Put me in,Coach, I’m ready to play

This paper explores the connection between discrimination and entrepreneurship. To pursue this inquiry we focus on the integration of black players in Major League Baseball (MLB). MLB team owners, acting as entrepreneurs, had to weigh the benefits of integrating versus the costs of alienating consumers who had a taste for discrimination against hiring blacks. We find that the owners whose teams could profit by contending for the league pennant with the addition of black players were the ones who were willing to take the risk of integrating, although integration often stood in contrast to revealed consumer preferences. In addition to illuminating the mechanism through which integration took place, we offer a general understanding of how the costs and benefits associated with consumers’ taste for discrimination can change via entrepreneurial activities.

Overcoming the Liability of Foreignness in Internationalization in Emerging Economies: Lessons from Acquiring a Chinese Firm

How foreign investors overcome the liability of foreignness has long been a topic for discussion in the study of inter nationalization. Whether MNCs rely on exploration or exploitation, especially in emerging economies, has not been adequately understood. Drawing on the theory of ownership advantage and local responsiveness, this study addresses the controversy in the literature by investigating the approaches to, and processes of, overcoming the liability of foreignness from a processual analysis. It reports on a case study of an American company's acquisition of a private Chinese firm. It concludes that exploration and exploitation are not merely simultaneous. Rather, these strategies are able to assimilate and deploy different categories of resources in order to build the basis for the exploitation of localization‐based resources in the later stage of integration. The findings of this study are not limited to emerging context but can be extended to any circumstance in which information deprivation exists. © 2014 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.     

Structural Change and Policy Reform in the UK Dairy Sector

Estimation of a cost function for a representative sample of UK dairy producers allows future re‐structuring of the industry to be simulated using a model which incorporates producers' differential costs and milk prices. Consideration is also given to reductions in producer prices and to the introduction of an A/B quota system. The results indicate that, despite the history of quota trading in the UK, there is considerable scope for further restructuring in the industry to take advantage of differential incentives between producers. It is also projected that UK milk supply would increase if quota restrictions were removed.     

Strategic resources: a missing role in understanding integration speed in international acquisition

It has long been debated whether integration speed positively or negatively contributes to acquisition performance. Drawing on the resource‐based view, this study addresses this controversy in the literature by investigating how integration speed for specific categories of strategic resources affects the integration process by capturing the expected value of an acquisition. With six in‐depth case studies, it concludes that the relationship between integration speed and acquisition performance cannot be understood quantitatively; instead, the focus should be on the interaction between integration speed and three broad groups of strategic resources (managerial, customer‐oriented, and supplier‐oriented) post acquisition. The study further finds that the understanding of integration speed should not be from a stand‐alone viewpoint but rather from a dynamic perspective—a viewpoint combined with time of integration. The findings of this study also complement the existing understanding of integration by extending the knowledge of task integration and its interaction with human integration. © 2017 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.     

A Discriminatory Mechanism to Reduce Urban Congestion

In this article, we propose an optimal mechanism to reduce congestion when information is asymmetric. Each car driver receives a quantity of traffic rights such that his adjusted marginal benefit is equal to the marginal cost of congestion and payments are based on willingness to pay. We show that the level of congestion achieved is lower and each car user can receive more or fewer rights than under complete information. With symmetric beliefs, the payment rule results from a second‐degree price discrimination. When beliefs are asymmetric, it results simultaneously from a second‐degree price discrimination and from a third‐degree price discrimination and high willingness‐to‐pay car users are discriminated against. The revenue raised can be used to reduce distortionary taxes, thereby gaining public acceptability.     

Mortgage Prepayment and Default Decisions: A Poisson Regression Approach

This paper uses an extensive and geographically dispersed sample of single-family fixed rate mortgages to assess the prepayment and default behavior of individual homeowners. We make use of Poisson regression to efficiently estimate the parameters of a proportional hazards model for prepayment and default decisions. Poisson regression for grouped survival data has several advantages over partial likelihood methods. First, when dealing with time-dependent covar-iates, it is considerably more efficient in terms of computations. Second, it is possible to estimate full-hazard models which include, for example, functions of time as well as multiple time scales (i.e., age of the loan and calendar time), in a much more straightforward manner than partial likelihood methods for un-grouped data. Third, Poisson regression can be used to estimate non-proportional hazards models such as additive excess risk specifications. Taken together, our data and estimation methodology allow us to obtain a better understanding of the economic factors underlying prepayment and default decisions.