Striking a balance between ‘Sir’ and ‘Dude’

This postcard reflects on an issue common to many academics, whether they teach accounting, politics or—as in my case—commercial law to business and economics students. Creating an open and effective relationship with students is a balancing act undertaken by educators across the board—and no less by my accounting colleagues down the hall. In teaching commercial law to accounting students, I was recently reminded of the importance and occasional difficulty in maintaining a healthy ‘two-way’ relationship. I trust the following may connect with accounting educators and others who are also trying to achieve the right balance.     

Obsolescence risk in advanced technologies for retailing: A management perspective

In recent years, a great deal of research focused on the introduction of advanced technologies for making traditional stores more appealing and attractive, with several benefits for the retail process. Since the introduction of these innovative systems involves several risks that can have a negative impact on business profitability, this paper aims at investigating to what extent it is possible to reduce these risks by proposing an explorative framework for a successful risk management strategies in retail context. Key results of this research concern the importance of the risk management also for retail sector, with emphasis on the introduction/adoption decision of innovative technologies in the points of sale, with consequences for retail-oriented industries. To achieve this task, the current study synthesizes findings from several fields such as management, marketing, and computer science.     

Real effects of private equity investments: Evidence from European buyouts

This study investigates the effects of buyout deals on the ex-post performance of target companies. The analysis is based on a sample of 241 private-to-private buyouts involving European companies between 1997 and 2004 and a control sample of non-buyouts selected through a propensity score matching methodology. The paper explores three different dimensions of firm performance: size, profitability and productivity. The results indicate a positive impact of buyouts on the growth of total assets and of employment in target firms in the short- and mid-term. An equivalent clear pattern cannot be identified for productivity, while we estimate a lower operating profitability for buyout companies with respect to the control group three years after a deal is made. When we restrict the analysis to the sub-sample of buyout companies, we find that generalist funds negatively and significantly impact the mean ex-post operating profitability of PE-backed firms, while turnaround specialists are positively associated with operating profitability. The evidence also highlights that target companies whose lead investor is located in the same country show relatively higher ex-post profitability performance.     

When Consumers and Products Come From the Same Place: Preferences and WTP for Geographical Indication Differ Across Regional Identity Groups

ABSTRACT

This article contributes to the existing literature on geographical indications by observing consumers’ stated preference for extra-virgin olive oil in two groups differing in their regional identity. In particular, consumers from two groups were asked to rank products in a contingent ranking survey. One group (“insiders,” Sicilian consumers) shared origin with a good product (Sicilian oil); the other group (“outsiders,” Rome and Milan) presented “no association” consumer-product. Results indicate that insiders are willing to pay more for goods originating from the region they identify with compared with a region associated with outsiders. Identity seems to give a bias by which a local product is not necessarily perceived as superior in absolute terms, but in relative terms: outside products are never considered better than inside options but are either inferior or equal in perceived value.     

An agent-based model of innovation diffusion: network structure and coexistence under different information regimes

The paper analyzes how the structure of social networks affects innovation diffusion and competition under different information regimes. Diffusion is modeled as the result of idiosyncratic adoption thresholds, local network effects and information diffusion (broadcasting and demonstration effect from previous adopters). A high social cohesion decreases the probability of one innovation cornering the market. Nonetheless, with imperfect information, in small-world networks the higher speed of diffusion produced by the low average distance increases this probability. A low social cohesion also increases the probability of falling into traps of under-adoption. However, such probability is significantly lower with imperfect information, because such regime is characterized by higher levels of market concentrations and this reduces the frictions due to the coexistence of non-compatible product innovations.     

Exploring professionals' motivation to lead: a cross-level study in the healthcare sector

The extant leadership research has paid increasing attention to the concept of motivation to lead (MTL) as an individual construct that strongly affects leadership processes and behaviors. However, despite its importance, scant knowledge is available about how individual characteristics and organizational structural features interact in influencing MTL in professional-based organizations. This article contributes to this line of research by adopting a multilevel perspective to study the MTL among individual professionals in the healthcare sector. We collected data from a sample of 791 physicians nested in 44 departments belonging to 27 hospitals. Using the hierarchical linear model, we tested the impact of individual and organizational variables on the motivation of physicians to engage in managerial positions. Our findings demonstrate that the physicians' MTL was positively associated with their individual self-efficacy. Departmental decentralization interacted with this self-efficacy, such that the effect of self-efficacy on the MTL was significantly lower when decentralization was high. We discuss the implications of these findings for human resource management and organizational (re)design within professional organizations.     

The covariation for Banach space valued processes and applications

This article focuses on a recent concept of covariation for processes taking values in a separable Banach space $B$ and a corresponding quadratic variation. The latter is more general than the classical one of Métivier and Pellaumail. Those notions are associated with some subspace $\chi $ of the dual of the projective tensor product of $B$ with itself. We also introduce the notion of a convolution type process, which is a natural generalization of the Itô process and the concept of $\bar{\nu }_0$ -semimartingale, which is a natural extension of the classical notion of semimartingale. The framework is the stochastic calculus via regularization in Banach spaces. Two main applications are mentioned: one related to Clark–Ocone formula for finite quadratic variation processes; the second one concerns the probabilistic representation of a Hilbert valued partial differential equation of Kolmogorov type.