Entry timing and innovation strategy in feature phones

Research summary : This inductive study examines how firms make decisions about the timing of innovations, focusing on the mobile handset industry during the feature‐phone era. Through qualitative and quantitative data, we reveal how individual technology‐entry decisions are influenced by a portfolio‐level timing preference, and how this preference informs other aspects of innovation strategy, too. Early movers address greater, more uncertain revenue opportunities with broader, less selective innovation portfolios. Conversely, late movers target lower, more certain revenue opportunities with narrower, more selective portfolios. While timing per se seems unrelated to performance, a timing‐strategy alignment is. Future research on the equifinal configurations we propose—broad/nonselective for early movers and narrow/selective for late movers—could thus help resolve the debate about the link between timing and performance. Managerial summary : We study how firms make decisions about the entry of new product features, in this case mobile phone technologies. During development firms weigh the scale and likelihood of features' commercial success. Some firms display a preference for earlier entry, which offers temporary monopoly rewards if uncertainty resolves favorably, while others tend to opt for later entry, which offers greater certainty but lower rewards due to competitive preemption. The innovation portfolios of these companies thus pursue differently structured opportunities, bringing about different strategic approaches. Since early movers aim for big hits to compensate for a higher failure rate, they launch a broader set of features and exert little selective pressure on the development portfolio. By contrast, late movers' lower payoffs reduce their tolerance for failure, making them launch fewer features and emphasize selectiveness; i.e., they invest in learning from the resolution of uncertainty so as to choose features more discriminately. When we examine innovation performance, timing has no significant effect but matching timing with feature breadth does. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

从日本的历史经验看：为什么人民币应该钉住美元

在汇率问题上,中国应避免重蹈日本的覆辙;人民币过多的升值并不能消除巨额经常项目顺差,相反可能导致经济在升值预期下陷入零利率陷阱。人民币汇率应保持缓慢爬升,升值幅度应盯住中美通胀率之差。一旦美国通货膨胀结束,美元资产利率下降,中国人民银行就应当宣布升值结束。     

The Relationships Between Mortgage Rates and Capital-Market Rates Under Alternative Market Conditions

Mortgage interest rates have become more integrated with other capital-market interest rates over recent decades, apparently as a result of the deregulation of financial markets. The link is both imperfect and time-varying. Mortgage rates during some time periods appear to be sticky with respect to their adjustment to changes in capital-market rates. We examine the relationship between weekly conventional mortgage rates and the interest rates on treasury and corporate securities under differing market conditions. We draw three conclusions based on the analysis. First, deregulation changed the link between mortgage rates and riskless interest rates, which confirms the findings of Goebel and Ma (1993). Second, mortgage rates were cointegrated with risky interest rates even before deregulation. Third, the link between mortgage rates and the risky bond rate can be associated with the behavior of the risk premium in the bond rate. The observed relationship is consistent with the stickiness observed by Haney (1988) and causes a more pronounced stickiness when rates are falling than when they are rising.     

Monopsonistic competition,low-wage labour markets,and minimum wages – An empirical analysis

This article investigates the degree of monopsony power of employers in different industries against the background of a statutory minimum wage introduction in Germany in January 2015. A semi-structural estimation approach is employed based on a dynamic model of monopsonistic competition. The empirical analysis relies on a linked employer–employee data set which allows to control for observed heterogeneity both on the worker and on the firm side. The results show important differences in monopsonistic competition among low-wage industries: While retailing, the hotel and restaurant industry as well as agriculture can be described as monopsonistic labour markets, this is not true for other services and manufacturing of food products. From a policy point of view, the introduction of a uniform minimum wage may therefore lead to different employment reactions in industries with a similar minimum wage bite.     

低碳节能城市空间规划策略——以南京河西新城南部地区为例

随着中国城市化进程的加块,城市能耗和由此带来的碳排放量越来越高.目前对城市节能减排研究的焦点主要集中在城市各项子系统的节能,而对子系统之间的相互影响研究不足.通过城市空间规划的策略来控制城市物质形态,可以优化城市子系统,以达到节能减排的目的.这些策略主要可分为两类:一类是通过优化城市空间减少能源的需求,另一类是通过优化用能单位的布局提高能源利用效率.在南京河西南部地区城市设计以及生态城市建设导则中对这些策略进行了具体应用.     

欧洲 并不利于创业

在美国,如果一个人创业失败,人们认为这种经验在他再次创业时会有所帮助。在欧洲,人们可能把这理解为"痛苦的尝试",是这个人不配成功     

Disadvantaged Consumers: An Ethical Approach to Consumption by the Poor

This essay presents my research stream on impoverished citizens as it relates to transdisciplinary work at the intersection of consumer behavior, applied ethics, public policy, and marketing practice. The original studies that inform this discussion were conducted using ethnographic methods with subpopulations that included the homeless, rural poor, children living in poverty, and aborigines isolated in the Australian outback. The opening section frames my work within the context of the larger marketing domain. The next section describes dysfunctional business activities that reduce the consumer quality of life of disadvantaged citizens. Their reactions to this maltreatment then are presented, with an emphasis on the various groups noted. The essay closes with a brief discourse on restricted consumer behavior in business ethics research. Ronald Paul Hill is the Robert J. and Barbara Naclerio Endowed Chairholder and Senior Associate Dean of Intellectual Strategy in the Villanova School of Business.     

Experts and Amateurs: The Role of Experience in Internet Auctions

The use of auctions as a pricing mechanism has grown dramatically over the last few years. The introduction of electronic auctions has significantly widened the pool of consumers who participate in auctions and increased the number of companies attempting to sell their products in an auction format. Previous empirical research on auctions has focused almost exclusively on the behavior of professional bidders in high stakes common value auctions or the behavior of students in laboratory experiments. We collect data on a large number of electronic auctions, across four product categories, to explore the behavior of consumers bidding in a real marketplace. In particular, we focus on the role experience plays in their bidding behavior to uncover whether consumer learning drives the bidding process towards outcomes described in the theoretical literature on auctions. We find that experience does indeed lead to behavior which is more consistent with theory although the proportion of experienced bidders who behave in a manner inconsistent with theory remains quite large.     

Mean Reversion across National Stock Markets and Parametric Contrarian Investment Strategies

For U.S. stock prices, evidence of mean reversion over long horizons is mixed, possibly due to lack of a reliable long time series. Using additional cross-sectional power gained from national stock index data of 18 countries during the period 1969 to 1996, we find strong evidence of mean reversion in relative stock index prices. Our findings imply a significantly positive speed of reversion with a half-life of three to three and one-half years. This result is robust to alternative specifications and data. Parametric contrarian investment strategies that fully exploit mean reversion across national indexes outperform buy-and-hold and standard contrarian strategies.