Crosswise and reciprocal interdependencies within retailers’ multichannel structures

Understanding consumer behavior across channels is the fundamental basis for implementing successful multichannel retailing strategies. This study analyzes the crosswise and reciprocal relationships between offline and online brand beliefs, offline and online retail brand equity and consumers’ conative loyalty to a retailer in multichannel structures. The relationships are contextualized by investigating fashion and grocery retail sectors and different prior channel performances that are likely to affect the paths to loyalty across channels. To provide insight into these issues, two cross-sectional and two longitudinal models are employed. The results show that former brick-and-mortar retailers are able to significantly increase consumers’ loyalty to the firm by primarily designing offline (secondary online) attributes and beliefs. The results hold for retailers in both fashion and grocery retailing, however, with stronger effects in fashion, as well as for retailers with strong vs. weak prior channel performance. However, indirect effects indicate that online brand beliefs and offline retail brand equity are the central strategic levers for prior strong (vs. weak) retailers. Reciprocal relationships between online and offline retail brands underline important channel interdependencies. Managers thus need to take these crosswise and reciprocal interdependencies between channels into account when designing successful multichannel retailing systems. This study introduces the novel idea of simultaneous crosswise and reciprocal relationships within multichannel retail structures and shows that paths to loyalty vary for retailers in different retail sectors and retailers with strong vs. weak offline and online channel performances.     

Selection by committee: Anonymity and gratitude

What kind of candidate is selected into a job when the principal has to appoint a committee to measure the candidates’ ability and select a winner? We find that if the committee takes into account the candidate’s gratitude towards them, a candidate with less than first best ability will be selected. A relevant exception may occur if the first best is the overall best candidate. First best selection is always achieved if the committee is anonymous to the candidates. If the committee is not detached enough from the candidates then delegation fares even worse than random selection.     

我国产学研互惠性协同微观机理研究*

产学研是我国国家创新战略的核心内容之一,当前发展到协同阶段.我国产学研的协同效率较低,不足以实现产学研结构的有序化.互惠性思想和方法是激活产学研协同的动力源之一.实证检验发现:互惠性合作及交互效应对产学研项目质量、市场适应性、投入产出匹配均存在着显著的促进效应.我国产学研应走互惠性协同之路,大力培育互惠性文化、学习西方互惠性经验、以互惠合作来解决契约不完全问题、以互惠来驱动诚信合作、摒弃合作中的极端利己主义、灵活地执行合作制度和规范,才能突破产学研协同创新中的瓶颈.     

身份认同与薪酬激励：一个文献评述

本文回顾了近期在西方取得快速研究进展的身份认同理论发展历程,并详细介绍了其在治理结构研究中的运用。我们发现身份认同与薪酬激励的结合为解决中国公共部门与企业的委托代理问题均提供了很好的研究思路。同时,身份认同理论与薪酬激励理论及发展经济学的结合将为解决中国转型经济特有的企业控股股东与经理人的委托代理问题发挥重要的作用。     

TDD系统中非理想互易条件下双流波束赋形的容量分析

在时分双工(TDD)多天线系统中,由于上行信道估计误差和上下行传输时延,上下行链路信 道的互易性并不理想。针对非理想互易条件下基于最小均方误差线性接收准则的双流波束赋 形,通过推导其后验信干噪比,得到了容量上界的闭合表达式。数值和仿真结果表明：所得 上界与准确值较为接近;且与理想互易情形相比,非理想互易性对系统的复用增益没有影响 ,而只会降低系统的阵列增益。     

Management rights: A topological survey of the terrain

Dramatic changes in both the business environment and practitioner attitudes have made many of the traditional views of management rights moribund. Based on an analysis of the pertinent literature and a series of field interviews, this article sketches the rough dimensions of a managerial perspective of the parties' respective rights that is far more specific, pragmatic, and reciprocal in nature than the erstwhile global normative views were. In the future, management rights researchers should strive for the following goals: (1) conducting both inductive and deductive studies, (2) considering both positive and normative elements, (3) achieving a better balance between global, middle range, and particularitstic theories, and (4) recognizing the diverse disciplinary approaches that can be brought to bear on the subject.     

Control Without Deception: Individual Behaviour in Free-Riding Experiments Revisited

Lying to participants offers an experimenter the enticing prospect of making others' behaviour a controlled variable, but is eschewed by experimental economists because it may pollute the pool of subjects. This paper proposes and implements a new experimental design, the Conditional Information Lottery, which offers all the benefits of deception without actually deceiving anyone. The design should be suitable for most economics experiments, and works by a modification of an already standard device, the Random Lottery incentive system. The deceptive scenarios of designs which use deceit are replaced with fictitious scenarios, each of which, from a subject's viewpoint, has a chance of being true. The design is implemented in a sequential play public good experiment prompted by Weimann's (1994) result, from a deceptive design, that subjects are more sensitive to freeriding than cooperation on the part of others. The experiment provides similar results to Weimann's, in that subjects are at least as cooperative when uninformed about others' behaviour as they are if reacting to high contributions. No deception is used and the data cohere well both internally and with other public goods experiments. In addition, simultaneous play is found to be more efficient than sequential play, and subjects contribute less at the end of a sequence than at the start. The results suggest pronounced elements of overconfidence, egoism and (biased) reciprocity in behaviour, which may explain decay in contributions in repeated play designs. The experiment shows there is a workable alternative to deception.     

Efficient Contracting and Fair Play in a Simple Principal-Agent Experiment

We study behavior within a simple principal-agent experiment. Our design allows for a large class of linear contracts. Principals can offer any feasible combination of (negative) fixed wages and incentives in the form of return sharing. This great contractual flexibility allows us to study incentive compatibility simultaneously with issues of 'fair sharing' and reciprocity, which were previously found to be important. We find a high degree of incentive-compatible behavior, but also 'fair sharing' and reciprocity. In contrast to other incentive devices studied in the literature, the incentives are 'reciprocity-compatible'. Principals recognize the agency problem and react accordingly.     

Reciprocity in Corporate Tax Compliance—Evidence from Ozone Pollution

In a tax—public goods reciprocity framework between citizens and the state, managers view taxes as a payment to the government in exchange for public goods, and hence they adjust their willingness to pay taxes as public good quality changes. We show that corporate tax planning intensity increases with ground-level ozone pollution. Revisions in ozone pollution regulations cause counties that failed the revised and more stringent standards to reduce ozone pollution. Consequently, firms headquartered in these counties reduced corporate tax planning intensity relative to firms in other counties. The ozone-tax link varies in the predicted directions with public attention to pollution, potential welfare loss due to ozone, managers’ stakeholder orientation, taxpayers’ polluting status, political preferences, and civic norms. We also find consistent results for Superfund cleanups of hazardous waste sites. Our research sheds light on reciprocity as a potential mechanism influencing corporate tax compliance.     

Wage delegation in the field

By conducting a natural field experiment, we analyze the managerial policy of delegating the wage choice to employees. We find that this policy enhances performance significantly, which is remarkable since allocated wage premiums of the same size have no effect at all. Observed self‐imposed wage restraints and absence of negative peer effects speak in favor of wage delegation, although the chosen wage premium levels severely dampen its net value. Additional experimental and survey data provide important insights into employees' underlying motivations.