Product Development Time Performance: Investigating the Effect of Interactions between Drivers

Rapid and punctual new product development (NPD) has become a top priority in many organizations as competitors rush to commercialize emerging technologies and to satisfy customer needs. Despite the importance of this issue, conceptual models or systematic testing of specific drivers that could improve time performances in NPD are few and far between. There is, however, a lack of extensive empirical research into whether “interactions” between different drivers affect time performances. This article aims to investigate whether drivers can interact and can influence time performances with a “synergistic” effect. A survey was carried out in order to study the effects of two‐way driver interactions on “launch on time” and “launch against an accelerated schedule.” Three groups of drivers within the development‐process, organizational‐mechanisms, and strategic‐capabilities were considered. As this is an exploratory study, two‐way interactions between drivers of different groups were analyzed in order to detect which drivers had a synergistic effect on time performances. The study was based on a sample of 85 manufacturing firms producing mainly industrial goods. The NPD program within each company was considered, i.e., the new products developed and launched in the last three years. The statistical approach used is suitable for exploratory surveys. In the first phase, the G‐correlation test was used to verify the effects of single drivers in order to help interpret the results regarding two‐way driver interactions. In the second phase, regression models with two‐way driver interaction were performed with both linear and logistic regression in order to discover which significant models had a significant driver interaction. The resulting 13 models showed that interactions played an important role in determining time performances. The following are some of the most interesting results, as they have managerial implications. The NP Strategic Guide (clear definition and communication of new product goals) interacts with and enhances the influence of other drivers, such as predevelopment tasks, project manager use, and supplier and customer involvement. Technological and up‐front staff capabilities create important interactions with product definition and with customer involvement, which avoids development delays. Furthermore, the authors of this study discovered that the adoption of an overlapping approach without a high level of interfunctional team use may not be time efficient. Thus, if a firm has to work to a tight development schedule, it should seek and should integrate any possible synergistic effects between team use and overlapping development phases. The insights into interactions provide useful information that can be used when setting priorities and can help to attain higher performances by adopting a combination of selected drivers. In particular, the best practices, which many studies have highlighted, do influence time performances that depend mainly on the so‐called strategic‐capabilities drivers. These latter variables, unlike practices and activities, require a complex learning process. The path toward improvements within the development‐process requires both long periods of time and an integrated view of the process; hence, improvements cannot be achieved by simply applying common practices. Therefore, analysis of interactions within the NPD field looks promising and requires further study.     

PRICE DYNAMICS WITH CUSTOMER MARKETS

Using microdata from a U.S. retailer we document that customer turnover responds to pricing. We study the optimal price setting of a firm when its demand has an extensive margin that is elastic to price due to customers' opportunity to search for an alternative supplier. The price pass‐through of idiosyncratic productivity shocks is incomplete, with the most productive firms passing through more. Firm demand is more persistent than price. Higher demand is associated with lower markups due to higher search intensity, despite flexible prices. We find empirical support for these predictions in microdata from the retail industry.     

Mapping Business Model Research: A Document Bibliometric Analysis

Today, the business model (BM) is one of the most studied concepts within managerial and innovation literature. Although scholars have shown a growing interest in understanding and analysing the BM, a theoretical conceptualization is still lacking. This paper provides a systematic review of the current state of BM research by mapping the research landscape to identify key research publications, journals that had relevance in developing the BM literature, and the main areas of research. Using the ISI Web of Knowledge “core collection”, this study conducts a document bibliometric analysis of 3,604 publications in the fields of management and business that were published between 1985 and 2017. The use of quantitative methods allowed us to overcome the shortcomings of the past subjective literature reviews. We clustered the selected articles on the basis of two distinct perspectives. First, we identified the founders of the discipline, creating a map of co-cited articles (co-citation analysis); this enabled us to identify five major research clusters, formed on the basis of similar co-citations, that characterize the historical evolution of the BM studies. Second, throughout the bibliographic coupling analysis, which aggregates articles sharing a similar bibliography, we captured the main emergent research sub-fields of the most recent BM literature.     

The Role of the Common Agricultural Policy in Enhancing Farm Income: A Dynamic Panel Analysis Accounting for Farm Size in Italy

As a multi-objective policy, the EU Common Agricultural Policy continues to secure significant income support for farmers as one of the nine specific objectives. We estimate the income transfer efficiency of a broad set of pivotal policy measures, focusing on the effects of farm structure on income transfer efficiency. We use dynamic modelling, based on a micro-data panel of Italian farms for the period 2008–2014, allowing for endogeneity, simultaneity bias, and omitted variables. In line with previous studies and economic expectations, we find that decoupled direct payments provide the highest contribution to agricultural incomes, followed by agri-environmental payments and on-farm investment subsidies. Coupled payments have no significant impacts on farmers’ income. Generally, for all analysed Common Agricultural Policy measures, large farms benefit from greater transfer efficiency levels compared with medium and small farms. These differences among instruments and across farms suggest that policy-participation costs may play a pivotal role, together with the economic structure of farms, in determining the income transfer efficiency of CAP policies.     

Likelihood,Replicability and Robbins' Confidence Sequences

The widely claimed replicability crisis in science may lead to revised standards of significance. The customary frequentist confidence intervals, calibrated through hypothetical repetitions of the experiment that is supposed to have produced the data at hand, rely on a feeble concept of replicability. In particular, contradictory conclusions may be reached when a substantial enlargement of the study is undertaken. To redefine statistical confidence in such a way that inferential conclusions are non-contradictory, with large enough probability, under enlargements of the sample, we give a new reading of a proposal dating back to the 60s, namely, Robbins' confidence sequences. Directly bounding the probability of reaching, in the future, conclusions that contradict the current ones, Robbins' confidence sequences ensure a clear-cut form of replicability when inference is performed on accumulating data. Their main frequentist property is easy to understand and to prove. We show that Robbins' confidence sequences may be justified under various views of inference: they are likelihood-based, can incorporate prior information and obey the strong likelihood principle. They are easy to compute, even when inference is on a parameter of interest, especially using a closed form approximation from normal asymptotic theory.     

From Economia Civile to Kameralwissenschaften. The line of descent from Genovesi to Beccaria in pre-Smithian Europe

Abstract

The Italian Enlightenment is one of the great intellectual achievements of Europe’s siècle des lumières. Its two branches, the Lombard branch together with the Neapolitan, both cooperate to producing perhaps the greatest overall contribution of Italian culture to the development of a modern European tradition of civil rights and enlightened governance. After the Second World War, there has been an intense flourishing of Italian studies, with a worldwide readership, on the Enlightenment and on the Italian Enlightenment in particular. This has been a response to the emerging need for deeper research on the roots of western culture and on the civic values of our societies so much shattered by the traumatic experiences of a new kind of war savaging our cities especially in Europe. Economic analysis is the core issue of the Italian Enlightenment. The economic discipline – originally called Civil economy in eighteenth century Naples and Cameral science (or Public economy) in Milan – was indeed prominent in the historical experience of the Italian Enlightenment, although the prominence of the discipline is only imperfectly reflected in much of the recent historiography. This paper belongs to a new developing line of research on the Italian Enlightenment rooted in a retrieval of the economic discipline of the time. Italy is the country where the first economic Chairs worldwide were created in Universities during the second half of the eighteenth century. This article presents a comparison and reciprocal integration of the two main schools in Italy, the Milanese and the Neapolitan, through the works and influence of the two incumbents to the respective Chairs, Antonio Genovesi in Naples, from 1754, and Cesare Beccaria in Milan, from 1769. The two Professors turn out to have much in common and in particular a clear economic perspective appears to be at the root of the whole of their literary production. A special attention is given to the Lezioni of Genovesi and the Elementi of Beccaria, reflecting the actual teaching of the two masters in their respective lectures.     

Heterogeneity in risk aversion and risk sharing regressions

Heterogeneity in risk attitudes, if not properly accounted for, may induce a bias on the income coefficient of standard consumption insurance regressions. We show that, extending the theoretical analysis and empirical findings in Schulhofer‐Wohl (Journal of Political Economy, 2011, 119, 925–958), the sign of the bias is ambiguous, and depends on cycle‐related variables and on the covariances of both aggregate and idiosyncratic risk with individual risk aversion.     

Service innovation: Inward and outward related activities and cooperation mode

Knowledge of how customers co-create value, the way that suppliers and providers co-produce services, and how research and development centers and universities transfer technologies is becoming increasingly important to scholars' understanding of service innovation. This paper presents an analysis of the relationship between inward and outward innovation activities in service organizations and their modes of innovation, using network innovation premises and an extended innovation model. Empirical data from retail, health and education sector service organizations show the existence of a relationship between the degree of development of the inward innovation process and the degree of development of outward innovation activities. The majority of service organizations have innovation processes with an orientation toward customers and suppliers rather than other service network members, and leading service organizations follow a path that the literature defines as oriented toward the service value network. Findings lead to implications of how innovation managers could develop their internal innovation capacity to balance inward and outward activities properly.     

To adjust or not to adjust after a cost-push shock? A simple duopoly model with (and without) resilience

We characterize the equilibrium in a homogeneous good Cournot duopoly in which firms have the choice to react to a cost-push shock by paying a lump-sum adjustment cost in order to offset the initial rise in marginal cost. Our results show that the size of the shock and the size of the adjustment cost jointly determine the nature and the number of the equilibria generated in the game. In particular, if the adjustment cost is high enough, at least one firm decides not to adjust at the pure-strategy equilibrium, and such a partial adjustment by the industry can be socially efficient as well. The main conclusions are robust to the endogenization of the adjustment cost as an increasing function of the shock size. Some implications of this partial equilibrium analysis about industry's resilience are outlined.