To Tip or Not to Tip,That Is the Question: Rewarding Customer Service Encounters

This instructional case deals with compensation schemes in service industries, specifically with managerial intervention in tipping schemes in a restaurant. The case provides an opportunity to explore the interaction of direct client feedback and management control systems in controlling service encounters and to develop an understanding of management control systems in a team production environment. While the case focuses on compensation issues and requires some quantitative analysis, it also provides an opportunity to introduce the concept of “management controls as a package” and an assessment of the linkage between organizational strategy and the overall package of management controls. Case guidance is provided for alternative approaches to using the case.     

A Marketing Approach to Commodity Futures Exchanges: A Case Study of the Dutch Hog Industry

This paper proposes a marketing strategic approach to commodity futures exchanges to optimise the (hedging) services offered. First, the environment of commodity futures exchanges is examined. Second, the threats and opportunities of commodity futures exchanges are analysed. Our analysis demonstrates that market orientation is an important element in the market strategies of commodity futures exchanges. Our market strategic framework is applied to the Dutch hog futures market. It is concluded that market penetration is an appropriate strategy. Consequently, to identify the variables that distinguish between farmers who initiate futures positions and farmers who do not, we conducted a discriminant analysis on data gathered from 418 Dutch hog farmers. The discriminant analysis shows that latent variables, such as farmers' perceived performance, farmers' reference price and farmers' market orientation, are important discriminating variables. Furthermore, farmers' cash market behaviour (in terms of the frequency of selling in the spot market) is an important discriminating variable as well. The usefulness of these results as input for a penetration policy is demonstrated.     

Woodsy the optimal owl: Environmental campaigns, norms, and implications for public goods policy

Norms regarding private provision of a public good (e.g. cutting down on energy use, not littering) can affect the marginal gains from contributing to a public good and therefore people's decisions about contributing to the public good. A model is proposed in which norms of private contributions to a public good can be influenced by public policy, and these norms affect people's self-image, which derives from a comparison of one's own contribution with the norm contribution. In this context, we examine the conditions under which private contributions to a public good are efficient, and the conditions under which policy affecting these norms improves social welfare. We find that (1) a benevolent social planner who fails to account for private provision norms will underprovide the public good, and (2) public policy that attempts to raise the norm contribution of private provision can increase social welfare if the effect of raising the norm does not have an extreme negative effect - either extremely small or extremely large - on peoples' self-image.     

Incentives and the structure of teams

This paper studies the relationship between moral hazard and the matching structure of teams. We show that team incentive problems may generate monotone matching predictions in the absence of complementarities in the production technology. Second, we analyze how complementarity in the underlying technology affects the matching predictions arising due to moral hazard. We find that (i) even when the production technology is strongly complementary, the incentive problem may lead to formation of negatively sorted teams; (ii) as the degree of complementarity increases, the optimal matching structure may switch from positive to negative, solely due to the need to provide incentives.     

Bibliometry and nanotechnology: A meta-analysis

As in other fields of science, bibliometry has become the primary method of gaging progress in nanotechnology. In the United States in the late 1990s, a period when policy makers were preparing the groundwork for what would become the National Nanotechnology Initiative (NNI), bibliometry largely replaced expert interviews, then the standard method of assessing nanotechnology. However, such analyses of this sector have tended not to account for productivity. We hope to correct this oversight by integrating economic input and output measurements calculating academic publications divided by the number of researchers, and accounting for government investment in nanotechnology. When nanotechnology journal publication is measured in these ways, the U.S. is not the leader, as has been widely assumed. Rather, it lags behind Germany, the United Kingdom, and France.     

Homeownership, dissatisfaction and voting

This article explores the relationships between homeownership, dissatisfaction with city services, and voting turnout in local elections, using original survey data. Homeowners are more likely than renters to vote, but the pure effect of ownership is not robust to either basic socio-economic controls or an instrumental variable strategy. However, dissatisfaction has a positive, significant and robust effect on likelihood of voting. When interacting homeownership and dissatisfaction, the author finds that dissatisfied homeowners are significantly more likely to vote than both satisfied homeowners and all renters. This finding is consistent with Fischel’s (2001) homevoter hypothesis.     

A new class of asymptotically efficient estimators for moment condition models

In this paper, we propose a new class of asymptotically efficient estimators for moment condition models. These estimators share the same higher order bias properties as the generalized empirical likelihood estimators and once bias corrected, have the same higher order efficiency properties as the bias corrected generalized empirical likelihood estimators. Unlike the generalized empirical likelihood estimators, our new estimators are much easier to compute. A simulation study finds that our estimators have better finite sample performance than the two-step GMM, and compare well to several potential alternatives in terms of both computational stability and overall performance.     

Distance traveled in three Canadian cities: Spatial analysis from the perspective of vulnerable population segments

The objective of this paper is to investigate the factors that influence distance traveled by individuals in Canadian urban areas, with a particular focus on three population segments thought to face the risk of mobility challenges: the elderly, low-income people, and members of single-parent households. Data obtained for three large urban centers - Hamilton, Toronto, and Montreal - are analyzed using spatial expansion models, a technique used to obtain spatially-varying coefficients that help to tease out contextual person-location variations in travel behavior. Detailed geographical results help to enhance our understanding of the spatiality of travel behavior of the population segments of interest. Substantively, the results provide evidence of significant interactions between location, various demographic factors, and mobility tools. More specifically, the results evince patterns of mobility that are significantly different from the mainstream population, particularly in suburban settings, in ways that are indicative of mobility challenges.     

Net Operating Working Capital Behavior: A First Look

Net operating working capital captures multiple dimensions of firms’ adjustments to operating and financial conditions. Sales growth, uncertainty of sales, costly external financing, and financial distress encourage firms to pursue more aggressive working capital strategies. Firms with greater internal financing capacity and superior capital market access employ more conservative working capital policies. Results are robust to unobserved heterogeneity and industry effects. The evidence suggests that operating and financing conditions should be considered when evaluating working capital behavior, not just industry averages. Additionally, industry concentration magnifies the effect of sales growth.