to the greater liability risk faced by auditors and corporate directors under that regime. These findings, based on 10 years of data and seven attributes of FRQ, are robust to different matching procedures and model specifications. This research contributes to the current debates in Canada as to whether financial market regulation under FCL and CL jurisdictions should be unified under a single CL national securities regulator. At the broader level, the results support claims that a more in‐depth understanding of the implementation of civil law and CL is needed rather than gross generalization about the two systems. These results especially call into question that CL regimes are unambiguously superior to civil law regimes in encouraging high‐quality financial reports.     

Controls,service type and perceived supplier performance in interfirm service exchanges

Control offers a critical differentiator between successful and failed interfirm service exchanges. The application of informal control to improve supplier performance has been well established, but the effect of formal control appears profoundly equivocal. This study proposes that the actual effect of formal control depends on its mode (output vs. behavior) and its relationship with the service type (mass vs. professional) and informal control. With survey data from 252 service buying organizations, the results indicate that output control interacts with service type to determine perceived supplier performance (PSP). Buyers’ reliance on high output control has a positive effect on PSP in mass service exchanges; this effect becomes negative in professional service exchanges. The effect of the interaction of behavior control and service type also depends on the presence of informal control. Buyers’ reliance on high behavior control exerts a more positive effect on PSP in professional service exchanges than in mass service exchanges, but only in the presence of informal control. These findings have key implications for both theory and practice.     

Herding Behavior in CEE Stock Markets Under Asymmetric Conditions: A Quantile Regression Analysis

This article investigates herding behavior in ten Central and East European (CEE) stock markets by using daily data on stock prices for 384 companies from January 2, 2003, to December 31, 2013. Our study is based on the methodology developed by Chang, Cheng, and Khorana [2000 Chang, Eric, Joseph Cheng, and Ajay Khorana. “An Examination of Herd Behavior in Equity Markets: An International Perspective.” Journal of Banking and Finance, 24, (2000), pp. 1651–1679.[Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]], adapted to detect herding behavior under different market conditions. The authors use quantile regression analysis as an estimation method and find evidence of herding behavior in all CEE countries, except for Poland and Romania. When the market is up and the trading volume increases, investors become enthusiastic and optimistic, neglecting their own information and following each other in buying transactions. Conversely, when the market declines, driven by panic and fear, investors follow the market consensus and engage in overselling transactions.     

Volatility transmission in emerging European foreign exchange markets

This paper studies the dynamics of volatility transmission between Central European (CE) currencies and the EUR/USD foreign exchange using model-free estimates of daily exchange rate volatility based on intraday data. We formulate a flexible yet parsimonious parametric model in which the daily realized volatility of a given exchange rate depends both on its own lags as well as on the lagged realized volatilities of the other exchange rates. We find evidence of statistically significant intra-regional volatility spillovers among the CE foreign exchange markets. With the exception of the Czech and, prior to the recent turbulent economic events, Polish currencies, we find no significant spillovers running from the EUR/USD to the CE foreign exchange markets. To measure the overall magnitude and evolution of volatility transmission over time, we construct a dynamic version of the Diebold–Yilmaz volatility spillover index and show that volatility spillovers tend to increase in periods characterized by market uncertainty.     

Martingale difference hypothesis and financial crisis: Empirical evidence from European emerging foreign exchange markets

This study investigates the effects of the recent global crisis on the relative efficiency of six CEE currency markets, using the generalized spectral test of Escanciano and Velasco (2006) in a rolling window approach. The empirical results show that the global crisis adversely affected the efficiency of most CEE currency markets, with the Turkish lira being hit the hardest, followed by the Russian ruble, Czech koruna, Romanian leu, Polish zloty and Hungarian forint. In the first stage of the crisis, covering the second half of 2008 and the first months of 2009, all foreign exchange markets experienced periods of inefficiency. In the second stage of the crisis, the Hungarian, Polish and Romanian foreign markets recovered market efficiency quickly, while Russia, Turkey and the Czech Republic continue to register a low degree of efficiency.