Consumer adoption of Internet banking in Jordan: Examining the role of hedonic motivation,habit, self-efficacy and trust

Despite the rapid growth of Internet banking (IB), customers in developing countries still hesitate to adopt this technology and its use in the Middle East remains low. This study aims to identify and examine the factors that predict behavioural intention and adoption of IB in Jordan. Four factors – hedonic motivation, habit, self-efficacy and trust – are proposed in a conceptual model. Data was collected by means of a survey with bank customers in Jordan. Structural equation modelling (SEM) was used to analyse the data. The results strongly supported the conceptual model. Further, hedonic motivation, habit, self-efficacy and trust were all confirmed to have a significant influence on behavioural intention. Trust was found to be strongly predicted by both hedonic motivation and self-efficacy. This study provides both academics and practitioners with an insight into the factors that can be used to encourage customer adoption of IB specifically in a Middle East context.     

Too-Big-To-Fail: Why Megabanks Have Not Become Smaller Since the Global Financial Crisis?

ABSTRACT

More than ten years after the global financial crisis, what has happened to the ‘too-big-to-fail’ (TBTF) banks whose reckless behavior was among its preconditions, but which received public support and guarantees in the midst of that crisis? Insofar as this too-big-to-fail status helped create the crisis and then imposed costs on the rest of society, we would expect these banks to have shrunk. We investigate the evolution of 31 global-TBTF banks and find that their overall size has hardly recorded any substantial change. However, there is no sense of urgency in the flourishing post-crisis literature on TBTF banks about the need to contain their size; the prevalent view therein is that if properly regulated, the risks that arise from a financial system dominated by TBTF banks are manageable. This view rests on the same overly narrow theoretical underpinnings whose flaws were exposed in the crisis. We argue that too-big-to-fail banking is embedded in a set of self-reinforcing policies—consolidation, balance-sheet support through quantitative easing, favorable regulations, bank lobbying, and geo-economic and geo-political considerations—which explain why these banks have not shrunk and why they remain a threat to financial stability, well after the lessons of the crisis should have been learned.     

AN ANALYSIS OF SUPPLY CHAIN COLLABORATIONS AND THEIR EFFECT ON PERFORMANCE OUTCOMES

This research examined how operational outcomes, relational outcomes and business performance are affected by a collaboration project between buyers and suppliers in a supply chain. It is hypothesized that interdependence of knowledge and process, supply chain partner insight, and the level of collaboration between the firms affect the outcomes of a collaboration project. Survey data from buyers and suppliers from a wide range of industries and organizations were used in this analysis. Among these participants, higher levels of collaboration led to improvements in operational and relational outcomes, which together led to improvements in asset utilization, competitive position, organizational performance, and profitability.     

What Plato Knew About Enron

This paper applies Plato’s cave allegory to Enron’s success and downfall. Plato’s famous tale of cave dwellers illustrates the different levels of truth and understanding. These levels include images, the sources of images, and the ultimate reality behind both. The paper first describes these levels of perception as they apply to Plato’s cave dwellers and then provides a brief history of the rise of Enron. Then we apply Plato’s levels of understanding to Enron, showing how the company created its image and presented information to support that image, and how the public eventually emerged from the cave to realize the truth about Enron’s actual accounting practices and financial state, which led to the corporation’s downfall. We find Plato’s allegory both useful in analyzing the relationship between Enron and the public and instructive about the power and moral responsibility of Enron’s executives.     

Persistent mispricing in a recently opened emerging index futures market: Arbitrageurs invited

The purpose of this study is to analyze the persistent, typically negative, mispricing in the new stock index futures market in Turkey, which has amounted to 5–8%, several multiples of transaction costs. The observations suggest that it is the outcome of a combination of practical difficulties of shorting in the spot stock market, behavioral effects, and insufficient arbitrage. The magnitude of the mispricing and the absence of arbitrage make behavioral effects more visible and provide a unique opportunity to examine extant behavioral hypotheses. Results confirm effects such as disposition and/or conservatism with the mispricing negatively related to past returns, but unrelated to future returns. Finally, an orderly weakening of the negative relation to past returns and behavioral effects is observed, suggesting that such effects will diminish as the market matures. © 2009 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Jrl Fut Mark 29:218–243, 2009     

Bargaining and the observability of contractual commitments via third parties

This paper analyzes a two-stage model of bilateral bargaining where one of the agents has the option to delegate. A first approach is to assume that the contract between the agent and his representative is perfectly observable and can be renegotiated. Commitment effects arise although renegotiation is possible. Then, perfect observability of the contract is weakened to observe it with certain probability. Commitment effects as pure-strategy equilibria exist if this probability is sufficiently close to 1, in contrast to Bagwell's [1995] findings that imperfect observability undermines commitment. Considering the realistic case of the actual agreement between two parties being private information, the commitment value as equilibrium outcome disappears since having closed a renegotiation-proof contract offers costless self-insurance against strategic misunderstandings. The author is grateful for helpful comments from Vasco Santos, participants at the International Atlantic Economic Conference, October 7–10, 1999, Montreal, Canada, an anonymous referee, and David M. Aadland.     

Umgang mit Aggressionen

Herausforderndes Verhalten bei Demenz - Wenn Aggression, erh?hter Bewegungsdrang, starke Orientierungsprobleme, Selbst- und Fremdgef?hrdung oder andere „herausfordernde“ Verhaltensweisen auftreten, wird die Pflege und Begleitung von Demenzkranken als Belastung erlebt. Doch Pflegende stehen dem Problem nicht hilflos gegenüber. Eine interdisziplin?re Expertengruppe gibt mit ihren Empfehlungen ein Handlungsgerüst.     

The contextual nature of the predictive power of statistically-based quarterly earnings models

We present new empirical evidence on the contextual nature of the predictive power of five statistically-based quarterly earnings expectation models evaluated on a holdout period spanning the twelve quarters from 2000–2002. In marked contrast to extant time-series work, the random walk with drift (RWD) model provides significantly more accurate pooled, one-step-ahead quarterly earnings predictions for a sample of high-technology firms (n = 202). In similar predictive comparisons, the Griffin-Watts (GW) ARIMA model provides significantly more accurate quarterly earnings predictions for a sample of regulated firms (n = 218). Finally, the RWD and GW ARIMA models jointly dominate the other expectation models (i.e., seasonal random walk with drift, the Brown-Rozeff (BR) and Foster (F) ARIMA models) for a default sample of firms (n = 796). We provide supplementary analyses that document the: (1) increased frequency of the number of loss quarters experienced by our sample firms in the holdout period (2000–2002) vis-à-vis the identification period (1990–1999); (2) reduced levels of earnings persistence for our sample firms relative to earnings persistence factors computed by Baginski et al. (2003) during earlier time periods (1970s–1980s); (3) relative impact on the predictive ability of the five expectation models conditioned upon the extent of analyst coverage of sample firms (i.e., no coverage, moderate coverage, and extensive coverage); and (4) sensitivity of predictive performance across subsets of regulated firms with the BR ARIMA model providing the most accurate predictions for utilities (n = 87) while the RWD model is superior for financial institutions (n = 131).

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