Custom-built

Mass customization has rapidly moved from an abstract theory to a practical source of competitive advantage. Fabrizio Salvador has been studying the companies that have bolstered their business by tapping into the idiosyncratic needs of customers. Tom Brown reports on his latest thinking.     

The development of a stakeholder-based scale for measuring corporate social responsibility in the banking industry

Research on corporate social responsibility (CSR) has notably increased in recent years and many scales for measuring CSR image have been developed in academic literature. Due to the contextual character recognized in the implementation of CSR strategies, in this paper a new scale based on stakeholder theory is developed to evaluate customers’ perception regarding the CSR performance of their banking service providers. The proposal of reliable measurement tools for evaluating customers’ perception is especially relevant for companies because of their significant role in influencing the design and implementation of corporate strategies. Results demonstrate the reliability and validity of this new scale in two different samples. In the banking industry, CSR includes corporate responsibilities toward customers, shareholders, employees, society, and all legal and ethical requirements of banking institutions. Nevertheless, different kinds of banking institutions have specific CSR images, which reveal different strategic approaches to CSR.     

Has the CSR engagement of electrical companies had an effect on their performance? A closer look at the environment

Even though electrical companies attain a top ranking in the publication of CSR reports, they are often accused of 'green‐washing' due to their bad environmental reputation. The current economic crisis is testing their real CSR commitment more than ever, especially when this goes beyond its economic consequences. Based on a worldwide sample of electrical companies, we are going to study why companies are being socially responsible. We wish to know if it is due to the impact on the firms' performance or whether there are other motives (legitimation, improving their reputation) that lead companies to carry out these practices. We will also consider if it changes across the kind of CSR action considered. The results show that there is an economic justification beyond the socially responsible behaviour of the electrical companies. Additionally, most kinds of CSR action (community, diversity, corporate governance, product responsibility) are also carried out looking for economic rewards. However, the CSR actions oriented to the environment are mainly motivated by their need to improve their image and reverse their negative impact. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment     

Adherence to customer loyalty programmes and changes in buyer behaviour

This study examines the factors that influence the effectiveness of customer loyalty programmes to cause a change in consumers' behaviour in retailing services. In particular, three explanatory variables are analysed: the quality of service offered to the customer, her/his trust in the company, and her/his attitude towards loyalty programmes. The results obtained indicate that a change in the buyer's behaviour is directly influenced by her/his loyalty to the retailer and by her/his attitude towards loyalty programmes. Furthermore, an indirect effect on changes in buyer behaviour caused by the quality of service and the consumer's attitude towards loyalty programmes is observed.     

New unit-consistent intermediate inequality indices

This paper introduces a class of intermediate inequality indices that is, at the same time, ray-invariant and unit-consistent. These measures allow us to make possible keeping some of the good properties of Krtscha’s (Models and measurement of welfare and inequality. Springer, Heidelberg, 1994) index while maintaining the “centrist” attitude no matter howmuch the income increases.By doing so, we approach the intermediate inequality concept suggested by Del Río and Ruiz-Castillo (Soc Choice Welfare 17:223–239, 2000) and generalize it in order to extend the range of income distributions that are comparable according to this ray-invariance criterion.     

Conditions for incentive compatibility in models with multidimensional allocation functions and one-dimensional types

We extend the conditions for incentive compatibility in mechanism design problems to a more general structure of preferences than that found in the literature, for the case where type is one-dimensional but the outcome function becomes multidimensional. This is so, at least, as long as preferences can be represented by means of sub-utility functions, it is adopted a weak single-crossing property and direct mechanisms turn out to be differentiable. When direct mechanisms are not differentiable, local incentive conditions still remain fully incentive compatible, provided utility is weakly separable in the outcome function, or else, it exhibits linearity in the type.     

Incentive compatible reward schemes for labour-managed firms

We consider a simple case of team production, where a set of workers have to contribute a single input (say labour) and then share the joint output amongst themselves. Different incentive issues arise when the skills as well as the levels of effort expended by workers are not publicly observable. We study one of these issues in terms of a very simple model in which two types of workers, skilled and unskilled, supply effort inelastically. Thus, we assume away the problem of moral hazard in order to focus on that of adverse selection. We also consider a hierarchical structure of production in which the workers need to be organised in two tiers. We look for reward schemes which specify higher payments to workers who have been assigned to the top-level jobs when the principal detects no lies, distribute the entire output in all circumstances, and induce workers to revel their true abilities. We contemplate two scenarios. In the first one, each individual worker knows only her own type, while in the second scenario each worker also knows the abilities of all other workers. Our general conclusion is that the adverse selection problem can be solved in our context. However, the range of satisfactory reward schemes depends on the informational framework.     

Aplicación de bicorrelación cruzada al rendimiento diario del precio del café

This paper uses the cross bicorrelation methodology, which can capture nonlinear trascendence periods through window functions and third-order moments. It applies to the return of four sets of commodities of coffee traded on the New York market (Arabica Colombian, mild Arabica, Arabica Brazilian and Other Arabicas), during the 20/06/1997 - 27/10/2010 period. The results conclude that there is a cross bicorrelation among the four series, with Brazilian type coffee being the leader and a lower bicorrelation with other Arabicas. This complicates decisions for investors in such series.