Sales managers and sales force feedback: Information left in the pipeline

In a study of sales force feedback at management levels, salesmen from two large corporations “planted” competitive new-product information with their sales managers. The object was to monitor the responses of the managers to reports from the field. Only about half of the 35 managers sampled passed the information on to higher levels. The importance of sales force feedback seems to have been lost on these managers, even though the use of such information had been stressed in their management training programs. The study indicates a need to provide motivation to use sales force feedback as a link in management information systems.     

A classification of economic activities based on location patterns

The Standard Industrial Classification (SIC) groups activities without regard to locational behavior. Any SIC group may—and often does—contain two or more activities that have different locational patterns.Starting with data describing the number of people employed in each of 480 activities in each of 311 metropolitan areas of the United States in 1965, we have devised a new classification based on similarity of locational behavior. The results are presented in the form of a 5-digit classification of these 480 SIC activities. Some of the more interesting clustering patterns are discussed and some patterns that might have been expected but did not appear are mentioned.This paper builds upon earlier research reported in “The Agglomeration Process in Urban Growth,” by Joel Bergsman, Peter Greenston and Robert Healy (Urban Studies, October 1972) and is part of a continuing inquiry into the economic development of cities.     

Towards a new way to measure power: Applying conjoint analysis to group decisions

This paper presents some preliminary development towards a methodology for measuring power in a group purchase decision. We define power as the capacity of an individual to change the probability of an alternative being chosen by expressing an opinion about that alternative. We present a linear model that relates the group members' preferences to the probability that a given alternative will be chosen. The model parameters reflect specific measures of power and can be estimated by conjoint analysis. We present the results of a pilot field study, conducted on a sample of purchasing managers, which favorably assesses certain psychometric properties of the resulting measures for dyads.     

与客户情投意合

有少数公司正在证明:网络上的服务可以变得个性化。这个结果从他们的收入中显现了出来。也许他们自己都没有意识到,自己正在建立一些新的客户关系管理规则     

First Degree Price Discrimination Goes to School

Personalized pricing is widely discussed but seldom observed, making studies of its efficacy rare. Yet, first degree price discrimination is common in the pricing of higher education, and I use data on prices and the characteristics of students admitted to a professional graduate program at a public university to estimate a matriculation demand function. I then derive linear pricing functions that maximize revenue for a target number of students. By allowing these functions to depend on progressively richer sets of observables, I explore the effect of personalization of pricing on profit. Tailoring prices to a one‐dimensional measure of student quality would raise revenue by 2.2 per cent above the revenue with uniform pricing. Pricing based on both student quality and state residency raises revenue by 8.4 per cent, and further tailoring based on available observables raises prices 9.0 per cent above the maximum revenue under uniform pricing. Pricing that obeys current statutory tuition limits raises revenue less but still by just over half as much. I also infer the welfare weights that the pricing process implicitly attaches to student characteristics.     

Tax competition with parasitic tax havens

We develop a tax competition framework in which some jurisdictions, called tax havens, are parasitic on the revenues of other countries, and these countries use resources in an attempt to limit the transfer of tax revenue from capital taxation to the havens. We demonstrate that the full or partial elimination of tax havens would improve welfare in non-haven countries. We also demonstrate that the smaller countries choose to become tax havens, and we show that the abolition of a sufficiently small number of the relatively large havens leaves all countries better off, including the remaining havens. We argue that these results extend to the case where there are also taxes on wage income that involve administrative and compliance costs.     

Individual and Organizational Antecedents of Misconduct in Organizations

A heterogeneous survey sample of for-profit, non-profit and government employees revealed that organizational factors but not personal characteristics were significant antecedents of misconduct and job satisfaction. Formal organizational compliance practices and ethical climate were independent predictors of misconduct, and compliance practices also moderated the relationship between ethical climate and misconduct, as well as between pressure to compromise ethical standards and misconduct. Misconduct was not predicted by level of moral reasoning, age, sex, ethnicity, job status, or size and type of organization. Demographic variables predicted job satisfaction and organizational variables added significant incremental variance. Results suggest the importance of promoting a moral organization through the words and actions of senior managers and supervisors, independent of formal mechanisms such as codes of conduct.

Downward nominal wage rigidity in Canada: Evidence against a “greasing effect”

The existence of downward nominal wage rigidity (DNWR) has often been used to justify a positive inflation target. It is traditionally assumed that positive inflation could “grease the wheels” of the labour market by putting downward pressure on real wages, easing labour market adjustments during a recession. A rise in the inflation target would attenuate the long‐run level of unemployment and hasten economic recovery after an adverse shock. Following Daly and Hobijn (2014), we re‐examine these issues in a model that accounts for precautionary motives in wage‐setting behaviour. We confirm that DNWR generates a long‐run negative relationship between inflation and unemployment, in line with previous contributions to the literature. However, we also find that the increase in the number of people bound by DNWR following a negative demand shock rises with the inflation target, offsetting the beneficial effects a higher inflation target has on closing the unemployment gap. As an implication, contrary to previous contributions that neglected precautionary behaviour, the speed at which unemployment returns back to pre‐crisis levels during recessions is relatively unaffected by variations in the inflation target.