On Quality

M. J. Stewart failed to critique the correct data set we sent him. He had two data sets of ours in his possession, and has written a critique (Stewart, 1992) of the earlier data set, data already rejected by us. Stewart's ‘Critique of Laugesen and Meads 1991’, wrongly titled, critiques our 1991 paper using a 1990 data set. We discarded the 1990 data set and revised and replaced it in 1991 prior to publication (Laugesen and Meads, 1991). The 1991 data set used for our 1991 paper differs from the 1990 version with regard to tobacco price in most countries; in addition the advertising restriction score for Sweden has been updated.

What Stewart wrote and asked for, and what we sent him, which he received but did not use, was a copy of the data we used in our 1991 paper (Laugesen and Meads, 1991). If he had any doubts as to which data set he should critique, he was entitled to ask us. As he did not use our 1991 data set, Stewart failed to note the very high correlation between our 1991 data and his UK price series.

We did not send Stewart the 1990 data set. Stewart evidently obtained it after the 1990 Quebec tobacco advertising trial. We made it available to the Canadian government, but with some reluctance to the Quebec Superior Court and hence to tobacco manufacturer plaintiffs, as we intended to revise and publish.

In response to the parts of Stewart's critique, applicable despite his using an earlier data set: 1. Stewart says we should calculate price independent of consumption, but the necessary data were only fully available for nine out of 22 countries; the method we used was the only feasible method, and gave a very high degree of correlation with Stewart's method.

2. Stewart misquotes us on income: as a comparator of incomes, we use gross domestic product per capita, in preference to private consumption which does not allow for the value of free public sector services.

3. After allowing for data errors in some values for tobacco consumption for the United Kingdom, and for Portugal's female work-force data, we recalculated our equations and confirm our published findings that adbans tend to be significantly associated with falls in consumption.

4. We preferred Generalized Least Squares for regression. The pre-conditions for using Ordinary Least Squares could not be met.

5. We confirm the general pattern of coefficients, and the tendency of advertising bans to be followed by falls in tobacco consumption, if we use country dummies and Ordinary Least Squares as Stewart suggests. The large residuals noted in our 1991 analysis disappear; between-country differences are significant, consistent with historical differences in intrinsic tobacco consumption.

6. We find significant correlations between adbans and later tobacco consumption. The converse was not true; earlier consumption did not correlate with later ban levels.

     

Winning methods for forecasting tourism time series

We constituted Team “Lee C. Baker”, which won the online tourism forecasting competition. Our forecasts had the smallest MASE for the first part of the competition involving 518 annual time series, and the second smallest MASE for the second part of the competition involving 427 quarterly time series and 366 monthly time series. In this article, we briefly describe the methods we used.     

跨越鸿沟的五大应对之策

那些对社会政治问题于企业之重要性始终心存疑问的管理者在看过《麦肯锡季刊》对这一问题所做的引人注目的民意调查后，一定会疑云顿消。     

"Management as the Spirit of the Modern Age"

This paper uses Collingwood's methodology to attempt to understand those formative influences influencing Drucker within the Weimar Republic. It is intent on using this methodology to advance an historical thesis about both the origins and sources of Drucker's thought. By illuminating these formative influences on Drucker, the paper hopes to portray the implications of such influences for his theory of business management.     

Experts and quacks

What happens when “type” is endogenous in a reputational setting? Here, customers cannot tell “experts” from imitative “quacks,” but gain information through repeated interaction. Firm incentives to invest in expertise vary nonmonotonically in how tolerant customers are of bad outcomes; more tolerant customers are both more forgiving, making expertise less necessary, and longer tenured, increasing the value of retaining them. In equilibrium, the proportion of expert firms is bounded away from one; some quacks are necessary to keep incentives of experts in line. The fraction of experts is decreasing in customers' switching costs and the relative cost of expertise over quackery.     

Primetime Spin: Media Bias and Belief Confirming Information

This paper develops a model of media bias in which rational agents acquire all their news from the source that is most likely to confirm their prior beliefs. Despite only wishing to make the correct decision, agents act as if they enjoy receiving news that supports their preconceptions. By exclusively gathering information from a source biased towards his prior, there is little chance an agent will be persuaded to change his mind. Moreover, it is shown that even an unbiased agent prefers to receive biased news as it is unlikely to produce conflicting reports. The media caters to the informational demands of consumers and accordingly slants its reporting. It is shown that competition may not decrease bias, but may actually enhance it. Finally, even when it increases bias, competition may improve welfare by expanding the market for news.     

A Simple Explanation of the Forecast Combination Puzzle*

This article presents a formal explanation of the forecast combination puzzle, that simple combinations of point forecasts are repeatedly found to outperform sophisticated weighted combinations in empirical applications. The explanation lies in the effect of finite‐sample error in estimating the combining weights. A small Monte Carlo study and a reappraisal of an empirical study by Stock and Watson [Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond Economic Quarterly (2003) Vol. 89/3, pp. 71–90] support this explanation. The Monte Carlo evidence, together with a large‐sample approximation to the variance of the combining weight, also supports the popular recommendation to ignore forecast error covariances in estimating the weight.     

风险管理在企业财资管理中日趋重要

长远来看,我们预期风险管理议程会对企业决策起到更大作用。这将使财资管理者在制定业务策略过程中成为很有影响力的角色。风险管理在财资管理的每一项决策中都是必不可少的要素。虽然财资管理工作的一项经常任务就是风险     

Organizational performance with a broader focus: The case for a stakeholder approach to leadership

In 2019, BlackRock CEO Larry Fink, Apple CEO Tim Cook, and the other 179 CEO members of the Business Roundtable argued that the purpose of a corporation must reflect not only the fiduciary interests of owners but also the varied interests of all stakeholders: employees, customers, partners, and broader society. This idea challenges a decades-old norm of shareholder primacy, so it is reasonable for organizational leaders to wonder whether doing so is truly in their firms’ best interests, and if so, how to implement this approach to leadership. To answer these questions, we draw on over 200 peer-reviewed articles covering leadership research to demonstrate how servant leadership, a stakeholder-focused approach to management, outperforms other leadership approaches across both shareholder and stakeholder criteria. We leverage case studies of organizational leaders from SAS, Zappos, Starbucks, and Jason’s Deli, financially successful organizations that exemplify how managers provide value and sustainability to stakeholders and shareholders through servant leadership. We also include practical steps managers can take to begin putting this form of leadership into practice.