How to boost frontline employee service recovery performance: the role of cultural intelligence

Service Business - Satisfying complaining customers is challenging, especially when dealing with the increasing number of customers with culturally diverse backgrounds. The purpose of this study is...     

Schumpeterian Dynamics Versus Williamsonian Considerations: A Test of Export Intermediary Performance

Using a sample of export intermediaries connecting domestic producers and foreign buyers, the study tests competing hypotheses on firm performance derived from the Austrian and transaction cost perspectives. Specifically, the Austrian perspective suggests that the more distant the export market and the more complex the product that the intermediary specializes in, the better its performance. Transaction cost theory, on the other hand, offers conflicting predictions. Our results indicate that these two theories are complementary to each other, and a contingency framework is proposed and discussed.     

Justifications and Questions in Detecting Deception

Truth-tellers and deceivers use justifications to bolster their credibility, but given their different motivations, truth-tellers and deceivers may use justifications differently. Participants were assigned the role of allocator or recipient in an ultimatum game. Allocators received money based on their performance on a task and made an offer. Recipients did not have information about allocator’s task performance or amount the allocator received, and therefore, allocators could deceive. Liars provided more plausible details to support their offer by stating the structure of their task; this strategy backfired and led to more detection of lies. Truth-tellers were more likely to disclose advantageous information about their endowment of money in their justifications, and this reduced suspicion in their offers. Deceivers used more wrap-up questions to end the interaction; this did not help reduce partner suspicion. Asking questions in general did not improve detection accuracy.     

Aggregation of Efficiency Indices

Measurement of technical efficiency is carried out at many levels of aggregation—at the individual branch, plant, division, or district level; at the company- or organization-wide level; at the industry or sectoral level; or at the economy-wide level. In this paper, we examine the conditions under which these indexes constructed at various levels of aggregation can be consistent with one another—that is, the extent to which efficiency indexes can be consistently aggregated. Unfortunately, our results are discouraging, indicating that very strong restrictions on the technology and/or the efficiency index itself are required to enable consistent aggregation (or disaggregation).     

Equilibria in a multi-object uniform price sealed bid auction with multi-unit demands

Summary In many existing markets demanders wish to buy more than one unit from a group of identical units of a commodity. Often, the units are sold simultaneously by auction. The vast majority of literature pertaining to the economics of auctions, however, considers environments in which demanders buy at most one object. In this paper we derive necessary and sufficient conditions for a set of bidding strategies to be a symmetric monotone Bayes-Nash equilibrium to a uniform price sealed bid auction using the first rejected bid pricing rule in an independent private values environment with two-unit demands. In any symmetric monotone Bayes-Nash equilibrium, all bidders submit one bid equal to their higher valuation and one bid lower than their lower valuation. We characterize the equilibrium and derive the exact amount of underrevelation in the lower bid.This article is based on chapter 2 of the author's Ph.D. thesis. I would like to acknowledge the financial support of the Clarence Hicks Memorial Fellowship, the California Institute of Technology and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. I also thank D. Roderick Kiewiet, Richard McKelvey, Charles Plott, David Porter, Annemieke Tromp, participants in the Tinbergen Institute Seminar Series, an anonymous referee and especially John Ledyard for countless enlightening comments.     

The effects of a “no-haggle” channel on marketing strategies

As sellers increasingly turn to multi-channel retailing, the opportunity to implement different pricing policies has grown. With the advent of the internet, many traditionally bargained products such as automobiles, jewelry, watches, appliances and furniture are now being offered online at a fixed pre-determined price. We explore the strategy of simultaneously offering two pricing formats (fixed and bargained) via two different channels (online and brick and mortar) and find that in a market where there are two types of consumers—those with a high cost of haggling and others with a lower cost—a dual-pricing strategy is optimal only when there are enough high haggling-cost consumers, but not too many, and when the haggling costs between the two types of consumers are sufficiently different. We also find that it is optimal for the seller to specify a higher-than-cost minimum acceptable price as the price floor of bargaining. By doing so, the seller increases the bargained price by complementing the salesperson's bargaining ability, and also softens the internal competition between the two channels. Finally, we find that, surprisingly, the dual-pricing strategy may serve fewer customers while still being more profitable than a single price structure. The implications for consumer surplus are also explored.     

Using Polynomial Regression Analysis and Response Surface Methodology to Make a Stronger Case for Value Congruence in Place Marketing

Values are an important concept in marketing because they comprise part of peoples’ identity and can thus help marketers separate and target different audiences. Unsurprisingly, places and their marketing initiatives increasingly try to appeal to (potential) residents’ identity by communicating core values. While the notion of value congruence is not novel, most empirical methods in marketing to date only account for the degree rather than the level of congruence. To address this issue, the present article utilizes polynomial regression and response surface methodology (Edwards & Parry, 1993 ) in the context of place marketing. Accordingly, the first study shows that the perceived congruence of residents’ own values and the values of stereotypical city inhabitants significantly affect residents’ feelings about their own cities (N = 1257), but with different effects for different values and levels of congruence. This finding holds not only for popular target groups such as the “creative class” but also across all groups. The second study (N = 449) shows that city slogans can effectively communicate specific values and that value congruence leads to a more positive evaluation of the city brand. Finally, the article discusses the benefits of differentiating between levels of congruence both in marketing research in general, and place brand management in particular.     

Culture,leadership and motivation in two Commonwealth Caribbean countries: One look at the African Diaspora

Little is known of Caribbean people's views on their culture or of their beliefs regarding leadership and motivation. This study reports the results of a Delphi Technique with people in leadership positions and focus groups. Across groups, responses were relatively consistent: ethnicity and culture are described as influenced by religion, and Christianity in particular; African roots and country of origin are important; effective leaders are charismatic, visionary, results oriented, and they motivate others, lead by example, and develop vision and goals. Leaders believe motivation comes from making a difference for others. Nonleaders believe leaders are influenced by financial rewards and self‐fulfilment; nonleaders are motivated primarily by financial rewards. The results are generally similar to Western beliefs, but some interesting differences are identified. Copyright © 2014 ASAC. Published by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

On Bayesian and non-Bayesian estimation of a two-level CES production function for the Dutch manufacturing sector

In this paper maximum-likelihood estimates of the parameters of the two-level CES function, obtained by direct estimation of this function, are given. In addition the authors propose to show how a Bayesian analysis may help to find a solution to the difficulties related with, but not specific to, this particular estimation problem. It is shown that numerical integration of the posterior distribution may give an indication as to which parameter has to be pinpointed and at which value when multi-collinearity precludes unconditional maximization of the likelihood. It is suspected that this approach has a wider field of application.