An Empirical Assessment of the Influence of March and Simon’s Organizations: The Realized Contribution and Unfulfilled Promise of a Masterpiece

March and Simon’s Organizations is a seminal work in management studies. We assess the contribution Organizations has made to management studies through a citation context analysis of 1,400 articles from top management journals. By categorizing the content from Organizations cited in subsequent works, we find that two related categories associated with cognitive limits and routines or programs account for half (50.5%) of all citation contexts since 1990. We also investigate whether citations to Organizations have been peripheral or substantial to the citing authors’ claims, how cited content has changed over time, and the extent to which citing works have provided empirical evidence to test March and Simon’s propositions or have been critical of their assertions. Our investigation reveals disturbingly few attempts to empirically validate the assertions made in Organizations. Overall, we provide a critical reflection on how well subsequent scholarship fulfils the aims and promise heralded by this masterpiece.     

Environmentally aware households

The rising environmental awareness induces a changing landscape for policymakers and real economic prospects. We examine the properties of a general equilibrium model with endogenous household preferences (for labor, consumption, and environmental quality) and a negative environmental externality. The endogeneity of labor creates an additional channel of substitution between environmental quality and labor, besides the channel of substitution between environmental quality and consumption. We show that a key requirement for improved output following a positive shock in the weight of environmental quality (household environmental awareness) is that environmental awareness trades off the weight on labor and not the weight on consumption. An interesting feature of the model is that the existence of the environmental externality gives a non-zero capital tax in the long run.     

The role of nostalgia-evoking stimuli at nostalgia-themed restaurants in explaining benefits,consumption value and post-purchase behavioral intention

This study focuses on nostalgia-evoking stimuli at nostalgic restaurants and their influence on customers’ consequent evaluation and post-purchase behavioral intention. Through in-depth interviews and a survey, the present study identified a factor structure of nostalgia stimuli that includes four dimensions and 18 items. Then, nostalgia stimuli, benefits, consumption value and post-purchase behavioral intention were incorporated into the model. Among the important results, the hypothesized relationships between nostalgia stimuli and epistemic, emotional and nostalgia-seeking benefits were partially supported. The benefits sought from dining in a nostalgic restaurant positively lead to consumption value, which further has a positive effect on post-purchase behavioral intention. These findings have theoretical and practical implications for capitalizing on nostalgia management in the hospitality industry.     

The differential motivation and context effects of cause-related marketing in the hotel industry: The moderating role of consumption value

This study examined the effects of cause-related marketing (CM: when the consumer is both a donor and a buyer) on the hotel industry. It suggests that based on the double-entry bookkeeping model in which consumers consider the benefits and costs of CM products, two kinds of strategic CM messages were proposed: “benefit-focused” and “cost-focused.” The findings consequently showed that, for hedonic consumption, consumers have a higher intent to recommend CM products when they receive benefit-focused messages as compared to cost-focused messages; however, the opposite was found for utilitarian consumption. Additionally, factors that motivate consumers to choose CM products were investigated. Specifically, with regard to intent to recommend CM products, the respective mediating effects of guilt and “warm glow” on the interaction between message focus and consumption value were examined. Consequently, warm glow, but not guilt, showed a significant mediation effect in this regard.     

Social insurance for the elderly

We study the effects of retirement benefits provided by social insurance programs on consumption, portfolio choice, and retirement in a continuous-time theoretical model. We show that people tend to retire earlier with an increase in retirement social insurance benefits (SIBs), consistent with empirical evidence. We show also that people tend to increase savings before retirement in anticipation of increased retirement benefits, a counter-intuitive result. The response of risky investment with an increase in the SIBs is ambiguous, depending on parameter values. The overall social welfare will increase with an increase in SIBs if the balanced budget constraint is satisfied. We also investigate the effects of changes in the two streams of the SIBs (paid in perishable goods and cash) and the proportion of workers in entire population on social welfare.     

Optimal effort in the principal-agent problem with time-inconsistent preferences

This paper incorporates an agent’s time-inconsistent preferences into the Sannikov (2008) contract model to explore the effects of an agent’s preferences on his own behaviors: the incentive effort choice, the optimal retirement time and the consumption flow during his whole career life. We find the agent’s time inconsistency makes it difficult for him to be motivated and makes him need more compensation. An agent’s time-inconsistency erodes both the principal and his own income. The time-inconsistent agent will choose a lower incentive effort level, retire at an earlier time and have a lower consumption flow compared with his time-consistent peer. The time-inconsistent preference exactly influences the agents behavior and makes the agency problem more serious. Therefore, the firm has to cost more to stimulate such a time-inconsistent agent, which will damage the firms profits, as well as the efficiency.     

More than what meets the eye: Understanding the effects of poly-contextual cues in online fashion retailing

While previous studies have examined the presence (vs. absence) of contextual cues or the product-context fit, the effect of multiple cues (poly-cue) remained underexplored. In response, this study investigated the effects of poly- (vs. mono-) cues on the valuation of a product and the underlying mechanism behind these effects. Findings suggest that a poly-cue increases the product valuation via increased consumption vision (Study 1–3), which was pronounced for global processors (Study 2) and attenuated for a product with low contextual versatility (Study 3). This study provides actionable insights for online retailers as well as enrich the relevant literature.     

Rural households in Papua New Guinea afford better diets with income from small businesses

Papua New Guinea is an economic leader in the Pacific region via its extractive resources. However, these industries do not provide employment opportunities for the country’s 6.4 million (80% of total population) rural inhabitants. Rural nonfarm enterprises (NFEs) could offer an additional source of structural change, whereby benefits are capitalized by domestic rural and urban households along the value chain. In 2018, we administered a survey to over 1000 households to gauge whether households with NFEs afford better diets. We examine the factors associated with NFE ownership using a multinomial logit (MNL) framework. We then evaluate whether welfare effects differ by the sex of the NFE owner using nearest neighbor matching to address selection into NFE ownership. Results suggest households with a NFE obtain greater levels of consumption on the order of 26% for protein per person, 11% for kilocalories per person, 13% for total yearly expenditures per person, and 10% for household dietary diversity. Results point to the resounding limitations of female-owned NFEs primarily created to cope with income risk. The findings highlight the relevance of NFEs as a poverty reduction strategy and the importance of targeting when promoting in-country entrepreneurship.     

DATA GAPS,DATA INCOMPARABILITY,AND DATA IMPUTATION: A REVIEW OF POVERTY MEASUREMENT METHODS FOR DATA‐SCARCE ENVIRONMENTS

Questions that often come up in contexts where household consumption data are unavailable or missing include: what are the best existing methods to obtain poverty estimates at a single snapshot in time? and over time? and what are the best available methods to study poverty dynamics? A variety of different techniques have been developed to tackle these questions, but unfortunately, they are presented in different forms and lack unified terminology. We offer a review of poverty imputation methods that address contexts ranging from completely missing and partially missing consumption data in cross‐sectional household surveys, to missing panel household data. We present the various existing methods under a common framework, with pedagogical discussion on their intuition. Empirical illustrations are provided using several rounds of household survey data from Vietnam. Furthermore, we also offer a practical guide with detailed instructions on computer programs that can be used to implement the reviewed techniques.     

Housing returns,precautionary savings and consumption: Micro evidence from China

We investigate how changes in home prices affect consumption in China via a wealth channel. Examining a panel of 7955 households via fixed effects and instrumental variable methods, we find a marginal propensity to consume out of housing wealth (home-price MPC) that is concentrated on goods consumed for pleasure rather than necessity. This trend is driven by the value of second homes rather than that of primary residences, suggesting a wealth channel. We further examine whether returns on housing investment, including rental income and home appreciation, fund the wealth channel; however, we find little supporting evidence. In contrast, a reduction in health risk increases the home-price MPC, but a reduction in income risk that also relieves precautionary saving motives does not. Our results are robust to alternative data, common-factor progress, expenditure shocks and bequest motives. We contribute by examining second homes, which carry little of the dual nature of housing that primary residences do, to identify a controversial wealth channel, and by studying the relative effects of health and income risks on the wealth channel.