Information sharing as a safeguard against the opportunistic behavior of South African Karoo Lamb farmers

Misconduct in global meat supply chains are omnipresent and even more so in differentiated chains where credence attributes such as origin and taste are used to differentiate the product. By definition, these attributes signal asymmetric information which implies that in the presence of bounded rational individuals with conflicting interests, misconduct in the form of opportunistic behavior is bound to prevail. Increased information exchange through farmer networks is, however, expected to reduce opportunistic behavior. In the case of a differentiated meat product, such as Karoo Lamb, the article studies the farmer‐abattoir transaction with the purpose of recommending strategies that can be implemented to reduce the farmer's tendency to behave opportunistically. The article employs the PLS approach to SEM and reveals a significant negative relationship between information shared and opportunistic behavior. The results indicate significant positive relationships between trust in the abattoir and information shared as well as between farmer networks and information shared. These results are indicative of the support provided to the information shared construct by higher levels of trust between farmers and abattoirs and established farmer networks. It is, therefore, recommended that differentiated meat supply chains, through their various associations, concentrate their efforts to promote information sharing by building stronger, trust centered relationships and by supporting farmer networks.     

Time orientation and construal level: effects on eating and exercising behaviour and preferences

Eating and exercising behaviour are both characterized by immediate and future consequences. Consequently, consideration of these consequences (i.e. time orientation) predicts eating and exercising behaviour. We investigate whether construal level acts as an underlying mechanism of these relations. Students (N = 101) completed measures of consideration of immediate and future consequences (i.e. CFC‐food and CFC‐exercise), construal level, eating and exercising behaviour and preferences. For self‐reported eating and exercising behaviour, only direct effects of consideration of immediate and future consequences were found. For eating preferences, however, there was evidence of an indirect effect through construal level. A stronger tendency to consider future consequences led to a stronger preference for utilitarian (as compared with hedonic) food products through a more abstract construal level. All in all, construal level partially explains the differential relations between consideration of immediate and future consequences and eating and exercising behaviour and preferences.     

Managing political imperatives in war time: strategic responses of Philips in Australia, 1939–1945

The Australian subsidiary of Dutch multi-national enterprise Philips came under secret service surveillance and faced risk of government takeover as enemy property during World War II. It was also excluded from Australian government contracts for war-related communications equipment at a time when it was forced to reduce civilian production. These threats to its assets and operations required the firm to develop an adaptive corporate strategy in order to respond to the political imperatives it faced; not just minimising political risk, but also taking advantage of the opportunities that war-related production offered during the war years and after.     

Disentangling location-based advertising: the effects of location congruency and medium type on consumers' ad attention and brand choice

Research on location-based advertising (LBA) suggests that the merits of LBA lie in the fact that consumers can be targeted with location-congruent ads on their personal mobile devices. However, LBA consists of two underlying constructs: a mobile (vs. point-of-sales) advertising medium and location congruency (vs. location incongruency). This study aims to disentangle these underlying constructs by showing that they differentially affect the efficacy of an ad. Using a virtual reality lab experiment, this study shows that location-congruent ads result in increased choice for the target brand as compared to location-incongruent ads, independent of medium type. However, in location-incongruent situations, mobile ads attracted more attention than point-of-sales display ads. The advantages of LBA thus do not seem to emanate from medium type, but rather from the congruency between the ad and product location. When the ad is received at a different location than the product, the mobile medium is able to enhance consumers' ad attention.     

Calendar Effects on the Amsterdam Stock Exchange

For daily data on a value-weighted index of all shares in the Netherlands (1981-1998), we find abnormally high returns in the pre-Christmas period of the second half of December and around the turn of the month, whereas returns are negative and volatility is relatively high on the Mondays where the previous week's return is below zero. Furthermore, our evidence indicates the presence of an ARCH(1) effect. Our intraday results based on an equal-weighted index of the leading shares in the Netherlands (1986-1993) reveal a U-shaped return pattern over each trading day, Monday morning excluded. Moreover, our tests reveal repeated price adjustments mostly in the same direction around and over non-trading periods. We argue that the arrival of private information is affected by strategic and behavioral factors incompatible with the risk-return paradigm.     

Some Evidence on the Relevance of Bank Behaviour for the Lending Channel in The Netherlands

This paper studies the behaviour of Dutch banks. We test the adjustment of banks' balance sheets in times of monetary policy changes during the period 1957–1991. As a reaction to a policy change, banks basically have two alternatives to adjust their net money creation: (1) sell securities in public capital markets, and/or issue long-term liabilities, and (2) change domestic loan supply. If banks opt for the latter a lending channel may be relevant, even in a small open economy with a fixed exchange rate and a high degree of international capital mobility. We test for the effectiveness of both indirect and direct instruments of monetary policy. It turns out that in case of changes in the official interest rate, the volume of bank loans is not affected and that banks display a kind of buffer-stock behaviour by diminishing their publicly traded assets. In situations with quantity restrictions on the growth of net money creation, however, the volume of loans is affected significantly when the quantity restriction is withdrawn thereby fulfilling a necessary condition for the bank lending channel to be effective.     

Economy-wide implications of biofuel production in Zambia

ABSTRACT

Potential biofuel demand in South Africa is estimated to increase to 1550 million litres by 2025 due to mandatory blending rates. Land and water constraints, however, limit the ability for domestic production. Zambia, due to its abundance in land, suitable climate, supportive set of bioenergy incentives and close geographical location to South Africa, has the potential to meet this increase in demand. Using a dynamic recursive computable general equilibrium model, we estimate the macro- and socio-economic impacts of bioethanol production in Zambia from three potential crops: sugarcane, cassava and sweet sorghum. The results show that the development of a single product bioethanol industry has the potential to increase economic growth without negatively affecting overall food security. Further expansion of the industry to multiple products results in larger gains to growth and welfare.     

A dual‐sequence framework for B2C relationship formation: Moderating effects of employee communication style in online group chat

Past research on B2C relationships has typically focused on unidimensional constructs of satisfaction, trust, and commitment, ignoring underlying psychological dimensions. Although some studies have examined cognitive and affective dimensions of these relational constructs, dual sequential effects in relationship formation have not been investigated. This study proposes and finds (in the context of online group chat) that parallel cognitive and affective sequences of relationship formation take place, thus expanding scholarly understanding of underlying psychological processes and offering marketing practitioners two different ways to build relationships with consumers. The proposed dual‐sequence relational framework further advances theory by shedding light on counterintuitive findings in past research. The study also supports the proposed moderating effects of employee communication style, such that sequential effects of cognitive (affective) relational constructs are stronger with a task‐oriented (socially oriented) employee, thus offering insights to practitioners in hiring and training employees to match specific organizational goals for building relationships with consumers. © 2009 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.