Innovation in food service technology and its strategic role

Innovation in food service technology offers differentiation and cost leadership in strategic terms. The majority of food service businesses do not have research and development laboratories. At present, the innovations in equipment design and layout, packaging and service techniques are of a defensive or reactive nature. Examples of defensive innovation include faster and better preparation methods, improved temperature control, even heating, energy and labour savings, less waste, better sanitation, faster service and flexibility. In contrast, developments in offensive or pro-active innovation, which can radically change current practices, are rare. Novel food service processes can evolve as a result of adoption of technological breakthroughs in “high tech” fields of the economy. This justifies investments in offensive research and highlights the importance of technical competencies for a food service professional.     

Exit problems in regime-switching models

This paper provides a general framework for pricing of perpetual American and real options in regime-switching Lévy models. In each state of the Markov chain, which determines switches from one Lévy process to another, the payoff stream is a monotone function of the Lévy process labeled by the state. This allows for additional switching within each state of the Markov chain (payoffs can be different in different regions of the real line). The pricing procedure is efficient even if the number of states is large provided the transition rates are not very large w.r.t. the riskless rates. The payoffs and riskless rates may depend on a state. Special cases are stochastic volatility models and models with stochastic interest rate; both must be modeled as finite-state Markov chains. As an application, we solve exit problems for a price-taking firm, and study the dependence of the exit threshold on the interest rate uncertainty.     

A Multi-Stage Model of Decision Bias: Implications for Expert Systems

The study of the bias processes that affect decision making is crucial in designing expert systems. This study proposes a multi-stage model for decision biases which reconceptualizes cognitive styles and decision heuristics within a framework that borrows heavily from research by Posner and McLeod (1982), Tversky and Kahneman (1973) and Ramaprasad (1987). The framework is tested within the context-bound area of loan making so that the biasing effects of prior experience on decision making can be examined. The results are analyzed with a path-modeling technique (i.e. covariance structural modeling) that allows testing for indirect as well as direct effects. The results are discussed in terms of the implications for expert systems development     

American options: the EPV pricing model

Summary We explicitly solve the pricing problem for perpetual American puts and calls, and provide an efficient semi-explicit pricing procedure for options with finite time horizon. Contrary to the standard approach, which uses the price process as a primitive, we model the price process as the expected present value of a stream, which is a monotone function of a Lévy process. Certain processes exhibiting mean-reverting, stochastic volatility and/or switching features can be modeled this way. This specification allows us to consider assets that pay no dividends at all when the level of the underlying stochastic factor is too low, assets that pay dividends at a fixed rate when the underlying stochastic process remains in some range, or capped dividends.The authors are grateful to the anonymous referees for valuable comments and suggestions.     

Advertising Benefits from Ethical Artificial Intelligence Algorithmic Purchase Decision Pathways

Journal of Business Ethics - Artificial intelligence (AI) has dramatically changed the way organizations communicate, understand, and interact with their potential consumers. In the context of this...     

Impact of Chinese Agribusiness Entrepreneurs on the Local Land Market in the Russian Far East

Chinese originally migrated to the Russian Far East (RFE) to fill a labor shortage on collective farms. In more recent decades, some Chinese migrants have chosen to lease land from Russian farmers to manage their own farms. Rising soybean prices and the trade war between China and the United States have increased demand for land capable of producing soybeans. Thus, Chinese farmers in the RFE compete for land with Russians. The Chinese also contribute positively to local food security by increasing food availability and accessibility. This study uses an econometric model to analyze the impact of Chinese on local land markets in the RFE. Financial support for Russian farmers by the government depresses their demand for land; rising soybean prices and the employment of Chinese farm workers by Russian farmers encourage farm expansion, resulting in higher land prices. Selling farm produce to Chinese merchants increases the amount of land owned, cultivated, and rented by Russian farmers.     

Same currency,different strategies? The (asymmetric) role of the exchange rate in shaping European agri-food exports

This article uses a nonlinear autoregressive distributed lag (NADRL) model introduced by Shin, Yu, and Greenwood-Nimmo (2014) to assess the role that the exchange rate plays in shaping European agri-food exports after the introduction of the Euro. Although the 10 countries of this study share the same currency (and thus a single nominal exchange rate with the US), cross-country discrepancies of exports’ reactions to exchange rate changes are evident. Moreover, I find that exchange rate changes influence exports asymmetrically in the long run. Euro appreciations are harmful to a lesser extent than Euro depreciations are beneficial for European agri-food exports. The magnitude of this effect is country-specific and varies considerably between individual exporting countries. Exported quantities are less affected by exchange rate fluctuations than export values, which is in line with local currency price stabilization strategies of the exporters. This finding is interpreted as a sign of an incomplete exchange rate pass-through due to strategic (asymmetric) markup adjustments by firms with heterogeneous productivity. Besides that, the outcomes suggest that nonprice competition might be in play in some cases.     

Credit Where Credit is Due: A Field Survey of the Interactive Effects of Credit Expectations and Leaders’ Credit Allocation on Employee Turnover

Today's human resource management community has a strong interest in the issue of how HR practice is implemented by managers and leaders in the workplace. In this article, we investigate how one specific practice, leaders’ public recognition of a job well done (i.e., credit allocation), impacts employee turnover. Based on expectancy violations, psychological contracts, and turnover research, we predicted that subordinates would be more likely to leave an organization if their leader took credit for their work, but only if the credit taking violated subordinates’ expectations. In a field survey of organizational employees, we found that the effects of credit taking on turnover were negated when subordinates’ expectations and leaders’ credit allocation behavior were aligned. However, when leaders’ credit behavior came as a surprise, participants responded negatively when expectations were not met and positively when expectations were exceeded. We discuss the implications of these results for both theory and practice. © 2014 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.