Strangers in the night: speeddating, CCI and service businesses

Organisations are increasingly realising the importance of customer-to-customer interactions (CCI). From theme parks and shopping malls, to hairdressing and health clubs, interactions between customers are recognised as a key aspect of the service experience. This research examines CCI in the context of the speeddating phenomena, a unique setting in which conversations between strangers are at the very core of the service exchange. Three elements emerge from an in-depth qualitative study to provide new insights for managers who wish to influence CCI and give some structure to future research in the area: planning, roles and performances, and cooperation versus competition.     

A critical assessment of how non‐governmental organizations use the capital markets to achieve their aims: a UK study

Non‐governmental organizations (NGOs) increasingly attempt to use the capital markets to further their aims. This paper proposes a taxonomy for such intervention that is based on two distinct strategies: a macro capital redistribution strategy and a micro investor influence strategy, both of which can be undertaken either directly or indirectly. The paper reviews empirical evidence of the success of each strategy through four case studies. It concludes by suggesting that there is some empirical evidence that the typology can be successfully applied and that there is some initial evidence that NGO capital market engagement strategies have, in certain circumstances, successfully changed business strategy. Copyright © 2003 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment.     

The ‘greening’ of tourism micro‐businesses: outcomes of focus group investigations in South East Cornwall

The response of micro‐businesses to sustainability issues, and their use of environmental management tools and systems, are often presented as simply scaled‐down versions of those of larger businesses in the small and medium‐sized enterprise (SME) sector as a whole. This paper presents the findings of a series of focus groups with the owners of tourism micro‐businesses in South East Cornwall about their awareness, understanding and adoption of sustainable tourism practices. The results reveal a complex and diverse response to the concept that resists such generalizations. A genuine need for measures to increase awareness and integrate sustainability issues within business practice is highlighted. Initiatives that do not account for the heterogeneity of the sector are likely to have only limited success. Copyright © 2003 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. and ERP Environment.     

Stock Market Reaction to the Appointment of Outside Directors

This paper examines the UK stock market's reaction to the appointment of outside (non‐executive) board members. Tests conducted using a sample of 714 appointments reported by EXTEL between 1 July, 1993 and 31 December, 1996, indicate a strong interaction between appointee characteristics and the magnitude of the agency problem: the share price reaction to outside director appointments is significantly more favourable when board ownership is low and the appointee possesses strong ex ante monitoring incentives. In contrast, the appointment of independent and manager‐affiliated outside directors does not appear to benefit shareholders on average, even in the presence of serious agency problems.     

From Imitation to Innovation: The Evolution of R&D Capabilities and Learning Processes in the Indian Pharmaceutical Industry

Since the mid 1990s the Indian pharmaceutical industry has emerged as a leading supplier of generic drugs to both developing and developed countries.The movement of the Indian pharmaceutical industry along the R&D value chain represents a remarkable shift from an importer to an innovator of drugs. The Indian government's industrial and technology policies along with changes in regulation of intellectual property rights played a crucial role in shaping this development of R&D capability. Using the 'capability creation model' this paper discusses the learning processes and stages involved in this dramatic accumulation of technological capability. This analysis shows that the Indian pharmaceutical industry has followed a trajectory from duplicative imitation to creative imitation to move up the value chain of pharmaceutical R&D. Finally as a result of changes in patent law the industry is learning to develop capabilities in innovative R&D. The basic and intermediate technological capabilities gained from imitative learning gave these firms a solid base for development of competence in advanced innovative R&D. These findings have implications for government policies as well as firm strategies in other developing countries albeit with some limitations due to global harmonisation of patent laws being promoted by the World Trade Organization.     

The information content of disaggregated accounting profitability: operating activities versus financing activities

This paper reports three empirical findings on the differential information content of the components of accounting profitability. First, the paper finds that the shareholder profitability driven by operating activities has a stronger association with annual stock returns than the shareholder profitability driven by financing activities. The finding provides empirical support for the FASB Financial Statement Presentation project, and the project suggests disaggregating accounting profitability into operating and financing activities. Second, the paper finds that the sustainable portion of operating profitability has a stronger association with annual stock returns than the unsustainable portion. This finding contributes to the literature by extending the two popular methods of breaking down operating profitability (DuPont analysis and operating liability leverage) into sustainable versus unsustainable operating income. Penman (Financial statement analysis and security valuation. McGraw-Hill, New York, NY, 2010) suggests disaggregating operating income into sustainable versus unsustainable operating income. Finally, the paper identifies the conditional persistence in Amir et al. (Rev Acc Stud 16:302–327, 2011) as one of the empirical attributes that affects the valuation usefulness of disaggregated accounting profitability. The conditional persistence measures the marginal contribution of disaggregated profitability to the persistence of aggregate profitability. This paper reports that the disaggregation is more useful in firms with significant differences in the conditional persistence of disaggregated components than in other firms. Test results are robust to controls for cross-sectional and time-series dependence in error terms.     

Implied measures of relative fund performance

We evaluate the relative performance of funds by conditioning their returns on the cross-section of portfolio characteristics across fund managers. Our implied procedure circumvents the need to specify benchmark returns or peer funds. Instead, fund-specific benchmarks for measuring selection and market timing ability are constructed. This technique is robust to herding as well as window dressing and mitigates survivorship bias. Empirically, the conditional information contained in portfolio weights defined by industry sectors, assets, and geographical regions is important to the assessment of fund management. For each set of portfolio characteristics, we identify funds with success at either selecting securities or timing-the-market.