A result similar to the Odlyzko's ‘Paris Metro Pricing’

The two-stage competition is investigated in which two Internet Service Providers (ISP) choose sequentially their capacities and then their prices while facing a flow of new customers who decide to belong to one ISP or the other on the basis of a comparison of access prices and of expected congestion rates. At the equilibrium of the game a vertical differentiation between the Internet Service Providers endogenously emerges: the firm which provides the larger network has the lowest rate of congestion and the highest access price. The ISP providing the smallest network (thus the most congested) earns the larger profit. It will be noticed that the spontaneous functioning of oligopolistic competition produces a result similar to the Odlyzko's ‘Paris Metro Pricing’: at the equilibrium the two competitors propose different prices and rates of congestion, the most expensive one being also the least congested.     

LABOR LAWS AND FIRM PERFORMANCE

U.S. labor laws impose higher costs on unionized firms in states without right‐to‐work (RTW) laws. I find that these firms experience poor stock performance. The difference‐in‐differences analysis comparing the effect of RTW laws on unionized and nonunionized firms shows that unionized firms in states without RTW laws underperform by about 7 percentage points per year. I find further evidence of underperformance using alternative methods to estimate abnormal stock performance, examining a natural experiment, showing expected cross‐sectional patterns, and assessing profitability and the market reaction to earnings announcements.     

University Students’ Attitudes Towards Entrepreneurship: A Two Countries Comparison

There is general agreement that attitudes towards the entrepreneur, entrepreneurial activity, and its social function are determinant factors for university students to decide an entrepreneurial career.This empirical study aims at assessing and comparing the attitudes of university students towards entrepreneurship and enterprise formation in Catalonia and Puerto Rico, using a sample of 837 and 435 students, respectively.Results reveal a positive entrepreneur’s image. Both samples have a favorable perception of desirability of new venture creation, although the perception of feasibility is by far not so positive and only a small percentage has the firm intention to create a new company.     

Deployment of Restaurants Websites’ Marketing Features: The Case of Spanish Michelin-Starred Restaurants

ABSTRACT

Websites have become a fundamental marketing tool for tourism businesses and have a special importance for highly rated restaurants. The aim of this article is to propose and apply a model to evaluate the deployment and adoption of website marketing features of restaurants from a specific category. The model is based on the application of an extended model of Internet commerce adoption (eMICA) technique for technical depth, combined with content analysis for breadth. This study analyzes the website features and capabilities for Spanish restaurants in the 2015 Michelin Red Guide. A total of 102 restaurants were analyzed. The results of the website evaluation model suggest that, despite the importance of the restaurant sector in the economy and in the tourism industry, the websites of high-quality restaurants require improvements to adapt to customers’ demands. Results further found that these websites are not tourist-orientated and are established at different stages of development.     

Which factors improve the performance of the internationalization process? Focus on family firms

This study aimed to analyse the impact that the financial features and characteristics of the ownership structures of international companies exert on the performance of their internationalization process, as perceived by managers, and attempted to detect differences between family firms (FF) and nonfamily firms (non-FF). In addition, the impact of these characteristics and others related to FF, such as family ownership and generation, on the perceived performance of their internationalization is analysed. Based on a sample of Spanish companies with direct investment in China, the results indicated that, from the managers’ perspective, being an FF and having lower financial leverage exerted a positive effect on the performance of the internationalization process. Moreover, the study proved that this performance was strongly and positively related to the financial results of the company, and this positive effect was even stronger in the case of FF. Finally, the findings also showed that FF with a higher involvement of the family in their ownership recognized a better performance of their internationalization process. These results will be useful for companies that are considering the value of internationalization as a strategy to improve or maintain their financial results, and they also highlight certain differences between FF and non-FF.