Resource allocation in multi-divisional multi-product firms

Journal of Productivity Analysis - This paper is concerned with specifying and estimating the productive characteristics of multidivisional multiproduct companies at the divisional level. In order...     

Cultural experiential goal pursuit,cultural brand engagement,and culturally authentic experiences: sojourners in America

Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science - Our research uses an interpretive approach to explore the consumer journeys of sojourners, temporary residents of a new country, with attention to...     

The Washington consensus works: Causal effects of reform, 1970-2015

Traditional policy reforms of the type embodied in the Washington Consensus have been out of academic fashion for decades. However, we are not aware of a paper that convincingly rejects the efficacy of these reforms. In this paper, we define generalized reform as a discrete, sustained jump in an index of economic freedom, whose components map well onto the points of the old consensus. We identify 49 cases of generalized reform in our dataset that spans 141 countries from 1970 to 2015. The average treatment effect associated with these reforms is positive, sizeable, and significant over 5- and 10- year windows. The result is robust to different thresholds for defining reform and different estimation methods. We argue that the policy reform baby was prematurely thrown out with the neoliberal bathwater.     

Weak links and the management of reputational interdependencies

This paper builds on a growing literature that takes into account the fact that firms in an industry may be interdependent with regard to their corporate reputations, thus sharing a “reputation commons.” We argue that the theory of public goods can help us to understand the interdependencies that link corporate reputations and to frame the contexts and requirements for collective action that they induce. In particular, we suggest that more and more frequently these interdependencies make industry reputation a “weak link” public good. We show that this raises new challenges for the strategic management of industry reputation by communities of firms. The discussion of these challenges is based on the case study of the collective action of the European chlorine companies towards restoring their reputation after being accused of not being safe, and on a model of the production of reputation by companies. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Mapping the Topic Landscape of JPIM, 1984–2013: In Search of Hidden Structures and Development Trajectories

During the three decades since its inception in 1984, the JPIM has shaped the evolution of innovation research as a scientific field. It helped create a topic landscape that is not only more diverse and rich in insights, but also more complex and fragmented in structure than ever before. We seek to map this landscape and identify salient development trajectories over time. In contrast to prior citation‐based studies covering the first two decades of JPIM research, we benefit from recent advances in natural language processing and rely on a topic modeling algorithm to extract 57 distinct topics and the corresponding most common words, terms, and phrases from the entire full‐text corpus of 1008 JPIM articles published between 1984 and 2013. Estimating the development trajectory of each topic based on yearly publication counts in JPIM allows us to identify “hot,” “cold,” “revival,” “evergreen,” and “wall‐flower” topics. We map these topics onto the Product Development and Management Association (PDMA) Body of Knowledge categories and discover that these categories differ significantly not only in terms of their internal topic diversity and relative prevalence, but also—and arguably more importantly—in terms of their publication and citation trajectories over time. For instance, the PDMA category “Codevelopment and Alliances” exhibits only moderate topic diversity (7 out of 57 topics) and prevalence in JPIM (161 out of 1008 articles). That said, it is among the most dynamic categories featuring two evergreen topic (“Users and Innovation” and “Tools and Systems for Technology Transfer”) and three hot topics (“Open Innovation,” “Alliances and Cooperation,” and “Networks and Network Structure”) as well as a sharply growing annual number of citations received. Our findings are likely to be of interest to all those who are keen to (re)discover JPIM's topic landscape in search of hidden structures and development trajectories.     

Survey of Recent Developments

Outgoing Indonesian president Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono's second-term record is creditable, measured against the targets he set himself in 2010, but deficient in key areas: economic reform, infrastructure investment, and anti-corruption. Indonesia's 2009–14 parliament has been active in economic policymaking, and will leave as its legacy a raft of protectionist legislation. Both presidential candidates, Joko ‘Jokowi’ Widodo and Prabowo Subianto, have appealed to nationalism in their campaigns, calling for Indonesia to assert its sovereignty and increase its self-sufficiency, but Jokowi's economic platform is more moderate and economically literate than Prabowo's. The incoming president will inherit an economy that continues to slow. Growth is now not expected to approach 6% until 2015 at the earliest. Having engineered a reduction in the current account deficit, Indonesian policymakers now face the more difficult problem of structural fiscal adjustment. Energy subsidies are the most immediate problem, but fiscal reform more generally will emerge as an overriding and unpleasant imperative for whoever wins the presidential election on 9 July. Unless difficult fiscal policy measures are taken, Indonesia will face major trade-offs between deficit control and investment in social programs and economic infrastructure. The new president will struggle to restrict the deficit to the cap of 3% of GDP: a balanced budget will likely not be feasible for several years. He will need to increase the ratio of revenue to GDP and eliminate fuel subsidies—through a more systematic approach than the infrequent price increases of the past. He will need to choose carefully between competing expenditure priorities, such as infrastructure and defence. The new president would also be well advised to tread cautiously in implementing the legal mandates he will inherit, and to work with parliament to avoid further and unwind current earmarking of public expenditure.     

Improving logistics performance in cross-border 3PL relationships

This paper proposes guidelines for improving logistics performance in terms of cost efficiency and on-time delivery in shipper–third-party logistics (3PL) provider relationships within an offshore outsourcing context. A conceptual framework is constructed based on a thorough literature review. Empirical data are collected through semi-structured interviews in a single-case study with a dyadic perspective, examining the 3PL relationship between Ericsson of Sweden and Aramex of Saudi Arabia. Accordingly, a revised framework is proposed after illustrating the case and merging the literature with practice. The findings highlight the impact of communication, trust, culture, system compliance, work agreements, and standardisation on cost efficiency and on-time delivery performance. The developed framework illustrates a sequential order for working on these factors to achieve performance improvement. This research is one of the first to propose guidelines for performance improvements within offshore outsourcing of 3PL services.     

The impact of matching mission preferences on well-being at work

A recent literature in economics assumes that workers differ in their mission preferences. These studies predict a premium on the matching of mission preferences between a worker and employer. This paper uses data from the Dutch LISS panel to examine this prediction for government workers. Results show that government workers report higher satisfaction with the type of work they do when their political preferences match those of the political parties in office as compared to when their political preferences do not match. A match of political preferences has no effect on the work type satisfaction of workers employed outside the government sector.     

Optimal Redistribution with Endogenous Social Norms

In this paper, we examine the effect of social norms on redistributive policies, where social norms are reflected in the degree of work participation among the different skill classes. Participation is driven both by the material incentives and heterogeneous preferences for leisure of each skill class, and by an endogenous social norm. Results for optimal redistributive taxation show that when the social norm enters as a benefit or cost for participants, participation taxes are generally lower than in its absence. Multiple participation equilibria can occur, and an engineered shift from a low‐ to a high‐participation equilibrium can be Pareto‐improving in the long run.