Mutual Fund Advisory Contracts: An Empirical Investigation

We investigate marginal compensation rates in mutual fund advisory contracts and find the following. Equity and foreign fund advisors receive higher marginal compensation than debt and domestic fund advisors. Advisors of funds with greater turnover receive higher marginal compensation. Also, closed-end fund advisors receive higher marginal compensation than open-end fund advisors. Finally, we find that marginal compensation is lower for advisors of large funds and members of large fund families. We argue that these differences in marginal compensation reflect differences in advisor marginal product, differences in the difficulty of monitoring performance, differences in control environments, and scale economies.     

B‐TO‐B E‐COMMERCE: A CONTENT ANALYTICAL ASSESSMENT OF MOTOR CARRIER WEBSITES

An Internet presence is a critical early component in the process of building towards a fully operational and unified e‐commerce strategy. E‐commerce has significantly impacted logistics/supply chain strategies and the development and implementation of a website have become key issues for many firms within the transportation industry. This study provides an overview of website content within the motor carrier industry. Content analysis was used to assess the site design, informational content, and the interactive content of 152 motor carrier websites, and to compare the features offered on the Top 100 motor carrier firm websites with those offered on the sites of smaller carrier firms.     

Making Sense of the Comparative Advantage Gains from Trade: Comment on Batra

This paper addresses Ravi Batra’s (2002 ) criticism of the basic comparative advantage gains‐from‐trade model. While Batra’s criticism is based on the selection view interpretation of real income, the gains from trade can only be properly understood from the options view interpretation of real income. I also show how a recent empirical implementation of the gains‐from‐trade model defies Batra’s claim that “the consumption gain . . . is not subject to measurement” (2002, p. 642).     

Approximating unanimity orderings: An application to Lorenz dominance

Stochastic dominance and Lorenz dominance are examples of orderings which require unanimous agreement among an infinite set of indices. This paper considers various subsets of inequality measures that respect Lorenz dominance, and assesses the extent to which a small number of indices can reproduce the Lorenz ordering. Using income data for 80 countries, our results suggest that Lorenz dominance can be predicted with 99% accuracy using just 3 or 4 inequality measures, as long as two of them focus on the extreme upper and lower tails of the distribution. In contrast, confining attention to the index families and parameter ranges normally considered may fail to detect the majority of occasions when Lorenz curves intersect. These results lead us to question the faith placed in procedures based on a finite set of inequality indices, and to suggest that similar lessons will apply to other types of unanimity orderings.     

Ethics and Australian International Business which way to Asia?

In an era of domestic and economic reform wherein deregulation/privatisation becomes a priority, short shift has too often been given to evaluative analyses of business activities. Evaluative monitoring and oversight are especially needful in highly competitive international business environments, where the temptations are very strong to adjudge individual effectiveness by the sole criterion of the bottom line. But what additional or alternative criteria should be administered, and by whom, is less clear. That any but the most vague Judeo-Christian or secular ethical standards are applicable (e.g. notions of fairness) is widely contested. The debate is significantly only widened when doing business across national borders involving peoples from different cultures and languages. This section is devoted to explicating the normative role of international codes of conduct for guiding the decision making of managers involved in multinational operations, and clarifying what ethical frameworks are available to the international manager for taking decisions which require selecting actions inconsistent with either home or host country demands.Daniel W. Skubik is a lecturer in the College of Liberal Arts, Florida Atlantic University; and is also an independent consultant. He holds the PhD (philosophy), a JD (law), and an MA (Hons.).     

Corporate Strategy and ethics

Corporate Strategy has emerged as a central metaphor for private-sector enterprise. Given inherent imperfections in markets, one important question to consider is how well the practice of Corporate Strategy contributes to social welfare. An account of the implicit morality of free markets is developed as a standard against which two particular, second best solutions to market imperfections — namely, American federal antitrust policy and Corporate Strategy — are compared. Corporate Strategy is subsequently evaluated in terms of the fundamental principles of Rawls' theory of justice. In both analyses, Corporate Strategy is found to depart significantly and systematically from the standards of social justice. An alternative principle, grounded in the concept of duty, is introduced as a means for reconceptualizing Corporate Strategy.Daniel R. Gilbert, Jr. is a doctoral student in the Strategic Management and Organization program, School of Management, University of Minnesota, and also serves as an Instructor in Strategic Management and a Research Associate in the Strategic Management Research Center.     

Measuring Hospital Performance in the Presence of Quasi-Fixed Inputs: An Analysis of Québec Hospitals

This research proposes an approach to measure hospital performance based on a generalization of Banker and Morey (1986) and Førsund (1996). This approach considers quasi-fixed inputs explicitly, calculates their implicit cost, and quantifies returns to scale. The performance measure is decomposed into allocative and technical inefficiencies. Based on a very complete data set of Québec hospitals, we find that significant inefficiencies of up to 17% ($700 CAN million) could have been saved through improved performance. Postestimation analyses that include qualitative measures of care suggest that differences in performance are attributable to differences in management or unobservable quality of care rather than patient case mix.     

Linear Programming Models for the Measurement of Environmental Performance of Firms—Concepts and Empirical Results

I use linear programming models to define standardised, aggregate environmental performance indicators for firms. The best practice frontier obtained corresponds to decision making units showing the best environmental behaviour. Results are obtained with data from U.S. fossil fuel-fired electric utilities, starting from four alternative models, among which are three linear programming models that differ in the way they account for undesirable outputs (pollutants) and resources used as inputs. The results indicate important discrepancies in the rankings obtained by the four models. Rather than contradictory, these results are interpreted as giving different, complementary kinds of information, that should all be taken into account by public decision-makers.