When Out-of-Stock Products DO Backfire: Managing Disclosure Time and Justification Wording

We investigate how stock-outs influence decision satisfaction and repatronage intentions for online purchase situations and how these responses vary with disclosure time and justification wording. We manipulate the disclosure time of the products’ unavailability (ex ante vs. ex post) and the justification given to consumers (firm-related vs. firm-unrelated). We find that, overall, stock-outs produce negative reactions, but that the main effects of timing and wording can sum up: ex ante, firm-related communication effectively offsets the damage caused by stock-outs. Retailers should employ real-time tracking to promptly inform consumers of product availability, and accept the responsibility for any outages.     

Lessons From Italy: A Good Pension System Needs an Effective Broader Social Policy Framework

Intereconomics - Italy, which is sometimes considered a laggard in terms of social and economic reforms, can boast a pension system that is, by and large, functioning sufficiently well in terms of...     

Marx‐biased technical change and income distribution: A panel data analysis

This paper provides a further empirical evaluation of the Neoclassical theory of distribution as opposed to Marx‐biased technical change (MBTC) using a series of panel estimators. We argue that a panel data analysis is instrumental in increasing the efficiency and validity of the test. Our results generalize previous findings in providing support for MBTC and against the Neoclassical theory of income distribution.     

Contracting Institutions,Agro‐food Trade and Product Quality

The agro‐food sector has experienced a profound transformation of contractual arrangements along the value chain, coinciding with important technological innovations and product quality upgrading. Our understanding of the impact that this transformation has had on trade flows in the agricultural sector is very limited. In particular, we have limited knowledge about the extent to which the patterns in agro‐food trade have been driven by the quality of contractual institutions. Using existing measures which capture the sensitivity of agro‐food products to contractual imperfections, we show that countries with better contract enforcement specialise in the production of food which requires higher level of relationship‐specific investments. We also find that countries with better contracting institutions and producing contract‐intensive goods specialise in exporting high quality foods. In addition, we show that the quality of contracting institutions might importantly affect the process of product quality upgrading.     

Self-selection and variations in the laboratory measurement of other-regarding preferences across subject pools: evidence from one college student and two adult samples

We measure the other-regarding behavior in samples from three related populations in the upper Midwest of the United States: college students, non-student adults from the community surrounding the college, and adult trainee truckers in a residential training program. The use of typical experimental economics recruitment procedures made the first two groups substantially self-selected. Because the context reduced the opportunity cost of participating dramatically, 91 % of the adult trainees solicited participated, leaving little scope for self-selection in this sample. We find no differences in the elicited other-regarding preferences between the self-selected adults and the adult trainees, suggesting that selection is unlikely to bias inferences about the prevalence of other-regarding preferences among non-student adult subjects. Our data also reject the more specific hypothesis that approval-seeking subjects are the ones most likely to select into experiments. Finally, we observe a large difference between self-selected college students and self-selected adults: the students appear considerably less pro-social.     

Education and Intergenerational Mobility in Occupations

A bstract The problem of measuring the intergenerational transmission of inequality and its implications for social welfare is studied. A possible decomposition of relevant factors–namely, educational attainments and other factors–is proposed and applied to three individual data sets regarding Germany, Italy, and the United States. The main result is that educational attainment is responsible for almost half of observed immobility The possibility that increasing equality of opportunity in entering the educational system may result in less inequality in income distribution is considered.     

Capital controls and distribution of income: Empirical evidence for Great Britain Japan and Australia

Zusammenfassung Kapitalverkehrskontrollen und Einkommensverteilung. Empirische Befunde für Gro?britannien, Japan und Australien. - Der Verfasser geht davon aus, da? die Einführung von Kapitalverkehrskontrollen die nationale Einkommensverteilung beeinflu?t; insbesondere zeigt er, da? Ma?nahmen zur Verhinderung von Kapitalabflüssen die Einkommensverteilung zugunsten der Lohnempf?nger verschiebt. Nachdem er die Wirksamkeit von Kontrollen mit Hilfe der Unterschiede zwischen in- und ausl?ndischen Zinss?tzen gemessen und die Erfahrungen dreier L?nder (Gro?britannien, Japan und Australien) berücksichtigt hat, pr?sentiert er einige Korrelationsindizes und Kausalit?tstests, um zu untersuchen, ob m?glicherweise Beziehungen zur Verteilung des Volkseinkommens bestehen. Danach entwickelt und sch?tzt er ein Strukturmodell. Der Autor zeigt, da? das Ausma? der finanziellen Protektion die (optimale) Wahl von Besch?ftigung und Lohn durch heimische Firmen und Gewerkschaften tendenziell beeinflu?t hat.

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Résumé Les contr?les de capitaux et la distribution du revenu: La preuve empirique pour La Grande Bretagne, le Japon et l’Australie. - Dans cette étude l’auteur soutient l’opinion que l’adoption des contr?les de capitaux se répercutent sur la distribution du revenue national; et plus spécifiquement elle montre qu’en empêchant l’exportation des capitaux, la distribution du revenu change en faveur des salariés. Après avoir mesuré l’efficacité des contr?les à l’aide de l’écart entre les taux d'intérêt nationaux et les taux off-shore et après avoir reconsidéré les expériences de trois pays (Grande Bretagne, Japon, Australie) on présente quelques indices de corrélation et des tests de causalité pour étudier s’il y a des rapports avec la distribution du revenu national. Puis on propose un modèle structurel. Les estimations montrent que le degré de protection financière pourrait avoir influencé la sélection optimale de l’emploi et du salaire par les entreprises nationales et les syndicats.

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Resumen Controles de capital y distributión del ingreso: evidencia empírica para el Reino Unido, el Japón y Australia. - En este trabajo se argumenta que la adoptión des controles de capital afecta a la distributión del ingreso national. Más específicamente, se demuestra que al impedirse las exportaciones de capital se modifica la distributión del ingreso en favor de los asalariados. Después de medir la efectividad de los controles con el diferencial entre las tasas nacionales y las tasas offshore, y de pasar revista a la experiencia de tres países (el Reino Unido, el Japón y Australia), se presentan algunos índices de correlatión y tests de causalidad, con el fin de investigar la existencia de una relatión potential con la distributión del ingreso national. Finalmente, se propone y estima un modelo estructural que muestra que el grado de proteción financiera podría haber afectado la decisión sobre el empleo y el salario (óptimos) por parte de empresas y sindicatos nationales.

     

Multi-level governance for sustainable innovation in smart communities: an ecosystems approach

International Entrepreneurship and Management Journal - This paper analyses the TrentoSmartCity project to redefine Trento (an Italian municipality) as a smart community according to an ecosystems...     

Exploring professionals' motivation to lead: a cross-level study in the healthcare sector

The extant leadership research has paid increasing attention to the concept of motivation to lead (MTL) as an individual construct that strongly affects leadership processes and behaviors. However, despite its importance, scant knowledge is available about how individual characteristics and organizational structural features interact in influencing MTL in professional-based organizations. This article contributes to this line of research by adopting a multilevel perspective to study the MTL among individual professionals in the healthcare sector. We collected data from a sample of 791 physicians nested in 44 departments belonging to 27 hospitals. Using the hierarchical linear model, we tested the impact of individual and organizational variables on the motivation of physicians to engage in managerial positions. Our findings demonstrate that the physicians' MTL was positively associated with their individual self-efficacy. Departmental decentralization interacted with this self-efficacy, such that the effect of self-efficacy on the MTL was significantly lower when decentralization was high. We discuss the implications of these findings for human resource management and organizational (re)design within professional organizations.