Bridge the Gaps: From Deficiency to Superior Service

In the face of ever intense competition and limited resources, it is management's primary concern to seek out accurate and effective ways for uncovering deficient service quality attributes and the real causes behind them. The purpose of this study is, therefore, to develop a two-phased service quality strategy model to identify defective service attributes and uncover their root causes by integrating the importance-performance gap analysis model, service triangle and gap analysis. A survey conducted on the guests, front-line servers and managers from nine different restaurant outlets of three similar international hotels in Taiwan is presented to empirically substantiate the suitability and practicality of this proposed model. The findings demonstrated that the model was fitted for the hotel in question to identify its defective service quality attributes, prioritize their order of improvement and consequently reveal the causes behind by analyzing the existence of the gaps among customers, managers and front-line servers. The managerial implication for restaurant managers is to reallocate resources and efforts in service areas that require immediate improvement. With this particular model, management now can serve their customers well even with limited resources.     

泛珠三角洲区域合作与湖南产业集群发展研究

从湖南省产业集群存在的问题入手,分析集群失效的原因,结合专业合作经济组织理论,探寻中小企业互助合作与竞争的实现途径,提出中小企业应通过组织创新来参与区域经济合作。     

Satisfaction with Cultural/Heritage Sites

SUMMARY

This study attempted to investigate the relationship between cultural/heritage destination attributes and overall satisfaction, and to identify the difference in the overall satisfaction of tourists in terms of selected demographic and travel behavior characteristics. The expectancy-disconfirmation theory provided a conceptual framework for this study. This theory holds that consumers first form expectations of products or service performance prior to purchasing or use. The study area for this study was Virginia Historic Triangle (Williamsburg, Jamestown, and York-town). The survey was conducted at five different sites in the Virginia Historic Triangle. The findings indicate that there is a relationship between destination attributes and overall satisfaction with cultural/heritage experience. The study also reveals that overall satisfaction may show variation by gender, length of stay, and decision horizon. The study concludes with appropriate marketing and management implications.     

美国高校法务会计教育现状考察

法务会计提供的调查与诉讼服务构成对传统审计的重要补充。为了培养合格的法务会计人才,美国高校法务会计教育已从单一课程设置向学历与学位教育等多类型系统范式演进。西弗吉尼亚大学主持的全美欺诈与法务会计课程标准化运动积累了丰富经验,可为法务会计高等教育的发展提供借鉴。     

The impact of corporate fraud on director‐interlocked firms: Evidence from bank loans

We examine the impact of corporate fraud committed by one firm (the “fraudulent firm”) on other firms with interlocking directors (the “interlocked firms”), focusing on the debtholder side. We argue that the revelation of a fraudulent firm's fraud can damage the reputation of the interlocked firms because corporate governance can propagate via director interlocks. Empirically, we find that the interlocked firms' cost of debt is higher and the loan covenants become stricter after the fraud cases of the fraudulent firms are revealed. Consistent with the corporate governance propagation explanation, our results are weaker (stronger) for interlocked firms that have better (worse) pre‐event corporate governance standards. Our findings suggest that corporate fraud of fraudulent firms can affect other firms through director‐interlocks beyond shareholder value.     

Employee treatment and corporate fraud

This paper examines the association between a firm’s relations with its employees and its likelihood of committing fraud. We find that firms treating their employees fairly (as measured by employee treatment index) have a lower likelihood of committing fraud since labor-friendly firms have incentives to signal their willingness to fulfill implicit contracts and maintain long-term relationships with employees. Further analysis shows that employee involvement and cash profit-sharing are the most important components in employee treatment to determine our results. Moreover, we show that the negative association between employee treatment and fraud propensity is more prominent when a firm is in a high-tech industry, when a firm in a less competitive industry, and when employees have less outside employment opportunities. Finally, we show that our results are not driven by the employee’s moral sensitivity or other labor related factors (i.e. labor wage, pension benefits, and labor union power).     

Fake it ‘til you make it: Hazards of a cultural norm in entrepreneurship

Fake it ‘til you make it—that is, deceptively claiming a new endeavor exhibits characteristics of successful entrepreneurial ventures to gain support from others—has become an accepted practice in entrepreneurship. One overlooked hazard of this strategy is that entrepreneurs’ efforts to fake it can become a slippery slope in which the deception escalates to a point where stakeholders accuse entrepreneurs of committing fraud. We delineate that the responsible use of faking it in entrepreneurial endeavors rests on entrepreneurs’ full appreciation of the determinants that make turning fiction into fact less and not more difficult. Leveraging prior research to offer new insights, we outline these determinates as controllable vs. uncontrollable elements, sole vs. contingent entrepreneurial action, and limited vs. extensive stakeholder interactions. We also look at faking it examples Lordstown Motors and uBiome, two startups whose founders engaged in and escalated faking it to the point where stakeholders accused them of fraud.     

Liar’s Loans,Mortgage Fraud,and the Great Recession

ABSTRACT

This paper contributes to research on misrepresentation in private residential mortgage-backed securities by using new data on losses from foreclosure to estimate higher than expected losses associated with income overstatement and adverse selection in no/low documentation loans, using full documentation loans as a counterfactual. Overall, no/low documentation loans account for $350 billion of the $500 billion lost from 2007 to 2012. No/low documentation loans lost an additional $5200 per loan, implying $97 billion of total no/low documentation losses were higher than expected. I also find underwriting exceptions differentially predict loss by documentation type, which provides evidence consistent with originator-led adverse selection.     

Rank and file equity compensation and earnings management: Evidence from stock options

The widespread use of rank and file equity‐based compensation suggests that executives believe that rank and file employees can affect firm outcomes, and some research supports this view. If equity‐based incentives influence rank and file employees’ productive efforts, they might also influence their earnings management decisions. We find that increases in rank and file employees’ option‐based compensation—our proxy for equity‐based compensation—are associated with increases in earnings management and that this relation is attributable to real activities (as opposed to accrual) earnings management. Cross‐sectional tests indicate that the relation is stronger when rank and file option compensation is likely to generate greater performance incentives and attenuated in the presence of more intense monitoring. Finally, we explore the role of cash constraints and overvaluation as potential alternative explanations for this relation and find that neither accounts for our results.     

浅析会计信息欺诈对上市公司的影响

随着世界经济的快速发展,各种经济犯罪活动屡见不鲜,其中,最为常见的当属会计信息欺诈事件。会计信息是否真实,是否存在会计欺诈问题,影响到广大投资者、债权人、监管机构等利益相关者的利益。会计信息欺诈不仅挫伤了投资者的投资热情,同时使得整个会计行业遭遇了前所未有的信誉危机。因此,减少并杜绝上市公司会计信息欺诈事件,是社会大众关心的问题。