Users' intentions to employ a Point-Of-Sale system

This study proposes that task, technology, and individual characteristics affect the Point-Of-Sale (POS) utilization of employees in service industry, specifically in restaurants. The integrated technology acceptance model and task–technology fit (TTF) model is appropriate for explaining service employees' behavioral intentions to use POS. Data were obtained from 167 service employees. The hypothesized model resulted in a good fit, supporting all eight proposed hypotheses. The TTF construct was confirmed to be a mediator of task, technology, and individual characteristics affecting intention to use. Our integrated model is expected to help researchers and practitioners better understand why service employees choose POS for their tasks and, further, how the technology characteristics of POS and its fit-with-task characteristics in a service sector lead to service employee choices.     

Can the Indicative Price System Mitigate Expiration‐Day Effects?

We investigate whether the indicative price system, introduced in the Korean derivatives market on July 1, 2003, has helped mitigate the options and futures expiration‐day effects. Prior to introduction of this system, we find evidence of high trading volume and significant price reversals during the first half hour of trading for the day immediately following the expiration day. These effects decline significantly after July 1, 2003. Our evidence suggests that the indicative price system can mitigate the expiration‐day effects.     

State Firearm Sales and Criminal Activity: Evidence from Firearm Background Checks

The FBI has reported the number of monthly firearm background checks in every state since November 1998. This article uses data on background checks at the state level to explore the relationship between guns and crime. The background checks capture an individual's intention to purchase a firearm and explain 96% of the variation in gun manufacturing at a national level. Fixed effect negative binomial regressions show a positive, but insignificant, relationship between background checks and violent crimes. Property crimes are negatively related to background checks and statistically significant at the 10% level. The results suggest that gun control policies should be coupled with other initiatives if policy makers intend to reduce gun‐related crime.     

Adam Smith's and Douglass North's Multidisciplinary Approach to Economic Development

This article aims to point out Adam Smith's and Douglass North's multidisciplinary approach to economic development and history. Based on a philosophical link of methodological issues, Smith and North shared a conceptual framework and explanatory principles in common as well as similar historical illustrations. In terms of the use of comprehensive and integrated models of society, politics, and economy, they presented that economic development relies on how far congenial both institutional environments and sociocultural values of justice, liberty, security, and equality are to economic agents, allowing the interplay between economic performance and polity/culture. Meanwhile, these suggest a bridging role between old and new institutionalism, and, more importantly, a revival of Smithian moral philosophical tradition in the history of economics.     

Gender Comparisons in Strategic Decision-Making: An Empirical Analysis of the Entrepreneurial Strategy Matrix

The strategic decision-making of male and female small businesspersons and entrepreneurs has been investigated in prior research, but the findings are mixed. This article reports on a gender comparison testing of the Entrepreneurial Strategy Matrix, a situational model which suggests strategies for new and ongoing ventures in response to the identification of different levels of venture innovation and risk. A national sample of 184 small firm owers (59 percent male/41 percent female) was tested. Results indicate that there are no significant gender differences in venture innovation/risk situation or in strategies chosen by business owners. Male respondents did indicate a higher overall satisfaction with venture performance than did females.     

Shopping value in online auctions: Their antecedents and outcomes

Online auctions present unique characteristics in the consumer decision-making process that raise new issues related to consumer shopping behaviors in auction-based purchases. The present research examined the relationship between consumer characteristics (i.e., compulsive buying behavior, variety-seeking tendency, and price sensitivity) and shopping value (i.e., utilitarian and hedonic) in online auctions and found that both compulsive buying behavior and variety-seeking tendency are critical factors of shopping value in the online auction environment. There were no positive relationships between price sensitivity and shopping value. The results of this study also revealed that consumers’ shopping value positively influenced their preference, which, in turn, formed behavioral intentions in online auctions. While utilitarian value was found to be a significant predictor of behavioral intentions, hedonic value was not. However, hedonic value influenced intentions indirectly through preference.     

Investigating the advertising–sales relationship in the Lydia Pinkham data: a bootstrap approach

The dynamic relationship between advertising and sales in the annual Lydia Pinkham data is re-evaluated. Past studies have found a feedback system, although one-way causality from advertising to sales is expected. The bootstrap method is used in this paper as an alternative to the asymptotic method exclusively adopted by past studies. The impulse response analysis based on bivariate autoregressive (AR) model is conducted. Bootstrap-after-bootstrap confidence intervals on impulse responses provide evidence that sales do not cause advertising, contrary to the findings of past studies. Comparison of bootstrap-after-bootstrap prediction intervals calculated from univariate and bivariate AR models further supports this finding. Overall, this paper finds evidence of one-way causality from advertising to sales.     

Value versus Growth International Real Estate Investment

We use office and retail properties return data for the United States and some Asia Pacific cities to ascertain the relative performance of value and growth investment strategies. The results reveal that value portfolios outperform growth portfolios. Furthermore, while the results show that risk varies over time, time‐varying risk analyses generally do not support the risk‐based explanation for the value premium. Similarly, conditional market regressions do not explain the value premium anomaly as all the alphas are positive and significant. Moreover, the results imply that naïve extrapolation of past performance could be a credible explanation for the value premium.     

Permanence discounting for land-based carbon sequestration

One major concern regarding land-based carbon sequestration involves the issue of permanence. Sequestration may not last forever and may either be released in the future or require expenditures to maintain the practices that keep it sequestered. In this paper, we investigate the differential value of offsets in the face of impermanent characteristics by forming a price discount that equalizes the effective price per ton between a “perfect offset” and one possessing some with impermanent characteristics. We find this discount to be a function of the future needs to replace offsets (in the face of lease expiration quantity or volatilization upon activities such as timber harvest) and the magnitude of any needed maintenance costs. We investigate the magnitude of the discounts under alternative agricultural tillage and forest management cases. In those studies, we find that permanence discounts in the range of 50% are not uncommon. This means that in the market place an impermanent sequestration offset may only receive payments amounting to 50% of the market carbon price. Furthermore, we find that in the face of escalating carbon prices that offsets may prove to be worthless.     

Stochastic Volatility: Likelihood Inference and Comparison with ARCH Models

In this paper, Markov chain Monte Carlo sampling methods are exploited to provide a unified, practical likelihood-based framework for the analysis of stochastic volatility models. A highly effective method is developed that samples all the unobserved volatilities at once using an approximating offset mixture model, followed by an importance reweighting procedure. This approach is compared with several alternative methods using real data. The paper also develops simulation-based methods for filtering, likelihood evaluation and model failure diagnostics. The issue of model choice using non-nested likelihood ratios and Bayes factors is also investigated. These methods are used to compare the fit of stochastic volatility and GARCH models. All the procedures are illustrated in detail.