The power of positivity? The influence of positive psychological capital language on crowdfunding performance

We extend the entrepreneurship literature to include positive psychological capital — an individual or organization's level of psychological resources consisting of hope, optimism, resilience, and confidence — as a salient signal in crowdfunding. We draw from the costless signaling literature to argue that positive psychological capital language usage enhances crowdfunding performance. We examine 1726 crowdfunding campaigns from Kickstarter, finding that entrepreneurs conveying positive psychological capital experience superior fundraising performance. Human capital moderates this relationship while social capital does not, suggesting that costly signals may, at times, enhance the influence of costless signals. Post hoc analyses suggest findings generalize across crowdfunding types, but not to IPOs.     

Marketplace and personal space: Investigating the differential effects of attachment style across relationship contexts

An individual's tendencies in purely personal relationships seem to lead to related tendencies in consumer relationships. The following article presents a study that illustrates how individual differences in personal relationship attachment style can be used to predict the likely success of consumer relationships. In addition, it illustrates how the success of consumption versus nonconsumption relationships can be explained by the effect of attachment style on the individual's perception of qualities of the relationship. © 2006 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.     

Cost Structures and Nash Play in Repeated Cournot Games

This paper reports an experiment designed to assess the effects of a rotation in the marginal cost curve on convergence in a repeated Cournot triopoly. Increasing the cost curve's slope both reduces the serially-undominated set to the Nash prediction, and increases the peakedness of earnings. We observe higher rates of Nash equilibrium play in the design with the steeper marginal cost schedule, but only when participants are also rematched after each decision. Examination of response patterns suggests that the treatment with a steeper marginal cost curve and with a re-matching of participants across periods induces the selection of Nash Consistent responses.     

Meta-ethical Reasoning: Applied to Economics and Business Principles

A bstract . Ethics and ethical thinking involve two primary and interdependent elements of analysis: the individual and the society. Economic thought dichotomized these two elements into the individual (competitive capitalism ) or the society (Marxist socialism ), with one element being the cause, and the other the effect. Views of economic reality were developed not on the basis of the interdependence of the individual and the society but their mutual antagonism.
Economic thought is based on the scientific reasoning of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Its abstract definition of reality narrowed the significance of the concrete appearances of things in favor of the rules (science) that define things. Science requires both an objective causal order (independent of human definitions and beliefs) and the development of laws (independent of the human observer or participant) that explain the nature of the objective world. Ethical reasoning requires that economic causality be defined to include both the individual and the society. Ethical reasoning is needed to bring together both the scientific and the metaphysical for human meaning. The science of means must be joined to the human purposes of ends.     

Climate Change Taxes and Energy Efficiency in Japan

In 2003 Japan proposed a Climate Change Tax to reduce its CO₂ emissions to the level required by the Kyoto Protocol. If implemented, the tax would be levied on fossil fuel use and the revenue distributed to encourage the purchase of energy efficient equipment. Analysis using the MIT Emissions Prediction and Policy Analysis (EPPA) model shows that this policy is unlikely to bring Japan into compliance with its Kyoto target unless the subsidy encourages improvement in energy intensity well beyond Japan’s recent historical experience. Similar demand-management programs in the US, where there has been extensive experience, have not been nearly as effective as they would need to be to achieve energy efficiency goals of the proposal. The Tax proposal also calls for limits on international emission trading. We find that this limit substantially affects costs of compliance. The welfare loss with full emissions trading is 1/6 that when Japan meets its target though domestic actions only, the carbon price is lower, and there is a smaller loss of energy-intensive exports. Japan can achieve substantial savings from emissions trading even under cases where, for example, the full amount of the Russian allowance is not available in international markets.     

Book reviews

Abstract

This article examines the cultural field of fitness as a network of producers, consumers, products and practices that has developed around the care of the body through physical exercise. Drawing on a thematic text analysis of US exercise manuals, the paper focuses on how the commercial fitness field naturalizes associations between physical exercise and leisure, and between leisure and self‐work. In particular, the analysis examines three themes and their relevance to our broader understanding of leisure in contemporary consumer society: the management of leisure time; the use of leisure for self‐investment strategies; and the promotion of consumption as the framework for leisure and an accompanying notion of pleasure. The fitness field casts light on how leisure more generally is constructed as a sphere of obligations to make productive use of one’s time, to improve one’s body and self, and to do so through the wares of the consumer marketplace. The cultural imaginary of leisure as a time of freedom from work and responsibility is thus recast, in an age of individualization, as a time of freedom to accomplish the work of self‐production.     

Access to credit and informality among micro and small enterprises in Ethiopia

This paper examines the determinants of Micro and Small and Enterprises (MSEs) access to credit in Ethiopia using detailed firm‐level data collected in 2003. Its basic purpose is to identify the various attributes of a firm that determine its access to credit with an emphasis on the role of firm formality. We find that informal firms are more credit constrained compared to formal firms. A firm’s location, membership of a business association and maintaining an accounting record are found to be important determinants of access to credit. Further, we find firms whose owners have vocational training are more credit constrained than those who are not, as are firms that are exclusively male owned. There is no systematic relation between access to credit and a firm’s age, size and the sector in which it operates. The paper concludes with possible policy interventions designed to improve access to credit for MSEs in Ethiopia.     

Impact of the economic downturn on nursing schools

The challenges posed by the economic downturn on baccalaureate nursing schools in the southeast as it relates to their perceptions of changes in the number of applicants, acceptance rates, employer recruitment efforts, and student clinical and job placement were explored. Responses from deans and program directors indicated nursing schools are experiencing negative effects of the economic downturn in the form of graduates having difficulty finding employment, decreased recruitment efforts from prospective employers, difficulty locating clinical placements for students, and no change in faculty applicants despite an increase in undergraduate student applicants as well as graduate student applicants. These multiple factors combined could signal the death knell for programs that are ill-prepared to deal with such a crisis. Programs need to be aggressive in their efforts to draw health care recruiters as well as qualified faculty applicants to their campuses. Nursing schools must be able to clearly show why their graduates are superior to other programs' graduates when competing for both highly qualified faculty applicants and prospective student employers.