Key institutions in business and management education research

The authors investigate institutional productivity in business and management education (BME) research based on the analysis of 4,464 articles published by 7,210 authors across 17 BME journals over a 10-year period, involving approximately 1,900 schools worldwide. Departing from traditional disciplinary silos, they examine the BME research field as a whole by including all traditional business disciplinary areas and producing two top 100 rankings, one based on raw number of author publications and the other based on weighted scores reflecting journal quality and coauthorship.     

The end of the Ghent system as trade union recruitment machinery?

During the past 15 years, membership rates in many unions have been declining in Denmark, Finland and Sweden. Reasons for this decline may be similar to what has happened in other countries—occupational change and neoliberal ideology and policies—but in the three Ghent countries, changes in the unemployment insurance system may also have affected trade union membership losses. The major part of the decline has taken place in a period of low unemployment, which may have reduced the employee incentive to take unemployment insurance, but will increasing unemployment rates mean more trade union members? At least for the LO‐ and SAK‐affiliated trade unions, it seems that trade union independent unemployment funds may be alternatives for workers who take unemployment insurance.     

A Sealed-Bid Two-Attribute Yardstick Auction Without Prior Scoring

We analyze a two-attribute single item procurement auction that uses yardstick competition to settle prices. The auction simplifies the procurement process by reducing the principal’s articulation of preferences to simply choosing the most preferred offer as if it was a market with posted prices. This is done simply by replacing the submitted sealed bids by yardstick bids, computed by a linear weighting of the other participants’ bids. We show that there is only one type of Nash equilibria where some agents may win the auction by submitting a zero price-bid. Using a simulation study we demonstrate that following this type of equilibrium behavior often leads to winner’s curse. The simulations show that in auctions with more than 12 participants the chance of facing winner’s curse is around 95 %. Truthful reporting, on the other hand, does not constitute a Nash equilibrium but it is ex post individually rational. Using a simulation study we demonstrate that truthful bidding may indeed represent some kind of focal point.     

Active and Forced Choice for Overcoming Status Quo Bias: A Field Experiment on the Adoption of “No junk mail” Stickers in Berlin,Germany

Consumers around the world are burdened by large amounts of unaddressed junk mail. Attaching “No junk mail” stickers to mailboxes offers a simple solution for protecting against unwanted ads. Presumably, the use of such stickers can be increased if consumers deliberately decide either for or against receiving junk mail. This conjecture of status quo bias was tested in a field experiment run with more than 900 households in Berlin, Germany. In one treatment, stickers were put into mailboxes, facilitating active choice. In a second treatment, stickers were attached halfway onto the outsides of mailboxes, forcing consumers to either remove or fully attach them. It was found that roughly a fifth of the sample attached a sticker after treatment. With uptake of more than 21, as compared to 16%, the forced choice was more effective than the active choice treatment. The findings highlight the importance of green nudges and defaults for promoting pro-environmental behaviour. Implications for landlords of the presented interventions are discussed. The field of social norms is identified as a promising area for extending the scope of the present study.     

The long and winding roads: Perceived quality of scenic tourism routes

This study aims to understand self-drive tourists’ satisfaction with and loyalty toward scenic roads. Building on previous studies in the context of tourism destinations, satisfaction is hypothesised to be influenced by leisure and holiday motorists’ motivation for driving the routes and the provision of roadside facilities. In turn, satisfaction is assumed to increase motorists’ loyalty toward the route. The study comprises data from two scenic roads in Norway that differ with respect to landscapes formations, settlements, experiences along the routes, and travel distance. Data are analysed using structural equation modelling. Results show that roadside facilities play a crucial role in achieving overall satisfaction and loyalty among motor tourists, and that route managers should improve the quality of these and related infrastructure facilities and services. Moreover, the study indicates that it is important to take into consideration the motorists’ desire to experience attractive sceneries in order to increase overall route satisfaction. Finally, satisfaction is demonstrated to significantly increase route loyalty, although this relationship appears weaker than in conventional destination studies.     

The value of extended delegation in dynamic agency

One of the main advantages of delegation is that specific department level information is used. Its main disadvantage is probably that central management looses direct control over certain actions. In this paper we challenge this widely accepted trade-off. We show that delegation might be favorable even if specific knowledge is completely absent. We consider a firm that lives for two periods. Due to its organizational structure part of the tasks and decision rights is inevitably delegated to a subordinate (agent). The agent performs the tasks assigned to him, tantamount to personal effort, in each of the two periods. Besides this effort the decision to implement a particular project has to be made at the beginning of period two. With regard to the project choice, central management can decide to delegate it to the agent (decentralization). Alternatively it can make it personally (centralization). If the project choice is decentralized it remains unobservable for central management. Along with second period effort it must be motivated via an incentive contract written on period output.We analyze two different contracting regimes: long-term commitment and long-term renegotiation-proof contracts. With full commitment we find that centralization is indeed favorable as compared to delegation if no informational advantage exists. This confirms conventional wisdom. However, the result does not necessarily hold with renegotiation-proof contracts. Renegotiation-proofness may force central management to set too low second-period incentives. Delegation counteracts this effect as it allows central management to implicitly commit to a higher second-period incentive rate. This arises as both, personal effort and the project choice, rather than effort alone need to be motivated. A necessary condition for too low second-period incentives, and thus for delegation to be favorable, is a negative intertemporal correlation of output.     

Contextual Framing and Monetary Incentives in Field Experiments on Risk Preferences: Evidence from German Farmers

Recent studies cast doubt on the ability of abstract experiments to predict decision‐making in the field. Thus, scholars have argued for more ‘realism’ by introducing context to field experiments. Yet, such realism may work against the induced values of monetary incentives in economic experiments. It is an open question whether contextual framing works best with or without inducing values, through methods such as the use of monetary incentives. Using a sample of 146 German farmers, we compare experimentally the predictive power of a framed lottery in an agricultural context vs. using an abstract version. For one half of the sample, lotteries are incentivised; for the other half, they are hypothetical. Although risk preferences differ between treatments, all four lottery tasks correlate poorly with farmers’ real‐world use of risk management instruments such as harvest or hail insurance. Subjects who start with an agricultural framing are willing to take significantly greater risks in the lotteries. More generally, our findings cast doubt on the ability of lottery tasks to predict risk‐taking in the field.     

How credibility affects eWOM reading: The influences of expertise,trustworthiness, and similarity on utilitarian and social functions

In online information settings, a few people tend to contribute, while the majority of people consume. For this latter group of readers, electronic word of mouth (eWOM) provides information about products or service experiences that rarely are available from manufacturer-controlled sources, which makes this source of information especially helpful. In turn, eWOM influences readers' attitudes, intentions, and behavior. Manufacturers also hope to monitor and positively influence eWOM content, such as by supporting and building brand communities. But eWOM readers might doubt the credibility of information if it is mostly positive, and the usefulness of eWOM information depends on its credibility. This study offers an empirical and theoretical validation of how specific utilitarian and social functions of eWOM affect attitudes toward and intentions to read eWOM. In particular, trustworthiness is the most important credibility dimension; it affects both functions. Perceived expertise also enhances the utilitarian while similarity improves the social function of eWOM.     

Job Loss and Entrepreneurship

We examine the impact of job loss on entrepreneurship behaviour. Our identification strategy relies on the use of mass layoffs caused by bankruptcies as indicators of exogenous displacement. Building on Norwegian register data, we find that working in a company which is going to close down due to bankruptcy in the near future raises the subsequent entrepreneur propensity by 155% for men and 180% for women, compared to working in a stable firm. These estimates are much larger than previously reported in the literature. Taking into account that many workers lose their jobs in the comparison group of stable firms also, we suggest that the full effects of displacement are even larger.     

Asymptotics for Autocovariances and Integrated Periodograms for Linear Processes Observed at Lower Frequencies

One of the most frequently used class of processes in time series analysis is the one of linear processes. For many statistical quantities, among them sample autocovariances and sample autocorrelations, central limit theorems are available in the literature. We investigate classical linear processes under a nonstandard observation pattern; namely, we assume that we are only able to observe the linear process at a lower frequency. It is shown that such observation pattern destroys the linear structure of the observations and leads to substantially different asymptotic results for standard statistical quantities. Central limit theorems are given for sample autocovariances and sample autocorrelations as well as more general integrated periodograms and ratio statistics. Moreover, for specific autoregressive processes, the possibilities to estimate the parameters of the underlying autoregression from lower frequency observations are addressed. Finally, we suggest for autoregressions of order 2 a valid bootstrap procedure. A small simulation study demonstrates the performance of the bootstrap proposal for finite sample size.