The impact of industry environment on early market entry decisions by B2B managers in the U.S. and Japan

Managers form simplified mental models to cope with market environment uncertainties and to process information. A critical decision is whether to enter a high-potential market early. Large innovation and development investments involved in this decision increase uncertainty. We examine the importance ascribed by U.S. and Japanese managers to competitive forces when making early market entry decisions. We expect that the competitive forces will have different effects on the likelihood of early market entry in the U.S. versus Japan due to cultural and business environment differences, and we thereby develop several propositions. We develop a decision-making exercise simulating early market entry decisions, and tested our propositions with managers in medium to large business-to-business (B2B) firms from both countries. We assessed impacts of the competitive market forces on entry strategy selection via relative weights, repeated-measures analysis of variance, and frequency analysis. Our findings revealed differences in the mental models of Japanese and U.S. managers. Buyer power had a larger effect on the decision to make an early market entry for Japanese managers, while threat of new firm entry had a larger effect for U.S. managers; these findings were consistent with our propositions. We also found several areas of agreement between U.S. and Japanese managers. We conclude with theoretical implications and recommendations to B2B management.     

Mapping natural resource-based poverty,with an application to rural Syria

This study presents advances in resource-based poverty mapping. It illustrates how agricultural income distribution maps can be generated at small pixel-level, providing an application of the approach in rural Syria. Census data on agriculture and population are disaggregated based on pixel-level agricultural productivity coefficients derived in a GIS environment. The approach, triangulated with survey results and compared with sub-national poverty maps, shows that the better-income areas of Syria are located in the irrigated and higher-rainfall areas, though lower-income pockets exist due to the presence of ecological and topographic factors or due to high population density. The method can be used for developing high-resolution, low cost maps for rapid detection of resource-driven poverty in low income countries where agriculture is a major source of rural income, and where poverty mapping is rarely undertaken due to the high costs involved.     

Opting for Opting‐In? An Evaluation of the European Commission's Proposals for Reforming VAT on Financial Services*

This paper provides a legal and economic analysis of the European Commission's recent proposals for reforming the application of VAT to financial services, with particular focus on their ‘third pillar’, under which firms would be allowed to opt in to taxation on exempt insurance and financial services. From a legal perspective, we show that the proposals’‘first and second pillars’ would give rise to considerable interpretative and qualification problems, resulting in as much complexity and legal uncertainty as the current regime. Equally, an option to tax could potentially follow significantly different legal designs, which would give rise to discrepancies in the application of the option amongst Member States of the European Union (EU). On the economic side, we show that quite generally, when firms cannot coordinate their behaviour, they have an individual incentive to opt in on business‐to‐business (B2B) transactions, but not on business‐to‐consumer (B2C) transactions. We also show that opting‐in eliminates the cost disadvantage that EU financial services firms face in competing with foreign firms for B2B sales. But these results do not hold if firms can coordinate their behaviour. An estimate of the upper bound on the amount of tax revenue that might be lost from allowing opting‐in is provided for a number of EU countries.     

The role of materialism,religiosity, and demographics in subjective well-being

In appealing to consumers, marketers need to know what the good life means across various consumer segments. The present study seeks to deepen the understanding of consumer subjective well-being (SWB) by exploring its relationship with selected secular and sacred values. SWB, defined as individuals' cognitive and affective assessments regarding their life satisfaction (Diener, 1984), is treated as the dependent variable in investigating how SWB is influenced by individual consumer materialistic attitudes (a secular value), religiosity (a sacred value), and demographics. Significant differences between high and low religiosity consumers regarding the role of income and materialistic attitudes in predicting SWB were found. Although income and some aspects of materialism are positively related to the SWB of low religiosity consumers, these variables are negatively related to the SWB of high religiosity consumers. This study implies that marketers might benefit from considering consumer religiosity as a segmentation and targeting direction in the design of materialistic positionings and communications. © 1997 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.     

Language and advertising effectiveness: code-switching in the Korean marketplace

Using two languages within an advertisement is increasing across many markets, throughout the world. By investigating code-switching effects between the Korean and English languages, this study is the first to directly test the Markedness Model perspective in the Korean marketplace. Furthermore, this study introduces a new type of code-switching (transliterated code-switching) between two alphabetic languages and assesses the impact of code-switching on advertising effectiveness across the different types. The results of Study 1 indicate that Korean–English (KE) code-switching and transliterated Korean–English (TL-KE) code-switching were significantly higher in attitude toward the slogan and product evaluation than English–Korean (EK) code-switching. However, there was no significant difference in the dependent variables between TL-KE and KE slogans. Study 2 tested the role of the perceived difficulty of the English words as a moderating variable. It was found that the KE slogan was more effective than the TL-KE slogan when difficult English words were embedded in the slogans, whereas no difference was found between the two slogans when the English words were perceived as easy. Implications for advertisers are presented and future research areas are discussed.     

Tourism and water use: Supply, demand, and security. An international review

This article reviews direct freshwater consumption in tourism from both quantitative and qualitative viewpoints to assess the current water demand of the tourism sector and to identify current and future management challenges. The article concludes that even though tourism increases global water consumption, direct tourism-related water use is considerably less than 1% of global consumption, and will not become significant even if the sector continues to grow at anticipated rates of around 4% per year (international tourist arrivals). The situation differs at the regional level because tourism concentrates traveller flows in time and space, and often-in dry destinations where water resources are limited. Furthermore, the understanding of tourism’s indirect water requirements, including the production of food, building materials and energy, remains inadequately understood, but is likely to be more substantial than direct water use. The article concludes that with expected changes in global precipitation patterns due to climate change, it is advisable in particular for already water scarce destinations to engage in proactive water management. Recommendations for managing tourism’s water footprint are made.     

Macroeconomic effects of family business inheritance tax reduction: Evidence from South Korea

This study examines the macroeconomic effects of family business inheritance tax reduction in South Korea using a theoretical model that addresses the problem of a family member's occupational choice decision between being a worker and being an entrepreneur. In contrast with previous studies, the model considers the distribution of firm size. The effect of the reduction in the family business inheritance tax rate on the macroeconomy is positive in this model, whereas it is negative in a model in the literature that does not consider the distribution of firm size when addressing the occupational choice decision. Calibrated results obtained using data for South Korea show that a 50% reduction in the family business inheritance tax rate increases the total labour demand, total real investment, and total sales by 0.13%, 1.88%, and 0.15%, respectively.     

Human capital mobility patterns in the European Union and the financial crisis

This paper provides new evidence on the quantification of economic losses and/or gains from skilled human capital mobility in terms of GDP and productivity in several EU countries during and after the Great Recession. We construct two novel indicators to quantify and compare the economic effects of human capital mobility across EU countries in 2008, 2012, and 2016. Through hierarchical clustering, we created groups of countries to perform a non-parametric MANOVA. The results suggest the existence of three groups of countries aggregated by similar economic and mobility patterns. The differences between these groups are significant and allow us to delineate the countries’ gains and losses.

     

Assessing skewness in financial markets

It is a matter of common observation that investors value substantial gains but are averse to heavy losses. Obvious as it may sound, this translates into an interesting preference for right-skewed return distributions, whose right tails are heavier than their left tails. Skewness is thus not only a way to describe the shape of a distribution, but also a tool for risk measurement. We review the statistical literature on skewness and provide a comprehensive framework for its assessment. Then, we present a new measure of skewness, based on the decomposition of variance in its upward and downward components. We argue that this measure fills a gap in the literature and show in a simulation study that it strikes a good balance between robustness and sensitivity.