Uncertainty in Prerelease Advertising

Firms frequently advertise products and services before they are launched. Yet how to best design such advertisements is not well understood. The current article investigates how consumers respond to uncertainty in prerelease advertisements. Across five studies, including both field and lab studies, we first provide evidence for the positive effect of uncertain prerelease advertisements using real consumer behavior on Facebook and YouTube and at the box office. Next, we uncover the mechanism underlying this effect (i.e., inflated outcome expectancies), outline a managerially relevant boundary condition (i.e., the positive effect reverses when a preorder opportunity is offered), and demonstrate that the effect of uncertainty on consumer response differs in prerelease versus postrelease advertisements depending on consumers’ perceived risk. Finally, we discuss implications for marketing research as well as for the design of prerelease advertisements for stimulating prerelease buzz and word of mouth.     

Processes of non-identification: Business school brands and academic faculty

This paper examines the internal implications of branding within higher education, a specific context which is dominated by the co-existence of strong professional logics and identity structures. We focus on how and whether academic faculty identify with the branding practices undertaken by their respective institution. The paper proposes a communicative perspective on brand identification to understand how academic faculty relate to and make sense of the brand. The findings, from responses of 65 faculty members at five business schools, indicate widespread indifference and non-identification with brand messages. Specifically, we identify four types of disconnects between faculty members and branding practices of their respective schools, namely ambiguity, emptiness, misalignment, and irrelevance. The evidence of these disconnects, we argue, suggests that the faculty members refrain from relating the brand to their own identities. Although individuals relate to discourses around the brand, these are often not internalized and do not thereby impact on their individual identity. Rather than navigating between identity tensions, they eschew identification altogether. We contribute to research on how branding works inside contemporary organizations – including higher education - through questioning the role of identity in branding processes seen as the management of meaning.     

A critical review of empirical research on open innovation adoption

The open innovation approach has been one of the most discussed topics in innovation management literature in the 2000s. Over the past few years, academic publications on open innovation have increased substantially. This paper attempts to summarize and review the state-of-the-art of empirical open innovation research and develop new opportunities for open innovation research in the future. In order to make the papers more comparable, a clear focus on large-scale quantitative-oriented studies was set. From a total of 282 documents, 30 studies were analyzed in detail along four key dimensions: Firstly, different methods of measuring open innovation adoption are compared. Then, the level of open innovation adoption is analyzed on a general basis. Thirdly, the level of adoption is compared at the level of the open innovation mode (inbound and outbound). Finally, the study results regarding the variables that influence open innovation adoption are compared and conclusions for future research directions are drawn.     

How Can We Better Understand Current and Future Workforce Values in the Global Business Environment?

Our study tested the predictive power of socioeconomic development theory and age differences theory to explain work values across cultures and across age groups. We compared the values orientations of future managers, business students under the age of 25, with those of current managers and professionals, who we split into three decade groups (30 to 39, 40 to 49, and 50 to 59). Our respondents (n = 1,518) come from six diverse societies: Brazil, Germany, Indonesia, Russia, the United States, and Vietnam. Our findings indicate that both theories contribute to our understanding of work values and behaviors. One implication is that while socioeconomic development theory makes an important contribution, it is clearly not sufficient by itself to explain work values/behavior differences in the global context. The study findings and the discussion of them will hopefully provide multinational managers with a clearer assessment of current and future workforce values/behavior. © 2012 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.     

Auditing Quality of Research in Social Sciences

A growing body of studies involves complex research processes facing many interpretations and iterations during the analyses. Complex research generally has an explorative in-depth qualitative nature. Because these studies rely less on standardized procedures of data gathering and analysis, it is often not clear how quality was insured or assured. However, one can not easily find techniques that are suitable for such complex research processes to assess the quality of the study. In this paper, we discuss and present a suitable validation procedure. We first discuss how ‘diagnosing’ quality involves three generic criteria. Next, we present findings of previous research in possible procedures to assure the quality of research in social sciences. We introduce the audit procedure designed by Halpern [(1983) Auditing Naturalistic Inquiries: The Development and Application of a Model. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, Indiana University] we found an appropriate starting point for a suitable procedure for quality judgment. Subsequently, we will present a redesign of the original procedure, with according guidelines for the researcher (the auditee) and for the evaluator of the quality of the study (the auditor). With that design, we aim to enable researchers to bring forward their explorative qualitative studies as stronger and more equally valuable to studies that can rely on standardized procedures.     

Attitudes towards immigration—Perceived consequences and economic self-interest

Using the European Social Survey 2002/3, we develop a new test of whether economic self-interest influences people's attitudes towards immigration, exploiting that people have widely different perceptions of the consequences of immigration.     

UNCOVERING THE COMMON RISK‐FREE RATE IN THE EUROPEAN MONETARY UNION

We introduce longitudinal factor analysis (LFA) to extract the common risk‐free (CRF) rate from a sample of sovereign bonds of countries in a monetary union. Since LFA exploits the typically very large longitudinal dimension of bond data, it performs better than traditional factor analysis methods that rely on the much smaller cross‐sectional dimension. European sovereign bond yields for the period 2006–2011 are decomposed into a CRF rate, a default risk premium and a liquidity risk premium. Our empirical findings suggest that investors chase both credit quality and liquidity, and that they price double default risk on credit default swaps. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

A local search algorithm for the optimization of the stochastic economic lot scheduling problem

This paper describes a model for the stochastic economic lot scheduling problem (SELSP) and a Local Search heuristic to find close to optimal solutions to this model. The SELSP considers multiple products, which have to be scheduled on a single facility with limited capacity and significant setup times and costs. The demand is modeled as a stationary compound renewal process. The objective is to find a schedule that minimizes the long-run average costs for setups and inventories while satisfying a given fill rate. We use a cyclic scheduling approach in which the individual cycle time of each product is a multiple of some basic period (fundamental cycle).For the deterministic version of the SELSP, efficient heuristics have been developed which guarantee the feasibility of the solution by adding an additional constraint to the problem. In our case this is not sufficient, because for the calculation of the average inventory levels and fill rates we need to develop a schedule with detailed timing of the lots. We present an efficient heuristic for this scheduling problem, which can also be used to check the feasibility of the solution. Thereby, the most time-consuming step (the calculation of average inventory levels and fill rates) is only performed for a limited set of candidates.The algorithm was tested on deterministic benchmark problems from literature and on a large set of stochastic instances. We report on the performance of the heuristic in both cases and try to identify the main factors influencing the objective.