ENERGY SECURITY IN THE ASIA‐PACIFIC REGION

The nations of the Asia‐Pacific Region, including its three sub‐regions of Northeast Asia, Southeast Asia, and South Asia, face major potential dangers in securing the energy needed for their economies. This paper focuses on these dangers and discusses the future prospects for these vulnerable nations, including their need for closer cooperation. (JEL Q32, Q34, Q40)     

The Trade Consequences of Maritime Insecurity: Evidence from Somali Piracy

In the past decade (2000–2010), pirates from Somalia have carried out thousands of attacks on cargo ships sailing through the Gulf of Aden and the Indian Ocean, causing what others have identified as significant damage to maritime trade. In this paper, we use variations in the spread and intensity of Somali piracy to estimate its effect on the volume of international trade. By comparing trade volume changes along shipping routes located in pirate waters to those that are not, we estimate that Somali piracy reduced bulk commodities trade passing through the Gulf of Aden by 4.1% per year from 2000 to 2010. We find smaller reductions in total trade, consistent with the fact that not all goods are shipped by sea or are targets of pirate attacks. While our estimates suggest that the trade costs of piracy are much lower than what has been suggested in the existing literature, we find that they remain significant and unevenly distributed, with five countries and the EU shouldering 70% of the total costs.     

Migration,Friendship Ties,and Cultural Assimilation

We study immigrant assimilation by analyzing whether friendship with natives is a measure of cultural assimilation, and by investigating the formation of social ties. Using the German Socio‐Economic Panel, we find that immigrants with a German friend are more similar to natives than those without German friends, along several important dimensions, including concerns about the economy, an interest in politics, and a host of policy issues. Turning to friendship acquisition, we find that becoming employed, time spent in the host country, the birth of a child, residential mobility, and additional education acquired in the host country are significant drivers of social network variation.     

The Value of Transferable Skills

Most studies on skill transferability focus on the return to capabilities developed in the initial job and disregard the different characteristics of the origin and the destination industries. In contrast, this article assesses the borders of skill transferability by comparing the return to skills for firm stayers, firm changers in the same industry, and firm changers to other industries. Based on a sample of Portuguese employees in retail banking, our results confirm significant inter‐firm and inter‐industry skill transferability. Difference‐in‐differences estimates with propensity score matching show that firm switchers benefit from a wage premium compared to firm stayers. However, the wage premium drops sharply when movers leave the banking sector.     

On the importance of matching strategic behavior and target market selection to business strategy in high-tech markets

Business strategy is fundamentally concerned with the actions required to create superior customer value in the firm’s target markets with the ultimate goal of achieving superior performance. Marketing theory suggests that two critical marketing activities required to achieve this end are: (1) the adoption of appropriate strategic behaviors (i.e., customer-oriented, competitor-oriented, technology-oriented) and (2) targeting of the appropriate market segments (i.e., innovators, early adopters, early majority, late majority, laggards). This study builds on prior research which demonstrates that the strategic behavior—firm performance relationship is contingent on the firm’s strategy by examining this relationship in high tech markets and by considering the incremental contribution of appropriate target market selection. Responses from 160 senior marketing managers in high-tech firms reveal strong support for our framework. Thus, this study provides useful guidance to executives and managers in high-tech firms regarding the steps that they should take to increase their probability of success.

Prototypicality advantages for pioneers over me-too brands: the role of evolving product designs

Prior empirical research suggests that consumers perceive pioneers as more prototypical (i.e., representative) of their product categories than me-too followers. This prototypicality advantage is believed to contribute to an enduring marketplace advantage for the pioneer. We extend research into pioneering prototypicality advantages by considering the ramifications of simultaneous product design (i.e., product attribute) evolutions. We hypothesize that the simultaneous evolution of product designs of both the pioneer and me-too will diminish the pioneer’s prototypicality advantage over the me-too, even though the me-too does not initiate the change. To test our hypotheses, we create an experimental environment consisting of four cells, each corresponding to a different marketplace scenario: a no-change condition; a simultaneous-evolution condition; a pioneer-updates-first condition; and a leapfrogging (i.e., me-too updates first) condition. The results suggest that simultaneous design evolutions can diminish the pioneer’s prototypicality advantage. As a result, me-too entry may be a more attractive strategy in the long-run than currently believed in product categories characterized by substantial design evolution.

Gratitude works: its impact and the mediating role of affective commitment in driving positive outcomes

After studying the effects of Louisiana’s post-hurricane “thank you” campaigns, the researchers find expressions of gratitude significantly improve perceptions of Louisiana in the midst of its recovery. Through a national survey conducted November 2006, they find that those who saw or heard a thank you advertisement have more positive attitudes toward the state and its people, a greater willingness to pay a premium for its products, services and travel to the state, and spread positive word-of-mouth, thus justifying the use of public funds to support the campaign. The authors investigate the role of participation on the effectiveness of expressions of gratitude and identify the mediating role of affective commitment in driving the positive results attributed to expressions of gratitude.     

The Effects of Competition in Short Product Life‐Cycle Markets: The Case of Motion Pictures*

It is critically important to understand the relationship between new product launch strategies and their interaction with the competitive environment, which results in the successful introduction of new products. Deciding when to launch new products is among the most significant issues facing managers when formulating new products strategy, especially for products with short product life cycles. However, little extant research has focused on the interaction of product launch timing and the competitive market environment. This study explores the effects of four types of competitive threats on the market performance of short product life‐cycle products. Threats from new products and incumbents are possible. Also, products in the same category and those in related product categories exert competitive pressures. In this paper, a framework of competitive threats is developed, and research questions are constructed and empirically tested using the motion pictures industry as the focus of this research. A set of simultaneous equations was estimated using a sample of 2,948 movies introduced in the U.S. market between 1997 and 2004. The results show that all competition types have negative direct, indirect (as mediated by distribution intensity), and total effects on the performance of a new product. For a focal product, incumbent products exert a greater negative impact on performance than new entrants. Surprisingly, products in different, but related, categories are more harmful to the performance of products than products in the same category. The results have important implications for launch timing and new product performance.     

The Effects of Market Network Heterogeneity on Innovation Diffusion: An Agent‐Based Modeling Approach

Innovations usually have an initial impact on very few people. The period of learning or early evaluation precedes the diffusion of the technology into the wider addressed population. More than a transfer, this is best characterized as communication of benefits, costs, and compatibility with earlier technologies and a relative assessment of the new state of the art. Innovation development by an organization or individual creates not just a device (i.e., process or tacit knowledge) but concomitantly a capacity on the part of other organizations or persons to use, adopt, replicate, enhance, or modify the technology, skills, or knowledge for their own purposes. How innovations actually diffuse is to understand the communication of progress, and this framing helps one to design innovations and also design the marketing and testing programs to ready innovations for market and launch them efficiently. Diffusion theory's main focus is on the flow of information within a social system, such as via mass media and word‐of‐mouth communications. This theory presents often in the form of mathematical models of innovation and imitation. Distinct from classical diffusion models, however, consumers are not all identical in how they connect to others within a market or how they respond to information. We examine the effects of various network structures and relational heterogeneity on innovation diffusion within market networks. Specifically, network topology (the structure of how individuals in the market are connected) and the strength of communication links between innovator and follower market segments (a form of relational heterogeneity) are studied. Several research questions concerning network heterogeneity are addressed with an agent‐based modeling approach. The present study's findings are based on simulation results that show important effects of network structure on the diffusion process. The ability to speed diffusion varies significantly according to within‐ and cross‐segment communications within a heterogeneous network structure. The implications of the present approach for new product diffusion are discussed, and future research directions are suggested that may add useful insights into the complex social networks inherent to diffusion. A simple summary is that discovery of significant prime communicator nodes in a network allows innovation development practices to be better calibrated to realistically multiple market segments.