Reciprocity as a key stabilizing norm of interpersonal marketing relationships: Scale development and validation

This study outlines the development and validation of a measure of reciprocity. The definition used to develop the measure extends traditional quid pro quo interpretations to include behavior designed to stabilize relationships in times of exchange breakdown. This includes resisting and not returning harm and making reparation for harm done. Reciprocity is positioned as an important interpersonal norm of stable marketing relationships given recent findings that relationships develop most strongly at the individual level. It is suggested that reciprocity leads to personal well-being; thus providing an additional motivation, over and above economic incentives, to develop and maintain relationships. Results of the scale development tests indicated a valid, two dimensional measure which correlated with key relational variables such as trust, commitment, satisfaction, self-esteem and reduced conflict.     

Parental control: A study of U.S. subsidiaries in Mexico

This study develops a framework that suggests that subsidiary characteristics, such as performance, purpose and manager nationality affect the extent of control and mechanisms of control (i.e., results, cultural and action controls) that their parent companies exercise over them. Hypotheses were tested using survey responses from 44 Mexican subsidiary—U.S. parent dyads. As expected, results suggest that parental perceptions of subsidiary performance are inversely related to the extent of control that parent companies exercise over these subsidiaries. It was also found that subsidiaries established for purposes relating to a knowledge seeking motivation tended to be subject to more cultural control, but no support was found for the hypothesized relationships between market purpose and results control, and resource purpose and action control. Finally, also as predicted, Mexican managers tended to be subject to greater action control by their U.S. parent than American managers.     

Adaptation to Temporal Shocks: Influences of Strategic Interpretation and Spatial Distance

Even when shocks in a firm's environment are predictable, their consequences are not. Using the relocation of the Dallas Cowboys Stadium as a rich case of such a disruption, we investigate how combinations of strategic interpretation and spatial distance influence incumbent business owners' decisions to pursue temporal adaptation as a response. Temporal adaptation (TA) comprises timing rather than content changes by the firm seeking to adjust to the reconfigured environment. Survey data from 168 business owners show that strategic interpretation directly influences TA decisions. However, the effect of strategic interpretation on the TA decision is moderated by the spatial (geographic) distance of the incumbent firm from the locus of the disruption. Furthermore, results suggest that through strategic interpretation, spatial distance also indirectly affects the business owners' decisions to make temporal changes. Data collected 1.5 and 4 years later suggest that TA responses are related to performance and may be indicative of a particular type of TA, organizational entrainment (OE), which concerns the synchronization of organizational activity cycles with cycles in the environment.     

Mandatory Environmental Disclosures by Companies Complying with IASs/IFRSs: The Cases of France,Germany, and the UK

This study investigates whether the adoption of a single set of accounting standards, such as IASs/IFRSs, guarantees the harmonization of accounting practices within a country and across countries, or whether differences in reporting practices persist because of dissimilarities in reporting habits and institutional settings. To this end, we investigate whether the level of environmental disclosure under IFRSs is related to the size of the reporting firm, and the strength of legal and regulatory constraints on environmental disclosures in the country where the firm is domiciled. Results indicate (1) that environmental disclosures imposed by IFRSs increase with firm size, and (2) that firms domiciled in countries with constraining environmental disclosure regulations (i.e., France and the UK) report more on environmental issues than firms domiciled in countries with weakly constraining regulations (i.e., Germany). This suggests a strong impact of national regulations on IFRS reporting. Taken as a whole, our results support the view that IFRSs are not applied consistently across firms and across countries, notably because of persistence of reporting traditions and discrepancies in national legal requirements.     

Socioeconomic Index for Income and Poverty Prediction: A Sufficient Dimension Reduction Approach

The present paper introduces a novel method for the construction of Socioeconomic Status (SES) indices that are specific to a target variable of interest. It is based on the Sufficient Dimension Reduction (SDR) paradigm and uses a factorized model-based approach to simultaneously deal with predictor variables of mixed nature (i.e. quantitative, binary, and ordinal), which are usual in microeconomic data. These SES indices also identify relevant predictor variables using a two-step regularized matrix factorization approach. Using data from household surveys for Argentina (Encuesta Permanente de Hogares-EPH), the proposed method is compared with other existing dimension reduction algorithms such as standard Principal Component Analysis (PCA) and its version for mixed variables, regression on the full set of variables and Least Absolute Shrinkage and Selection Operator regression (LASSO).     

Local and global indeterminacy and transition dynamics in a growth model with public goods

Portuguese Economic Journal - This paper studies local and global indeterminacy and transition dynamics in an endogenous growth model where public goods increase production and the...