Restaurant employees and food safety compliance: motivation comes from within

The purpose of this study was to investigate the impact of restaurant employee internal belief systems on their motivation to comply with food safety guidelines in restaurants. Food safety training programs and those offered by third-party vendors are commonplace in the industry, yet despite the expectations of employees to engage in safe food handling, not all are motivated to do so. To date, research has yet to be conducted on the impact of employees’ individual belief systems and their motivations to comply with safe food-handling practices expected by both their employer and local health agencies. This study posits that individuals either possess an internal values system committed to food safety compliance or they do not; and, that individually oriented beliefs and norms have a significant influence on organizational efforts to implement an effective food safety culture. Practical and academic implications are discussed in detail.     

The effects of procedural and informational justice in the integration of related acquisitions

This study explores the independent and interactive effects of procedural justice and informational justice on post‐deal value creation in large, related acquisitions. Our results show that informational justice and procedural justice affect different components of value creation. Procedural justice is critical in realizing market position improvements following the integration process, while informational justice is essential in achieving market position gains during integration and financial return gains both during and post‐integration. Indicating that the interrelationships between different justice dimensions may be more complex than previously thought, we find that procedural justice reduces the positive effects of informational justice on financial return during the integration process, while it magnifies the effects of informational justice on the combined firms' market position during integration efforts. We explore the implications of these results for future research on the acquisition integration process and for practicing managers engaging in large, related acquisitions. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Explaining Individual and Task Differences in Consumer Attitudes toward Ambiguity

Consumers frequently face choices involving ambiguity, or uncertainty about the probabilities of the various possible outcomes. Past research has found that attitudes towards ambiguity vary across tasks. It is the purpose of this paper to suggest that such variation in consumer attitudes can be explained by examining the nature of the source of the uncertainty. It is suggested that consumers will have different attitudes depending upon whether the ambiguity is generated internally (by the consumer) or externally (by some outside source). Exploratory evidence and propositions for future research are presented. The results suggest that marketing strategies and de-biasing methods for ambiguous situations should consider the source of the ambiguity.     

Audit Firm Industry Specialization and Client Disclosure Quality

This paper provides evidence that clients select auditors as part of their overall disclosure strategy. We hypothesize that in addition to higher quality audits, industry-specialist audit firms assist clients in enhancing disclosures. We also posit that the choice of an industry-specialist auditor signals a clients intention to provide enhanced disclosures. However, we predict that industry-specialist audit firms are less important in regulated industries where enhanced disclosures add little value. Consistent with our hypotheses, we document a positive association between industry-specialist audit firms and analysts rankings of disclosure quality in unregulated industries, but no relation in regulated industries.     

Cooperation between agroindustry and the UN

This article provides a current assessment of cooperation between business and the UN system in agricultural development.The authors describe the experience, needs, and attitudes of UN agencies and a representative sample of the agroindustry firms in order to increase understanding between the two diverse sets of resources and to better define areas of mutual interest and effective cooperation.They suggest specific new initiatives for business and UN cooperation in agricultural development, to help interested parties to translate mutual economic goals and rhetorical good will into results and concrete cooperative projects.     

The interactive effects of message appeal and individual differences on information processing and persuasion

Individuals differing in the extent to which they enjoy thinking (Cacioppo & Petty, 1982) were exposed either to factual or to evaluative messages pertaining to a fictitious automobile. The results show that message appeal moderates the relationship between need for cognition and judgments about the message, whereas beliefs about the product attributes mediate the relationship between message judgments and product evaluations. Theoretical and practical implications of the moderator-mediator distinction are discussed.     

The evolution of interorganizational relationships in emerging ventures: An ethnographic study within the new product development process

Emerging ventures rarely have the resources they need, which often force them to reach beyond their boundaries to access these resources. While the field has acknowledged how critical external relationships are in the emergence process, we lack an understanding of how these relationships evolve. Drawing on fourteen longitudinal case studies, this article begins to fill that gap by examining how emerging ventures use interorganizational relationships to discover, develop, and commercialize new products. We found that emerging ventures tended to establish outsourcing relationships early and that many outsourcing relationships progressed into alliances. This suggests that these early relationships are dynamic, evolve through the emergence process, and may be critical to the successful emergence of a venture. We also discovered that many entrepreneurs developed strong socioemotional bonds with their alliance partners. Unexpectedly, our study revealed that in many cases these socioemotional bonds clouded the entrepreneur's judgment of the partner's abilities and led to problems that threatened the venture's survival.     

“When Life Gives You Lemons”: Using Cross-Sectional Surveys to Identify Chronic Poverty in the Absence of Panel Data

At the core of poverty eradication is the need to eliminate that poverty that is persistent over time (chronic poverty). Unfortunately, traditional approaches to identifying chronic poverty require longitudinal data that is rarely available. In its absence, this paper proposes an alternative approach that only requires 1 year of cross-sectional data on monetary and non-monetary poverty. It puts forth two conjectures and contends that the combined profile of a household as both income poor and multidimensionally poor can be used as a proxy of that household being chronically income poor. To explore the viability of this approach, we use a probit model and longitudinal data for three Latin American countries to estimate households’ probabilities of remaining in income poverty based on their past income and multidimensional poverty statuses. We find empirical support for the approach that is significant, consistent across countries, and robust to various controls and periods of analysis.     

How Much Are Borrowers Willing to Pay to Remove Uncertainty Surrounding Mortgage Defaults?

The Journal of Real Estate Finance and Economics - Using a large, non-student sample, we assess and differentiate between borrowers’ Risk Aversion and Ambiguity Aversion levels and their...