Market Share, Market Value and Innovation in a Panel of British Manufacturing Firms

This paper examines the empirical relationship between technological innovations, market share and stock market value. New developments in the estimation of dynamic count data models are used to control for unobserved firm specific heterogeneity. We find a robust and positive effect of market share on observable headcounts of innovations and patents although increased product market competition in the industry tends to stimulate innovative activity. Furthermore, the impact of innovation on market value is larger for firms with higher market shares. We argue that our results are consistent with models where high market share firms have incentives to pre-emptively innovate.     

Client and contractor roles in a changing local government environment

The advent of Compulsory Competitive Tendering (CCT) exposes large swathes of local authority services to private sector competition. The challenge facing those in local government who wish to protect in-house services is how to adjust to a new commercial contracting culture without losing the values of public service.

The Audit Commission argues that such a culture requires a hard split between the Council as a client, who sets service standards and ensures value for money and its contractor side that concerns itself with performing to standard and price.

This article looks at both the legal and operational impetus for such a client-contractor split, from a DSO (Direct Service Organisation) perspective, and examines the strategic issues raised for local authority reorganisation.     

Fashion sensitive young consumers and fashion garment repair: Emotional connections to garments as a sustainability strategy

Where clothing consumption has continued to rise around the world, a deeper understanding of how and why garments are disposed of is critical in regard to addressing the issue of textile waste by consumers. The purpose of this study was to explore the garment management processes of young, fashion sensitive consumers, examining their disposal behaviours as well as motivations towards garment end‐of‐life extension through maintenance or repair of damaged fashion clothing. A survey of 161 South Korean young consumers (18–34 years) was conducted, utilizing a fashion sensitivity scale to measure impact on unsustainable garment disposal practices and garment repair behaviour. Further, general recycling behaviour of these individuals was examined, as linked to garment repair propensity. Results indicate that fashion sensitive consumers dispose of garments more rapidly, and with less ethical consideration. However, these same consumers are motivated to repair items that support their fashion identity. The study contributes some useful insight into encouraging garment life extension practise among heavy consumers of fashion, thus extending what is known about fashion garment disposal in the sustainability context.     

RUMORS AND SOCIAL NETWORKS

This article studies the transmission of rumors in social networks. We consider a model with biased and unbiased agents. Biased agents want to enforce a specific decision and unbiased agents to match the true state. One agent learns the true state and sends a message to her neighbors, who decide whether or not to transmit it further. We characterize the perfect Bayesian equilibria of the game, show that the social network can act as a filter, and that biased agents may have an incentive to limit their number.     

It’s all about audit quality: Perspectives on strategic-systems auditing

We discuss the antecedents of and rationale for what has become known as Strategic-Systems Auditing (SSA). We also describe the conceptual foundation and key elements of SSA. We observe that the auditor employing SSA conceives the audit as a process of evidence-driven, belief-based, risk assessment. We also illustrate facets of this process, including how the auditor, by acquiring a rich understanding of how and how well management is executing its business-model, develops rich (e.g., distributional) expectations of future financial-statement amounts and disclosures. These expectations form a benchmark against which the auditor later compares and investigates management’s asserted financial-statement amounts and disclosures. Finally, we pose and respond to some of the more common questions about elements of SSA and complete the paper by suggesting some educational innovations and high-value targets for research.One salient message is that SSA first emerged in the 1990s as an attempt to enhance audit quality in response to changes in the audit environment. Another salient message is that SSA continues to equilibrate, adapting to more recent environmental changes, especially society’s demand for greater protection from financial-statement fraud. Such adaptation requires ongoing, significant intellectual investments by audit practitioners and audit scholars/educators.     

Bonuses and Non-Public Information in Publicly Traded Firms

Recent research in accounting explores how firms use “individual” or “non-financial” measures of performance in executive compensation contracts. We model a firm that conditions bonus payments to executives on information that is not available to those outside the firm. This raises two issues. First, market participants may use the magnitude of such payments to infer the non-public information. Second, because information that is non-public is, by extension, non-verifiable, the firm cannot write explicit contracts based on it. Combining the relational incentive contracts and financial signaling literatures, we examine equilibria of a signaling game in which bonus payments from a firm to a manager convey non-public information regarding the firm’s future cash flows. Our main result is that increases in corporate myopia can, under some conditions, lead to increased profits. This finding is contrary to that typically found in financial signaling models.     

An Economic Analysis and Simulation of Woodfuel Management in the Sahel

This paper presents an economic framework and a computationalmethodology for assessing the evolution of woodfuel supply costsand the spatial distribution of biomass in a Sahelian woodlandsetting. Spatial data on standing stock and the costs oftransport to market are used to construct a supply curve for fuelto a fuel-consuming location. Given an exogenously specifieddemand, the model simulates, period by period, the extraction,regeneration, and transport of wood fuels. The model is appliedto evaluate the benefits and ecological impacts of scenarios forwoodland management around the city of N'Djamena, Chad.     

“You can try to press different emotional buttons”: The conflicts and strategies of eliciting emotions for fundraisers

In a competitive climate in which charities must increasingly rely on fundraising with the public, emotions such as hope, guilt, and fear are powerful tools that can be used strategically to secure donations or participation. This paper explores data from interviews with 23 fundraisers and voluntary sector workers, managers, and officials, to argue that decisions around how, why, and when to invest in the elicitation of emotion in fundraising are often difficult and conflicted, with some identifying a battle between ethics and effectiveness. We identify 3 key levels of conflict that must be negotiated: at the level of the charity sector, where the emotional ethics particularly of larger charities have been met with some resistance from the public and press; at the level of the organisation itself, where the ethics of representation are often a subject of conflict between fundraising and other departments such as policy; and, finally, at the experiential level of individual fundraisers themselves, who report being routinely internally conflicted around the rights and wrongs of using emotion in their work. A strategic approach to eliciting emotion emerges in the data as a useful way to address some of these areas of conflict, with fundraisers making careful “balancing” decisions about how and with whom to mobilise certain emotions at specific times.