Wage Bargaining, Inventories, and Union Legislation

This paper analyses a strategic bargaining game where the firm may or maynot be able to sell out of its inventory of finished goods during astrike. Firms and the union are both risk neutral and have the same discountrate. It is shown that the wage equilibrium corresponds to the axiomaticNash bargaining solution where the threatpoints are the agents' payoffsshould bargaining continue indefinitely. We use the 1980 and 1982 EmploymentActs to test this theory, interpreting that legislation change as changingthe firm's threatpoint but not its bargaining power. This allows us toidentify the value of the firm's threatpoint post-1982. Formal testssupport the theory. Also consistent with the theory, it is found that unionwages decrease with inventories after 1982, but not before, and that theunion wage gap is smaller after 1982.     

New Evidence on the Market for Directors: Board Membership and Pennsylvania Senate Bill 1310

We examine the relation between a board's decision to reject antitakeover provisions of Pennsylvania Senate Bill 1310 and subsequent labor market opportunities of those same board members. Compared to directors retaining all provisions, directors rejecting all protective provisions of SB1310 are three times as likely to gain additional external directorships and are 30 percent more likely to retain their internal slot on the board of that same Pennsylvania company. For external board seats, the results are driven by nonexecutive directors who are not members of the management team; for internal board seats, the results are driven by executive directors.     

Responsibilities,recession and the tourism sector: perspectives on CSR among low-fares airlines during the economic downturn in the UK

Responsibility has featured prominently in recent discussions about tourism governance. Nevertheless, research into corporate social responsibility (CSR) among travel and tourism businesses is at a relatively early stage. This paper reports on external stakeholders' perceptions of CSR among low-fares airlines (LFAs) in peripheral regions of the UK in late 2008; that is, during the current global economic downturn. LFAs, their business plans and their ability to contribute towards sustainable development have been the source of much public discourse and media scrutiny in the last decade. This paper does not set out to reopen that debate per se. Rather, it contributes to a deeper understanding of CSR in the tourism sector by arguing for a more nuanced approach to external stakeholders, one which is also informed by primary empirical research from qualitative sources, and which is conceptually informed by the latest thinking from other sectors of economic activity. Important inter-regional variations exist in external stakeholders' perceptions and valorisations of CSR, they are context-specific, and they are not static as their responses to the recent downturn reveal.     

A review of business models for decentralised renewable energy projects

The diffusion of renewable energy technologies has often been suggested as a means to reduce the emission of greenhouse gases, but emphasis tends to be placed on large scale projects. Adoption of renewable energy at the local level provides opportunities for both distributed energy schemes and domestic microgeneration. However, alternative models of ownership, governance and operation are not well developed. Locally managed energy solutions need to respond to varied end users' requirements to ensure that needs are met, so understanding of different types of end users is a prerequisite to the development of robust business models. This paper presents a review of existing models of decentralised energy generation in which actors such as community groups, energy cooperatives, charities and municipalities participate as owners and coproducers. End users can become involved in the design, development and delivery of energy services in a variety of ways. The focus is active user engagement through coconstruction, coproduction and coprovision of energy services. The following categories will be reviewed with reference to current understandings of both sustainable entrepreneurship and social enterprise: (a) energy service companies (ESCos) as commercial actors that undertake management of these projects, (b) energy cooperatives and (c) municipal energy. This analysis is used to reflect on and refine understanding of the relationship between technical, financial and operational constructs in models of decentralised energy generation which can contribute to social and environmental gains.     

Synchronisation von Nachricht und Werbung

Advertiser pressure has always been seen as a potential source of bias in the coverage of ad-financed media. The effects of advertiser pressure, however, have seldom been subject to systematic empirical research. Content analyses on the subject are particularly rare. This study for the first time scrutinizes on how the representation of firms by the leading German political weeklies Der Spiegel und Focus correlates with the amount of advertising by those firms. For this purpose all ads and the full news coverage on selected firms during the year of 2011 were analyzed. Central findings show that firms will receive more coverage, friendlier coverage and a larger share of product coverage, the higher their volume of advertising both in Der Spiegel and in Focus.     

Tourists’ participation and preference-related belief in co-creating value of experience: a nature-based perspective

We draw theoretical support from the concept of customer participation and cognitive dissonance theory to investigate the moderating effects of the preference-related belief of nature-based tourists, that is, the New Environmental Paradigm (NEP), on relationships between tourist experiential components and outcomes. The responses of 500 visitors to the Yangmingshan National Park, Taiwan indicate that actively participative experiences (APEs)—that is, education and escapism—are more positively related than passively participative experiences (PPEs)—that is, entertainment and esthetics—to pleasure and memorability. Furthermore, tourists’ NEP appears to reinforce the effects of APEs and to weaken the effects of PPEs. We also found that tourists’ NEP has a stronger reinforcing effect than a weakening effect. Our study contributes further evidence to current insights into the importance of tourists’ participation in co-creating value of tourist experiences.     

Buyer animosity in business to business markets: Evidence from the French nuclear tests

Academic studies of buyer reaction to unpopular political events in the country of origin of products have focused on consumer markets. This paper aims to extend Klein, Ettenson and Morris' [Klein, J., Ettenson, R., & Morris, M. (1998). The animosity model of foreign product purchase: An empirical test in the People's Republic of China. Journal of Marketing, 62(1), 89-101] concept of consumer animosity to industrial markets by comparing industrial and consumer buyer reaction to the nuclear tests conducted by France in the Pacific in the mid-1990s. It investigates whether firms in the B2B sector were affected more than those in B2C markets, whether entry mode was significant, and examines the way in which firms in the two market sectors responded. The results show that buyer animosity was less pronounced in industrial than in consumer markets. They also show that entry mode can influence the experience of animosity.     

Currency boards: More than a quick fix?

Once a popular colonial monetary arrangement, currency boards fell into disuse as countries gained political independence. But recently, currency boards have made a remarkable come-back. This essay takes a critical look at their performance. Are currency boards really a panacea for achieving low inflation and high growth? Or do they merely provide a 'quick fix' allowing authorities to neglect fundamental reforms and thus fail to yield lasting benefits? We have three major findings. First, the historical track record of currency boards is sterling, with few instances of speculative attacks and virtually no 'involuntary' exits. Countries that did exit from currency boards did so mainly for political, rather than economic reasons, and such exits were usually uneventful. Second, modern currency boards have often been instituted to gain credibility following a period of high or hyperinflation, and in this regard, have been remarkably successful. Countries with currency boards experienced lower inflation and higher (if more volatile) GDP growth compared to both floating regimes and simple pegs. The inflation difference reflects both a lower growth rate of money supply (a 'discipline effect'), and a faster growth of money demand (a 'credibility effect'). The GDP growth effect is significant, but may simply reflect a rebound from depressed levels. Third, case studies reveal the successful introduction of a currency board to be far from trivial, requiring lengthy legal and institutional changes, as well as a broad economic and social consensus for the implied commitment. Moreover, there are thorny issues, as yet untested, regarding possible exits from a currency board. Thus currency boards do not provide easy solutions. But if introduced in the right circumstances, with some built-in flexibility, they can be an important tool for gaining credibility and achieving macroeconomic stabilization.     

Real-time data exploitation supported by model- and event-driven architecture to enhance situation awareness,application to crisis management

ABSTRACT

An effective crisis response requires up-to-date information. The crisis cell must reach for new, external, data sources. However, new data lead to new issues: their volume, veracity, variety or velocity cannot be managed by humans only, especially under high stress and time pressure. This paper proposes (i) a framework to enhance situation awareness while managing the 5Vs of Big Data, (ii) general principles to be followed and (iii) a new architecture implementing the proposed framework. The latter merges event-driven and model-driven architectures. It has been tested on a realistic flood scenario set up by official French services.