Viasystems Group,inc.

Viasystems Group, Inc. (Viasystems) is an international supplier of electromechanical assemblies and components. It specializes in manufacturing printed circuits and assembling electric cables and industrial metal cabinets. The case concerns the Printed Circuit Division at Viasystems and its need to adapt its costing system to the relocation of its manufacturing activities to China under its strategic planning, begun in 2001. Planning and controlling operating costs and the presentation of the financial statements have therefore become major issues. The case is set in 2006, six years after the start of progressive offshoring of manufacturing to China. It describes: 1) how external environmental pressures and the need for profitability have led to a critical strategic decision; and 2) how this new business model has changed upper management's informational needs, leading them to rethink their costing system, particularly at the Chinese plants. Setting the case in 2006, when all the plants have been relocated to China, enables discussions of the challenges that management will have to cope with in the future, after the operations transfer has been completed and the consequences on the management control system.     

Social Preferences and Competition

There is a general presumption that social preferences can be ignored if markets are competitive. Market experiments (Smith 1962) and recent theoretical results ( Dufwenberg et al. Forthcoming ) suggest that competition forces people to behave as if they were purely self‐interested. We qualify this view. Social preferences tend to be irrelevant if two conditions are met: separability of preferences and completeness of contracts. These conditions are often plausible, but they fail to hold when uncertainty is important (financial markets) or when incomplete contracts are traded (labor markets). Social preferences can explain many of the anomalies frequently observed on these markets.     

Resort cycle revisited: The retirement connection

This article reappraises the Butler model of resort evolution with the addition of a focus on retirement-tourism relationships. The model predicts retirement will emerge as a major factor in resorts as tourism goes into decline, but an examination of trends in Parksville and Qualicum Beach, British Columbia, Canada, revealed retirement has been a feature of those resorts since their early days and has grown alongside tourism. However, an analysis of content of local newspapers revealed that the two communities came to appreciate the retirement sector with their first major downturn in tourism, which in itself partially supports Butler's thesis.     

The Dynamics of Firm Growth and Survival Under Alternative Forms of Control

The publication of the passive learning model of Jovanovic [Jovanic, B., "Selection and the Evolution of Industry," Econometrica, 1982, 60, 649–670.] initiated a resurgence of interest in firm growth and survival processes. Yet all the recent work has focused on the profit maximizing firm, without considering how robust the results are to alternative forms of control. This paper applies the model to the case of the labour managed firm, a type of firm studied extensively for its divergent behaviour from profit maximising firms. The findings indicate that Jovanovic's key predictions are rendered indeterminate under labour management, although there is evidence to show that the actual empirical relationships continue to hold. In considering possible explanations for the breakdown of the results, we conclude that the Jovanovic model overemphasizes institutional structure to the neglect of more fundamental determinants of growth and survival.midt, Paul Geroski and an anonymous referee for helpful comments and discussions. Any remaining errors are my own.     

Inattentive consumers

This paper studies the consumption decisions of agents who face costs of acquiring, absorbing and processing information. These consumers rationally choose to only sporadically update their information and re-compute their optimal consumption plans. In between updating dates, they remain inattentive. This behavior implies that news disperses slowly throughout the population, so events have a gradual and delayed effect on aggregate consumption. The model predicts that aggregate consumption adjusts slowly to shocks, and is able to explain the excess sensitivity and excess smoothness puzzles. In addition, individual consumption is sensitive to ordinary and unexpected past news, but it is not sensitive to extraordinary or predictable events. The model further predicts that some people rationally choose to not plan, live hand-to-mouth, and save less, while other people sporadically update their plans. The longer are these plans, the more they save. Evidence using U.S. aggregate and microeconomic data generally supports these predictions.     

碳九石油树脂生产技术及进展

随着我国石油化工的迅速发展，特别是乙烯的生产能力逐年提高，裂解碳九的数量也在不断增加，如何利用这部分资源开发下游产品越来越引起人们的重视。目前裂解碳九主要用于生产碳九芳烃石油树脂，采用适当工艺合成的碳九树脂可广泛用于涂料、油漆、橡胶及轻工行业，残余的混合芳烃可作为生产涂料的溶剂。     

Analysis of a merger from a governance perspective: the case of Abitibi‐Consolidated and Donohue

Adopting a governance perspective, this study analyzes the merger between closely‐held Donohue Inc. and widely‐held Abitibi‐Consolidated Inc. Findings suggest that the absence of a controlling shareholder and weak board governance at Abitibi might explain both (a) its executives' interests in the transaction and (b) its CEO's compensation increase despite underperformance. Second, an intergeneration shift of control at Quebecor (Donohue's parent company) led to a strategic reorientation that (a) transformed Donohue into a target and (b) insured that Donohue's executives had incentives to pursue a deal. Finally, Donohue's noncontrolling shareholders benefited from the transaction while Abitibi shareholders experienced wealth reduction. The merger's aftermath provides some counter evidence regarding blockholders' power in widely‐held firms. Copyright © 2008 ASAC. Published by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

A Note on the Incremental Validity of Integrity Tests beyond Standard Personality Inventories for the Criterion of Counterproductive Behaviour

Although the validity of integrity tests for predicting the focal criterion of counterproductive work behaviour (CWB) is well‐established, little research has yet addressed the incremental CWB‐related validity of integrity tests beyond basic personality traits. The present research addresses this issue by re‐analyzing data adopted from Marcus, Lee, and Ashton (2007), in which four different overt and personality‐based integrity tests and the HEXACO‐Personality Inventory (Lee & Ashton, 2004) were related to CWB. Integrity accounted for practically significant proportions of incremental variance beyond personality across all integrity tests, yet effect sizes of incremental validity dropped considerably if Honesty‐Humility was added to traditional Big Five dimensions. In addition, findings suggest that CWB is best predicted by a combination of integrity and personality tests. Copyright © 2013 ASAC. Published by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Creating Early Success in Financial Accounting: Improving Performance on Adjusting Journal Entries*

Adjusting journal entries constitute a necessary component of accrual basis accounting and are critical to the accuracy of financial statements. However, accounting students often struggle to comprehend these accounting entries, which is a concern given that failure to understand early topics in accounting courses has been found to impact course performance and selection of undergraduate major. Perceiving accounting as a language, we utilize psycholinguistic theory to understand how an instructor may improve coherence of students’ mental structures of accounting problems. We conduct an experiment to investigate the extent to which a simple instructor intervention, requiring that the initial deferral transaction be recorded, is able to improve student performance on the subsequent deferral adjustments, and whether this improvement is consistent across problem sets that differ in task difficulty. Consistent with our theoretical prediction, we find that this intervention results in improved performance. The beneficial effect of the intervention is found to differ across problem‐set task difficulty. Implications for accounting education are discussed.