Antecedents and consequences of environmental stewardship in boundary-spanning B2B teams

The authors examine antecedents and consequences of environmental stewardship in frontline business-to-business teams. On the basis of data from members of 34 teams organized into regional networks, they demonstrate the differential impact of team environmental stewardship on customer satisfaction ratings and sales. Furthermore, the results reveal lagged individual-level effects of autonomy and supervisory support on environmental stewardship, as well as lagged group-level effects of past performance. Finally, dispersion models of team stewardship differentially moderate antecedent–stewardship relationships. Whereas within-team consensus strengthens the impact of past satisfaction ratings on subsequent stewardship, between-team consensus weakens the negative impact of past sales.     

Gratitude works: its impact and the mediating role of affective commitment in driving positive outcomes

After studying the effects of Louisiana’s post-hurricane “thank you” campaigns, the researchers find expressions of gratitude significantly improve perceptions of Louisiana in the midst of its recovery. Through a national survey conducted November 2006, they find that those who saw or heard a thank you advertisement have more positive attitudes toward the state and its people, a greater willingness to pay a premium for its products, services and travel to the state, and spread positive word-of-mouth, thus justifying the use of public funds to support the campaign. The authors investigate the role of participation on the effectiveness of expressions of gratitude and identify the mediating role of affective commitment in driving the positive results attributed to expressions of gratitude.     

Insuring against the shortfall risk associated with real options

We would like to insure against the risk that a geometric Brownian motion, correlated with the price process of a certain traded asset, is in a set E at time T. In this paper it is shown that the best action one can take to insure against this risk is to buy a binary option on the traded asset. We give explicit formulas in the case that E is an infinite interval. The setting of all our investigations is the Black-Scholes model. Mathematics Subject Classification (2000): 91B28, 60J65, 62P05, 91B30, 62F03 Journal of Economic Literature Classification: G31     

Optimal design of trade institutions

We model an economy with social institutions that facilitate trade and induce three types of costs: establishment costs, access costs, and use costs. Use costs are specific transaction costs related to the use of these trade institutions. We assume that a trade institution is economically completely determined by the costs it imposes and by the effects on the trades it facilitates. We extend the Pareto efficiency concept to include various modes of organization of social institutions: the costs and benefits of these organizations are expressed in the trades they facilitate.Within this setting we discuss a valuation equilibrium concept, in which all agents use a common conjectural price system that assigns to every trade institution the price vector that would prevail under it. This feature of the equilibrium is important in securing the second welfare theorem, and is new to the analysis of economies with costly trade. Since the use costs can be nonlinear, there are non-convexities that prevent the second welfare theorem from obtaining in a finite economy, but we show it for large economies.Received: 3 April 2002, Accepted: 30 April 2003, JEL Classification: D59, D70, H49Robert P. Gilles: donewhile visiting the Center for Economic Research, Tilburg University, Tilburg, The Netherlands. Financial support from the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO), grant B46-390, is gratefully acknowledged.Dimitrios Diamantaras: Part of this research wasSupport from Temple University via a Fuller research fellowship is gratefully acknowledged.The authors would like to thank Suzanne Scotchmer, Andreu Mas-Colell, Marcus Berliant, Shlomo Weber, Hans Haller, Dhanajay Gokhale, Julian Manning, and two anonymous referees for their valuable comments and discussions of previous drafts of this paper. A previous version of this paper was circulated as Equilibria of economies with costly trade.     

Inpatient nursing unit volume, length of stay, cost, and mortality

Nursing unit volume-outcome relationships exist for patients assigned selected DRGs. This finding suggests that, in some cases, aggregating inpatients with similar clinical conditions may result in lower cost of care, shorter length of stay, and fewer hospital deaths.     

Democracy and environmental quality

We develop and estimate an econometric model of the relationship between several local and global air pollutants and economic development while allowing for critical aspects of the socio-political-economic regime of a State. We obtain empirical support for our hypothesis that democracy and its associated freedoms provide the conduit through which agents can exercise their preferences for environmental quality more effectively than under an autocratic regime, thus leading to decreased concentrations or emissions of pollution. However, additional factors such as income inequality, age distribution, education, and urbanization may mitigate or exacerbate the net effect of the type of political regime on pollution, depending on the underlying societal preferences and the weights assigned to those preferences by the State.     

The desired level of market orientation and business unit performance

Existing studies of market orientation have hypothesized that the strength of the market orientation/performance relationship depends on environmental variables such as market turbulence, technological turbulence, and competitive intensity. To date most empirical studies have failed to confirm these hypotheses; however, these studies (1) assumed that performance is a linear function of the achieved level of market orientation and (2) tested whether environmental uncertainty moderates this relationship. A complementary explanation for the impact of environmental variables on a firm’s market orientation arises from studies of organizational behavior that link the need for coordination and control to environmental uncertainty and organizational strategy. Building on this perspective, the authors argue that (1) environmental uncertainty influences the desired level of market orientation and (2) the gap between the desired and achieved levels of market orientation influence business unit performance. The authors test these hypotheses with data collected from multiple respondents in 308 US firms. The data analysis confirms that the desired level of market orientation is a function of market turbulence, competitive intensity, technological turbulence, and innovation strategy. In addition, the desired level of market orientation positively influences the achieved level. Finally, when the achieved level of market orientation is less than the desired level, business unit performance is a negative function of the gap between the desired and achieved levels of market orientation.

Corporate social responsibility: attributions,loyalty, and the mediating role of trust

This study investigates whether consumers’ perceptions of motives influence their evaluation of corporate social responsibility (CSR) efforts. The study reveals the mediating role of consumer trust in CSR evaluation frameworks; managers should monitor consumer trust, which seems to be an important subprocess regulating the effect of consumer attributions on patronage and recommendation intentions. Further, managers may allay the negative effects of profit-motivated giving by doing well on service quality perceptions. On the other hand, appropriately motivated giving continues to positively affect trust regardless of the performance of the firm on service quality provision.     

An examination of Peter Drucker's work from an institutional perspective: How institutional innovation creates value leadership

This paper uses an institutional perspective to analyze Peter Drucker's contributions to management, marketing and marketing strategy. Drucker recognizes the importance of institutions in society. Further, his work reflects a variety of institutional views from sociology, economics and marketing. Drucker uses a form of comparative institutional analysis for evaluating both management and strategy issues. At the heart of each institutional comparison is the customer and the value created for the customer by the organization. Institutional comparisons help managers understand how the organization can create customers by adjusting its customer value proposition. Drucker influences marketers by focusing on how the organization's values are used to develop the organization's customer value proposition. Further, it is shown that the organization's values and its customer value propositions are manifested in its transaction rules, termed marketing institutions. Based on Drucker's work, a framework for comparing marketing institutions is introduced: the value leadership framework.

Peter Drucker on marketing: an exploration of five tenets

The authors review Peter Drucker’s contributions to marketing theory and practice. A bibliometric analysis of Drucker’s academic influence in marketing is presented. The five main tenets that are derived from the bibliometric study are expanded upon as follows: (1) The Marketing Concept: Creating Value for Customers; (2) Broadened Role of Marketing in Society: Corporate Social Responsibility, Consumerism, Social Marketing, and Lessons from Non-Profit Organizations; (3) Contributions to Marketing Strategy: The Obvious and Not So Obvious; (4) Marketing-Innovation Interface: New Product Development; (5) Future of Globalization: Rise of Non-National Enterprises.