A relationship-management assessment tool: Questioning, identifying, and prioritizing critical aspects of customer relationships

With customer-relationship management (CRM) no longer a buzzword among trendsetters, organizations in all types of industries initially rushed to embrace it. Although a seductively attractive concept, the implementation of CRM proved difficult, however, and organizations are struggling with realizing their vision of a CRM organization. To help managers assessing the stage of relationships between their organization and the organization's business customers we consider the automotive industry. Based upon our case organization and its relationships with numerous business customers we develop a practical tool to question, identify, and prioritize critical aspects of customer-relationship management. First, we identify key areas in CRM. Secondly, we investigate how the chosen case organization has managed each of these key CRM areas over a broad range of business-customer relationships. Thirdly, we acknowledge that many organizations simultaneously have different types (transaction-relationship continuum) of business customers. We finish the article with a discussion of the study's limitations, and suggest avenues for future research.     

Expert relevance and the use of context-driven heuristic processes in risk perception

The effectiveness of a medical treatment should not predict its risk (highly effective treatments can be either safe or risky), however, people’s use of heuristic shortcuts may lead them to judge a link between effectiveness and risk, typically a negative correlation. A particular concern is that experts might use such a strategy and that this is unlikely to provide an accurate judgement. This large-scale field-based experiment compares expert-relevant and non-expert-relevant contexts, for both expert and public judgements of risk and effectiveness in the context of blood transfusion medicine. Postal questionnaires were distributed to anaesthetists (experts, N?=?123) and a general public (non-expert) comparison group (N?=?1153); half of the participants were cued with accompanying general information about genetically-modified (GM) biotechnology and half received specific information about blood product technologies. The blood-focussed information served to emphasise the medical relevance of the questionnaire to the expert group. Regression analyses showed that generally perceived effectiveness predicted perceived risk for both experts and non-experts, which suggests heuristic processing. However, although experts appeared to engage in heuristic processing for risk perceptions in certain circumstances, this processing is strongly affected by context. Experts who received the medically relevant context rated perceptions of effectiveness independently of perceptions of risk, unlike those who received the GM context. This indicates a reduced reliance on a low-effort heuristic for experts given an expertise-relevant context. The results are considered in light of dual-process (rational-associative) accounts of reasoning.     

Did accelerated filing requirements and SOX Section?404 affect the timeliness of 10-K filings?

This paper examines the effect of Sarbanes-Oxley provisions on 10-K filing delays. We find that tightened filing deadlines for accelerated and large accelerated filers are not associated with changes in the incidence of late filing. While Section 404 compliance does not affect filing timeliness for firms with effective internal controls, we find that about half the firms disclosing internal control weaknesses are late filers. As a consequence, many Section 404 material weakness firms experience negative abnormal returns around late filing notifications before filing the 10-K. Lastly, we find that market reactions to late filing notifications are more negative when management provides no meaningful explanation for the delay, consistent with managers’ incentives to withhold bad news.     

A Tale of Two Tails: Establishment Size and Labour Productivity in United States and German Manufacturing at the Start of the Twentieth Century

This paper studies the importance of establishment size for the German/US labour‐productivity gap in manufacturing at the start of the twentieth century. First, we show that the left tail of the employment distribution by establishment size was larger in Germany than in the USA. Second, using US state data for 1909, we find a positive correlation between establishment size and labour productivity. Third, imposing the coefficients of these estimates on establishment‐size differences between Germany and the USA, we calculate that a redistribution of German employment to larger establishments, as in the USA, reduces the labour‐productivity gap by about 25 per cent.     

Towards a Theory of Revealed Economic Behavior: The Economic-Neurosciences Interface

Based on recent findings from economics and the neurosciences, we present a conceptual decision-making model that provides insight into human decision-making and illustrates how behavioral outcomes are transformed into phenomena. The model may be viewed as a bridge between the seemingly disparate disciplines of neuroscience and economics that may facilitate more integrative research efforts and provide a framework for developing research agendas for scientists interested in human behavior and economic phenomena.     

Automated feature extraction from social media for systematic lead user identification

Manufacturers strive to rapidly develop novel products and offer solutions that meet the emerging customer needs. The Lead User Method, emerging from studies on sources of innovation by the scientific community, offers a validated approach to identify users with innovation ideas to support rapid and successful new product development process. The approach has been more recently applied on online communities, where collection and analysis of rich user data are performed by expert practitioners. In this paper, feature extraction techniques are outlined, that enable automated classification and identification of lead users that are present in online communities. The authors describe two case studies to construct a classification model that is then used to identify online lead users for confectionery products, and to evaluate the outlined feature extraction techniques. The presented research points to opportunities in automated identification within the lead user approach that further reduce the resource and time costs.     

新风能瞬间理论的研究与讨论

根据惯性运动理论和守恒定律进行科学逻辑推理,探索出来的新风能瞬间理论,其以科学理论为基础,深刻地揭示了自然规律。文章对新风能瞬间理论进了阐述,并对其具体应用作了介绍。     

Risk aversion,cooperative membership,and path dependences of smallholder farmers in Ethiopia

Smallholder farmers in Sub‐Saharan Africa often mitigate production risks through cooperative membership: institutionalized arrangements where they pool resources and collectively manage production and marketing chains. Cooperative membership has a significant advantage: it cushions detrimental effects of external forces, placing a premium on a risk‐seeking attitude (experimenting and innovating), which can yield greater accumulation. However, cooperatives are self‐selective institutions: relatively better‐endowed farmers, who are usually less risk‐avoidant than poorer ones (a consequence of their broader material bases), tend to be overrepresented. These two realities complicate the causal assessment of the relationships between risk attitudes, farmers’ socioeconomic status, and cooperative membership that is essential to comprehend the role of cooperatives in local capital accumulation. To help resolve this thorny analytical problem, an experimental study was carried out in eastern Ethiopia—a risky production environment where cooperatives feature prominently and relatively affluent farmers exist alongside poorer ones. It unveils the working of specific path dependences: poorer cooperative members are less risk seeking than nonmembers, but at an interval much less than that observed for affluent farmers. For development policies, this suggests that a greater payoff can be expected from investing in farmers’ material bases than from further improving cooperative membership.     

Dominant design or multiple designs: the flash memory card case

Literature suggests that in battles between competing designs, ultimately one design will emerge as dominant to the detriment of the others. Various factors and forces have been identified to explain this phenomenon. Yet, sometimes no dominant design emerges at all and multiple competing designs coexist in the market. The flash memory card industry provides an example of this. In this study, we use this example as a case to investigate the circumstances under which an industry has a tendency toward multiple designs. The case shows that a combination of factors may result in multiple designs and we argue that such a combination of factors will increasingly also apply in other cases.