Product—Market Choices and Growth of New Businesses

The relationship between product–market strategies and the growth of new firms is incompletely understood. The lack of understanding reflects the absence of a conceptual framework that would explain why certain product–market strategies achieve specified goals more effectively than do others. Prior research links product and market strategy to business growth, but does not clearly separate product line choices from market choices, and provides little guidance with respect to the sequence in which product and market changes should be made. Richard Cardozo, Karen McLaughlin, Brian Harmon, Paul Reynolds, and Brenda Miller propose a "wave" model of product–market choice, which yields hypotheses they evaluate with data from a subsample of 120 firms drawn from a representative sample of new businesses. Results yield preliminary guidelines for product–market strategy for managers of fledgling businesses.     

Skateboarding beyond the limits of gender? Strategic interventions in Sweden

Sweden prides itself as a country where young women can enjoy gender equality. Yet many young women skateboarders still experience discomfort when skateboarding in public spaces. We argue that diverse strategies are required to intervene in the intransigent problem of gender inequality in the male-dominated sport of skateboarding. We discuss two intertwined strategies adopted in Swedish skateboarding contexts, strategic visibility and strategic entitlement. Strategic visibility is premised on making girls a special case, separated from the boys, and therefore highly visible. The other intervention goes beyond the limits of gender, aiming to achieve strategic entitlement, which takes-for-granted girls’ participation and competence. Drawing from ethnographic data, we explore the paradoxical spaces of these interventions, identifying the benefits and risks of each strategy. We conclude that both strategies are important, yet the latter breaks new ground. Strategic entitlement, which constructs skateboarding girls as ordinary and indistinguishable from boys, no longer constructs gender as a limiting factor. Interventions to promote gender equality should include strategies that seek to go beyond gender and strategies that acknowledge the significance of gender. We need to keep experimenting with and researching the unintended consequences of all strategies for challenging and changing male dominance in sport and leisure.     

Pricing Discrete Dynamic Fund Protections

Abstract

The authors investigate the pricing of discretely monitored dynamic fund protections when the fund price follows a lognormal process or a constant elasticity of variance (CEV) process. A backward recursive pricing formula is derived. By employing a numerical technique that combines function approximation and numerical quadrature, the authors demonstrate how to complete each recursion level efficiently. Numerical experiments show that the results compare favorably with those obtained by other pricing methods.