Business at the fingertips of consumers: a scale for measuring resale motivations in online settings

Our current understanding of what motivates consumers to resell second-hand products online is limited. This article lays out the development and validation of an online resale motivation (ORM) scale based on three studies involving 1119 respondents. Study 1 presents the ORM scale development process and the resulting multidimensional construct, including the protester, economic, generative, recreational, practical and social facets of motivation. Study 2 replicates the scale and investigates its predictive value, demonstrating that the ORM scale successfully predicts online resale frequency. Study 3 examines the mediating role of ORM on the relationship between planned resale intentions and online resale behaviour. The findings show that there is no direct link between a consumer’s intention to resell an item prior to its purchase and the frequency with which they resell online. Rather, consumers who more frequently resell online items that they acquired with the intention of reselling do so because they perceive positive economic, practical and recreational outcomes associated with online reselling.     

Value creation by knowledge‐based ecosystems: evidence from a field study

A growing number of research and development‐driven companies are located in knowledge‐based ecosystems. Value creation by these ecosystems draws on the dynamics of single firms (interacting and partnering) as well as the ecosystem at large. Drawing on a field study of a Dutch high‐tech campus, two key sources of value creation are identified: (1) facilitation of the innovation process for individual companies and (2) creation of an innovation community. Furthermore, the coevolution of the ecosystem's business model with firm‐level business models explains why technology‐based firms join, stay in, or leave the ecosystem at a certain point in time. A remarkable finding is that ecosystem managers have to deliberately facilitate exit routes for companies that no longer fit the ecosystem in order to enhance and reinforce its business model. As such, this study suggests a dynamic capability perspective on knowledge‐based ecosystems that need to develop a business model at the ecosystem level to create sufficient innovative capacity and entrepreneurial fitness.     

The role of entrepreneurship education as a predictor of university students’ entrepreneurial intention

Using Ajzen’s theory of planned behavior and Shapero’s entrepreneurial event model as well as entrepreneurial cognition theory, we attempt to identify the relationship between entrepreneurship education, prior entrepreneurial exposure, perceived desirability and feasibility, and entrepreneurial intentions (EI) for university students. The data were collected from a survey of ten universities; we received 494 effective responses. We used probit estimation to show that perceived desirability significantly impacts EI whereas there is no significant impact from perceived feasibility. There is a significant negative impact from exposure (which is surprising) and a significant positive impact from entrepreneurship education. Males and people from technological universities and/or backgrounds have higher EI than females and people from other universities and backgrounds. There are also significant positive interactive effects by gender, university type, and study major on the relationship between entrepreneurship education and EI.     

Robust control and central banking behaviour

This paper seeks to explain the recent behaviour of the two main central banks in the recent financial crisis, applying a robust control tool through a Neo-Keynesian monetary policy model. The direct forbearer of this paper is the Giordani and Söderlind (2004) study. It begins with the origin, purpose and theoretical grounds of robust control, indicating that it is one way to face model uncertainty, as an alternative to the Bayesian approach. In the middle section, we seek to obtain the course of the model's main variables: interest rates, inflation and output. The model constructor also wants the participating agents to have the same doubts that he has regarding its validity; therefore, robust control is considered as a “fine-tuning” of the rational expectations approach. The impulse-response functions are obtained, with the monetary authority acting as a Stackelberg-type leader, affected by a perturbation on the supply side. The two relevant equilibria are obtained and compared in robust control with dynamic economy (the reference equilibrium and the worst possible case equilibrium) with that obtained when operating with rational expectations. The alternative course for the reference model set forth in the paper by Dennis (2008) is also analysed. We mainly find that the different results depend on the behaviour of the law of motion of the state variables, specifically the shadow prices that influence the private sector's expectations. Lastly, the paper relates the recent monetary policy performance when facing the financial crisis that began in the summer of 2007.     

The influence of the media on the history of business success

All the main indicators related to entrepreneurship have increased since 2011 (Global Entrepreneurship Monitor 2018, 2019). The positive perception of this phenomenon was boosted by the socio-economic situation and by a specific agent of the entrepreneurial ecosystem: the economic specialized media. The aim of this study is to demonstrate that the economic media has given their readers an excessively positive discourse, linked to success and to the lack of analysis of the entrepreneurial phenomenon. The sample is defined in terms of a linguistic corpus comprising content related to entrepreneurship drawn from the digital editions of the three most important Spanish economic newspapers for the period 2010 to 2018. A systematic standardize assignment of categories to the contents and an analysis of the relationships between those categories has been carried out (Riffe et al. 2019). These categories are ‘number of contents’, ‘information treatment’, ‘percentage of success stories’, ‘percentage of content analysis’ and ‘sources’. The results reveal a clear intention of the media to offer an overly optimistic perception of the entrepreneurial phenomenon considering the survival rate of the projects mentioned. There is evidence for a selection of information linked to success, a lack of follow-up of the stories and a poor preparation by the media, which lacks specialized journalists and, above all, replicates agency contents. This study provides empirical evidence that helps to identify the optimistic perception imposed by the media for the entrepreneurial phenomenon. This perception, together with other relevant facts, contribute to the creation of an ‘information bubble’ (Cervantes-Zacarés 2019) during the period under study.