Goals versus institutions: the development of performance measurement in the Swedish university sector

This paper contrasts goal-directed and institutional approaches to the development of performance measurement (PM) in the Swedish university sector, which has been subject to increasing emphasis on management by objectives since the early 1990s. We adopt a macro perspective, focusing on recent changes in PM related to governmental control of universities and colleges and combine an extensive review of archival data with interviews in our empirical analysis. It is concluded that although the goal-directed model cannot be completely rejected as a heuristic informing recent changes in PM, a process-orientated institutional perspective considerably enriches the analysis by making it less static and more contextually informed. In particular, the latter perspective better explains the evolution of loose couplings between formally stated goals and performance indicators and between different systems for PM by directing attention to the complex interplay between conflicting constituent interests in the evolution of resource and cost allocation practices and quality control procedures. However, our empirical analysis also leads us to reconsider the conceptions of loose coupling as either a “given” feature of institutionalised organizations or an outcome of more pro-active resistance at the micro level prevailing in much earlier work in institutional theory.     

Strategic trading and learning about liquidity

Many practitioners point out that the speculative profits of institutional traders are eroded by the difficulty in gauging the price impact of their trades. In this paper, we develop a model of strategic trading where speculators face such a dilemma because of incomplete information about time-varying market liquidity. Unlike the competitive market makers that they trade against, informed traders do not know the distribution of liquidity (“noise”) trades. Instead, they have to learn about liquidity from past prices and trading volume. This learning implies that strategic trades and market statistics such as informational efficiency are path-dependent on past market outcomes. Our paper also has normative implications for practitioners.     

Option pricing in the presence of natural boundaries and a quadratic diffusion term

This paper uses a probabilistic change-of-numeraire technique to compute closed-form prices of European options to exchange one asset against another when the relative price of the underlying assets follows a diffusion process with natural boundaries and a quadratic diffusion coefficient. The paper shows in particular how to interpret the option price formula in terms of exercise probabilities which are calculated under the martingale measures associated with two specific numeraire portfolios. An application to the pricing of bond options and certain interest rate derivatives illustrates the main results.     

Whither seniority? Career progression and performance orientation in South Korea

Framed by institutional theory, this study reassesses the influence of seniority on (HRM) in South Korea today. We analyze first the overall influence of seniority in business, second its significance for career progression (i.e. promotion), and third its relation to individual performance orientation. By conducting in-depth interviews among local and expatriate managers, we find that the role of seniority is still pronounced. Seniority-based promotion remains significant, and individual performance evaluation systems, as are typically found in Western countries, hardly fit the cultural environment and tend to be ineffective. By contributing to the extant theories on institutional dynamics and the convergence–divergence–hybridization debate alike, our results strengthen the culturalist approaches, holding that informal institutions persist and do not disappear quickly. Further, rather than moving towards global convergence, we see the Korean HRM system as being in a state of hybridization caused by coercive isomorphism resulting from experimentation with foreign best-practice systems. As a result, some HRM practices are dysfunctional. We recommend that firms should reinterpret their valuation of individual performance towards team achievements and pay more attention to the optimal team composition.     

The Tragedy of the Commons and Inflation Bias in the Euro Area

Central bank credit has expanded dramatically in some of the Euro Area member countries since the beginning of the financial crisis. This paper makes two contributions to understand this stylized fact. First, we discuss a simple model of monetary policy that includes (i) a credit channel and (ii) a common pool problem in a monetary union. We illustrate that the interaction of the two elements leads to an inflation bias that is independent of the standard time-inconsistency bias. Secondly, we present an institutional analysis that is consistent with the view of fragmented monetary policy and empirical evidence that illustrates the heterogeneity of central bank credit expansion.     

False Discoveries und Fehlinterpretationen wissenschaftlicher Ergebnisse

High-quality science communication to the public depends to a large extent on the way research findings are translated into comprehensible language and common speech. In this communicative process, a reasonable evaluation of the trustworthiness of empirical findings, based on an adequate interpretation of statistical analyses, is absolutely crucial. This paper’s authors argue that the credibility of science is jeopardised by two compromising developments within science itself: on the one hand, an inflation of ostensible empirical evidence related to misuses and misinterpretations of the concept of statistical significance, and, on the other, a sensationalist overvaluation of the results of single studies instead of an adequate representation of the available body of evidence in a given scientific field.     

Cents of self: How and when self-signals influence consumer value derived from choices of green products

Consumers choosing between green and conventional products often believe such choices imply trade-off decisions, such that green products provide morally-related advantages but embody price or quality-related disadvantages compared to standard products. We study the consequences of such trade-offs for consumer value in the context of privately consumed green products. To develop our theoretical model, we draw from the perspective of self-signaling – consumers' act of signaling information about their internal qualities to their own self through choice. We explore how and when self-signals from such trade-off decisions influence consumer value gained from comparative choices of green versus standard products. Six studies were conducted, using divergent measures of the dependent variable, multiple product categories, and measured as well as manipulated self-concept clarity (SCC). We find a joint effect of self-signals from comparative choices and self-concept clarity on consumer value, such that positive self-signals lead to incrementally higher satisfaction and willingness to pay for consumers with low SCC but not significantly so for those with high SCC. Results show that this joint effect may occur for consumers with low SCC because they gain incremental value from perceived self-concept alignment – a state that is construed from the perception that a self-signal is aligned with the consumer's self-concept. This study contributes to marketing research by proposing and testing a novel mechanism that can underlie self-signaling.