A Case of Mistaken Identity? Measuring Rates of Improved Seed Adoption in Tanzania Using DNA Fingerprinting

Studies of improved seed adoption in developing countries are almost always based on household surveys and are premised on the assumption that farmers can accurately self-report their use of improved seed varieties. However, recent studies suggest that farmers’ reports of seed varieties planted, or even whether the seed is local or improved, are sometimes inconsistent with the DNA fingerprinting results of those crops. We use household survey data from Tanzania to test the alignment between farmer-reported and DNA-identified maize seed types planted. In the sample, 70% of maize seed observations are correctly reported as local or improved, while 16% are type I errors (falsely reported as improved) and 14% are type II errors (falsely reported as local). Type I errors are more likely to have been sourced from other farmers, rather than formal channels. An analysis of input use, including seed, fertiliser, and labour allocations, reveals that farmers tend to treat improved maize differently, depending on whether they correctly perceive it as improved. This suggests that errors in farmers’ seed type awareness may translate into suboptimal management practices. The average yield of seed that is correctly identified as improved is almost 700 kg per hectare greater than that of type I errors. This indicates that investments in farmers’ access to information, seed labelling, and seed system oversight are needed to complement investments in seed variety development.     

Detecting Asymmetric Price Transmission with Consistent Threshold along the Fish Supply Chain

The present study deals with asymmetric price transmission (APT) along the fish value chain by using a consistent threshold autoregressive (consistent TAR and momentum‐threshold autoregressive [M‐TAR]) model. A nonzero threshold captures strategic behaviors and adjustment costs that are not observable with small price changes around a zero threshold. Fish farming, because of greater control over supply, is expected to produce less asymmetry than wild harvesting. Asymmetry is notwithstanding found for both wild cod and farmed salmon marketed in France, but only with consistent thresholds and operating in opposite ways. The results are discussed with regard to the trade restrictions imposed by the Common Fisheries Policy. Cet article traite de l’asymétrie de transmission des prix (ATP) dans la filière des produits de la mer en utilisant un modèle autorégressif à effet de seuil (consistent TAR et M‐TAR). Un seuil non nul permet de révéler certains comportements stratégiques et des coûts fixes d’ajustement qui ne seraient pas observables sur de faibles variations de prix autour d’un seuil nul. On s’attend à ce que l’aquaculture, en vertu d’un degré de contrôle supérieur sur l’offre, engendre une plus faible asymétrie comparativement à la production halieutique. Une asymétrie de transmission est néanmoins observée à la fois dans le cas du cabillaud sauvage et du saumon d’élevage commercialisés en France, mais uniquement à partir de seuils endogènes et l’ATP agissant en sens opposé. Les résultats sont commentés au regard des restrictions commerciales imposés par la Politique Commune des Pêches européenne.     

Young Consumers' Evaluation of School Meals

ABSTRACT

This study determines the impact service quality on customer satisfaction in the school meal context. The empirical analysis reveals three dimensions of service quality (quality of food, atmosphere, and customer service), which have a high impact on customer satisfaction. A low level of satisfaction was identified but with differences between the various schools. Understanding the antecedents of pupils' satisfaction is important to policy makers, schools, and school meals providers. Due to the increasing importance of school meal programs and their high impact on nutritional status on young people, a high service quality in school meal programs is inevitable.     

Erratum to: Ethics,Diversity Management,and Financial Reporting Quality

This article proposes and empirically tests a theoretical framework incorporating Reidenbach and Robin’s (J Bus Ethics 10(4):273–284, 1991) conceptual model of corporate moral development. The framework is used to examine the relation between governance and business ethics, as proxied by diversity management (DM), and financial reporting quality, as proxied by the magnitude of earnings management (EM). The level of DM and governance quality are measured in accordance with the ratings of Jantzi Research (JR), a leading provider of social and governance research for institutional investors. This DM score is part of an index developed by JR that investment managers use to integrate DM criteria into their investment decisions. As expected, a negative relation between corporate DM development and financial reporting quality is found while controlling for other factors known in the literatures on governance and accounting choices to affect earnings quality. Despite some caveats presented in conclusion, this study contributes to the ethics, governance, and financial reporting literatures by studying the dynamics between governance and ethics in the prevention of EM.     

Comparing Customer and Supplier Perceptions of Value Offerings: An Exploratory Assessment

This paper proposes an exploratory assessment of similarities and differences between the perceptions of suppliers and their customers about what is important in a value offering—and to which extent—in a specific business sector.     

Corporate Fraud and Managers’ Behavior: Evidence from the Press

Government-sponsored enterprises (GSEs) and quasi-autonomous non-governmental organizations (quangos) comprise a powerful organizational sector that has been criticized for its lack of accountability to governments and their citizens. These organizations are established to serve the public as a whole by targeting the needs of particular groups or fulfilling specific functions. Often they use practices adopted from the business sector, and sometimes they enter the marketplace as profit-making enterprises. In light of the contribution of GSE Fannie Mae to the 2008 world economic crisis, the impact of this sector on effective democratic government bears further examination. In this article, I present a systems model that suggests how researchers might comprehensively assess the accountability of organizations in this sector, here termed the “gray sector,” with respect to their government missions. I focus on four systems dimensions: mission, organizational design, organizational outcomes, and the information feedback process. Organizational design and the nature of the sector population are cited as emerging issues of particular importance.     

Leading and Following (Un)ethically in <Emphasis Type=Italic>Limen</Emphasis>

We propose a liminality-based analysis of the process of ethical leadership/followership in organizations. A liminal view presents ethical leadership as a process taking place in organizational contexts that are often characterized by high levels of ambiguity, which render the usual rules and preferences dubious or inadequate. In these relational spaces, involving leaders, followers, and their context, old frames may be questioned and new ones introduced in an emergent way, through subtle processes whose evolution and implications may not be easy to grasp even by those participating in them.     

Entrepreneurs in the new economy: Immigration and sex effects in the Montreal metropolitan area

The recent literature on women’s entrepreneurship shows that they are underrepresented in the main stream economy when compared to their male counterparts, a phenomenon typically observed in other urban contexts. Approximately 30% of the entrepreneurs in the Montreal metropolitan area are women, active in a variety of sectors of the general economy. Their underrepresentation is still greater in the new economy, that is, those sectors that are knowledge-based and/or specialized in information technologies and communications. In this article, we examine the place of female entrepreneurs in the larger economy and in the new economy as related to their immigrant and/or ethnic origins. We seek in this paper to establish a comparative analysis of the situation of women entrepreneurs in immigrant-origin groups, focusing our attention on both the presence of women in entrepreneurial positions and the differential impact associated with membership in an immigrant-origin group. Based on data derived from Scott's Directory of 2007, we first determined an operational definition of the new economy and then analyzed the data from the perspective of sex and ethnic/immigrant origin. New economy enterprises represent approximately 12% of businesses in the Montreal metropolitan area, the majority of which are of the knowledge-based variety, and there is a relative, statistically significant absence of women from such enterprises. At the same time, there is a significantly greater presence of women drawn from minority groups, that is, from groups other than the Anglo-Canadian and French-Canadian dominant groups.     

The need to touch: Exploring the link between music involvement and tangibility preference

Amid the increasing consumption of digital music and generally declining sales of recorded music, physical formats persist as the preferred means of storing and listening to music for many consumers. The purpose of this paper is to increase the understanding of the relationship between music involvement and preference for tangible music formats. To achieve this, we test a research model and perform a segmentation analysis based on music involvement. Findings indicate that high music involvement is positively correlated with subjective music knowledge, tangibility preference, and portable player use. Quite naturally, involvement increases music consumption in all formats, including digitized forms, but high involvement appears connected to a perception of tangible records as more valuable. The behavior of highly involved consumers suggests that digital music is not necessarily eradicating physical formats but possibly fulfilling different needs; for example, sampling and complementing vs. collecting and displaying.     

Customer satisfaction's key factors in Spanish grocery stores: Evidence from hypermarkets and supermarkets

The marketing literature has shown how certain attributes of the store are key for grocery retailers to differentiate themselves in the final markets. From this preliminary consideration the present work proposes a step forward by ascertaining the main factors that underlie the attributes of the store which have already been identified in the literature. All of this is taken into account with the object to examine which of these factors presents a greater influence on customer satisfaction. To test the proposed analysis, a sample of 358 Spanish customers that had carried out their purchase in different types of grocery stores (in particular, hypermarkets and supermarkets) has been analyzed considering a key variable of retail patronage behavior: the store format in which the purchase had been carried out. This study has enabled us to obtain interesting conclusions about the variables that have the most influence on customer satisfaction, providing useful managerial recommendations for decision-making in grocery retailing.