Managing For Successful Customer Acquisition: An Exploration

Abstract

This paper explores how consumers select different peers in their social network when obtaining positive verses negative referrals, and the role of social cues in this selection process. An inductive framework incorporating a mixed method process was employed. Thirty in-depth interviews were used to understand how consumers activate specific peers when seeking referrals. First, participants mapped their peer networks and, second, debriefs were undertaken to understand how their peer networks were used across ten product categories. Our research identifies that the choice of peer when seeking referral information is conditional on the type of referral sought. Also, that the cues used by consumers when selecting the most appropriate peer differ depending on the type of referral sought. The different peer activation for these two types of referrals indicates a need to adopt strategies specific to the different referral types.     

银行业支持实体经济发展的制约因素及路径分析

面对信贷规模持续紧缩的经营形势,商业银行如何支持实体经济发展,就成为2012年工作的重中之重。本文分析了银行业支持实体经济发展的制约因素,针对性地提出了银行业支持实体经济发展的建议。     

Rethinking the Role of State-owned Enterprises in China’s Rise

The massive overseas expansion of Chinese state-owned enterprises (SOEs) is a central aspect of China’s ‘rise’ to great-power status. There is significant disagreement, however, over how to interpret SOEs’ role. Are they instruments of Chinese statecraft, being directed purposefully from Beijing as part of a ‘grand strategy’? Or are they relatively autonomous, profit-maximising businesses, their free-wheeling behaviour often undermining Chinese foreign policy? Finding that there is evidence for both theses, we provide a framework to explain this. We propose theorising party-state/SOEs relations using the concepts of state transformation and regulatory statehood. We show that the Chinese state’s fragmentation, decentralisation and internationalisation since the late 1970s has substantially increased SOE autonomy and weakened but also transformed the executive’s control, reconfiguring it towards a regulatory mode of governance. Party-state/SOEs relations are thus characterised not by direct command and control but weak oversight and ongoing struggles within the party-state. We illustrate this using a case study of China Power Investment Corporation and its Myitsone hydropower dam project in Myanmar. Here, a central SOE clearly defied and subverted central regulations, profoundly damaging Sino-Myanmar state-to-state relations. Party-state authorities are now struggling to rein in this and other central SOEs.     

Intermediation Behavior of the Financial Superstructure in Response to Environmental Stimuli

ABSTRACT

This paper is an empirical extension aimed at investigating the relationships between the indicators of the financial superstructure and its intermediation environments; and especially how the former responds to the effects of the latter. Intermediation-environmental models patterned after multivariate regression, causality, and partial adjustment models of both linear and log-linear formulations were estimated and analyzed. The results reveal that three environments: socio-political, regulatory, and international finance-exerted significant effects on the intermediation function of the superstructure. Previous intermediation successes ginger up current performance. In the long run, the effects of the environmental factors on the intermediation function of the superstructure, in whatever direction, more than quadruples. In any given year, the Nigerian financial superstructure attains only about 21.9% of desired (optimal) FIR. Given this, it would take about 4-1/2 years for it to adjust its intermediation operations (FIR), in light of the effects of environmental factors, to optimal levels in order to significantly impact the economy as desired. Some consistent behavioral traits were identified from the results to include: the precepts of potential maximization, profit maximization, accommodation principles, survival and cost-minimization principles, and the neutrality axiom.     

International tourism demand and the business cycle

The focus of this study is on presenting causes and hypotheses for the existence of asymmetric income and price effects on tourism demand across business cycles. The theoretical assumptions were tested by analyzing tourism import demand in different source markets, drawing on econometric models that provide for the magnitudes of price and income effects either to vary depending on the phase of the business cycle or to remain stable across the business cycles. The major outcome of this study is that the general assumption in most of the tourism demand studies—i.e. that the income effects are symmetric—should not be expected to be automatically true for every source market.     

Do hotel REIT companies face investment constraints? A comparison with C-corporation hotel companies

This study investigates whether corporate investment by REIT hotel companies (hotel REITs hereafter) is more constrained than investment by C-corporation hotel companies (hotel C-corps hereafter). The investments of hotel REITs and hotel C-corps are examined by comparing the sensitivities of investment to cash flow and investment opportunities between the two groups. Results show that the sensitivity of investment to cash flow is positive and significantly higher for hotel REITs than for hotel C-corps, suggesting that hotel REITs are likely to experience more constraints on their corporate investment. This finding suggests that hotel firms and owners should be more cautious about electing to be a REIT if they are planning large investments in the future. In addition, this finding has policy implications; even a small reduction in the rate of mandatory dividend payouts could significantly increase hotel REITs’ corporate investments.     

中国—东盟大物流的初步形成及制约因素

中国—东盟自由贸易区已建立起来,并初步形成了为自由贸易区经济服务的中国—东盟大物流环境。但是东盟各成员国经济发展不平衡,存在资源、贸易、产业的竞争,自由区大物流还有待进一步完善和发展。这需要各成员国求同存异,摒弃贸易保护主义,共同完成自由贸易区大物流格局的整体升级。     

Constrained Kalman Filtering: Additional Results

This paper deals with linear state space modelling subject to general linear constraints on the state vector. The discussion concentrates on four topics: the constrained Kalman filtering versus the recursive restricted least squares estimator; a new proof of the constrained Kalman filtering under a conditional expectation framework; linear constraints under a reduced state space modelling; and state vector prediction under linear constraints. The techniques proposed are illustrated in two real problems. The first problem is related to investment analysis under a dynamic factor model, whereas the second is about making constrained predictions within a GDP benchmarking estimation.