Individual Priming in Virtual Team Decision-Making

Virtual teams have different interactions than face-to-face teams because they rely on information and communication technologies, which can impede or assist certain human cognitive processes. Past research has shown that although virtual teams exchange more information than face-to-face teams, poor decisions often result, because team members do not consider the unique information they receive from others. Drawing from cognitive psychology, our research explored a unique way to improve team decision-making through the use of cognitive priming. We proposed that priming group members to pay attention to others or to engage in counterfactual thinking would improve team members’ cognition and, therefore, team performance. Prior research with individuals and brainstorming teams has shown these forms of priming to improve performance; however, no research has attempted to use priming to improve the outcomes of virtual team decision-making, which requires deeper interaction and cognitive involvement than brainstorming. We performed two lab experiments using primes that have been found to improve the individual decision-making process. We found that priming had some impact, but it did not significantly improve decision quality. Various reasons are discussed to explain why priming techniques may not be as powerful in teams as in individuals, and future research ideas are suggested to build on our initial work on priming in virtual team decision-making.     

Mitigating Monopoly or Preventing Discrimination: Comparing Antitrust to Regulatory Goals in the Interstate Commerce Act

The Interstate Commerce Act and Sherman Antitrust Act were passed within 3 years of each other. Although regulation and antitrust both address market power, the ICA and Sherman Act had different objectives. After a minimal reference to just and reasonable prices, the ICA focused on preventing price discrimination in rail. No posited Sherman Act goal—inequality, consumer welfare, efficiency—is in the ICA. Priority of discrimination in the ICA, however, is predictable. Shippers would care less about absolute rates—which can be passed on to final consumers—and more about preventing rivals from gaining advantages through input price discounts.     

Lobbying and discretion

When interest groups compete to influence legislators, the resulting legislation is often vague, and thus obliges the groups to continue their fight in the executive. On its face, this seems inefficient—at least from the point of view of the groups. We explore this intuition in a model of “nested lobbying” in which interest groups first compete to influence a legislative agenda setter, then compete to influence legislative votes over the resulting agenda. If the resulting legislation grants discretion to the executive, the final prize is allocated in yet one more contest in the bureaucracy. We find that when the status quo is non-discretionary, competition over the agenda never results in an agenda that includes discretion. Surprisingly, however, a discretionary status quo can stand with probability 1 if the preferences of the bureaucracy, the legislature, and the agenda setter are arranged in an “iron triangle”. Specifically, the bureaucracy and agenda setter must be biased in favor of one group, while the legislature is biased in favor of the other.     

Modifying Conjoint Methods to Model Managers' Reactions to Business Environmental Trends: An Application to Modeling Retailer Reactions to Sales Trends

This article proposes and demonstrates how conjoint methods can be adapted to allow the modeling of managerial reactions to various changes in economic and competitive environments and their effects on observed sales levels. Because in general micro-level data on strategic decision making over time are difficult and expensive to obtain, this approach can be of much value to the further study of managerial strategic behavior and market dynamics. In our application we model retailer reactions to changes in their sales, focusing in particular on the actions that affect the demand for retail space and possibilities to improve retail sites. Choice responses to hypothetical sales and environmental trend scenarios are collected from 183 retailers and used to estimate to logit regression model that predicts retailers' probabilities of choosing actions. The model results confirm that retailers are more likely to take action when sales go down than when they go up, and also that they react more quickly if sales go down. It is also found that retailers are more reluctant to change the positioning of their store when confronted with a sales increase than when confronted with a sales decrease. The model is compared with a non-experimental model that is based on retailers' reactions to the trends they report to have observed for their own stores. The article concludes with a discussion of the implications of this research for the further development of conjoint-like approaches to studying entrepreneurial behavior.     

Ireland's innovative governmental policies promoting internationalisation

The importance of innovation is reflected in the policy strategies that have been adopted by countries that have gained competitive advantage over the last two decades. In today's competitive global economy, Ireland has been acknowledged for its governmental policies and policy dynamics that have created a competitive market site for FDI. These policies have been based on continual policy innovation. The purpose of this paper is to analyse the governmental policies and policy dynamics within the Irish context of internationalisation. From this analysis a model of government influence on FDI in Ireland is developed. The main conclusions are that the success of the Irish model of internationalisation can be attributed to its innovative character. If Ireland's success is to extend into the future, it will have to continue to pursue innovation in the approach it adopts to internationalisation.     

Family Members' Projections of Each Other's Preference and Influence: A Two-Stage Conjoint Approach

Two important sources of error that may limit the accuracy of individual family members' projections of joint family preferences are: (i) misperceptions of other members' preferences, and (ii) misperceptions of other members' influence in joint family evaluations. We propose a two-stage conjoint approach to study these potential errors. Stage one compares family members' projections of each other's preferences to members' self-reported preferences. Stage two compares family members' projections of each other's influence to observed influence in joint family preferences. An empirical illustration shows that family members are relatively poor predictors of preference, but fairly accurate predictors of influence, in the area of family holiday preferences.     

Market orientation and marketing in nonprofit organizations. Indications for fundraising from Victoria

The effectiveness of a market orientation has been established in other parts of the world. Using a modified replication study of 401 nonprofit organizations from Victoria, this research took some initial steps to assess fundraising and marketing activities. Studies in Australia have usually focused on only one part of the Third Sector. This study takes a different view and uses a criteria sampling method to survey all 11 sections named by the Australian Bureau of Statistics. The self‐reported data of fundraising activities showed that there were several choices available to all nonprofit organizations that can lead to an improvement in organizational performance. Results suggest that should nonprofit organizations have knowledge generating systems that evaluate their performance, this will improve outcomes for them. Even though organizational size is strongly linked to fundraising performance, there are key drivers that can aid even small organizations in their efforts. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.