Financial services and the elderly poor: Development and implementation of sustainable intervention strategies

Given the significance of the elderly consumer market in the development of successful and comprehensive marketing strategies, it is imperative that marketing decision-makers and policymakers better understand and respond to the varied needs of this significant consumer segment. The management of financial matters is important at every juncture in life, but particularly so for the elderly. This area of concern is exacerbated when considering the large number of elderly in poverty or near-poverty levels of existence. On the basis of the extant literature review, most consumer education programs focus on young consumers. As the population ages, the societal role of the mature market becomes more and more significant. A well-developed consumer financial initiative designed to assist this important market segment can generate tremendous dividends in both the short- and long-run for sponsoring institutions/business organizations. Consumer financial education programs offer considerable promise for this market sector. Given this state of affairs, the article's key objective is to offer an integrative conceptual platform to address some of major concerns in developing and implementing consumer financial education programs for the elderly poor. The conceptual model details the mechanics of constructing and executing effective financial education initiatives for the elderly poor, with the attendant marketing management implications.     

Late and multiple bidding in second price Internet auctions: Theory and evidence concerning different rules for ending an auction

In second price Internet auctions with a fixed end time, such as those on eBay, many bidders submit their bids in the closing minutes or seconds of an auction. We propose an internet auction model, in which very late bids have a positive probability of not being successfully submitted, and show that late bidding in a fixed deadline auction can occur at equilibrium in auctions both with private values and with uncertain, dependent values. Late bidding may also arise out of equilibrium, as a best reply to incremental bidding. However, the strategic advantages of late bidding are severely attenuated in auctions that apply an automatic extension rule such as auctions conducted on Amazon. Field data show that there is more late bidding on eBay than on Amazon, and this difference grows with experience. We also study the incidence of multiple bidding, and its relation to late bidding.     

Wealth Effects of Private Equity Placements: Evidence from Singapore

We examine institutional characteristics and the wealth effects of private equity placements in Singapore. Our findings show that private placements in Singapore generally result in a negative wealth effect and a reduction in ownership concentration. We find that at high levels of ownership concentration, the relation between abnormal returns and changes in ownership concentration is significantly negative. We also show that the market reacts less favorably to placements in which management ownership falls below 50%, but more favorably to issues to single investors. We do not find evidence suggesting that our results are due to an information effect.     

An Investigation of Brand-Related User-Generated Content on Twitter

The big data of user-generated content (UGC) on social media are laden with potential value for brand managers. However, there are many obstacles to using big data to answer brand-management questions. This article presents a framework that automatically derives latent brand topics and classifies brand sentiments. It applies text mining with latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA) and sentiment analysis on 1.7 million unique tweets for 20 brands across five industries: fast food, department store, footwear, electronics, and telecommunications. The framework is used to explore four brand-related questions on Twitter. There are three main findings. First, product, service, and promotions are the dominant topics of interest when consumers interact with brands on Twitter. Second, consumer sentiments toward brands vary within and across industries. Third, separate company-specific analyses of positive and negative tweets generate a more accurate understanding of Twitter users' major brand topics and sentiments. Our findings provide brand managers with actionable insights in targeted advertising, social customer relationship management (CRM), and brand management.     

Regime switching based portfolio selection for pension funds

This paper shows how a mean variance criterion can be applied to a multi period setting in order to obtain efficient portfolios in an asset and liability context. The optimization model allows for rebalancing activities, transaction costs, stochastic volatilities for both assets and liabilities. Furthermore, a general framework for the projection of pension fund liabilities as well as for the generation of asset returns is given. In a further step the dynamics of the liability maturity structure is modeled as customized index, whose volatility and correlation with asset returns become integral components of the applied regime switching approach. The numerical results illustrate the diversification of the assets and its risk return pattern in dependency of the liability dynamics.     

Does Alibaba's Magic Work Outside China?

Alibaba was an established e‐commerce giant in the Chinese online retail industry. In 2014, it recorded the world's largest initial public offering (IPO), raising a total of $25 billion. Alibaba's groundbreaking IPO and continuous growth in China had raised speculation on its imminent and potential expansions into other countries including the United States. On the other hand, Amazon and eBay had been leaders in the e‐commerce industry of the United States, arguably the world. This case seeks to weigh the potential success of Alibaba should it choose to expand outside its home country, China, including the United States. This case also helps understand how the Chinese business environment influenced the success of Alibaba, relative to other countries. © 2015 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.     

Information processing and jury decisionmaking

We develop a model to explore the information processing function that jury deliberation and its analogues perform. The central question we ask is: How much better could a jury possibly perform if it optimally used the collective information available to it than if it decides cases by a simple majority vote before any deliberation or information sharing occurs? It is shown how the answer depends on a number of considerations, including the correlation among jurors' observations, the jurors' assessments of the relative importance of type I and type II errors compared with society's assessment of those errors, and differences in jurors' abilities.     

Leader–Member Exchange and Relational Quality in a Singapore Public Sector Organization

An objective of Singapore’s ongoing public sector reform (PS21) requires agencies to focus on getting the best out of its employees. One way of doing this is by creating a positive leader–member exchange (LMX) relationship, enabling supervisors to motivate their subordinates towards the development of organizational citizenship behaviours (OCBs). This article reports the extent of LMX and relational quality in a public sector agency experiencing PS21 reform and high staff turnover. In addition, we examined the effects of organizational justice perceptions and job satisfaction towards a subordinates’ OCB. A path model was developed to examine the relationships between LMX, organizational justice, job satisfaction, and OCB and tested by applying LMX theory. The path analysis results showed that LMX mediates the relationship between organizational justice perceptions and OCB. The results also showed that one’s job satisfaction led to higher level of OCB. The study findings have implications for theory and practice which have been presented in the discussion section.