The joint influence of technology uncertainty and interorganizational interaction on external technology integration success

This paper empirically examines the acquisition of a technology from a source outside the firm and its incorporation into a new or existing operational process. We refer to this key activity in process innovation as external technology integration. This paper develops a conceptual framework of external technology integration based on organizational information processing theory and technology management literature. The primary hypothesis underlying the conceptual framework is that external technology integration will be most successful when the level of interaction between the source of the technology and recipient of the technology is appropriately matched, or fit, to the characteristics of the technology to be integrated. The conceptual framework also develops other hypotheses relating to contextual factors that may also influence the success of external technology integration. A cross-sectional survey methodology is employed to test the four hypotheses of the conceptual framework, with the results indicating strong support for the fit hypothesis and general support for the contextual hypotheses. The paper closes with a discussion of the implications of this study for both theory and practice.     

Franchisee leadership traits vs. manager leadership traits an exploratory study comparing hope, leadership, commitment and service quality delivery

In order to add to the understanding of the role of franchising in entrepreneurship and to help franchise systems improve efficiency, the constructs of organizational leadership, hope, organizational commitment, and service quality perceptions of franchised managers and franchisees are differentiated in the current study. For scholars and practitioners, the dynamic relationship between entrepreneurship, franchisees, and management is an important triangle which merits further investigation. While the results offered only that managers and franchisees differed statistically in service empathy, differences were noted across all areas which approached significance but was limited due to the small sample size. Implications for future research are discussed.     

Project management infrastructure: The key to operational performance improvement

Process improvement programs such as Six Sigma, Lean, and Lean Sigma are very important and deserve serious academic research attention. However, definition problems make it difficult to study any specific type of process improvement program. Therefore, this study defines two organizational level program management factors, Strategic Project Selection (SPS) and Project Management Infrastructure (PMI), that are independent of any specific process improvement program. Drawing upon current literature, this study develops and tests theoretical models that relate SPS and PMI to operational performance improvement and to each other. Using empirical data collected from 53 supplier plants of one large high-tech firm, this study finds that at the plant level, SPS mediates the relationship between PMI and operational performance improvement. This insight contributes to both theory development and practice, suggesting that a viable strategy for a process improvement program’s success is to focus on PMI in order to enhance SPS and ultimately improve performance. Not to be reproduced or quoted without written permission from the authors.     

The Potential Role of Organizational Setting in Creating “Entitled” Employees: An Investigation of the Antecedents of Equity Sensitivity

Existing research suggests that the equity sensitivity construct has both theoretical significance and applied value. This study investigates the antecedents of equity sensitivity, focusing on the relationships among organizational setting, personal characteristics (age, sex, work experience), organization tenure, and equity sensitivity. Results based on survey data from 613 individuals employed in ten diverse organizations suggest that organizational setting influences equity sensitivity levels among employees, Evidence of a significant relationship between age and equity sensitivity is also found. However, the relationship between organizational tenure and equity sensitivity found in previous studies is not replicated when adequate controls are included. Theoretical and practical implications of the findings are discussed.     

全球化与WTO：利益分析及争端解决

一、引言“全球化”这一说法是最近才开始流行的,而我们这些贸易经济学家对它的研究历史却有几十年甚至上百年了;世界贸易组织(WTO)也是最近才成立的,而国际贸易方面的法律专家对它和它的前身--GATT的研究也已近五十年了。在前面的两种情况中,国际贸易方面的专家都会强调世界经     

Self-selection and variations in the laboratory measurement of other-regarding preferences across subject pools: evidence from one college student and two adult samples

We measure the other-regarding behavior in samples from three related populations in the upper Midwest of the United States: college students, non-student adults from the community surrounding the college, and adult trainee truckers in a residential training program. The use of typical experimental economics recruitment procedures made the first two groups substantially self-selected. Because the context reduced the opportunity cost of participating dramatically, 91 % of the adult trainees solicited participated, leaving little scope for self-selection in this sample. We find no differences in the elicited other-regarding preferences between the self-selected adults and the adult trainees, suggesting that selection is unlikely to bias inferences about the prevalence of other-regarding preferences among non-student adult subjects. Our data also reject the more specific hypothesis that approval-seeking subjects are the ones most likely to select into experiments. Finally, we observe a large difference between self-selected college students and self-selected adults: the students appear considerably less pro-social.     

A General Method of Deriving the Inefficiencies of Banks from a Profit Function

This article develops a new method of estimating inefficiencies in joint production and shows that unlike the approaches utilized in the previous studies of inefficiency, this method maintains a consistent relationship between the error term of a profit function and the error terms of its price derivatives. A useful by-product of the method is a proof of a Hotelling-like lemma that relates stochastic input demand and output supply functions to stochastic profit functions. While the previous studies fit a single frontier to data on all firms, this paper estimates a frontier unique to every observed firm to allow each one to have a different potential of achieving maximal levels of profit. The new method is applied in the analysis of annual data, 1984–1989, for U.S. commercial banks. Both the analytical and numerical results of the paper show that the residual that the previous studies attribute to inefficiency includes the effects of excluded variables and of inaccuracies in the specified functional forms. Once accurate estimates of these effects are subtracted from the residual, the distortions in the measured inefficiencies should be considerably reduced. Consequently, this article considers how such estimates might be obtained.     

Another view on optimal design for estimating the point of extremum in quadratic regression

In this paper we illustrate how certain design problems can be simplified by reparametrization of the response function. This alternative viewpoint provides further insights than the more traditional approaches, like minimax, Bayesian or sequential techniques. It will also improve a practitioner’s understanding of more general situations and their “classical” treatment.     

Market volatility and the dynamic hedging of multi-commodity price risk

Commodity cash and futures prices experienced a severe boom-and-bust cycle between 2006 and 2009. Increases in commodity price volatility have raised concerns about the usefulness of commodity futures and options as risk management tools. Dynamic hedging strategies have the potential to improve risk management when conditional (co)variances depart significantly from their unconditional, long-run counterparts and may be useful to decision-makers despite their greater complexity and higher transaction costs. We propose a Nonparametric Copula-based Generalized Autoregressive Conditional Heteroscedastic (NPC-GARCH) approach to estimate time-varying hedge ratios, and evaluate the benefits of dynamic hedging during four sub-periods between 2000 and 2011 using a stylized Texas cattle feedlot management problem. The NPC-GARCH approach allows for a flexible, nonlinear and asymmetric dependence structure between cash and futures prices for different commodities. We find that NPC-GARCH dynamic hedging performs better than either static, GARCH-Dynamic Conditional Correlation (DCC) or GARCH-Baba, Engle, Kraft and Kroner (BEKK) hedging in terms of lower tail risk (expected shortfall), but that there is no significant difference between hedging approaches in terms of portfolio variance reduction.     

A peculiar archaeology: Searching for Mr Giffen's behaviour

Abstract

It has been claimed that references to ‘Giffen behaviour’ constituted a single research project, driven by attempts to establish whether an initial ‘conjecture’ by Alfred Marshall had empirical validity. There is no stable basis for that claim because Marshall's discussion was contradictory and Robert Giffen rejected a key assumption made by Marshall. By the mid-1920s, discussion of an upward-sloping demand curve attached no particular significance to a Marshallian story. The formulation of the Irish famine Giffen exemplar by P.A. Samuelson illustrates how Giffen behaviour was stabilised as the single possible exception to the law of demand in the 1960s.