The Internationalization of Chinese Firms and Negative Media Coverage: The Case of Geely's Acquisition of Volvo Cars

Chinese firms are internationalizing at an unprecedented speed. One profound phenomenon linked to this active Chinese firms internationalization process is that the process tends to be confronted with negative media coverage of China and Chinese firms in Western countries. How to understand and cope with the negative image of China and Chinese firms, as they are often seen in the Western media, emerges as a relevant and timely research topic in the study of the internationalization of Chinese firms. The purpose of this article is to stimulate ideas for further research on the relations between the internationalization of Chinese firms and the media coverage. We use the case of Geely's acquisition of Volvo Cars, which was to a large extent negatively reported in the Swedish media during 2008–2013, as inspiration to identify the interesting research themes and questions. Given the increasing anti‐globalization trend, we hypothesize that Chinese firms will have to face up to the reality of negative media coverage in many Western countries for the foreseeable future, at least in the firms’ initial establishment phases. We end our paper with the managerial implications. © 2017 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.     

政府与市场博弈下的媒介经济

媒介经济是一个全球性的词汇,而在社会主义市场经济体制下,这个称谓所蕴含的意思.却并不仅仅是一个简单的经济词汇,它所包含的是刻板和渴望开拓体制下的一种新的变革和发展。在这场变革中扮演对手戏的就是政府和市场,而裁判就是历史。     

Content and advertising in the media: Pay-tv versus free-to-air

We compare the advertising intensity and content of programming in a market with competing media platforms. With pay-tv, media platforms have two sources of revenues, advertising revenues and revenues from viewers. With free-to-air, media platforms receive all revenues from advertising. We show that if viewers strongly dislike advertising, the advertising intensity is greater under free-to-air television. We also show that free-to-air television tends to provide less differentiated content whereas pay-tv stations always maximally differentiate their content. In addition, we compare the welfare properties of the two different schemes.     

The quality of food risk management in Europe: Perspectives and priorities

In this paper, we address the issue of food risk management as practised in Western Europe. We begin by considering how food risks are managed, and then go on to consider how well they are managed. There are multiple answers to the ‘how well’ question, which are related to the varied perspectives of the different key stakeholders – from the food risk managers and producers, to the general public and the media. Consequently, there is no clear answer to the question of quality. What our review does identify is two priorities relevant to our understanding of effective food risk management: first, a need for further research to determine the source and nature of the different evaluative perspectives, and second, a need for the key stakeholders to appreciate and understand the alternative perspectives in order to enhance the effectiveness of the food risk management process.     

Does a free media protect labour rights?

Based on a sample of 47 developing economies considered over the period 1992–2012, we find that a free media reduces the legal protection of labour, taken as a whole. However, the impact differs over various aspects of labour regulation: while media freedom correlates with less stringent regulation of work time, less constraints to dismissal, and lower protection of employee representation rights, it also correlates with greater legal parity of part-time and fixed-term labour with full-time and permanent workers.     

Business and financial information integration and voluntary management earnings forecasts

In this study, the impact of business and financial information integration (BFII) on the voluntary management earnings forecasts (VMEFs) of listed firms in China between 2008 and 2018 is investigated. Drawing on litigation cost and ability signaling theories, we find that the adoption of BFII encourages top managers to disclose VMEFs. BFII firms are identified through the textual analysis of management discussion and analysis (MD&A) reports, and the empirical results indicate that BFII firms have a higher probability and frequency of issuing VMEFs than non-BFII firms. The results remain robust after we identify causality by applying a propensity score matching and difference-in-differences (PSM-DID) test and use an alternate measure of BFII. Further tests show that BFII firms issue more accurate VMEFs and are able to issue them at an earlier stage. We also find that the positive relationship between BFII and VMEFs is weakened if the media expresses concern about the uncertainty of BFII adoption.     

Media attention and betting markets

This paper investigates whether biased media attention affects perceptions about future events. We use data on World Cup tournaments in alpine skiing for the period of 1992–2014 and exploit close races as a source of randomness for ranking positions. Since the allocation of media attention is skewed towards the winner and athletes on the podium, we can estimate the causal effect of media attention. Our results document that ranking schemes generate sharp discontinuities in media attention even in close competitions. However, both regression discontinuity and instrumental variables estimates reveal that biased media attention neither affects prices nor quantities in the betting market. We conduct a series of robustness tests to explore the sensitivity of our results.     

Augmented reality: Research agenda for studying the impact of its media characteristics on consumer behaviour

Augmented reality has emerged as a new interactive technology and its unprecedented way of complementing the physical environment with virtual annotations offers innovative modes for accessing commercially-relevant content. However, little is known about how consumers respond to its features. This paper approaches augmented reality (AR) by studying media characteristics of interactive technologies and shows to which extent they are indicative of current AR commercial apps. Based on a literature review about consumer responses to these characteristics, potential media effects of AR on consumer behaviour are discussed. Finally, the article proposes a research agenda for further study of this new phenomenon in marketing.     

苏州金诚传媒整合营销传播研究

本文对传媒行业和苏州金诚传媒发展现状进行分析,对整合营销传播创立和推广的过程进行探讨,以期为行业领域其他企业提供借鉴和参考。     

News on inflation and the epidemiology of inflation expectations in China

Inflation expectations are important elements in monetary policy analysis. This paper examines how inflation expectations of Chinese consumers and professional forecasters are affected by media sentiments based on the epidemiological foundations of the sticky information model. Rather than assuming professional forecasts are identical to newspaper forecasts, we assume news media are a common source for the transmission of typical people's inflation expectations. We collect media data from 30 leading newspapers and magazines in China and code news reports into three types of inflation: rising, falling, and unchanged. More importantly, we categorize the media pool into comprehensive, economic, and politically oriented media sources. We find a fundamental connection between news media and inflation expectations. However, there are significantly different impacts of news reports in different media sources on expectations. The difference is mainly concentrated in politically oriented media sources, and may be a reflection of China's unique media administration system.