Sales force modeling: State of the field and research agenda

Inspired by Erin Anderson’s contributions to sales force research, this paper focuses on research that utilizes quantitative models to investigate important questions in sales force management. The purpose is to summarize several significant developments in knowledge over the last 40 years and identify major opportunities for impactful theoretical, empirical, and decision model-based research in the future.     

Impact of Environmental Performance on Firm Value for Sustainable Investment: Evidence from Large US Firms

This research examines the impact of environmental performance on firm value, applying the event study methodology to Newsweek’s ‘Green Rankings’ announcement of 2012 for large US firms. Specifically, it analyzes the impact of the absolute green score and green rank of firms on their performance in the stock market. We found that investors perceive the announcement as positive news, leading to significant positive standardized cumulative abnormal returns (SCARs). After controlling for industry‐ and firm‐specific effects, we observed that firms with repeated green rankings for enhancing environmental performance showed significantly higher SCARs than those with either reduced or unchanged environmental performance. In addition, the environmental impact score measuring environmental damage from a firm's operational activities was found to be the most influential factor in improving the firm's value. Our findings are beneficial to managers in allocating resources to different types of environmental initiative, and provide valuable insight for sustainable environmental investment. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment     

On certain type of Queues in series

Summary This paper studies the steady-state behaviour of a queueing system consisting of three servers S₁, S₂ and S₃ . Two types of units each requiring two phases of service arrive and form two queues Q₁ and Q₂ in-front of the two servers S₁ and S₂, respectively, which attend to their first phase of service in order of arrival. On completion of the first phase the units discharged from these servers from a single queue Q₃ in-front of S₃ for the phase 2 service. The various stochastic processes namely, the interrarrival times and the service times, have been assumed to be distributed exponentially. We derive for this queueing process an expression for the mean queue length and some particular cases thereof.     

The propensity of managers to create budgetary slack: A cross-national re-examination using random sampling

Following a review of the slack literature, Merchant (1985a) proposed that the propensity of subordinate managers to create slack is positively related to the importance placed on meeting budget targets, negatively related to the extent of participation allowed in budgeting processes, negatively related to the degree of predictability in the production processes, and negatively related to their superiors' abilities to detect slack. The results of his empirical tests provided little overall support for these hypotheses. The mixed nature of his results is of some concern since the literature provides considerable support for the theoretical framework underlying his propositions. He concluded that his use of non-random sampling may have influenced the results of his study. The objectives of this paper are first to extend Merchant's (1985a) study using the same measures but employing random sampling in a cross-national setting to enhance result generalizability. Second to assess whether the ability of superiors to detect slack interacts with budgetary participation to affect a subordinate manager's propensity to create slack. The results provide support for the cross-national generalizability of all five hypotheses.     

Nationalism,socialism and planning: Influential ideas in the South

The paper discusses the origin of three influential ideas in the South, the reasons why they are found persuasive by Southern elites, and finally whether they are helpful in promoting modernization. It argues that all three ideas are Janus-faced, combining the ‘modern’ aspects of the rationalist Enlightenment with the partly ‘pre-modern’ rural nostalgia of the Romantic movement. But the ideas are dysfunctional in terms of the desired aims of ‘nation-building’ and attaining material progress. Nationalism, far from being an adhesive can become a disintegrative force in pluralistic societies. Planning becomes a means of suppressing the agents of the economic modernization that is desired. The waving of the Enlightenment and socialist banner of equality in suppressing the merchant, financier and entrepreneur is a smokescreen. The suppression reflects more atavistic impulses, which amount to a denial of the irreducible uncertainty that unavoidably attends commercialization, monetization and industrialization.     

Free Trade and Laissez Faire: Has the Wheel Come Full Circle?

This paper notes that there is a need to get to a fourth stage in the evolution of the relationship of free trade to laissez faire going beyond the three stages identified in Max Cordon's magisterial book Trade Policy and Economic Welfare. In the first stage free trade was a special case of the argument for laissez faire. In the second stage many arguments for protection arose with various qualifications to the case of free trade and laissez faire. In the third stage the link between free trade and laissez faire was broken and in the theory of domestic distortions it was noted that all arguments for protection except in the case of monopoly power in trade were second best arguments. Moreover, it was possible to devise measures such as taxes and subsidies that reduced the distortion through government intervention. But noting that government intervention itself carries with it problems of rent seeking and directly unproductive activities as well as the taking into the proper role of Government, laissez faire seems the best policy. Hence the need for a fourth stage in the evolution of free trade and laissez faire to link them together again.