Communication assumptions in consumer research: An alternative socio‐cognitive approach

Although communication appears natural to most people, the successful act of transferring meaning relies on an alignment of intricate interpretive processes between the sender and receiver. Yet the full range of these intricate processes is often oversimplified, homogenized, and molded according to each paradigm’s narrow epistemological assumptions, leading to contradictory representations across paradigms. For example, within cognitivist and structuralist research the communicative act is portrayed as unproblematic as it engages objectified meaning structures embedded in the structures of texts, symbols, and social practices, which remain independent of (i.e., disembodied from) the interpreting mind. In contrast, in postmodernist research, communication is regarded as implausible as meaning is uniquely created by the receiver (regardless of what is intended by the sender). Although each major perspective provides some insights to the communicative act, the elegance of each camp’s reasoning is undone by it not addressing the full complexity of communication as it actually exists. To provide a more comprehensive and internally consistent understanding of meaning transfer (i.e., communication) we introduce a socio‐cognitive model that accounts for apparent objectivist and subjectivist outcomes. This framework situates meaning production within the mind, driven by the interaction between mental (private and/or cultural) models, cognitive (reflective and/or categorical) processing, and environmental feedback mechanisms.     

The Power of Innovativeness in Manufacturer–Retailer Relationships

ABSTRACT

Purpose: Retailers often challenge manufacturers through aggressive store brand policies and severe listing constraints. This study investigates manufacturer innovativeness as a managerial lever to shift the power balance between manufacturers and retailers.

Methodology/approach: Using data from 277 senior managers of Swiss and German consumer goods manufacturers and analyzing these data with structural equation modelling, the authors test hypotheses about the impact of manufacturer innovativeness on manufacturer–retailer relationship characteristics (i.e., retailer dependency, store brand aggressiveness, and listing constraints).

Findings: The study demonstrates that manufacturer innovativeness enhances retailer dependency, which in turn positively affects overall manufacturer performance. This relationship can be explained further: By increasing retailer dependency, manufacturers suppress retailers’ store brand aggressiveness and attenuate retailers’ listing constraints. Store brand aggressiveness affects overall manufacturer performance through listing constraints.

Research implications: Identifying levers such as innovativeness that assist manufacturers in fostering their power over retailers provides a new mode for understanding how manufacturers can influence the balance of power between manufacturers and retailers. The study provides support for the approach/inhibition theory of power on the inter-organizational level. Organizations with increased power are assumed to have approach-related tendencies and act in goal-consistent manner, whereas organizations with reduced power are assumed to develop the tendency to pursue inhibition-related actions, e.g., attending to threats. Furthermore, this study identifies channel relationship characteristics such as retailer dependency as a mediating path between manufacturer innovativeness and performance.

Practical implications: Managers need to strengthen the firm’s innovative capacity to enhance the performance of their companies. By developing the capability to provide radical innovations, manufacturers are able to enhance their performance not only directly but also indirectly by strengthening the manufacturer’s position with regard to retailers. This study underscores the relevance of innovativeness for strengthening the manufacturer’s position in its relationship with retailers that avoids problems with aggressive store brands and constrained listing conditions.

Originality/value/contribution: This study proposes manufacturer innovativeness as a managerial lever to shift the power balance between manufacturers and retailers.     

Optimal liquidation in dark pools

We consider a large trader liquidating a portfolio using a transparent trading venue with price impact and a dark pool with execution uncertainty. The optimal execution strategy uses both venues continuously, with dark pool orders over-/underrepresenting the portfolio size depending on return correlations; trading at the traditional venue is delayed depending on dark liquidity. Pushing up prices at the traditional venue while selling in the dark pool might generate profits. If future returns depend on historical dark pool liquidity, then sending orders to the dark pool can be worthwhile simply to gather information.     

Optimierte Integration der Elektromobilität in das Stromversorgungssystem bei hohen Anteilen erneuerbarer Energien

Electric mobility will play a key role for the transformation of the energy supply in Germany [the “Energiewende”]. A successful market development of plug-in hybrids and battery electric vehicles and a full fleet penetration in the long-term are the most efficient and effective measure for integrating large amounts of renewable energy into the transport sector and for reaching the efficiency targets. These new electricity consumers in the supply system will cause additional electricity loads strongly dependent on the mobility needs of the vehicle users. A controlled battery charging is able to avoid new peak demands and to increase the efficiency of the power generation system by using excess power. By scenario analysis, the German Aerospace Center (DLR) in cooperation with the Fraunhofer Institute for Solar Energy Systems (ISE) and the Institute for High Voltage Technology of the RWTH Aachen investigated a possible successful development path of electric mobility in Germany and its integration into and interaction with the future power supply system. From both perspectives—the one of the total supply system as well as the other of local distribution grids—the results show promising potentials but also limits.     

Creating shareholder value via collaborative innovation: the role of industry and resource alignment in knowledge exploration

Collaborative innovation provides firms with a privileged opportunity to perform exploration in an externally oriented mode. The central challenges in exploration via collaborative innovation lie in the selection of relevant partners and in gaining access to potentially valuable external knowledge that the focal firm lacks. This article focuses on two aspects of inter-organizational alignment that affect knowledge differences and may thus help explaining the shareholder value implications arising from collaborative innovation: industry and resource alignment. Relying on data covering 97 bilateral collaborative innovations (194 innovation partners) in R&D intensive high-technology industries, we used event study methodology and follow-up hierarchical regression analyses to test our conceptual framework. With regard to industry alignment, results suggest that investors value greater industry distance between collaborating partners, especially when the partner firm provides high-level R&D resources. Furthermore, the results show a positive effect of supplementary resource alignment (i.e., a focal firm's R&D resources are supplemented by a partner firm's R&D resources) and, notably, a negative effect of complementary resource alignment (i.e., a focal firm's R&D resources are complemented by a partner firm's marketing resources) on investors' valuation of the collaboration's expected future performance. They, thus, contribute to research on shareholder value implications of collaborative innovation. From a managerial perspective, the study provides a better understanding of partner selection and shows how managers should position a collaboration to signal the shareholder value-creating potential to investors.     

Mapping the Topic Landscape of JPIM, 1984–2013: In Search of Hidden Structures and Development Trajectories

During the three decades since its inception in 1984, the JPIM has shaped the evolution of innovation research as a scientific field. It helped create a topic landscape that is not only more diverse and rich in insights, but also more complex and fragmented in structure than ever before. We seek to map this landscape and identify salient development trajectories over time. In contrast to prior citation‐based studies covering the first two decades of JPIM research, we benefit from recent advances in natural language processing and rely on a topic modeling algorithm to extract 57 distinct topics and the corresponding most common words, terms, and phrases from the entire full‐text corpus of 1008 JPIM articles published between 1984 and 2013. Estimating the development trajectory of each topic based on yearly publication counts in JPIM allows us to identify “hot,” “cold,” “revival,” “evergreen,” and “wall‐flower” topics. We map these topics onto the Product Development and Management Association (PDMA) Body of Knowledge categories and discover that these categories differ significantly not only in terms of their internal topic diversity and relative prevalence, but also—and arguably more importantly—in terms of their publication and citation trajectories over time. For instance, the PDMA category “Codevelopment and Alliances” exhibits only moderate topic diversity (7 out of 57 topics) and prevalence in JPIM (161 out of 1008 articles). That said, it is among the most dynamic categories featuring two evergreen topic (“Users and Innovation” and “Tools and Systems for Technology Transfer”) and three hot topics (“Open Innovation,” “Alliances and Cooperation,” and “Networks and Network Structure”) as well as a sharply growing annual number of citations received. Our findings are likely to be of interest to all those who are keen to (re)discover JPIM's topic landscape in search of hidden structures and development trajectories.     

Stock investments for German life insurers in the current low interest environment: more homework to do

Currently a stock market rally and at the same time extremely low interest rates can be observed. This coincides with more volatile risk premiums for interest baring assets like government bonds. The mixture makes life harder for investment managers of (especially life) insurances. They have to continuously find profitable investments with good returns for the customers’ money, in case of the life insurers, in order to be able to pay at least the promised returns of the contracts. After the stock market burst around the turn of the century the levels of stock investments by German insurers have declined significantly, therefore also missing out on the rises leading up to the Lehman crash and also not participating in recent developments. With insurance asset managers avoiding stocks in the past years the questions can be raised, if they are forfeiting a good opportunity for their portfolio and if there is still time to participate in possible future gains. On the other hand the upcoming regulatory environment, namely Solvency II, will play an important role in the future and likely already has an impact on the investment decisions of the companies. Higher capital requirements for stock investments make it even harder to earn the so-called “Garantiezins”. Without ignoring the risks related to stock investments, effectively banning equities from asset managers’ buy lists might lead to missing out on desperately needed returns for the life insurance industry. So policy makers probably should reconsider their directives. This paper evaluates the attractiveness of stock investments from a long term as well as a risk adjusted perspective using e.g. different indicators and commonly used measurements for stocks with a rather conservative focus, in order to possibly get some insight into the future performance of stocks. Looking back to a decade of boom and bust cycles in the equity markets does not necessary rule out stocks as an important source for returns. The results are discussed comprehensively also in face of the regulatory changes to come. In the end timing plays a major role and due to that the current valuation of stocks as well as the look ahead are of vital importance. Assessing the reliability of professional forecasts for financial market time series—in this context especially for stocks as well as interest rates—plays an important role for asset managers.     

Understanding the Antecedents,Contingencies, and Performance Implications of Process Innovation: A Dynamic Capabilities Perspective

This paper examines one of the most important sources of competitiveness in dynamic industries—the capability of firms to introduce process innovations. While the management of product innovation has received considerable theoretical and empirical attention in the literature, our knowledge about how firms become process innovators—and why many firms fail to do so—remains underdeveloped. In order to provide novel insights into the configuration of firms' process innovation activities and their performance implications, this paper draws on the dynamic capabilities approach. More specifically, this study aims to shed light on the antecedents, contingencies, and performance consequences of interfirm differences in process innovation success, that is, firms' propensity and effectiveness of implementing new production, supply chain, or administrative processes. Particular emphasis is placed upon the analysis of potential complementarities or substitution effects between innovation activities such as internal and external research and development, prototyping, external knowledge acquisition, and employee training. Cross‐sectional data from a large‐scale survey of German manufacturing and service firms serves as the basis for testing the hypotheses advanced in this paper. Findings suggest that by engaging in a broad range of different innovation activities, firms can indeed increase the likelihood of achieving process innovation success, which is in turn positively related to firm financial performance. Yet decreasing marginal returns to innovation activities have to be considered as process innovation propensity was found to increase with the number of activities pursued simultaneously only up to a point, after which negative marginal returns set in (inverted U‐shaped relationship). Furthermore, while environmental turbulence was found to have surprisingly little influence when it comes to translating process innovation success into firms' subsequent financial performance, industry membership as well as the nature of the innovation process (i.e., internal generation, external adoption, or cocreation of an innovation) emerged as key contingency factors. These findings have important theoretical as well as practical implications for managing new process introductions.     

A simulation of the insurance industry: the problem of risk model homogeneity

Journal of Economic Interaction and Coordination - We develop an agent-based simulation of the catastrophe insurance and reinsurance industry and use it to study the problem of risk model...     

Embedded in context: How time and distance affect the convergence of personnel selection practices

The debate on convergence versus divergence or stasis in human resource management (HRM) practices over time is still ongoing. We look at configurations of organisations' personnel selection practices and empirically analyse the role of geographic, cultural and regulatory institutional distance between countries for emerging similarity or dissimilarity in these practices. We also examine whether convergence occurred between 1995 and 2015. Based on the Cranet data of 25,869 organisations from 42 countries and statistical tests using energy distance, we find a pattern over time, moving from stasis to divergence. In addition, personnel selection configurations relate to cultural and regulatory institutional differences in the sense that smaller distances lead to higher similarity. This is not the case, however, for geographic distance. Our study adds to the debate on HRM convergence and offers a new method of analysis for other areas of HRM research where configurations instead of single HRM practices play a role.