Real Estate Brokerage Earnings: The Role of Choice of Compensation Scheme

One of the more interesting characteristics about the real estate brokerage industry is that workers are presented with a choice regarding the sort of compensation scheme under which they want to work. An overwhelming majority of workers choose what is referred to as a commission split scheme in which the salesperson splits any commission that they earn with a supervising broker that they generally are required to work under. In this case the firm provides office support and administrative services to the salesperson and, in return, the salesperson must split any commissions that they earn with the firm. Under the alternative compensation scheme, workers pay a substantial up-front “desk” fee to the firm and then are allowed to keep 100% of any commissions that they earn. In spite of the large volume of research on the determinants of real estate salesperson earnings, to our knowledge there are no studies analyzing the choice of compensation scheme and its impact on the earnings of real estate salespersons. This study uses data from the 2001 and 2003 Membership Surveys of the National Association of REALTORs® to analyze the impact of the real estate salespersons’ choice of compensation scheme on their earnings.     

Discussion of: “Flattening the organization: the effect of organizational reporting structure on budgeting effectiveness”

This paper is a discussion of Hannan et al. (Rev Account Stud, 2010), wherein subordinate-participants are endowed with private information, and superior-participants can potentially affect budget requests through their ability to reject them. Their findings are of interest to research on both the design of budgeting systems and span of control. I discuss the relevance of HRT to these literatures and comment on their implementation and experimental design. Also, I offer suggestions for future research, one of which is to explicitly introduce monitoring into experiments on span of control.     

Voluntary agreements for environmental performance improvement: perspectives on the chemical industry's responsible care programme

Responsible Care is perhaps the best known voluntary agreement programme world-wide. It is an initiative of the chemical industry. Under it, participating companies publicly commit themselves to seek continuous improvement in their performance in all aspects of safety, health, protection of the environment, product safety, distribution, emergency response and relations with the public. Under the initiative, company commitments are generally made by Chief Executive Officers (CEOs), who then are responsible for ensuring actions by their company under the initiative, and for reporting back to on progress to the national and/or regional chemical industry association running Responsible Care programmes. © 1997 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment.     

Institutional industry herding

We examine whether institutional investors follow each other into and out of the same industries. Our empirical results reveal strong evidence of institutional industry herding. The cross-sectional correlation between the fraction of institutional traders buying an industry this quarter and the fraction buying last quarter, for example, averages 40%. Additional tests suggest that correlated signals primarily drive institutional industry herding. Our results also provide empirical support for “style investing” models.     

From Member of the Company to Registered Auditor: The Role of the External Auditor in Corporate Governance

Corporate governance has often been defined in a narrow way as comprising 'the range of control mechanisms that protect and enhance the interests of shareholders of business enterprises' ( Fama and Jensen 1983 ). In the corporate governance literature there has also been a general focus on the structure and functioning of boards of directors and the responsibilities of audit committees in relation to external auditing ( Rosenstein and Wyatt 1990 ; Shleifer and Vishny 1997 ). This article looks at the evolution of the role of external auditing in corporate governance. The role of the external auditor has changed through time, and consequently it should not be assumed that the role of external auditing is fixed or that it cannot be changed to meet societal needs and expectations. This observation leads to the primary argument of our article, which is that the role of the external auditor in corporate governance ought to be expanded in order to enhance the effectiveness of corporate governance for the benefit of a wider spectrum of stakeholders and society generally.     

Benefits and Costs of International Financial Integration: Theory and Facts

This paper provides a selective review of the recent analytical and empirical literature on the benefits and costs of international financial integration. It discusses the impact of financial openness and capital flows on consumption, investment and growth, as well as the impact of foreign bank entry on the domestic financial system. It argues that, for small open developing countries, the benefits of financial integration are mostly long term in nature, whereas risks can be significant in the short run. Careful preparation and management are therefore essential to ensure that short‐run costs do not lead to policy reversals. It also stresses that the empirical evidence on the impact of foreign direct investment on domestic capital formation and growth, as well as on the effects of foreign bank entry, should be viewed with caution. In particular, the possibility that foreign bank penetration may lead to adverse changes in the allocation of credit cannot be dismissed on the basis of the existing evidence.     

Setting Efficient Incentives for Agricultural Research: Lessons from Principal-Agent Theory

A conceptual analysis of important issues in the organization and management of academic research is presented. Principal-agent theory is applied to derive optimal compensation schemes for scientists when they differ in ability, risk aversion, cost of effort, and reservation utility, and to show the optimal trade-off between institutional risk and scientists' abilities. Implications for an efficient organization of research are derived, including how scientists' incentives should be structured to elicit optimal research efforts and direction, whether research direction should be centralized or decentralized, and whether the organization of research should be through external competitive grants or program and institutional funding.     

Emergence of entrepreneurs following exogenous technological change

This paper explains how, after an exogenous technological change occurs, entrepreneurs displace incumbents who were ex ante capable of exploiting any innovations that resulted from the change. The model initially considers classical economic assumptions in the context of process innovations, and then its robustness to uncertainty, bounded rationality, firm asymmetry, and product innovations are discussed. The model is preliminarily tested against industry trends, using both results from an analysis of the information technology sector and from the literature. The paper does not suffer from the inconsistency of explaining how capable incumbents are displaced by resorting to characterizations of incumbents as incapable due to some inefficiency; the paper models incumbents as efficient yet rationally choosing, in some instances, to be displaced. Copyright © 1999 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The year 2000: Looking back

In this article, the authors reflect on the development of the discipline of marketing. In the process, they point out the salient aspects of modern marketing and comment on the possible directions that it can take as it develops further. © 1999 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.