The social media faces of major global financial service brands

With the advent of social media, brand management has become not only more difficult, but also increasingly critical to the credibility and reputation of firms. Moreover, consumer-generated content and its rapid diffusion takes control over advertising-intended messages away from brand managers. Financial services brand managers will not fully be able to control the destinies of their brands, but at the very least they need to be involved in the conversations that speak about their brand. This article suggests a powerful analytical tool Chernoff Faces, which can add to financial service brand managers’ arsenal.     

App service: How do consumers perceive the quality of financial service apps on smart devices?

Apps on smart devices such as phones and tablets have enabled financial services firms not only to provide greater convenience and flexibility to customers, but also to get them to do a lot of the work entailed in these services. This has changed the character of service in many ways, including the nature of service quality where service is no longer delivered by people, but by means of technology. The study reported here used an amended version of the SERVQUAL instrument to assess consumers’ perception of the quality of the service delivered by the apps of their financial services providers. Three dimensions of app service quality emerge: reliability, personal and visibles. Generally, consumers are reasonable satisfied with the quality of service provided by their financial apps and prefer them to visits to service providers physical locations and rate them as highly as online service provision on PCs or laptops. Limitations are acknowledged, managerial implications drawn and avenues for future research are identified.     

股东控制权结构与其对公司绩效影响研究

关于公司控制权的研究随着现代股份制公司的产生而产生和发展。本文对股东控制权结构做一个界定,利用Banzhaf权利指数法,将2007-2012年A股样本上市公司的前八大股东的股权比例转化成控制权比例,运用软件Eviews 5.0建立公司绩效的多元回归模型,说明股东控制权结构对公司绩效的影响。     

Leadership and group size: An experiment

Our experimental results suggest that the effectiveness of leading by example decreases with group size. The discrepancy between the leaders' and followers' incentives increases with group size. Thus, as group size increases, followers more often refuse to follow their leaders.     

Leadership and gender in groups: An experiment

We conduct a laboratory experiment to study gender differences in leadership. We strip the concept of leadership down to its most basic elements. Questions of style and evaluations of a leader based on style of leadership adopted are made irrelevant. Our leader is an average player who is distinguished merely by occupying the leadership position. Legitimacy is conferred on the leader by the special information possessed. Followers voluntarily choose whether or not to follow the better‐informed leader. The effectiveness of the leader is reduced to two simple factors: is the leader willing or not to voluntarily place him/herself in a vulnerable position to achieve an outcome beneficial to both the leader and his/her followers? Do followers trust their leaders to make the right choice? We provide experimental evidence that female leaders and followers are more cooperative than the males in most circumstances. Female leaders show a hesitation to lead in mixed‐gender environments with gender signalling in circumstances where followers' refusal to follow can significantly hurt them. The behaviour of the followers is the same toward the leaders regardless of their gender.     

Leadership based on asymmetric information

Rational players, unconstrained by contracts or formal authority, choose to follow a better‐informed leader, whose action reveals part of her information. If the leader satisfies a credibility condition, then the unique nondegenerate equilibrium solves distinct shirking and coordination problems and achieves the first best. If credibility fails, as is more likely for a large organization, then followers ignore the leader, and equilibria are very inefficient. Appointing multiple leaders, or a high‐cost leader, can restore credibility. If players invest privately in information, then a leader often appears endogenously. The equilibrium concept is an original extension of sequential equilibrium to continuous states.     

Leadership and information in a single‐shot collective action game: An experimental study

We consider a leader–follower mechanism in a collective action game, which exhibits both free riding and coordination problems. Leaders can persuade group cooperation by making a costly commitment to a project. Followers can choose to follow their leaders. The project's return can be transparent to all or only to the leaders. We show experimentally that when free riding is the dominant strategy of an informed subject, concentrating information in the hands of the leaders improves cooperation more effectively than a regime of information dispersal. The coordination problem, however, may be reduced more effectively in a regime of information dispersal. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The social media faces of major global financial service brands

With the advent of social media, brand management has become not only more difficult, but also increasingly critical to the credibility and reputation of firms. Moreover, consumer-generated content and its rapid diffusion takes control over advertising-intended messages away from brand managers. Financial services brand managers will not fully be able to control the destinies of their brands, but at the very least they need to be involved in the conversations that speak about their brand. This article suggests a powerful analytical tool Chernoff Faces, which can add to financial service brand managers’ arsenal.     

Go boldly!: Explore augmented reality (AR), virtual reality (VR), and mixed reality (MR) for business

It is not surprising that managers find it hard to distinguish similar-sounding, IT-based concepts such as augmented reality and virtual reality. To many, all of these constructs mean nearly the same and, as a result, the terms are often used interchangeably. This confusion holds back those eager to explore the different opportunities these new technologies present. This Executive Digest presents six different types of reality and virtual reality—(1) reality, (2) augmented reality, (3) virtual reality, (4) mixed reality, (5) augmented virtuality, and (6) virtuality—as part of our actual reality/virtual reality continuum. We then illustrate their differences using a common example and outline business applications for each type.     

Financial services Apps: What makes the difference between a great and a ghastly review?

Internet as we know it, has entered a spiral of decline while mobile Apps are gradually taking over and are steadily changing the way we go about our individual daily lives. This study examines the fact that certain financial services Apps are far more successful than others, specifically by looking at what makes a user think that an App may be great, and give it a favorable review, or that it is rather ghastly, and give it an unfavorable review. Next, we describe a study of six of the most popular financial services Apps on the iTunes App Store, for which reviews were analyzed using DICTION software. Employing Diction variables, ambivalence and temporal terms were prevalent in negative reviews while accomplishment, motion, optimism and certainty, were predominantly expressed in positive reviews. Human interest, on the other hand, seemed to be uniformly distributed between both types of reviews.