Dark Side or Bright Light: Destructive and Constructive Deviant Content in Consumer Ideation Contests

Firms use ideation contests to generate ideas from consumers. This type of collaboration provides access to new knowledge and reveals latent consumer needs. But it also is risky, as firms give up control to an unknown crowd. Some contestants use ideation contests to post content that is unintended and unwanted by contest hosts, a behavior that represents deviant co‐creation. Drawing on literature from sociology and consumer research, deviance is defined as a relative, norm‐violating behavior that has the potential to activate others. We report the results from a netnography study to define the phenomenon of deviant co‐creation in ideation contests. Based on these findings, we provide a theoretical foundation for deviant co‐creation and conceptualize and empirically illustrate various patterns of deviant content, ranging from destructive to constructive. The study reveals that deviant content in ideation contests includes illegitimate as well as legitimate content. Legitimate content includes five themes: humorous, provocative, unique, violation from technical, and social norms. Deviant content usually bewilders evaluators and draws their attention to the content. Destructive deviant content may trigger visible and malicious protests or result in mocking and ridicule on the contest platform and other social media, thereby exposing the contest host to reputational risks. Constructive deviant content can lead to positive discussions in comment sections and other social media outlets, as well as foster further development of an initial idea, thereby contributing to the firm's innovation potential. This article provides managers a deeper understanding of deviant content raising awareness for the dark side risks as well as indicating how to leverage it to achieve constructive co‐creation.     

It is all about the emotional state: Managing tourists’ experiences

When consuming tourism and leisure services tourists do not only expect professional services but also desire satisfying emotional experiences. To measure satisfaction with emotional experiences traditional service quality and satisfaction research is outdated because those models are based on cognitive components and neglect emotional aspects of customer satisfaction. This research investigates factors determining the service setting that enhance customers’ emotional reactions and lead to psychological states and behaviours. Referring to existing theories and empirical evidence in environmental psychology, a research model is developed explaining the relationship between different components of service settings influencing emotional states and satisfaction. Guests’ emotions are assessed during service consumption in hotel settings in order to investigate the importance of emotional states. The paper derives three main factors (leisure experience, hardware and human ware) significantly influencing emotional states of customers in high-quality hotels.     

20 Jahre EEG: Ist das Förderende für alte Anlagen ein Problem für die Energiewende?

In 2020 Germany’s Renewable Energy Sources Act celebrates its twentieth anniversary. Pioneers of the German energy transition, who have invested early in wind, photovoltaic and biomass plants, may expect this anniversary with sorrow. This is because it will also imply that public support expires for the first renewable energy installations, after 20 years of guaranteed feed in tariffs. It is unclear whether existing installations can be operated profitably without public support. Concerns are growing that the objectives of Germany’s energy transition may be difficult to attain if existing renewable energy plants go offline. Are these concerns justified? And if yes, how should they be addressed by public policy?     

Do Pan-African banks have the best of both worlds?

There has been a large expansion of foreign banks in Africa over the last two decades, with Pan-African banks playing a key role in this phenomenon. This paper questions if this development is beneficial for bank efficiency in African countries by investigating if Pan-African banks are more efficient than other types of foreign and domestic banks. We analyse the relation between ownership type and bank efficiency on a large sample of African banks covering 39 African countries over the period 2002–2015. We find that Pan-African banks are the most efficient banks in the African banking industries. We explain this finding with the fact that these banks combine the best of both worlds: they have the global advantages of foreign banks and the home field advantages of domestic banks. They are therefore able to be more efficient than both foreign banks from developed countries and domestic banks. This suggests that favouring the entry of Pan-African banks would be beneficial to bank efficiency in Africa.     

Tom L. Johnson and Cleveland Traction Wars, 1901–1909

Tom L. Johnson made his mark on politics far from Capitol Hill, in the gritty world of turn‐of‐the‐century Cleveland, Ohio. Barely 30 years old and at the height of a successful career as an inventor, steel manufacturer, and street railway monopolist, Tom Loftin Johnson experienced a change of heart. After discovering the ideas of Henry George, Johnson became a lifelong advocate of the single tax, which he used to guide his new career in politics. In 1901, Cleveland voters elected Johnson to the first of his four terms as mayor of the industrial city of 400,000 people. During his eight‐year reign as chief executive, Cleveland took over essential services such as garbage collection, street cleaning, and lighting from private enterprise. Johnson helped humanize the city's correctional system by replacing the old workhouse with a network of farm colonies designed to rehabilitate wayward youths and adults convicted of petty crimes. Largely as a result of Johnson's efforts, Cleveland won constitutional home rule, a lower streetcar fare, the referendum, and higher taxes on the corporations that amassed giant fortunes through perpetual public franchise grants. For a short time, while he was still mayor, Cleveland owned and operated its own streetcar company, a rarity in early 20^th‐century America. All of these accomplishments made Johnson something of a hero to progressive reformers. The muckraker Lincoln Steffens famously called Johnson “the best Mayor of the best‐governed city in the United States.”     

Job security as a threatened resource: reactions to job insecurity in culturally distinct regions

As downsizing and restructuring have become global phenomena, the impact of job insecurity on employee attitudes has received significant attention. However, research examining the role of cultural dimensions has been largely unexplored. Drawing on the conservation of resources theory, we investigated whether the relationships between both quantitative job insecurity (i.e. the perceived threat of job loss) and qualitative job insecurity (i.e. the perceived threat of losing valued job features) and employee attitudes (job satisfaction and turnover intention) differ in culturally distinct regions. This was examined using representative employee samples from two regions of Switzerland which differ in societal practices uncertainty avoidance and performance orientation: the German-speaking (n = 966) and the French-speaking (n = 307) regions. Our research indicates that whereas the relationship between quantitative job insecurity and turnover intention is stronger in the French-speaking region where there is higher societal practice uncertainty avoidance, the relationship between qualitative job insecurity and job satisfaction is stronger in the German-speaking region where there is higher societal practice performance orientation.     

Asset allocation: How much does model choice matter?

This paper analyzes the optimal portfolio decision of a CRRA investor in models with stochastic volatility and stochastic jumps. The investor follows a buy-and-hold strategy in the stock, the money market account, and one additional derivative. We show that both the type of the model and the structure of the risk premia have a significant impact on the optimal portfolio, on the utility gain from having access to derivatives, and on whether the investor prefers to trade OTM or ATM options. We also show that model mis-specification results in significant utility losses. Omitting jumps in volatility can be devastating, in particular if the investor chooses the seemingly optimal OTM put options. A misestimation of the structure of the risk premia has a less devastating effect, but can still lead to a loss of around 4% in the annual certainty equivalent return.     

Regional and environmental impacts of expanding the heavy duty vehicle charge to the secondary road network in Austria

In road freight transport a particularly large share of the total social costs generated is not borne by road users. To correct for this, many European countries use pricing instruments specifically targeted at heavy duty vehicles, so far targeted almost exclusively at the primary road network. In line with the overall EU objective of greening the transport sector, we discuss the possibility of expanding the road charging system to a more comprehensive, area-wide one. The degree to which peripheral or disadvantaged regions are hit over-proportionally by such a measure remains an open question in the literature on heavy duty vehicle road pricing. We combine an input–output and a computable general equilibrium approach to analyse the case for Austria. We find that while it is not the sectors of highest economic importance in the periphery regions that are hit by the charge, those sectors that are hit are those which are relatively more important in peripheral regions (with up to a twofold share in value added) and for whom production price impacts tend to be relatively strong. The short term consumer price effect of extending the current primary road network charges to the secondary network is found not to exceed 0.15%. In terms of the principles of sustainable transport we find that extending charge coverage is compatible with most core principles, the exception being the principle of regional need. In terms of environmental impact, for example, expanding heavy duty vehicle charges to the secondary road network reduces heavy duty vehicle kilometres in the overall network (and related emissions) by roughly 2%. However, in order to comply with the needs principle, suitable complementary transfer policies need to be designed and implemented for peripheral regions.     

The Declining Impact of Exchange Rate Volatility on Trade

The introduction of the euro in 1999 eliminated exchange rate volatility between the members of the eurozone. Despite the elimination of currency risks, trade flows within the eurozone hardly increased (Bun and Klaassen in Oxf Bull Econ Stat 69:473–496, 2007, Santos Silva and Tenreyro, 2009). Using a standard gravity model, we find that nominal exchange rate volatility has had a negative effect on trade before 1985 but that this effect disappeared in later years, coinciding with the introduction and rapid diffusion of over-the-counter currency swaps. The estimated coefficient for the euro dummy does not change when we include nominal exchange rate volatility as an additional regressor. This confirms our finding that the impact of exchange rate volatility on trade has been small in more recent years.