An examination of the ethical beliefs of managers using selected scenarios in a cross-cultural environment

Academic literature addressing the topic of business ethics has paid little attention to cross-cultural studies of business ethics. Uncertainty exists concerning the effect of culture on ethical beliefs. The purpose of this research is to compare the ethical beliefs of managers operating in South Africa and Australia. Responses of 52 managers to a series of ethical scenarios were sought. Results indicate that despite differences in socio-cultural and political factors there are no statistically significant differences between the two groups regarding their own ethical beliefs. Results thus support the view that culture has little or no impact on ethical beliefs.Russell Abratt (DBA Pretoria) is Professor of Marketing at the University of Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa. His research interests include business ethics and promotional strategy. His work has been published in various sources includingJournal of Business Ethics, European Journal of Marketing, International Journal of Advertising andIndustrial Marketing Management.Deon Nel (DCom Pretoria) is Professor of Marketing at the University of Pretoria, South Africa. His research interests include business ethics and group decision making in organisations. His work has been published in various sources includingJournal of Business Ethics, European Journal of Marketing, Management Research News.Nicola Higgs is a graduate student at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa.     

Major league baseball division standings,sports journalists' predictions and player salaries

This paper analyzes the accuracy of predictions of division baseball winners and rankings for the 1982 to 1990 seasons. The forecasts in Sport, Sports Illustrated and the New York Times are more accurate than purely random forecasts except at predicting the National League winners. The journalists are better at predicting division winners, but not division rankings, than a naive model that assumes this season's rankings, will be the same as last seasons's. Combining the forecasts in the three publications does not result in greater forecasting accuracy. A model that uses the relative average salaries of teams significantly outperforms the journalists at predicting division rankings and, when allowance is made for ‘George Steinbrenner effect’, also at predicting division winners.     

Capitalist lessons for communists

Are there any tips that capitalists can offer former communists in introducing and managing a market economy? Russell Lewis reviews the dangers and opportunities.     

Full Steam Ahead or Abandon Ship? An Empirical Investigation of Complete Pivot Decisions

New products or services often misalign with customer preferences, and sometimes these initial offerings must be abandoned and replaced. Factors influencing these “complete pivot” decisions are poorly understood. We use behavioral decision theory to develop a theoretical model of pivot decisions that tests our predictions via a conjoint analysis experiment. We find that magnitude of the miss (revenues compared to plan), length of the runway (cash available/burn rate), and attribution for the miss (reason for customer misreads) significantly influence complete pivot decisions, and we simultaneously consider interactions. Individual grit and impulsiveness also shape the effects of some attributes.     

Beer Uses and Attitudes in the Craft Era

Abstract

This article aims to address the shifts in uses and attitudes in the era of craft beer’s growth in the United States, where brand loyalty has diminished in importance; whereas the need for exploration and trial has increased in importance. These changes have implored a need for craft beer marketers to change tactics in regards to how customers learn about new beers to try, the most trusted sources and influencers of beer choice, and how to build loyalty in an increasingly brand dis-loyal customer. The gap in research being addressed is seeking to find the pathway from how traditional beer marketers have grown brands and loyal customers to where we are today, where the customer is increasingly fickle, enjoys the newness that comes from shifting loyalties, and tends to reject brands that become too strong in this arena.     

Financial development and top income shares in OECD countries

We examine the causal impact of financial development (FD) on top income shares for a panel of 14 OECD countries—five Anglo‐Saxon countries, eight continental European countries, and Japan—over a 110‐year period. In our main General Method of Moments estimates, we find that a 1‐percentage‐point change in FD increases the top 1% income share by 0.2%. In distribution terms, a 1‐SD incr=ease in FD increases the top 1% income share by around 0.4 of an SD. The effects are robust to various measures of top income shares and FD and alternative estimation techniques, including nonparametric estimation. FD is typically viewed in positive terms in that it makes it easier to access credit and facilitates economic growth. Our results are important because they contribute to understanding of the potential negative effects of FD.     

Charitable bequest importance among donors to different types of charities

This paper explores differences in the self‐rated importance of charitable estate giving depending upon the type of charitable cause a person donates to during life. One theoretical motivation for lifetime giving is to personally enjoy benefits from improving a shared collective good. However, this motivation is not possible for bequests. Bequest transfers and resulting improvements occur after personal enjoyment of benefits is no longer possible. This paper hypothesizes that among donors to high personal benefit causes (those typically creating shared goods benefitting donors), interest in a charitable bequest (which offers no opportunity for receiving such benefits) will be relatively less than among donors to low personal benefit causes. In order to explore this, each charity type is categorized as providing high, low, or mixed personal benefits from shared collective goods. This hypothesis receives mixed support. Donors to international relief organizations, a low personal benefit charity type, do place a higher importance on charitable bequests than do donors to shared‐goods type causes such as neighborhood associations, service clubs, sports leagues, or “other” charities, including those focused on local public safety and crime. However, donors to arts organizations—a classic example of donors creating a shared good—have a relatively high interest in charitable bequests. One important exception to the exclusion of postmortem personal benefits could come from religious belief. Accordingly, donors to religious causes do place a higher importance on charitable bequests.     

Shakeout in the early commercial airframe industry

The commercial airframe industry in the US experienced a shakeout from the early 1930s into the post‐Second World War period. Unlike shakeouts in automobiles, tyres, or televisions, the commercial airframe industry's early life cycle was affected by external factors, particularly government demand. Using newly digitized data on all planes introduced in the commercial market between 1926 and 1965, we find that commercial airframe manufacturers with bomber contracts during the Second World War were more likely to have postwar market share than firms without such contracts, controlling for plane characteristics and other forms of government contracting. We attribute the effect of bomber contracts to advantages in R&D learning capacity acquired by firms with military airframe contracts. Despite low (or zero) initial presence in the commercial market, these learning capacity advantages allowed such firms to survive the early period of the shakeout, and later to thrive.     

The intersection of entrepreneurship and selling: An interdisciplinary review,framework, and future research agenda

Selling is integral to entrepreneurship, yet it has rarely been a focal topic of analysis for entrepreneurship scholars. To address this, we undertake a broad-ranging systematic literature review of research that in some way explores selling within entrepreneurial contexts. We inductively develop a framework that orders extant research into selling antecedents, activities, contexts, and outcomes. Then, drawing on these entrepreneurship-selling intersections, we suggest opportunity theory can be extended by integrating critical insights from selling literatures. In particular, we address ego-centric views of entrepreneurship which prioritize entrepreneurial agency, and advocate for the incorporation of customer agency into synchronized processes of opportunity identification, refinement, and exploitation. The article concludes that a promising avenue for future theory development resides in the study of situated sales interactions, which can serve as an empirical vista to the underexplored entrepreneur-customer nexus.