Electronic commerce and the marketing of Internet banking in the UK

Recent market research findings and financial services consultants' reports have signalled that electronic commerce will play an increasingly important role in consumers' future financial lives. This paper discusses such evidence and seeks to contextualise the debate on the future of banking through a discussion of consumers' financial behaviour, the UK Government's position and an analysis of UK financial providers' current marketing of Internet banking services to consumers.     

We Provoked Business Students to Unionize: Using Deception to Prove an IR Point

Many industrial relations (IR) scholars experience some angst at their (mis)placement in business schools. While our expertise broadens the curriculum, the topics central to IR and union–management matters often are met with student resistance, particularly in North America. At our wits’ end, we decided to employ a deception simulation. We devised an award winning exercise that broke business students’ psychological contract with their professor and gave them an opportunity to organize collectively to redress this injustice. Students observed first‐hand the triggers of union organizing as well as their responses to inequity. Anonymous student feedback showed an overwhelmingly positive reception to the exercise. Ethical standards developed to scrutinize deception are used to review our own exercise according to our profession’s standards. Deception is rarely used in teaching and is often associated with malevolent, callous or selfish ends. We challenge this viewpoint. Its power is in generating relevant controversies and evoking emotions that help memory consolidation.     

Reconciling traditional Chinese management with high‐tech Taiwan

The traditional view of management culture among the overseas Chinese is that of an autocratic, paternalistic and centralised organisation with low levels of trust of ‘outside’ professional managers and employees. By contrast, the organisational culture associated with successful innovation and/or high technology is that of a decentralised organisation with high levels of employee autonomy. Existing research indicates that the overseas Chinese have become successful by sticking to the business sectors compatible with their preferred management culture, and that this holds true for Taiwan. What, then, explains the Taiwanese success in high‐technology ventures? This article offers initial evidence that management culture in Taiwan is adapting in order to enable industrial development in new areas. In‐depth interviews with 20 Taiwanese companies indicated that the change is being led by the high‐technology businesses. However, while many of these business culture changes are in a direction towards the organisational culture associated with high‐technology companies, it is also clear that a strong Chinese influence remains.     

Preferences of citizens for public expenditures on elementary and secondary education

This paper presents an empirical analysis of citizens' preferences for public elementary and secondary education expenditures. Survey data collected in conjunction with a school tax referendum and a multinomial probit random utility model are used to make inferences concerning the preference mappings of citizens. These estimated mappings, in turn, imply unique estimates of the demands of citizens for public education expenditures. Citizens' beliefs concerning whether expenditures are wisely spent and will affect school quality are seen to be important determinants of demand. The impact of citizens' perceptions of tax costs is also considered.     

Country—specific advantage and international cooperation

This paper tests the hypothesis that country-specific advantage embedded in firms of a particular nationality is a motivation for international interfirm cooperation. A sample of domestic and international cooperative relationships formed by Japanese firms in the commercialization of biotechnology is used to identify factors which differentiate domestic from foreign partners. The findings support our hypothesis that country-specific advantage is a significant variable in explaining differences between cooperative relationships with partners of different countries. The results of this study indicate that interfirm cooperation has implications for the international competitiveness of both firms and nations in high technology industries.     

Sources of variation in holding returns for fed funds futures contracts

This study relates predictable gains from positions in fed funds futures contracts to violations of the expectations hypothesis of the term structure of interest rates. Although evidence for predictable gains from positions in short‐horizon contracts is mixed, we find that gains in longer horizon contracts can be well described using Markov‐switching models, with predictability associated with particular episodes in which economic activity was weak and variability in the returns to these contracts was quite high. © 2010 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Jrl Fut Mark 31:205–229, 2011