Does it really pay to be good,everywhere? A first step to understand the corporate social and financial performance link in Latin American controversial industries

Most research studying the corporate social performance (CSP)–corporate financial performance (CFP) link has utilized developed country samples. Also, this literature has generally focused on a wide variety of industries, ignoring the fact that certain sectors – such as controversial industries – have graver social and environmental issues. Hence, a gap exists in this tradition when it comes to emerging markets and controversial industries. This paper attempts to fill this void by providing preliminary evidence and insight on the matter. Based on an exploration in six Latin American countries and five controversial industries, we find a negative bidirectional association (or a non‐significant one at best) between CSP and CFP. These results tend to contradict the mainstream conclusion of a positive bidirectional link, suggesting that institutional and market‐level forces play a major role in shaping this relationship.     

Performance feedback in competitive product development

Performance feedback is ubiquitous in competitive settings where new products are developed. This article introduces a fundamental tension between incentives and improvement in the provision of feedback. Using a sample of 4294 commercial logo design tournaments, I show that feedback reduces participation but improves the quality of subsequent submissions, with an ambiguous effect on high‐quality output. To evaluate this trade‐off, I develop a procedure to estimate agents' effort costs and simulate counterfactuals under alternative feedback policies. The results suggest that feedback on net increases the number of high‐quality ideas produced and is thus desirable for a principal seeking innovation.     

Unjustified prices: environmental drivers of managers’ propensity to overprice

Ideally, a product’s price should strike a balance between extracting value for a firm and sharing some of that value with customers. Charging less than what is warranted by a product’s value “leaves money on the table”, but far greater long-run harm to the brand is caused when managers charge more than what is justified by the product’s benefits. This study examines the effect of environmental- and firm-level factors on managers’ judgment when setting prices. Using data collected from brand managers of major consumer goods companies, we found that managers are more inclined to charge unjustified prices in environments with less intense competition and in business units with a strong technological orientation. Brand strength is also positively related to the propensity to overprice, but this relationship diminishes as the brand becomes stronger.     

Entrepreneurial capacities as antecedents of business performance in Brazilian firms

We investigate the relationship between entrepreneurial capacities and firm performance. More specifically, we investigate the effects of radical innovation and learning orientation on business performance. We test the effects of entrepreneurial orientation on learning orientation and radical innovation. The results suggest that radical product innovation and companies' orientation to learn have a positive effect on organizational performance. Additionally, we find that entrepreneurial orientation positively influences a firm's capability to learn and innovate. Our findings also show a direct effect of learning orientation on radical innovation, which means that companies with a higher proclivity to learn are more likely to create products and processes, representing a major departure from the state of current knowledge. Copyright © 2014 ASAC. Published by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Distance from core competences and new export survival: Evidence from multi‐product exporters

We study the determinants of the survival of new export products of multi‐product firms. We use micro‐level data from Chile to estimate linear fixed‐effects and non‐linear survival models to show that a measure of “distance” between a firm's new export and its previous export basket is a negative and significant determinant of the survival of the new export, especially during its first year. Our interpretation of this finding is that exports further away from firms’ core competences have lower chances of survival in exports since it is more difficult for firms to achieve competitiveness in them. Our results suggest that country‐level diversification, at least through existing firms, should be gradual.     

INTERNATIONAL TRADE NETWORKS UNDER GLOBAL TREATY STABILITY

The stability of international trade networks has been investigated using the pairwise stability concept. This concept is suitable to study the formation of bilateral agreements. However, it cannot be used to determine the stability of global trade agreements. This article proposes an alternative stability concept that can be adopted to determine the stability of global agreements such as the Doha agreement. This concept is named in this paper Global Treaty Stability.     

Identifying relevant and irrelevant variables in sparse factor models

This paper considers factor estimation from heterogeneous data, where some of the variables—the relevant ones—are informative for estimating the factors, and others—the irrelevant ones—are not. We estimate the factor model within a Bayesian framework, specifying a sparse prior distribution for the factor loadings. Based on identified posterior factor loading estimates, we provide alternative methods to identify relevant and irrelevant variables. Simulations show that both types of variables are identified quite accurately. Empirical estimates for a large multi‐country GDP dataset and a disaggregated inflation dataset for the USA show that a considerable share of variables is irrelevant for factor estimation.     

Efficiencies brewed: pricing and consolidation in the US beer industry

Merger efficiencies provide the primary justification for why mergers of competitors may benefit consumers. Surprisingly, there is little evidence that efficiencies can offset incentives to raise prices following mergers. We estimate the effects of increased concentration and efficiencies on pricing by using panel scanner data and geographic variation in how the merger of the brewers Miller and Coors was expected to increase concentration and reduce costs. All else equal, the average predicted increase in concentration led to price increases of 2%, but at the mean this was offset by a nearly equal and opposite efficiency effect.     

Sufficient Decisions in Multi‐Sided and Multiproduct Markets

We show that in many models where firms make multiple decisions, analysis can be made more tractable by re‐formulating the model into one in which each firm makes a single choice, which we call a sufficient decision. The transformation allows application of standard techniques in these settings, including pass‐through for tax incidence and upward pricing pressure for merger analysis. The transformation works because the assumption of profit maximization links the firms’ decisions together. Examples include models of monopoly and oligopoly in two‐sided markets, where a natural sufficient decision may be the number of transactions that the firm facilitates, and multiproduct markets.