Improving Marketing's Contribution to New Product Development

In many firms, the marketing department plays a minor role in new product development (NPD). However, recent research demonstrates that marketing capabilities more strongly influence firm performance than other areas such as research and development. This finding underscores the importance of identifying relevant capabilities that can improve the position of marketing within the NPD process as part of the quest to improve innovation performance. However, thus far, it has remained unclear precisely how the marketing department can increase its influence on NPD to enhance a firm's innovation performance. The results of this study demonstrate that the relationship between marketing capabilities and innovation performance is generally mediated by the decision influence of marketing on NPD. In particular, both marketing research quality and the ability to translate customer needs into product characteristics serve to increase marketing's influence on NPD. This increased influence, in turn, positively contributes to overall firm innovation performance. Hence, these results show that in addition to having the appropriate marketing capabilities, the marketing department must achieve a status in which these capabilities can translate into performance implications.     

How to sell services more profitably

When products become commodities, manufacturing companies may seek to differentiate themselves with value-added services--a potentially profitable strategy. Unfortunately, companies often stumble in the effort. Reinartz and Ulaga conducted in-depth studies of 18 leading companies in a broad variety of product markets to learn what distinguished the successes from the rest. They discovered four steps to developing a profitable services capability. RECOGNIZE THAT YOU ALREADY HAVE A SERVICE COMPANY: You can identify and charge for simple services--as Merck did when it stopped quietly absorbing shipping costs. Switching services from free to fee clarifies their value for managers as well as for customers. INDUSTRIALIZE THE BACK OFFICE: To prevent delivery costs from eating up service-offering margins, build flexible service platforms, closely monitor process costs, and exploit new technologies that enable process innovations. The Swedish bearings manufacturer SKF provided off-site access to an online monitoring tool that could warn of potential failure in customers' machines. CREATE A SERVICE-SAVVY SALES FORCE: Services require longer sales cycles and, often, decisions from high up in a customer's hierarchy; what's more, product salespeople may be inimical to change. Schneider-Electric did a major overhaul of its sales organization and trained its people to switch from cost-plus pricing to value-based pricing. FOCUS ON CUSTOMERS' PROCESSES AND THE OPPORTUNITIES THEY AFFORD FOR NEW SERVICE OFFERINGS: You may need to acquire new capabilities to take advantage of those opportunities: The industrial coatings specialist PPG had to learn how painting robots function after it offered to take over Fiat's Torino paint shop. Services can both lock in customers and help acquire new accounts. They should be developed with care and attention.     

Semiparametric diffusion estimation and application to a stock market index

The analysis of diffusion processes in financial models is crucially dependent on the form of the drift and diffusion coefficient functions. A new model for a stock market index process is proposed in which the index is decomposed into an average growth process and an ergodic diffusion. The ergodic diffusion part of the model is not directly observable. A methodology is developed for estimating and testing the coefficient functions of this unobserved diffusion process. The estimation is based on the observations of the index process and uses semiparametric and non-parametric techniques. The testing is performed via the wild bootstrap resampling technique. The method is illustrated on S&P 500 index data.     

Bond pricing when the short-term interest rate follows a threshold process

This paper derives analytical solutions for arbitrage-free bond yields when the short-term interest rate follows an autoregressive process with the intercept switching endogenously. This process from the SETAR family is especially suited to capture the near-unit-root behaviour typically observed in the evolution of short-term interest rates. The derived yield functions, mapping the one-month rate into n-period yields, exhibit a convex/concave shape to the left and right of the threshold value, respectively, a pattern which is also found in US bond yield data. The longer the time to maturity, the more distinct the nonlinearity of the yield function becomes.     

Equity returns,bond returns,and the equity premium in the German capital market

This article reviews the empirical evidence for equity returns, bond returns, and the equity premium in the German capital market for the period from 1870 to 1995. Taken together, the studies reviewed provide convincing evidence that over longer investment periods, average equity returns have been higher than average bond returns. These excess returns, however, have been highly volatile and negative in many years, illustrating the higher risk of equity investments. Moreover, market timing had a major positive or negative impact on overall returns. Despite the historical evidence of a substantial equity premium there is still little equity investment by German households.     

Estimating cost of capital in firm valuations with arithmetic or geometric mean – or better use the Cooper estimator?

We test the extent and determinants of bias effects of the arithmetic as well as the geometric mean estimator and the estimator of Cooper [1996. Arithmetic versus geometric mean estimators: Setting discount rates for capital budgeting. European Financial Management 2 (July): 157–67] regarding discount rate estimation for firm valuation by way of a bootstrap approach for 13 different countries. The Cooper estimator is superior to both the geometric and the (conventional) arithmetic mean estimator. However, a ‘truncated’ version of the arithmetic mean estimator leads generally to better estimation outcomes than the Cooper estimator. This means that, in order to reduce problems of upward-biased firm value estimates, expected cash flows beyond a certain time horizon are completely neglected in terminal value estimation. Such an approach seems particularly reasonable for the valuation of young growth companies as well as for companies from quickly developing countries such as Brazil, China, or Thailand, because the bias in terminal value estimation is increasing in the growth rate of future expected cash flows.     

Value creation in the relationship life cycle: A quasi-longitudinal analysis

Among the growing literature on value creation in collaborative buyer-seller relationships, most researchers examine relationship value at a single point in time. In the present research, we explore whether different stages of the relationship life cycle moderate the relative importance of value-creating dimensions. To shed light on the dynamic nature of value in B2B relationships, we present the results of a survey among purchasing managers using a quasi-longitudinal research design. Our findings confirm the moderating role of the relationship life cycle in value creation. More precisely, our results indicate that a key supplier's potential for value creation in customer's operations increases in relative importance as relationships move through the life cycle. In turn, supplier's capabilities to create superior value at the level of the customer's sourcing process display a decreasing role over the life cycle of a business relationship. No significant link was found in the present study between value creation through a supplier's core offering and different stages of a buyer-seller relationship.     

对盈余管理的再认识

盈余管理普遍存在,主要原因是企业管理层有强烈的追求与预先制定的盈余目标相一致的动机以及盈余结果的不确定性。会计政策和会计事项处理方法的可选择性导致没有绝对"真实"的盈余数据,只有相对合理的盈余结果。盈余管理具有合法性,在会计准则(或制度)允许的范围内进行正当的盈余管理是合乎道德的行为,目的是为使企业价值最大化,帮助报告使用者更好地理解公司业绩。盈余管理又具有秘密性,而这种秘密行为为社会所迫;消除盈余管理是不现实的。