Do Innovative Work Practices and Use of Information and Communication Technologies Motivate Employees?

I investigate the impact of innovative work practices and information and communication technologies (ICT) use on employees’ motivations. The paper provides new and interesting results on how firms can build a motivational environment. Within an original instrumenting framework, I modify what previous analyses reveal about quality circle and training participation. The results confirm the positive role of work practices such as teamwork, quality norms, formal appraisals, management recognition, and family‐friendly policies. The ICT that most contributed to the development of a motivational environment are those that facilitate access to information and knowledge such as workflow, Internet, and e‐mail.     

Negative nominal interest rates: history and current proposals

Given the renewed interest in negative interest rates on base money—or equivalently ‘taxing money’—as a means for overcoming the zero bound on short-term nominal interest rates, this article reviews the history of negative nominal interest rates starting from the ‘taxing money’ proposal of Silvio Gesell up to current proposals that received popular attention in the wake of the financial crisis of 2007/2008. It is demonstrated that ‘taxing money’ proposals have a long intellectual history and that instead of being the conjecture of a monetary crank, they are a serious policy proposal. In a second step, the article points out that besides the more popular debate on a Gesell tax as a means to remove the zero bound on nominal interest rates, there is a class of neoclassical search models that advocates a negative tax on money as efficiency enhancing. This strand of the literature has so far been largely ignored by the policy debate on negative interest rates.     

Branding strategies,marketing communication,and perceived brand meaning: The transfer of purposive,goal-oriented brand meaning to brand extensions

This article develops and tests a conceptual model of the transfer process whereby perceived similarity organized around shared goals facilitates the transfer of knowledge and affect from a parent brand to an extension of that brand. Empirical results, based on two well-known brands and two hypothetical product extensions for each brand, demonstrate that the availability of well-formed, goal-derived categories associated with a parent brand establishes an organizing framework for consumers' assessments of similarity thatfacilitates the transfer of consumer knowledge and attitude from the parent brand to a brand extension in another product category. This facilitating effect of similarity does not occur in the absence of goal-derived categories. The results also reveal how marketing communication can be used to facilitate the transfer process by framing similarity in terms of common goals. Implications are discussed for the organization of consumer knowledge and affect across product categories and for understanding prior research findings on brand extension. Ingrid M. Martin (imartin@csulb.edu) is an associate professor of marketing at California State University at Long Beach. Her research has examined issues in the area of consumer goals as they guide structuring and processing marketing information, product choice and usage. Her research has been published in theJournal of Consumer Research, Journal of Marketing Research, Journal of Public Policy & Research, and five book chapters. David W. Stewart (david.stewart@marshall.usc.edu) is the Robert E. Brooker Professor of Marketing in the Marshall School of Business at the University of Southern California. He is the immediate past editor of theJournal of Marketing. Dr. Stewart has authored or co-authored more than 200 publications and seven books. Shashi Matta (matta@marshall.usc.edu) is a doctoral candidate in marketing at the Marshal School of Business, University of Southern California. His research interests include branding, and services marketing. Shashi’s research has been published in theJournal of Consumer Research.     

EQUALITY OF OPPORTUNITY: EAST VS. WEST GERMANY

The case of German reunification has been subject to extensive research on earnings inequality and labour market integration. However, little is known about the development of equality of opportunity (EOp) in East and West Germany after 1990. Using German micro data, we empirically analyse how circumstances beyond the sphere of individual control relate to inequality in East and West Germany. Our results show that EOp is larger in East than in West Germany. However, despite increasing income inequality, EOp remained surprisingly constant.     

The first Sterling Area†

Between the eleventh century and mid‐thirteenth century a Sterling Area evolved in the British Isles, with a common currency based upon the English silver penny and equivalents of it produced in Scotland and Ireland. This Sterling Area began to contract in the second half of the fourteenth century, when reductions in the bullion content of Scottish coins ended the equivalence of the English and Scottish currencies, and in the fifteenth century Ireland developed its own coinage. Estimates of the currency of the Sterling Area are provided, taking the chronology of its growth and contraction into account. Estimates of the sterling currency are not estimates of the currency of England, and they cannot be combined with data relating exclusively to England in economic modelling, without qualification. Per capita currency estimates and values of coin hoards and single coin finds are at a high level around 1400, falling in the second half of the fifteenth century, indicating that the European ‘bullion famine’ of the 1390s to c. 1415 had less effect on the currency than the second late medieval bullion crisis, from the 1430s to the 1460s.     

Going short‐term or long‐term? CEO stock options and temporal orientation in the presence of slack

Research summary: We draw on behavioral agency theory to explain how decision heuristics associated with CEO stock options interact with firm slack to shape the CEO's preference for short‐ or long‐term strategies (temporal orientation). Our findings suggest CEO current option wealth substitutes for the influence of slack resources in encouraging a long‐term orientation, while prospective option wealth enhances the positive effect of slack on temporal orientation. Our theory offers explanations for non‐findings in previous analysis of the relationship between CEO equity based pay and temporal orientation and provides the insights that CEO incentives created by stock options (1) enhance the effect of available slack upon temporal orientation and (2) can both incentivize and de‐incentivize destructive short‐termism, depending upon the values of current and prospective option wealth. Managerial summary: We explore how compensation design can play a role in affecting the CEO's preference for short‐ or long‐term strategic projects. When the CEOs have accumulated option wealth, they are more likely to invest in the long term. Yet when they have a large number of recently granted options with the potential to generate significant wealth in the event of successful risk taking, the CEO is more likely to prefer the short term in order to achieve personal wealth gains more quickly. The more liquid assets the firm holds, the weaker both of the aforementioned effects. An implication for boards is that they should anticipate CEO short‐termism if the CEO has been granted new options, underlining the potential negative consequences of option compensation. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Do computers improve the drawing of a geometrical figure for 10?year-old children?

Nowadays, computer aided design (CAD) is widely used by designers. Would children learn to draw more easily and more efficiently if they were taught with computerised tools? To answer this question, we made an experiment designed to compare two methods for children to do the same drawing: the classical ‘pen and paper’ method and a CAD method. We asked two groups of 14 children to draw a geometrical figure: the Rey-Osterrieth Complex Figure (ROCF). The first group drew it with a pen on a sheet of paper (‘paper’ group) and the second on a computer screen with CAD software (‘computer’ group). Two drawing conditions were studied: ‘Copying’ the figure and drawing from memory. Results showed that the ‘computer’ group was better at copying the figure but that both groups performed equally well when the figure was drawn from memory. These preliminary results suggest that using a CAD tool could help children while they copy a model, but that it does not improve their ability to draw the same figure using their own, internal model.     

Technology Sharing in Manufacturing Business Groups

Technology represents the primordial force for companies and organizations in securing long‐term competitiveness. In the intensive search to access new technology, organizations are more and more looking beyond the borders of the focal firm and becoming involved in various networks with suppliers, consultants, partners, and others. However, the distinction between the focal firm, on the one hand, and networks, on the other, is in this paper argued to be too extensive without intermediating nuances. Less focus is given to an in‐between perspective configured by business groups or concerns here defined as parent corporations with subsidiary companies. It is this perspective of business groups with characteristics between individual firms and open networks that is of interest in this paper. The focus is on manufacturing business groups in which the companies will typically have individual as well as common technologies. The research aim is to develop a framework to be used as an analytical tool for understanding and organizing technology sharing in manufacturing business groups. The research approach was to study technology sharing in a natural setting combining multiple in‐depth sources of evidence in a clinical research setting. A prestudy identified key dimensions in classifying cases leading to four clusters of typified cases. Data were gathered from meetings with 24 managers from various research and development (R&D) units who met regularly every other week during seven months, in‐depth interviews, internal documents and protocols, and workshops. Following the clinical field‐study approach, findings are theoretically validated in relation to literature. The analysis identifies and depicts four different types of technology‐sharing scenarios in manufacturing business groups. Each type has particular characteristics of its own. The four scenarios together provide a synthesized portfolio with different types of dimensions. A first dimension makes a distinction between sharing new technology development versus existing technology. Another distinguishes between technologies aimed at the whole business group and those aimed at specific segments. The two dimensions together comprise four different types of technology‐sharing alternatives. Each one of them can be used at the focal firm, and together, they are applicable from a business group perspective comprising technology‐sharing portfolios of manufacturing business groups.     

The Value of Crowdsourcing: Can Users Really Compete with Professionals in Generating New Product Ideas?

Generating ideas for new products used to be the exclusive domain of marketers, engineers, and/or designers. Users have only recently been recognized as an alternative source of new product ideas. Whereas some have attributed great potential to outsourcing idea generation to the “crowd” of users (“crowdsourcing”), others have clearly been more skeptical. The authors join this debate by presenting a real‐world comparison of ideas actually generated by a firm's professionals with those generated by users in the course of an idea generation contest. Both professionals and users provided ideas to solve an effective and relevant problem in the consumer goods market for baby products. Executives from the underlying company evaluated all ideas (blind to their source) in terms of key quality dimensions including novelty, customer benefit, and feasibility. The study reveals that the crowdsourcing process generated user ideas that score significantly higher in terms of novelty and customer benefit, and somewhat lower in terms of feasibility. However, the average values for feasibility—in sharp contrast to novelty and customer benefit—tended to be relatively high overall, meaning that feasibility did not constitute a narrow bottleneck in this study. Even more interestingly, it is found that user ideas are placed more frequently than expected among the very best in terms of novelty and customer benefit. These findings, which are quite counterintuitive from the perspective of classic new product development (NPD) literature, suggest that, at least under certain conditions, crowdsourcing might constitute a promising method to gather user ideas that can complement those of a firm's professionals at the idea generation stage in NPD.