Some potential issues of service quality reporting for airlines

Prior studies have examined the value relevance of operating measures in the airline industry. These indicators, however, have been evaluated in isolation. This study adds to the extant literature by investigating the interactive effects of service quality (e.g., on-time arrivals, flight delays, mishandled baggage, and complaints) and aircraft productivity on the firm's future performance as measured by one-quarter-ahead Return on Assets or Return on Sales. Overall, results show that negative factors such as more complaints and more mishandled baggage interact with aircraft productivity to further reduce one-quarter ahead Return on Assets or Return on Sales, with the results of complaints being more pronounced. On the other hand, there is no support for the interaction between on-time arrivals and aircraft productivity.     

Competing at the frontier: The changing role of technology policy in Singapore's economic strategy

For an economy competing at the global frontier, an innovation-based growth strategy requires a well-developed technological infrastructure, a set of capabilities-focused technology policies, as well as an institutional environment that stimulates innovation and entrepreneurship. This paper examines the role played by science and technology policy in an economy's transition to an innovation-based growth strategy. We discuss the challenges governments face as they restructure economic institutions to deepen R&D capabilities and encourage technology creation. We review Singapore's experience in this regard and assess its ongoing efforts to remake itself to compete at the global frontier.     

Attracting the Rival’s Customers in a Model with Switching Costs

We consider the option of a firm’s honouring the rival’s coupons in a duopoly model in which products are differentiated by both characteristics and a switching cost. A firm may honour its rival’s coupons to increase its market share only if its previous market share is less than one‐half but not too low and, as a result, the market share is increased but only up to one‐half. JEL Classification Number: D13.     

Incentives for Journal Editors

Scholars may become journal editors because editors may generate more citations of their own works. This paper empirically establishes that a scholar's publications are more likely to be cited by papers in a journal that is edited by the scholar. We then test if editors exercise influence on authors to cite editors’ papers by either pressuring authors (“editor‐pressure” hypothesis) or accepting articles with references to the editors’ papers (“editor‐selection” hypothesis), by using the keyword analysis and the forward citation analysis, respectively. We find no evidence for the two hypotheses, which leaves self‐selection as a possible cause for the editor effect. JEL classification: J01     

COMPETITIVENESS AND STRESS

This study explores the relationship between competitiveness and stress. In Experiment 1, we observe a higher response of cortisol—the primary stress hormone—to the computation task coupled with tournament than to the computation task with piece rate. Moreover, more competitive subjects exhibit higher stress responses than their less competitive counterparts in the computation tasks under both tournament and piece rate. In Experiment 2, we find that exogenously induced stress does not significantly affect competitiveness. Overall, our findings reveal an important trade‐off between tournament and piece rate in terms of stress response with implications on the design of incentive contracts.     

Can Anticipating Time Pressure Reduce the Likelihood of Unethical Behaviour Occurring?

Academic integrity (AI) violations on college campuses continue to be a significant concern that draws public attention. Even though AI has been the subject of numerous studies offering explanations and recommendations, academic dishonesty persists. Consequently, this has rekindled interest in understanding AI behavior and its influencers. This paper focuses on the AI violations of plagiarism and sharing homework for freshman business students, examining the factors that influence a student’s intention to plagiarize or share homework with others. Using a sample of more than 1300 freshman business students over 2 years, we modeled intent to plagiarize and intent to share homework using factors in the Theory of Planned Behavior in addition to past violation behavior and moral obligation (feelings of guilt). Based on the results of this study, attitude, perceived behavioral control, subjective norm, and in addition past behavior and moral obligation, were found to significantly influence an individual’s intention to violate academic integrity (for plagiarism and sharing homework when asked not to do so), explaining 33 and 35 % of the variance in intention to commit an AI violation for sharing homework and plagiarism, respectively. These results contribute to a better understanding of individuals’ motivations for plagiarizing and sharing homework, which is a necessary step toward reducing academic integrity violations.     

Accruals Quality, Information Risk and Cost of Capital: Evidence from Australia

Abstract:  Recent theoretical work argues that information risk is a non-diversifiable risk factor that is priced in the capital market. Using accruals quality to proxy for information risk, Francis et al. (2005) provide empirical support for this argument using a sample of US firms. This paper re-examines the interplay of accruals quality, information risk and cost of capital in Australia, where a number of important institutional and regulatory differences are hypothesized to affect the relation between accruals quality and cost of capital. The results suggest that, while accruals quality impacts on the cost of capital for Australian firms, some salient differences exist. In contrast to findings for US firms, the costs of debt and equity for Australian firms are largely influenced by accruals quality arising from economic fundamentals (i.e., innate accrual quality) but not discretionary reporting choices (i.e., discretionary accrual quality). This finding is consistent with our predictions based on the Australian institutional and regulatory environment. In addition, using both the asset pricing tests in Francis et al. (2005) and Core et al. (2008) , we provide evidence consistent with accruals quality being a priced risk factor.     

Development of a model to estimate the economic impacts of R&D output of public research institutes

This paper proposes a modeling framework to estimate the economic impacts of R&D output of public research institutes. The framework models the process of R&D output generating the economic impacts. The authors collect case data of market‐creation economic impacts originating from R&D output of the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology, Japan. On the basis of the case studies, the process of R&D output generating economic impacts is modeled in the following four stages: (1) R&D output, (2) technology transfer, (3) commercialization, and (4) market impacts. The model describes these stages using six parameters. This paper presents the model and case studies, and discusses the application of the model.     

Keyword auctions with budget-constrained bidders

We study a keyword auction model where bidders have constrained budgets. In the absence of budget constraints, Edelman et al. (Am Econ Rev 97(1):242–259, 2007) and Varian (Int J Ind Organ 25(6):1163–1178, 2007) analyze “locally envy-free equilibrium” or “symmetric Nash equilibrium” bidding strategies in generalized second-price auctions. However, bidders often have to set their daily budgets when they participate in an auction; once a bidder’s payment reaches his budget, he drops out of the auction. This raises an important strategic issue that has been overlooked in the previous literature: Bidders may change their bids to inflict higher prices on their competitors because under generalized second-price, the per-click price paid by a bidder is the next highest bid. We provide budget thresholds under which equilibria analyzed in Edelman et al. (Am Econ Rev 97(1):242–259, 2007) and Varian (Int J Ind Organ 25(6):1163–1178, 2007) are sustained as “equilibria with budget constraints” in our setting. We then consider a simple environment with one position and two bidders and show that a search engine’s revenue with budget constraints may be larger than its revenue without budget constraints.     

Cross-listing effect of U.S. casino companies: Risk-adjusted performances

Globalization and market liberalization have resulted in more firms being listed on foreign stock exchanges. Even though cross-listing is an important corporate financial decision, research in this area for the hospitality discipline has been limited. The current study investigates issues of international cross-listing from the perspective of diversification. The findings from examination of five risk-adjusted measurements—Jensen's Alpha, Treynor Index, Sharpe Ratio, Sortino Ratio, and Upside Potential Ratio—for U.S. casino companies show that cross-listing improves U.S. casinos’ performances in terms of Jensen's Alpha and Sharpe Ratio, but not in terms of the other three measures.