Ethical behavior among marketing researchers: An assessment of selected demographic characteristics

This study considers the relationship between perceptions of ethical behavior and the demographic characteristics of sex, age, education level, job title, and job tenure among a sample of marketing researchers. The findings of this study indicate that female marketing researchers, older marketing researchers, and marketing researchers holding their present job for ten years or more generally rate their behavior as more ethical. Scott W. Kelley is an Assistant Professor of Marketing at the University of Kentucky. His research has been published in the Journal of Business Research, the Journal of Services Marketing, and national and regional conferences. O. C. Ferrell is the Distinguished Professor of Marketing and Business Ethics at Memphis State University. He is co-author of Marketing: Basic Concepts and Decisions. Sixth Edition. His articles have appeared in a wide variety of marketing journals. Steven J. Skinner is a Professor and Ashland Oil Research Fellow in the Department of Marketing at the University of Kentucky. He is the author of the first edition of Marketing. His research has been published in a number of journals.     

Evaluating an Environmental Right: Information Disclosure, Public Comment, and Government Decision Making in Ontario

In 1993, the Ontario government enacted the Environmental Bill of Rights (EBR). The EBR guarantees residents of the province, among other things, the right to comment on permit requests to take water and to discharge into the air and a guarantee that these comments are taken into account in the decision to approve or deny a permit. We model the firm's decision to request a permit, a resident's decision to provide public comment, and the government's decision to approve or deny permit requests to use water or air. Our examination of 1,000 government decisions regarding permit requests leads to two key findings: (1) few permit requests receive any public comment; and (2) to the extent that the public does comment, we find no empirical evidence that comments affect the likelihood that the government will deny a permit request. Our theoretical model anticipates the first result: there are few comments observed for permit applications, because each individual has an incentive to undercontribute to the provision of a public good. The second result did not support the theoretical argument we advance: government, acting to maximize social welfare, takes public concern as a signal of environmental damage. En 1993, le gouvernement de l'Ontario a édicté la Charte des droits environnementaux (CDE). La CDE garantit aux résidents de la province, entre autres, le droit de faire des observations sur les demandes de permis pour puiser l'eau et rejeter des quantités limitées de substances polluantes dans l'air, et garantit aussi que ces observations seront prises en considération dans la décision d'accorder ou de refuser un permis. Nous avons modélisé la décision d'une entreprise de déposer une demande de permis, la décision d'un résident de faire des observations et la décision du gouvernement d'accorder ou de refuser les demandes de permis pour l'usage de l'eau ou de l'air. L'examen de 1000 décisions du gouvernement concernant des demandes de permis a menéà deux principaux constats: 1. peu de demandes de permis reçoivent des observations du public; 2. lorsque le public soumet des observations, aucune évidence empirique ne laisse supposer que les observations influent sur la probabilité que le gouvernement rejette une demande de permis. Notre modèle théorique a anticipé le premier constat: les demandes de permis reçoivent peu d'observations parce que chaque individu a un incitatif à sous–contribuer à la fourniture d'un bien collectif. Le deuxième constat n'a pas appuyé notre argument théorique voulant que le gouvernement, qui agit afin de maximiser le bien–être collectif, tienne compte des préoccupations du public comme un signal de dommage environnemental.     

Coaching government and political leaders in complex environments

In the corporate world, leadership development programs are standard fare. Such programs often include well‐defined competencies and performance metrics, as well as regularly scheduled feedback and mentoring sessions, especially for those employees designated “high potential” performers. Not so in the public sphere. There are no defined career paths or standardized training curricula for heads of state. There are, however, requisite competencies for effective public sector leadership. As Gardner (1990) observed, “Leadership is not a mysterious activity. It is possible to describe the tasks that leaders perform....[But] we have barely scratched the surface in our efforts toward leadership development” (p. xix). The learning curve is steep for a newly elected leader, and fraught with potential landmines. Speaking with the candor of someone no longer seeking public office, former UK Prime Minister Tony Blair said recently, “When I came to office, prime minister was the only job I'd ever held; I'd never been a government minister before....The business of running a government is like anything else: You get better the longer you do it. And there are lessons out there that, had they come to me in an identifiable form, would have been useful to know” (talk given on December 16, 2010b). Both Gardner and Blair are emphatic that leadership is not something one is born with but something learned over time. And as Blair (2010a) put it, “Government is a race between expectations and capability.” In the essays that follow, several leadership coaches discuss the unique challenges and effective approaches they are using to help government leaders build the competencies that will enable them to govern effectively—and win that race between their constituents's expectations and their own capabilities.     

‘Who owns the customer?’: A commentary on channel debate through the eyes of the customer

Amid intense changing competitive environments in the insurance industry, insurance manufacturers and intermediaries are preparing themselves to be closer than ever to their customers. But are they collaborating to serve the customer or are they still playing ‘tug of war’ over who owns the customer, while their customers seek greener pastures with the competition? In this paper the authors discuss six realities of customers and the insurance industry today and finish with suggestions on how collaboration between manufacturer and intermediaries will help serve the common interest of building stronger customer relationships.     

Oligopolies with (Somewhat) Environmentally Conscious Consumers: Market Equilibrium and Regulatory Intervention

We consider a horizontally differentiated duopoly where consumers care about the product's “greenness.” Firms can be asymmetric: they may differ in the product's intrinsic value and may also differ in their chosen level of greenness. We examine the choice of greenness and the implications of various policy interventions. We show that (i) the choices of product greenness are strategic substitutes, (ii) the high‐intrinsic quality firm produces the greener product, (iii) the low‐quality firm's greenness may increase with the cost of its provision or decrease with consumer willingness to pay for it, (iv) a minimum quality standard (MQS) leads the greener firm to lower its environmental quality and can even reduce average quality, (v) greenness is underprovided even if consumers fully internalize the externality, and (v) an MQS can reduce welfare if the greenness of the high‐quality firm exceeds the MQS, even when environmental quality is underprovided. The effects of policy interventions on profits differ qualitatively across polices and firms: A firm that lobbies for one type of intervention may lobby against another similar one, and a firm may lobby for an intervention while its competitor may lobby against it. A subsidy for the development costs of a green product can financially hurt both firms.     

Short Interest and Lottery Stocks

We find short interest‐related mispricing is strongest in lottery stocks. As stocks become more lottery‐like, arbitrage risk increases, resulting in higher overpricing (underpricing) in high (low) relative short interest (RSI) stocks. Monthly portfolio alphas are –1.61% for high RSI lottery stocks, whereas high RSI stocks with the least lottery‐like attributes show statistically insignificant alphas. Among lightly shorted stocks, lottery securities exhibit monthly alphas of 1.80%. Thus, although lottery stocks as a group typically underperform, investors can earn positive abnormal returns in lightly shorted lottery stocks. Our results suggest that lottery stocks’ greater noise trader risk and higher transactions costs impedes arbitrage in short interest‐related mispricing.     

DEREGULATION AND EFFICIENCY IN GRAIN TRANSPORT

In this paper, it is argued that removing restrictions on road transport will not be sufficient to encourage efficiency improvements in grain freight industry while rail authorities continue to operate as public monopolies. This is because of the structure of costs in the grain freight industry, which imply that road transport cannot compete with rail transport in areas where road is the more efficient mode. While the tendency for a regulated monopoly to cross-subsidise inefficient operations is common place, the focus in this analysis is on the nature of the cross-subsidy in the grain freight industry, and shows that it is a type of cross-subsidy that is well hidden by aggregation. A model of investment in a rail network is presented where the monopoly power afforded to the rail industry is shown to be due to economies of traffic density. A case study of the grain rail network in Western Australia is presented where it is shown that the rail authority has been able to maintain very uneconomic sections of rail line, despite the introduction of road competition and apparently competitive pricing practices.     

The Impact of Rating Agency Reputation on Local Government Bond Yields

This study examines a sample of 12,562 dual-rated local government bond issues including 6,104 split-rated issues to determine which rating agency has the greatest impact on yields. Using a database of municipal bond issues from 1986 to 2002, we show that Moody’s rated significantly more issues than S&P, and that Moody’s ratings were more conservative. However, from 1993 to 1997, there was a reduction in ratings disagreements and in Moody’s market share. Beginning in 1995, Moody’s received negative publicity related to a Department of Justice anti-trust investigation. Moody’s appears to have responded by sharply increasing their relative conservatism in 1997. From 1986 to 1994, Moody’s ratings had a greater impact on bond yields than S&P ratings, but their dominant influence on yields disappears in the recent sample period from 1995 to 2002.

Do company ethics training programs make a difference? An empirical analysis

The authors analyze results of a survey of members of the Columbia University Graduate School of Business classes of 1953–1987 in order to assess the potential effectiveness of firms' ethics training programs. Results suggest that such training has a positive effect, but that relatively few firms provide such programs (about one-third of the respondents worked for firms with such programs). Although the sample is not representative of American employees and managers generally, the results suggest that it may be worthwhile for firms to provide formal ethics training to their employees.John Delaney is Associate Professor of Management and Organizations at The University of Iowa. His research on ethics in business has been published in Across the Board and Iowa Business. As part of an ongoing study, he is collecting examples of ethical dilemmas that have been confronted by managers in recent years.Donna Sockell is Director of Credit Programs and Professor of Management and Labor Relations at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey. In addition to her research on ethics in the workplace, she has designed and taught ethics programs for several corporations and commodities exchanges. Currently, she is gathering information on how firms' ethical practices affect employees.     

The Impact of Segment Reporting Under the IFRS 8 and SFAS 131 Management Approach: A Research Review

This paper evaluates the impact of adopting the management approach for segment reporting. We review studies of the effect of the application of SFAS 131 and IFRS 8 on the number of reported operating segments and items of disclosure, segment reporting gaps and reconciliations, entitywide geographic disclosures, and competitive harm and decision usefulness of segment information. We report on the advantages and disadvantages of the management approach and explore whether the concerns of critics of adopting the management approach in IFRS 8 have been realized. We also identify opportunities for important and policy‐relevant research in the area of segment reporting based on IFRS 8.