Publication Selection Bias in Minimum‐Wage Research? A Meta‐Regression Analysis

Card and Krueger's meta-analysis of the employment effects of minimum wages challenged existing theory. Unfortunately, their meta-analysis confused publication selection with the absence of a genuine empirical effect. We apply recently developed meta-analysis methods to 64 US minimum-wage studies and corroborate that Card and Krueger's findings were nevertheless correct. The minimum-wage effects literature is contaminated by publication selection bias, which we estimate to be slightly larger than the average reported minimum-wage effect. Once this publication selection is corrected, little or no evidence of a negative association between minimum wages and employment remains.     

The Federal Trade Commission's Anti-trust Attack on Advertising

Over the last decade, American public policy has turned increasingly against advertising. The Federal Trade Commission, in several test cases, has set out to show that advertising strengthens and sustains the power of the monopolist. By and large, the attack has failed, and thereby enhanced the contrary view that advertising is a force for competitive efficiency.     

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.     

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.     

Strategic Purity and Efficiency in the Motor Carrier Industry: A Multiyear Panel Investigation

Two questions facing motor carrier managers are (1) whether carriers should specialize in providing full truckload (TL) or less‐than‐truckload (LTL) services vis‐à‐vis offering mix of both and (2) whether this decision is contingent on carrier size. Yet, the literature provides little guidance because research to date has offered contradictory theoretical predictions and inconsistent empirical findings. Drawing on the theory of strategic purity and information processing theory, we explain why service specialization is likely to increase carriers' technical efficiency and why size will have a more pronounced effect on technical efficiency for carriers specializing in LTL services versus TL services. To test our theory, we assemble a panel data set from archival government sources regarding general freight motor carriers' provision of LTL and TL services. We measure carriers' technical efficiency using data envelopment analysis and test our hypotheses by fitting a series of panel data mixed‐effects models. Our results indicate that carriers are most technically efficient when they specialize in one service type. We also find that size positively affects technical efficiency but only for carriers specializing in LTL services; no returns to scale with regard to technical efficiency exist for carriers specializing in TL services.     

Boundary-crossing and the localization of capabilities in a Japanese multinational firm

We conducted a case study to explore the challenges encountered by a foreign subsidiary of a Japanese multinational firm when localizing its organizational capabilities in China. Drawing on the concepts of boundaries and boundary-crossing, we identify pragmatic and cultural knowledge boundaries, which denied opportunities for the host-country employees to contribute their local expertise to augment the firm's core capabilities within the domains of research and development and operational protocols. However, within those domains that were regarded as complementary to or peripheral to the firm's core capabilities, host-country employees were granted more scope to cross the associated pragmatic boundaries.     

Linking Order Fulfillment Performance to Referrals in Online Retailing: An Empirical Analysis

Referral management for online retailers is a strategically important activity, as referrals offer a highly cost‐effective method of customer acquisition. In fact, online customers mention referrals as the second‐most common reason for choosing to shop at a particular retailer, second only to search engine suggestions. However, while online retailers are able to improve their visibility on search engines through focused keyword insertions, they are often unable to pinpoint the drivers of referral behavior among their customers. The current research examines the relationship between two key dimensions of online retailing: order fulfillment cycle times and referral behavior. Employing a theory of customer appraisal and empirically testing the ensuing model using structural equation modeling, we find that excellent order fulfillment is instrumental in generating referrals for the online retailer, even after factoring in product quality.