Refining e-shoppers’ perceived risks: Development and validation of new measurement scale

Due to the rapid expansion of perceived e-shopping risks, and highly isolated and inconsistent presentation of literature about this concept, understanding e-shopper's behavior has become more difficult. In this regard, this study brings together different views, evidences and facts about perceived e-shopping risks from both scholars and practitioners of South-East Asian and Western countries. It then interprets the information in the form of a new scale which offers more adequacy, assemblage and uniformity than the existing models of perceived risks of e-shoppers. The new scale of construct has 11 dimensions comprising a pool of 38 items, which has been empirically validated through the data collected from 537 Malaysian e-shoppers. The dimensions are: high price risk, deception risk, transaction failure risk, dissimilar product risk, incapable service risk, illegitimate product risk, isolation risk, unease risk, displeasure risk, prior-purchase time delays risk, and post-purchase time delays risk. The theoretical and managerial implications and research limitations have also been discussed.     

学者型CEO更加自律吗?——学术经历对高管在职消费的影响

本文选取2010—2016年中国沪深A股上市公司样本,实证检验CEO学术经历对高管在职消费行为的影响。研究发现,学术经历有助于CEO强化道德自觉、增强道德自律,形成内在的自我约束与监督机制,进而抑制了其所在企业的高管在职消费活动。当CEO拥有高层次学术经历或来自内部晋升时,CEO学术经历对高管在职消费的抑制效应更为显著。该结论在采用双重差分模型、Heckman两阶段模型控制潜在的内生性问题及其他稳健性检验之后仍然成立。进一步研究表明,在自由现金流较多、董事会规模较大或独立性较低、外部审计监督较弱以及产品市场竞争程度较低等公司内外部治理环境较差的情景下,学者型CEO的自律品质所能发挥的治理作用更大,对高管在职消费的抑制效应也更为明显。此外,在党的十八大之后,随着“八项规定”等多项高压反腐政策的出台,政策效应在国有企业高管在职消费的治理中发挥着主导性作用,CEO学术经历对国有企业高管在职消费的抑制效应有所下降。本文为高管学术经历的治理效应假说提供了证据支持,对于上市公司规范和治理高管在职消费行为、选聘合适的高管人才具有重要的借鉴意义。     

Auction winning,social dynamics and non-compliance in a payment for ecosystem services scheme in Indonesia

Conservation auctions for payment for ecosystem services (PES) are useful to identify the levels of incentives that will cover the opportunity costs of farmers supplying ecosystem services. Although auctions are increasingly used for allocation in PES schemes, the factors that lead to their successful implementation and eventual environmental outcomes are poorly understood in developing countries. We investigated the socio-economic and institutional contexts that led to smallholders' auction winning and eventual compliance using linear mixed-effects models, and post-auction and post-contract surveys. We employed a case study of a conservation contract preceded by a sealed-bid, multiple round, uniform price auction for watershed services from coffee farmers in Lampung, Indonesia. The auction participants presented low education levels, low asset endowments and small plot sizes. The study obtained evidence that farmers with larger plot areas were more likely to win the contracts, suggesting economies of scale. Most farmers considered the auction a fair self-selection mechanism to allocate contracts where allocation was not influenced by power or social rank. Non-compliance was associated with labor availability constraints, short duration of land ownership and existence of previous conservation applications, suggesting lax of capability to invest in applying conservation agriculture. Final bids were however not good predictors of compliance, among other factors, calling into question the potential of auctions to elicit the actual incentive from the farmers. Ensuring that farmers understand the purposes of auctions for effective contract allocation beyond a mere game and identifying farmers that might encounter difficulties fulfilling the contract could increase the likelihood that such a PES scheme would be successful.     

基于通勤行为的小城镇土地利用与格局优化对策研究——以扬中市为例

研究目的:从居民的通勤行为特征中寻求小城镇土地利用格局优化路径,为产城融合的实现提供理论支持。研究方法:构建通勤流矩阵,运用Arc GIS路径分析测算通勤距离,并通过缓冲区分析通勤距离在空间上的特征,并与土地利用类型进行对比分析,同时建立通勤距离与社会经济因素的回归方程,分析通勤距离的影响因素。研究结果:小城镇通勤方式以便捷型工具为主,通勤高峰集中于上下班,通勤距离随着城镇化和工业化水平的提高,短距离占比增大。主要结论:在城镇化和工业化发展较快的区域,短距离通勤集聚更具有"同心圆"特征,核心力更强。工业化带动的聚集结构呈现出"条带形"态势,与区域工业布局结构有较密切的关系,也与城镇化和工业化扩增融合有关。短距离通勤集聚区会随着城镇化水平的提高而由"双核"向"单核"结构发展,并针对以上问题提出了相应的对策。     

Contrasting the Drivers of Switching Intent and Switching Behavior in Contractual Service Settings

We examine consumer switching decisions in contractual service settings and contrast the drivers of actual switching with those of switching intent. We surveyed a panel of subscribers to all cell phone service providers in a market and recorded key marketing mix data. At four months intervals, we asked panel members about their switching intentions and then subsequently observed actual switching behavior. Consistent with construal level theory, our findings show that switching intent is explained by only a handful of desirability- or outcome-related variables (i.e., overall satisfaction, performance perceptions of important attributes, and monetary switching costs). In contrast, the results show that many more variable categories contributed to explain actual switching behavior. These findings confirm that switching intent is driven by a qualitatively different set of variables than switching behavior. Implications for theory, research and practice are discussed.     

Promoting Persistent Strategic Reasoning Behavior: An Experimental Approach

The present research is aimed to apply experimental techniques to study strategic behavior in one-shot-hide-and-seek games as a frame to elicit more real and elaborated business situations. To promote strategic thinking and persistence, we conducted treatments with repeated matching games among strangers, and one of them with a fixed endowment (fixed initial payment that decreases each round an amount) with the possibility of abandon in any round, retaining the remaining of endowment. In fact, effortful strategic reasoning is found in deviation of subjects’ random choices along the repetitions and abandon, loss aversion, and cultural differences seem articulate a strategic behavior.     

A multilevel perspective on organizational buying behavior in coopetition–an exploratory case study

This article offers a new and interesting perspective on organizational buying behavior by focusing on the simultaneous existence of both cooperation and competition, that is, coopetition. Coopetition may bring undesired knowledge leaks, opportunism, and weakened competitive advantage, and it is therefore important to understand how coopetition develops over time through interrelated activities on multiple levels. The article aims to improve our understanding of the development of organizational buying behavior through adopting a multilevel perspective on coopetition. The empirical study is based on exploratory case study research involving a single case from the manufacturing sector featuring a large multinational buyer and its supplier. The findings of the study show that organizational buying behavior in coopetition develops through interrelated activities on the individual, the organizational, and the relational level. Over time, dominating activities evolve from being ambivalent on an individual level to become authoritative on a company level and finally to being opportunistic on a relational level. Theoretically, this study contributes to organizational buying behavior literature by examining coopetition from a multilevel perspective. From a managerial perspective, the findings establish the importance of recognizing individual-, and organizational-level activities.     

Herding behavior in the Pakistan stock exchange: Some new insights

This study attempts to examine the presence of herding behavior in the Pakistan Stock Exchange (PSX). The novel contribution of this paper is that it investigates the herding phenomenon from a large number of facets such as herding of firms towards market, herding of firms towards industry portfolios, herding of industry portfolios towards market, herding in mostly traded stocks and in large and small stocks, and herding in the crisis period. For this purpose, we use the herding behavior model of Christie and Huang (1995) on the daily closing prices data of 609 firms listed on the PSX from January 2004 to December 2013. Results show that individual firms do not herd towards market index, except when the market experiences a negative return of 5%. However, when we sort firms into small and large groups based on median market capitalization, results indicate that large firms show herding behavior in extreme market movements. Further, we find that firms in several industries herd towards their industry portfolios. However, we find weak evidence of industry portfolios herding towards the market. We also segregate the impact of financial crisis of 2008 from normal times. These findings support results of our baseline estimation.     

Information and Investor Behavior Surrounding Earnings Announcements

The goal of this paper is to analyze the impact of annual earnings announcements on the market through the order flow data in addition to the usual transaction data. In this respect, examining order flow data can potentially reveal valuable information that is not available from transaction data. In fact, the data allow us to test hypotheses about asymmetric information and investor behavior and to test if the behavior varies with investor sophistication. In addition, the paper tries to identify the determinants of the impact on a firm's value using assumptions about investor behavior.     

Efficiency in overlapping generations economies with longevity choices and fair annuities

When individuals can influence their life-expectancies and save in annuities, suboptimal savings result from the lack of incentives to choose the optimal longevity, even when annuity returns can be made contingent to longevity-related choices. Specifically, the golden rule steady state maximizing the representative agent utility cannot be attained as a competitive equilibrium under laissez-faire, even with actuarially fair annuities contingent to longevity-enhancing choices. In order to decentralize through markets the golden rule, longevity-enhancing expenditures need to be taxed if the steady state old-age consumption exceeds the annuitized capital return, and subsidized otherwise—the government budget being balanced through lump-sum transfers or taxes. Interestingly, with positive population growth the expected net contribution is negative when longevity-enhancing expenditures are taxed, and positive when subsidized.