Open fields, risk, and land divisibility

Why were open fields pervasive in the middle ages? Our findings support the general contention that behavior towards risk explains the persistence of open fields, but we reject the mechanism of diversification via scattered landholdings. Simulation analysis is used to estimate the relative efficiency of alternative forms of insurance available to peasant households. We find that, for the vast majority of peasants, self-insurance through land accumulation was a superior risk management/wealth accumulation strategy, but only if land could be transacted in small parcels. Scattering existed because it transformed land into a divisible savings instrument.     

Religious prohibitions against usury

Roman Catholic usury prohibitions created an explicit negative “tie-in” between salvation and consumption lending at interest. We view the prohibitions as a response to severe consumption smoothing problems created by the substitutability of capital market transactions for traditional smoothing mechanisms—informal pooling and charity. We demonstrate consistency between our model and the broad features of the Roman Catholic chronology of prohibitions.     

A Formal Basis for Negotiation Support System Research

A high-level theoretical model of negotiation activity is introduced as a foundation for guiding future research and development in the area of negotiation support literature. A formal model at this level is presently absent from the negotiation support systems. The model is formally expressed in terms of definitions and postulates that describe eight important negotiation parameters. Relationships between the model and research in game theory, social behavior science, and decision support systems fields are examined.     

The Payoff to America from Globalisation

This article summarizes the economic payoff to the United States from its postwar trade opening and estimates the potential future gains from more opening going forward. To quantify these gains, we survey different methodologies and estimates. We find that trade opening since World War II has added between $800 billion to $1.4 trillion to the US economy, or about $7,000 to $13,000 per household. More speculative estimates of the potential additional gains from removing the rest of US trade barriers range from $400 billion to $1.3 trillion, or about $4,000 to $12,000 per household. Since trade opening permanently raises national income, these gains are enjoyed annually. Trade opening inevitably entails adjustment costs. We estimate that the lifetime cost of all worker dislocations that have been triggered by expanded trade in the United States could be as high as $54 billion, although probably less. The permanent gains from past and potential liberalization easily swamp the modest sums necessary to alleviate the temporary pains of adjustment. In the future as in the past, free trade can significantly raise income – and quality of life – in America.     

Learning Capability,Technological Parity,and Innovation Mode Use*

The purpose of this research was to examine whether a firm's learning capability interacts with industry technological parity to predict innovation mode use. Learning capability is conceptualized in the current research as a firm's ability to develop or acquire the new knowledge‐based resources and skills needed to offer new products. Industry technological parity is conceptualized as the extent to which similarity and equality exist among the technological competencies of the firms in an industry. Three generic modes of innovation are considered: internal, cooperative, and external innovation. These modes reflect the development of new products based solely on internal resources, the collaborative development of new products (i.e., with one or more development partners), and the acquisition of fully developed products from external sources, respectively. The premises of this research are that (1) technological parity can create incentives or disincentives for innovating in a particular mode, depending upon the value of external innovative resources relative to the value of internal innovative resources and (2) firms will choose innovation modes that reflect a combination of their abilities and incentives to innovate alone, with others, or through others. Survey research and secondary sources were used to collect data from 119 high‐technology firms. Results indicate that firms exhibit greater use of internal and external innovation when high levels of industry technological parity are matched by high levels of firm learning capability. By contrast, a negative relationship between learning capability and industry technological parity is associated with greater use of the cooperative mode of innovation. Thus, a single, common internal capability—learning capability—interacts with the level of technological parity in the environment to significantly predict three distinct innovation modes—modes that are not inherently dependent upon one another. As such, a firm's internal ability to innovate, as reflected in learning capability, has relevance well beyond that firm's likely internal innovation output. It also predicts the firm's likely use of cooperative and external innovation when considered in light of the level of industry technological parity. A practical implication of these findings is that companies with modest learning capabilities are not inherently precluded from innovating. Rather, they can innovate through modes for which conditions in their current environments do not constitute significant obstacles to innovation output. In particular, modest learning capabilities are associated with higher innovative output in the internal, cooperative, and external modes when industry technological parity levels are low, high, and low, respectively. Conversely, strong learning capabilities tend to be associated with higher innovative output in the internal, cooperative, and external modes when industry technological parity levels are high, low, and high, respectively.     

Information Flow Analysis and the Theory of the Firm

In this paper, I examine the role the firm plays in economizing on information flows that are required to turn raw materials and ideas into products and services used by final consumers. Specifically, I argue that scale economies associated with complex information transfers are an important benefit of integration. This argument is distinct from theories that are based on incentives and leads to different or more refined conclusions in some cases. The differences are explored in the context of literature on specific assets, vertically related monopolies, and physical asset ownership. Information flow analysis also arms managers with a framework for addressing organizational questions beyond firm‐boundary decisions such as intrafirm decisions. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Global media, local metaphor: Television shopping and marketing-as-relationship in America, Japan, and Taiwan

Rapid acceptance of the relationship paradigm, within marketing, is in no small part due to the powerful metaphor of marketing-as-relationship. Through observation of localized television home shopping (THS), with its intensive use of communication between salesperson and customer, we examine how local meanings of relationship marketing are abstracted to their constituent values for broadcast over television, extending the metaphor of marketing-as-relationship to more accurately reflect differing values among American, Japanese, and Chinese retailing cultures. Combining observations with historical records, and ethnographic data, we propose culturally specific shopping relationship metaphors that help managers quickly understanding core local values of retailing.     

A nonverbal test of naturalistic memory for alcohol commercials

This study investigated a nonverbal test of memory for naturally occurring events: alcohol commercials. Such tests, supported by dual‐code and transfer‐appropriate processing perspectives from basic research, are useful for research on consumer behavior and public health. The participants were 750 adolescents who completed a nonverbal test of memory, tailored to detect prominent visual features of remembered alcohol commercials. The results showed (a) that independent judges reliably coded primary features of remembered advertisements along most dimensions, and (b) the test met important criteria for convergent and discriminant validity in comparisons with other measures. Applications were proposed for research on advertising effects, health behavior, and media copy testing. © 2004 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.     

How Corporate Social Responsibility Engagement Strategy Moderates the CSR–Financial Performance Relationship

We propose that firm profits are shaped by how firms engage in corporate social responsibility. Recent research on the corporate social responsibility (CSR)–corporate financial performance (CFP) relationship proposes a variety of contextual and organizational factors to create a more robust link. However, few of these studies explore the role of the CSR engagement strategy. Drawing on absorptive capacity theory and related perspectives such as time compression diseconomies, asset mass efficiencies, and path dependence theory, we argue that when a firm engages in CSR slowly and consistently, focuses on related CSR dimensions, and starts with internal dimensions of CSR, CFP will be enhanced. With longitudinal data collected from 130 firms from 1995 to 2007, we find that firms benefit more when they adopt a CSR engagement strategy that is consistent, involves related dimensions of CSR, and begins with aspects of CSR that are more internal to the firm. The pace of the CSR engagement strategy, however, does not moderate the CSR–CFP relationship. This study helps fill the gap in CSR research by showing that, regardless of contextual factors, a firm can choose the proper strategy to enhance the financial benefits of the CSR engagement.