The rise of smart consumers: role of smart servicescape and smart consumer experience co-creation

ABSTRACT

Rapid technological advancements have led to the emergence of smart services and smart consumers. This study focuses on smart consumers who voluntarily engage in value creation activities, in order to conceptualise smart experience co-creation (SEC) and the smart servicescape. Drawing on the Stimulus-Organism-Response (SOR) framework, a model is proposed and tested around the impacts of smart servicescape dimensions (aesthetics, superior functionality, social presence, perceived interactivity and perceived personalisation) on smart consumer experience co-creation. SEC is conceptualised as a second-order construct consisting of cognitive, hedonic, social/personal, and pragmatic/economic first-order dimensions. Results show that the technological environmental cues of the smart servicescape (S) collectively influence smart experience co-creation (O), and this co-created experience eventually influences consumers’ service brand equity and word-of-mouth (WOM) intentions (R). A major novelty of this study lies in uncovering the relationship between experience co-creation and service brand equity. Findings have theoretical and managerial implications for smart services.     

Evolution of the Infant Health Production Function

Michael Grossman's seminal publication on the demand for health and health production (Grossman 1972) has spawned a substantial body of research focusing on the production of infant health. This article provides a systematic review of the published literature to date on infant health production and how it has evolved over the past 3–4 decades as data have become more available, computing has improved, and econometric methods have become more sophisticated. While empirical research in most fields has expanded in corresponding ways, the infant health production research has become an important part of the broader and inherently multidisciplinary literature on intergenerational health. The strongest and most robust findings are that policies matter for infant health, particularly those affecting access to health care, and that prenatal smoking and other chemical exposures substantially compromise infant health. Promising directions for future research include elucidating relevant pathways, reconciling the largely inconsistent estimated effects of nutrition and education, and exploring the roles of preconceptional and lifetime health care, paternal factors, social support, housing, complementarity and substitutability of inputs, factors that modify effects of inputs, and evolving medical technologies.     

Blockholder Exit Threats and Financial Reporting Quality

Recent theoretical and empirical studies suggest that blockholders (shareholders with ownership ≥ 5 percent) exert governance through the threat of exit. Blockholders have strong incentives to gather private information and sell their shares when managers are perceived to underperform. To prevent blockholders from selling their shares and the firm from suffering a stock price decline, managers align their actions with the interests of shareholders. As a result of the greater manager‐shareholder alignment, managers' actions are more likely to be in shareholders' best interest, and consequently there is less need for managers to manipulate earnings. Consistent with these predictions from economic theory, we find evidence that as exit threat increases, firms have higher financial reporting quality. Theory also predicts that the impact of blockholders' exit threat on financial reporting quality (FRQ) should increase as the manager's wealth is tied more closely to the stock price, and this is what we find. Our study contributes to the research on the impact of shareholders on FRQ and to an emerging literature on the impact of blockholders in financial markets. Blockholders play an important role in managers' reporting outcomes through their actions as informed investors.     

The economic crisis in Southern Africa: Some perspectives on its origins and nature

The crisis of development in most of Southern Africa has come to be regarded as an inevitable outcome of the failure of post‐independence development policy in those countries. That policy failure eventually led to the need for policy reform, which emerged most dominantly in the form of structural adjustment programmes. This article, which is a comparative analytical review, examines the origins and nature of the economic crisis in Southern Africa and the policy framework giving rise to it, drawing on country examples to illuminate and illustrate the analytical perspective.     

China's Anti-Corruption Campaign and Financial Reporting Quality

We examine the impact of China's anti-corruption campaign on firm-level financial reporting quality (FRQ). As an important component of the anti-corruption campaign, in October 2013, “Rule 18” was issued to prohibit party and government officials from serving as directors for publicly listed firms. The regulation led to a large number of official directors resigning from their roles as directors involuntarily. As such, Rule 18 has effectively weakened, if not fully discontinued, the political connections of the firms that previously hired officials as directors. Our empirical analyses employ a difference-in-differences research design with firm fixed effects and propensity-score matching to examine the pre- and post-period FRQ around the enactment of Rule 18. We find that, compared to propensity-score-matched control firms, FRQ of firms with resigned official directors increases after Rule 18. Further evidence suggests that the impact is stronger when firms are located in regions with more developed financial markets and in regions with higher judiciary efficiency. We also find that the effect is more pronounced when firms are non-state-owned, received preferential credits, and face refinancing pressure.     

Tourism in difficult areas revisited: the case of Bradford

Bradford was the first city in a “difficult area” in the UK to try to capitalise on tourism. This concept was introduced by Buckley and Witt in the 1980s using Bradford as an example. The article looks at how Bradford and its tourism policies have changed since their initial success in the 1980s. Support for tourism from Local Government has fluctuated because of funding crises, uncertainty about the benefits of tourism and changing political priorities in the City. In the late 1990s, Bradford launched a new strategy to attract leisure tourists, using support from the private sector and funds from Europe. Finally, we attempt to evaluate Bradford's success in tourism over the period and relate this to the original study of difficult areas     

Employee work values and organizational attachment in North Mexican maquiladoras

Maquiladoras in Northern Mexico are currently plagued by low organizational attachment among production workers. Workers often feel little psychological commitment to their maquiladora, and turnover rates in the plants average about 10 per cent per month. In this study we examine the role that work values play in maquiladora workers' attachment to their organizations. An analysis of data from 227 production workers in two maquiladoras reveals that the upward-striving value (a desire continually to seek a higher-level job) is positively associated with turnover intentions and negatively associated with organizational commitment, while the social-status-of-job value (the perception that a good job merits respect) is positively associated with organizational commitment. The findings offer guidance to managers and management scholars attempting to understand and combat the organizational attachment problem in Northern Mexico.     

Agency conflicts and auditing in private firms

We are interested in understanding how agency conflicts in private firms arise through ownership structures and family relationships. Specifically, we analyze auditors’ increase of effort and firms’ choice of auditors in situations with higher level of agency conflicts. For a large sample of private firms, we use unique and confidential data (obtained through special permission by the government) to measure direct and ultimate ownership for each shareholder as well as extended family relationships (based on marriage and blood lines, going back four generations and extending out to fourth cousin) among all shareholders, board members, and CEOs. We first find that audit fees, our proxy for audit effort, vary as hypothesized with firm-level characteristics related to ownership structures and family relationships. Second, we find evidence that firms in higher agency cost settings respond by having their financial statements audited by a higher-quality auditor (i.e., a Big 4 firm). However, for CEO family-related settings (i.e., where the CEO is related to the major shareholder or as the number of board members related to the CEO increases), we find no evidence of a greater demand for a Big 4 auditor.