Translating satisfaction determination from health care to the automotive industry

This study is based on the case of BMW, and aims to improve the determination of perceived consumer satisfaction in the automotive industry by transferring existing knowledge from the health care sector. A literature analysis of the health care sector and the automotive industry was conducted to identify the common concepts of determining satisfaction. These were the service encounter, situational factors, and sociodemographics. The practical application was tested by analyzing a contemporary survey from BMW. Based on the findings, managers responsible for customer satisfaction in after-sales services in the automotive industry could improve measurement of customer satisfaction.     

Die stochastische Modellierung von Großschäden für den Einsatz in internen Risikomodellen der Schadenversicherung

Along with individual corporate management and regulatory matters for instance within EU regime Solvency II, Internal Risk Models are very important for major general insurance companies. Of crucial importance in building these internal models, is the stochastic modelling of large claims and in particular, the selection and parameterization of suitable probability distributions for the amount and number of claims based on empirical data. To this end, in practice, a visually-based methodology is more appropriate and workable than strict mathematical approaches. Based on a practical case study, this paper provides some insight into a visually-based methodology for internal risk models.     

Island futures—Does a participatory scenario process capture the common view of local residents?

Scenarios are often developed by small groups of motivated individuals, but how representative are they of community views of desirable futures? A scenario process in the coastal community of Vega in central Norway was complemented by a survey among 200 community residents in which respondents rated a preferred development option from a series of future choices and dilemmas. While the scenario process produced novelty and diversity in thinking about the future, the common community view reflects a more traditionalistic view of the future. Tourism was identified as a key economic opportunity in the scenario process, but the larger island community has little faith in tourism as a future cornerstone of economic development and would rather rely on traditional sectors like agriculture and fisheries. The scenarios brought out richness in future development options, highlighted place identity and support for heritage conservation based on wise use of natural resources. The scenarios were less suited for making decisions about economic investments, but produced salient information about opportunities, uncertainties and complexities of the future. Findings show the need to compliment scenario processes where a small group explores “possible futures” with surveys to explore the wider populations’ views about “preferred futures”.     

Control Aversion and The Search for External Financing in Swedish SMEs

The discussion on growth (see Storey, 1997) and control aversion (Cressy, 1995; Chittenden et al., 1996; Cressy and Olofsson, 1996) in small and medium sized firms has been attracting an increasing amount of attention. Our purpose in this article is to identify under what circumstances small and medium sized firms are prepared to accept outside control in the business firm in order to grow. In the article it is argued that technology development, financial strength, size and perceived need to grow, change firms attitudes towards external financiers. The change in attitude towards more openness eventually leads to an actual behaviour where the principals choose to apply for external finance in the form of bank loans. A linear structural equation modelling program, LISREL, is used to analyse a sample of 281 Swedish firms. The firms all have less than 200 employees, and the sample includes both manufacturing and service firms. This revised version was published online in August 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

Development of Norms Through Compliance Disclosure

This article introduces compliance disclosure regimes to business ethics research. Compliance disclosure is a relatively recent regulatory technique whereby companies are obliged to disclose the extent to which they comply with codes, ‘best practice standards’ or other extra-legal texts containing norms or prospective norms. Such ‘compliance disclosure’ obligations are often presented as flexible regulatory alternatives to substantive, command-and-control regulation. However, based on a report on experiences of existing compliance disclosure obligations, this article will identify major weaknesses that prevent them from becoming effective mechanisms to discipline a certain type of behaviour. It will be argued that regulatory recourse to compliance disclosure obligations is nonetheless worthwhile if we view them as mechanisms that can initiate a dialogue about norm interpretation, application and norm desirability. From this perspective, compliance disclosure obligations serve less to discipline companies by making corporate practices transparent, and more to trigger a process of norm development, in which the law, companies and their stakeholders interact. This article provides an illustration of how mandatory disclosure, if it is restricted to a unilateral communication process, may produce no effective results (or even prove counterproductive), whilst highlighting the alternative potential of disclosure as an initiator of dialogue, supported by laws, geared towards the development and refinement of norms applicable to business in a global context and the values they promote.     

What characterizes Chinese consumer behavior? A cross-industry analysis of the Chinese diaspora in Japan

In order to profit from China??s enormous business opportunities, international firms need to know Chinese consumer preferences. To learn more about intrinsic Chinese consumer preferences and their distinction from other Asian consumer preferences, this study analyzes differences in the formation of customer satisfaction, repurchase intent, and word-of-mouth intent between Chinese-born and locally born consumers in Japan. Verifying culture-based hypotheses, cross-industry analyses show that Chinese-born consumers pay less attention to the public brand image and risk-related switching costs, but more attention to quality expectations, perceived value, experienced usefulness, and financial switching costs than Japanese consumers. Marketing strategies should account for these preference structures.     

Family background and income during the rise of the welfare state: Brother correlations in income for Swedish men born 1932–1968

We investigate if the association between family background and income in Sweden has changed for men born between 1932 and 1968. Our main finding is that the share of the variance in long-run income that is attributable to family background, the so-called brother correlation in income, has fallen by some 17% from 0.49 for the cohorts of brothers born in the early 1930s to below 0.32 for the cohorts born around 1950. From then on, the correlations have inched back up to around 0.37. We report suggestive evidence that the decline is driven by changes in education.     

Recursions for Distribution Functions and Stop-Loss Transforms

For any function f on the non-negative integers, we can evaluate the cumulative function o f given by o f ( s )= ~ s x=0 f ( x ) from the values of f by the recursion o f ( s )= o f ( s -1)+ f ( s ). Analogously we can use this procedure t times to evaluate the t -th order cumulative function o t f . As an alternative, in the present paper we shall derive recursions for direct evaluation of o t f when f itself satisfies a certain sort of recursion. We shall also derive recursions for the t -th order tails v t f where v f ( s )= ~ X x=s+1 f ( x ). The recursions can be applied for exact and approximate evaluation of distribution functions and stop-loss transforms of probability distributions. The class of recursions for f includes the classes discussed by Sundt (1992), incorporating the class studied by Panjer's (1981). We discuss in particular convolutions and compound functions.