CATALOG RETAILER IN‐STOCK PERFORMANCE: AN ASSESSMENT OF CUSTOMER SERVICE LEVELS

The purpose of this article is to study the level of “in‐stock” customer service performance being offered in the catalog channel of distribution. The article provides benchmark information for the catalog industry. More importantly, the article serves as one test of the effectiveness of the modern supply chain, where the expectation is for near perfect orders. Customer service levels are studied by using an empirical observation methodology in which catalog retailer's in‐stock performance was measured. Comparisons are made across item type, season, retailer type, and days from catalog receipt. Overall, items were out‐of‐stock during 15.9% of all checkpoints, compared to an 11.8% stock‐out rate in an earlier study of bricks and mortar retailers.     

The Contingent Value of Responsive and Proactive Market Orientations for New Product Program Performance*

While the benefits of being market oriented are largely accepted, a group of scholars and managers remain skeptical. Marketing scholars have sought to counter the criticisms leveled against market orientation (MO) by arguing that it has both responsive and proactive dimensions. However, few studies have empirically examined the complexity of the effects of these dimensions on firm performance. Drawing on theories of resource‐based advantage and organizational search behavior, this article advances understanding by arguing that responsive and proactive market orientations have curvilinear effects on product development performance, that their interaction may be positively related to product development performance, and that their effects on new product program performance are moderated differentially by the organizational implementation conditions and marketing function power. Survey results of 175 U.S. firms indicate support for most of the hypotheses. Specifically, whereas responsive MO has a U‐shaped relationship with new product program performance, proactive MO has an inverted U‐shaped relationship with new product program performance. Contrary to the arguments presented here, the interaction of both orientations is negatively related to new product program performance. This study finds that both orientations are needed; however, new product program performance is enhanced when one is at higher level and the other is at lower level. Finally, responsive MO is only positively related to new product program performance under specific conditions such as when strategic consensus among managers is high. On the other hand, the positive effect of proactive MO on new product program performance is further strengthened when learning orientation and marketing power are high. Overall, this study suggests that the effects of responsive and proactive MO on new product program performance are more complex than previously theoretically argued and empirically examined.     

Do departures from democratic accountability compromise the stability of public finances? Keynesianism, central banking, and minority governments in the Canadian system of party government, 1867–2009

This paper is concerned with the effectiveness of Westminster parliamentary institutions in ensuring the stability of a nation??s public finances. Our starting point and major hypothesis is that the governance structure embodied in Canada??s parliamentary system has contributed importantly to the maintenance of fiscal stability. The fact that the Government of Canada, like the central government of many other modern democracies, has survived for over a century without default on its public debt means that in some meaningful sense, long run responsibility with respect to the nation??s finances has in fact been achieved, and we show that this is in fact the case. Hence a more meaningful test of our main hypothesis requires the designation of specific sub-periods when the ideological background for political policy making changed and/or when the institutions and organizations for operationalizing policy varied in ways that either improved or discouraged responsible fiscal performance. We consider ideational and institutional factors that are predicted to either enhance or detract from accountability and fiscal stability, including central banking, the adoption of Keynesianism, inflation targeting and periods of minority government, and test for their effects on long run stability of the debt to GDP ratio using data for almost the entire history of the modern state from 1867 to 2008.     

An Exploration of Managerial Views on Positioning Services in Ghana

ABSTRACT

The paper constitutes an analysis of the views of managers of service firms on positioning strategies in Ghana. The research employed a qualitative research method. Data were collected from 21 service managers and analyzed using content analysis procedures. The results indicate that for service managers, the perceived dominant positioning strategies of their organizations were: service quality, customer relationship, innovation, availability of service, community support, and leading organization, among others. The findings suggest that the dominant managerial views of Ghanaian service managers form a ‘hybrid’ of those of the Western manager. This research is important in clarifying this position. Additionally, as an exploratory piece, the study provides bases for further research on a topic in Ghana with a rather scant evidence of research.     

Convertibility risk: the precautionary demand for foreign currency in a crisis

This paper presents theoretical work linking money demand to the perceptions of households about the risk that domestic currency may become inconvertible or that it may be devalued. An empirical investigation of the size of this effect is carried out using monthly data for Korea to estimate an augmented demand-for-money equation. It is found that the fear of inconvertibility arising from the 1997 Korean currency crisis may have caused broad money demand to fall by 4–5% points,equivalent to the loss of reserves of $6–7.5 billion (or about 30% of reserves as measured at end-November 1997). This is a revised version of IMF Working paper WP/2001/210; it was written while Professor Black was Senior Policy Advisor at the IMF Institute and Christofides and Mourmouras were staff members in the IMF’s Policy Development and Review Department. The views expressed are those of the authors and should not be attributed to the IMF, its Executive Board, or its management. For useful comments and suggestions we thank an anonymous referee, Tim Lane, Ydahlia Metzgen, Roberto Perelli, Tony Richards, Christian Mulder, Steve Russell, as well as seminar participants at the IMF Institute, the IMF’s Asia and Pacific Department, Federal Reserve Board, and Bank of Indonesia. We would also like to note similar (unpublished) empirical results using our approach by Dr. Rino Effendi for Indonesia and Angana Banerji for Russia     

The business case for commitment to diversity

Does an organization's commitment to diversity - as reflected by CEO commitment, human capital, corporate communications (internal and external), and supplier diversity - result in competitive advantage and superior financial performance? Diversity can bring new voices and perspectives into the strategy dialogue, help managers understand and address the needs of a demographically diverse customer base, and stimulate a wider range of creative decision alternatives. However, the anticipated benefits of corporate diversity efforts may also be accompanied by costs that can affect shareholder wealth. In a study comparing the financial performance of the DiversityInc Top 50 Companies for Diversity to a matched sample, we find evidence that firms with a strong commitment to diversity outperform their peers on average. For commitment to diversity to become ingrained in corporate culture there must be visible and ongoing support from senior management, a clear articulation of the business case for diversity, line manager accountability, and training programs directed at communications, conflict resolution, and team building.     

On automated e‐business negotiations: Goal,policy, strategy,and plans of decision and action

In recent years, there has been increasing interest in automated e‐business negotiations. The automation of negotiation requires a decision model to capture the negotiation knowledge of policymakers and negotiation experts so that the decision‐making process can be carried out automatically. Current research on automated e‐business negotiations has focused on defining low‐level tactics (or negotiation rules) so that automated negotiation systems can carry out automated negotiation processes. These low‐level tactics are usually defined from a technical perspective, not from a business perspective. There is a gap between high‐level business negotiation goals and low‐level tactics. In this article, we distinguish the concepts of negotiation context, negotiation goals, negotiation strategy, and negotiation tactics and introduce a formal decision model to show the relations among these concepts. We show how high‐level negotiation goals can be formally mapped to low‐level tactics that can be used to affect the behavior of a negotiation system during the negotiation process. In business, a business organization faces different negotiation situations (or contexts) and determines different sets of goals for different negotiation contexts. In our decision model, a business policymaker sets negotiation goals from different perspectives, which are called goal dimensions. A negotiation policy is a functional mapping from a negotiation context to some quantitative measures (or goal values) for the goal dimensions to express how competitive the policymaker wants to reach that set of goals. A negotiation expert who has the experience and expertise to conduct negotiations would define the negotiation strategies needed for reaching the negotiation goals. Formally, a negotiation strategy is a functional mapping from a set of goal values to a set of decision‐action rules that implement negotiation tactics. The selected decision‐action rules can then be used to control the execution of an automated negotiation system, which conducts a negotiation on behalf of a business organization.