Consumer legislation: A proactive or reactive response to consumerism?

The number and rate of development of new consumer legislation necessitates the evaluation of existing legislation. This paper summarizes and categorizes, in detail, the impact of select pieces of consumer legislation on consumer decision making. It is an implied objective of the paper to provide a perspective for future public policy formulation. The pieces of legislation evaluated in the paper are: (1) unit pricing; (2) product labeling; and (3) disclosure of interest rate provisions for consumer credit. The impact of these pieces of legislation have been minimal, indicating the need for an educational program for consumers.     

Prospects for Personalization on the Internet

Personalization is a key component of an interactive marketing strategy. Its purpose is to adapt a standardized product or service to an individual customer's needs. The goal is to create profit for the producer and increased value for the consumer. This goal fits nicely into traditional notions of segmentation. Applications of personalization have advanced greatly in conjunction with the Internet, since it provides an environment that is information rich and well suited to interactivity. This article reviews past research on personalization and considers some examples of personalization in practice. We discuss what we believe are key problems and directions for personalization in the future.     

Learning,experience and the dynamics of north–south Trade and technology transfer

This paper examines the dynamics of learning and experience that underlie technology transfer using a North-South trade model with a continuum of goods. Since North is historically more experienced than South, it initially produces the most advanced goods and pays higher wages. Whenever there is a market-driven transfer of technology and production over time, there will be some wage convergence as South gradually gains experience. Nevertheless, wage inequality must persist in the steady state. Product innovation typically increases steady-state wage inequality because new goods are produced in North, and North ultimately learns than South. [F12, O19]     

Testing a DSGE Model of the EU Using Indirect Inference

We use the method of indirect inference, using the bootstrap, to test the Smets and Wouters model of the EU against a VAR auxiliary equation describing their data. We find that their model generates excessive variance compared with the data. But their model fits the dynamic facts quite well if the errors have the properties assumed by SW but scaled down. We compare a New Classical version of the model which also performs reasonably if error properties are chosen using New Classical priors (notably excluding shocks to preferences). Both versions have (different) difficulties fitting the data if the actual error properties are used. A model combining rigid and flexible-wage/price sectors, with a weight of around 5% on the rigid sector, does best in fitting the data.     

Rent Sharing and the Compensation of Head Coaches in Power Five College Football

The monopoly and monopsony power of intercollegiate sports create significant rents, but previous studies of intercollegiate football coaches’ salaries implicitly assume that coaches are paid their marginal revenue products. In a two-stage estimation, we show that coaches share in these rents. The first stage shows that several common measures of coaches’ productivity do not affect an athletic department’s variable revenue. When we include these measures in the second-stage salary equation, their impact on pay reflects bargaining power, not productivity. We also find that several measures of fixed revenue, which are independent of the coach’s performance, increase the coach’s pay.     

Firm responses to secondary stakeholder action

In this paper, we explore the conditions under which secondary stakeholder groups are likely to elicit positive firm responses. To this end, we build upon and advance Mitchell, Agle, and Wood's (1997) stakeholder saliency and identification framework by defining saliency in terms of actions, not perceptions, and by proposing that power, legitimacy, and urgency arise out of the nature of stakeholder–request–firm triplets. To test this framework, we build a unique dataset of over 600 secondary stakeholder actions within the United States, all concerning environmental issues over the period 1971–2003. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The Effect of Multiknowledge Individuals on Performance in Cross‐Functional New Product Development Teams*

This study examines the effect of multiknowledge individuals (especially those possessing both marketing and technological knowledge) on performance in cross‐functional new product development teams. A survey of 62 cross‐functional teams shows that the proportion of multiknowledge individuals has an indirect positive effect through information sharing on product innovativeness and a direct positive effect on time efficiency of new product development teams.     

Promise and peril in implementing pay‐for‐performance

Why would managers abandon pay‐for‐performance plans they initiated with great hopes? Why would employees celebrate this decision? This article explores why managers made their decisions in 12 of 13 pay‐for‐performance “experiments” at Hewlett‐Packard in the mid‐1990s. We find that managers thought the costs of these programs to be higher than the benefits. Alternative managerial practices such as effective leadership, clear objectives, coaching, or training were thought a better investment. Despite the undisputed instrumentality of pay‐for‐performance to motivate, little attention has been given to whether the benefits outweigh the costs or the “fit” of these programs with high‐commitment cultures like Hewlett‐Packard was at the time. © 2004 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.     

Explaining qualifications in audit reports using a support vector machine methodology

The verification of whether the financial statements of a firm represent its actual position is of major importance for auditors, who should provide a qualified report if they conclude that the financial statements fail to meet this requirement. This paper implements support vector machines (SVMs) to develop models that may support auditors in this task. Linear and non‐linear models are developed and their performance is analysed using training samples of different size and out‐of‐sample/out‐of‐time data. The results show that all SVM models are capable of distinguishing between qualified and unqualified financial statements with satisfactory accuracy. The performance of the models over time is also explored. Copyright © 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.