The implications of the FTC's clear and conspicuous standards for the communication of credit card information to young consumers

College students are an important target market for credit card companies and are substantial users of this form of credit, even though they may not have the appropriate knowledge to make informed decisions regarding credit cards. Specific to financial services marketing, the focus of this study is to ascertain whether college-age students recall and understand disclosed information in credit card commercials. This study analyzes the effectiveness of three disclosure standards advocated by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) which are intended to ensure that consumers (such as college students) are appropriately informed. Specifically, this study focuses on: (1) modality, (2) audience consideration and (3) distraction level present during the disclosure presentation. Tests of the impact of these standards on consumer recall and comprehension of disclosed information have been mixed and the extant research has failed to test all of the standards in combination. An important contribution that this research makes is the reconciliation of differences found in previous research, while revealing the effects that implementing multiple FTC standards has on college students’ recall and comprehension, perceptions of recall and comprehension, and attitudes and behavioral intentions.     

Beyond the personal–anonymous divide: agency relations in powers of attorney in France in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries

Powers of attorney are often interpreted as evidence of trust among the parties involved. We build a novel dataset of notarized powers of attorney, capturing a wide variety of agency relationships in four large French commercial cities in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, to test hypotheses on the relational basis of economic relationships. We find little support for the idea of a radical shift from personal to anonymous relationships during our period. Our results point to more nuanced transformations. The preference for proxies in the same occupation as the principal somewhat declined, while professional proxies emerged and principals used relational chains, especially involving notaries, to find proxies.     

Entrepreneurship as the structuration of individual and opportunity: A response using a critical realist perspective : Comment on Sarason,Dean and Dillard

Sarason et al. [Sarason, Y., Dean, T., Dillard, J.F., 2006. Entrepreneurship as the nexus of individual and opportunity: a structuration view. J. Bus. Venturing, 21, 286-305] build upon Shane and Venkataraman’s [Shane, S., Venkataraman, S., 2000. The promise of entrepreneurship as a field of research. Acad. Manage. Rev., 25, 217–226] framework of the interrelationship between opportunity and the entrepreneur, by proposing Giddens’ structuration theory as the ‘lens through which to view the entrepreneurial process’ (2006: 286). In this comment we make four points. Although we agree that the nexus of entrepreneur and opportunity is one that requires understanding within the context of social structure and the individual agency. Our view of structure differs substantially from Giddens and by implication Sarason et al. (2006). We discuss the implications. Second, since strata in social reality have different ontologies we propose it follows that they are viewed as a dualism. Third, agents have causal power, and ultimate concerns which they try to fallibly to put into practice. We propose entrepreneurship as the study of the interplay between the structures of a society and the agents within it, the implications of fallibility is made explicit. Finally, we take issue with Sarason et al.’s argument for an interpretist epistemology.     

An Analysis of the Burden of Corporation Tax upon Investment of Retained profits in Plant and Machinery

The burden of corporation tax in project appraisal is defined here to be the ratio of the net present value (NPV) of the tax cash flows to the pre-tax project NPV. This burden, under careful stated conditions, is shown to be a heperbolic function of the pre-tax profitability index. It may be well in excess of 100% for projects with marginal pre-tax profitability and it falls asymptotically with increasing pre-tax profitability to less than the nominal 35% rate of corporation tax. It falls more heavily upon long rather than short term projects, and the effects of inflation are capricions. These results are contrasted with the corresponding results for the fiscal arrangements which applied prior to the 1984 Finance Act.     

Linking individual performance to business strategy: The people process model

During the last five years, a team of researchers has worked with the senior human resource (HR) teams of seven large companies with United Kingdom operations. This research initiative has focused on a number of aims, one of which has been to understand and model how business strategies are translated through human resource strategies and people processes into individual and organizational performance. This article summarizes the key findings, provides a map of how this translation takes place in these companies, and discusses why some people processes are more strongly linked to business strategy. © 1999 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.