Teaching with Mission: Personal Development, Team Building, and Social Responsibility

An innovative gateway MBA course, Personal Development and Social Responsibility, is the focus of this paper. We describe the course and show how it is related intimately to the missions and traditions of our university and college; various themes are integrated; and our interactions as developers of and instructors for the course mirror some of the issues addressed in it. We include an evaluation of the efficacy of the course, based on student course and self evaluations. We do not write with the expectation that others will necessarily replicate what we have done but with the hope that they will (1) consider carefully the relationship between what and how they teach with the missions and traditions of their universities and colleges; (2) examine the integration of content and process; and (3) reflect on their collegial associations with one another.     

Keiretsu and relationship-specific investment: implications for market-opening trade policy

This paper considers the implications of relationship-specific investment within keiretsu for policies aimed at opening the Japanese market for intermediate goods, such as auto-parts. Both VIEs applied to parts and VERs restricting Japanese exports of autos cause the keiretsu to import a wider range of parts, but of a relatively unimportant type, such as seat covers. Since keiretsu investment and output fall, the total value of US parts exports may actually fall. For a given value of these exports, a VIE is less costly for US consumers and Japanese producers, but a VER is preferred by US automakers.     

Entry,reputation and intellectual property rights enforcement

We examine how reputation concerns induce a multinational to partly withhold its entry into a developing country under weak intellectual property rights (IPR) enforcement. Equilibrium IPR violations are shown to arise only in the presence of such concerns. Holding constant a multinational's incentive to innovate, better IPR enforcement encourages entry but reduces social welfare. The multinational's incentive to innovate may be inversely U‐shaped in the strength of IPR enforcement. If timed properly, however, stronger IPR enforcement can foster innovation without compromising social welfare. Testable implications concerning observable IPR violations are derived.     

Regret and Regulation

We analyse the welfare effect of governmental regulation for individuals who consider anticipated regret in their decision-making process. Although governmental policies by directing choice, distort individual decisions in the private market, they can alleviate individuals’ pain associated with the feeling of regret. We analyse this trade-off and provide conditions under which the implied reduction of regret justifies regulation. Furthermore, we demonstrate our findings on tax deduction for non-insured losses, a well-studied social policy in insurance. Last, we consider heterogenous individuals and alternative social welfare functions and show that our results hold in these extended settings.     

User,Use & Utility Research

Business and Information Systems Engineering (BISE) is at a turning point. Planning, designing, developing and operating IT used to be a management task of a few elites in public ad-ministrations and corporations. But the continuous digitization of nearly all areas of life changes the IT landscape fundamentally. Success in this new era requires putting the human perspective – the digital user – at the very heart of the new digitized service-led economy. BISE faces not just a temporary trend but a complex socio-technical phenomenon with far-reaching implications. The challenges are manifold and have major consequences for all stakeholders, both in information systems and management research as well as in practice. Corporate processes have to be re-designed from the ground up, starting with the user’s perspective, thus putting usage experience and utility of the individual center stage. The digital service economy leads to highly personalized application systems while organizational functions are being fragmented. Entirely new ways of interacting with information systems, in particular beyond desktop IT, are being invented and established. These fundamental challenges require novel approaches with regards to innovation and development methods as well as adequate concepts for enterprise or service system architectures. Gigantic amounts of data are being generated at an accelerating rate by an increasing number of devices – data that need to be managed. In order to tackle these extraordinary challenges we introduce ‘user, use & utility’ as a new field of BISE that focuses primarily on the digital user, his or her usage behavior and the utility associated with system usage in the digitized service-led economy. The research objectives encompass the development of theories, methods and tools for systematic requirement elicitation, systems design, and business development for successful Business and Information Systems Engineering in a digitized economy – information systems that digital users enjoy using. This challenge calls for leveraging insights from various scientific disciplines such as Design, Engineering, Computer Science, Psychology and Sociology. BISE can provide an integrated perspective, thereby assuming a pivotal role within the digitized service led economy.     

Sewer System Design Using Simulated Annealing in Excel

An optimization procedure has been developed for branching storm and sanitary sewer systems with a pre-determined layout for determining the minimum total cost. The model was developed within Microsoft Excel using simulated annealing as the optimization procedure. The total cost of the storm sewer system that was obtained with this optimal design procedure was compared to the total cost of the system as obtained from the conventional straight slope design procedure. Applying the simulated annealing optimizer to the design of the branching storm sewer network resulted in a cost savings of over $77,100 or about 7 % (a reduction from $1,117,700 to $1,040,600). These significant savings were realized by simply going an extra step and implementing an optimization technique during the design phase. Use of Excel should enhance the availability and the usage of such an optimization model for the design of storm and sanitary sewer systems by consulting engineers and various agencies.     

Economic Impacts of Inbound Tourism under Different Assumptions Regarding the Macroeconomy

On what is taken to be the 'Standard View', increased tourism expenditure from inbound markets has direct, indirect and induced effects on a host destination, leading to increased production, income and employment. Strong links between tourism and other sectors of business reduce import leakages from tourism expenditure thereby enhancing the multiplier effects of the injected expenditure on domestic output, value added and employment. The usual technique for analysing these effects is input-output analysis. This paper argues that economy-wide effects must be taken into account in determining the impacts of increased tourism expenditure on a destination, and that the 'Standard View' is superficial and very often misleading. An expanding tourism industry tends to 'crowd out' other sectors of economic activity, reducing the demand for traditional exports and import competing industries. The extent of these 'crowding out' effects depends, in turn, on the workings of labour markets, changes in prices and the real exchange rate, and the macroeconomic policy context. It is argued that these mechanisms can only properly be taken into account using Computable General Equilibrium (CGE) models rather than input-output modelling. The paper then looks at applications of CGE modelling to tourism growth in both nations and regions, classifying the various studies according to assumptions made about labour markets and government policies. The discussion has relevance for estimating the economic contribution of tourism in all destinations. The paper concludes with some observations regarding the use of CGE modelling in tourism contexts internationally and issues for further research.     

An Empirical Study of Service Quality Implementation

The strategic importance of quality management has grown in importance in recent years. However, although the competitive implications of adhering to a quality agenda have been much alluded to within the literature, the evidence from a review of published studies suggests that service quality and strategy issues have been addressed as separate concerns by researchers. This study examines the components which facilitate the quality implementation process. The factor analysis of data emphasises the importance of ‘senior managerial commitment’ and ‘employee resourcefulness’ in quality implementation initiatives and offers support to the growing implementation initiatives and offers support to the growing literature arguing for a greater consideration of the human dimension in quality implementation programmes. It is proposed that further research needs to be carried out to examine mangerial attiudes towards the service quality implementation process and to assess some of the practical issues involved in introducing quality initiatives in hotel organisations.