Are You a Chocolate Lover? An Investigation of the Repurchase Behavior of Chocolate Consumers

This study aimed to understand the factors affecting repurchase behavior of chocolate brands and, consequently, customer retention and acquisition. The study adopted a qualitative, inductive approach using in-depth interviews with 31 Australian consumers. The factors identified in the extant literature as antecedents of customers’ repurchase intention in the chocolate industry, including brand recognition, sales promotion, product price value, variety, taste, texture, size, packaging, and customer satisfaction, were confirmed. The results also indicated that functional value, product selection value, self-gratification value, socialization value, and transactional value were also considered during the consumer decision-making process. Implications for practitioners are provided.     

Pricing U.S. Dollar Index Futures Options: An Empirical Investigation

This paper develops a pricing model and empirically tests the pricing efficiency of options on the U.S. Dollar Index (USDX) futures contract. Empirical tests of the model indicate that the market consistently overprices these options relative to the derived model. This overpricing is more pronounced for out‐of‐the‐money options than for in‐the‐money options and more pronounced for put options than for call options. To validate the above results, delta neutral portfolios are created for one‐ and two‐day holding periods and consistently generate positive arbitrage profits, indicating that on average the market overprices the options on the USDX futures contracts.     

Firms’ fundamentals,macroeconomic variables and quarterly stock prices in the US

This paper modeled the effects of firms’ fundamentals such as total assets and long-term debt and of macroeconomic variables such as unemployment and interest rates on quarterly stock prices of over 3000 US firms in the period 2000–07. The merged CRSP/Compustat database was augmented by macroeconomic variables and comprehensive dynamic models were estimated by maximum likelihood taking into account heterogeneity across firms. Likelihood ratio statistics were developed for sequentially testing hypotheses regarding the adequacy of macroeconomic variables in the models. The main findings were that the estimated coefficients of lagged stock prices in simple dynamic random effects models were in the interval 0.90–0.95. Second, comprehensive dynamic models for stock prices showed that the firms’ earnings per share, total assets, long-term debt, dividends per share, and unemployment and interest rates were significant predictors; there were significant interactions between firms’ long-term debt and interest rates. Finally, implications of the results for corporate policies are discussed.     

Executive compensation, share repurchases and investment expenditures: econometric evidence from US firms

This paper modeled the dynamic inter-relationships between average salary, bonus, and stock options granted to top executives of 700 US firms using a merged ExecuComp and Compustat database. The effects of stock options granted and exercised on firms’ share repurchases and research and development and investment expenditures were investigated, taking into account simultaneity and distributional misspecification aspects. First, firms’ total assets, intangible assets, market-to-book value, and share repurchases were positively associated with the values of stock options granted. Second, stock options exercised in the previous year were significant predictors of share repurchases indicating that firms avoided dilution of earnings per share. Third, share repurchases and stock options granted were negatively associated with expenditures on research and development and long-term investments. Overall, the results suggest that high levels of stock options granted to executives and share repurchases are unlikely to have beneficial effects for raising future productivity.     

Market-based capabilities and financial performance of firms: insights into marketing’s contribution to firm value

While there is recognition that market-based capabilities contribute to a firm’s financial performance, the exposition is largely conceptual (Srivastava et al. Journal of Marketing 62:2–18, 1998; Journal of Marketing 63:168–179, 1999). Using a resource based view of the firm, the present study proposes that (1) market-based assets and capabilities of a firm impacts (2) performance in three market-facing business processes (new product development, supply-chain and customer management), which in turn, influence (3) the firm’s financial performance. It develops related hypotheses and tests the framework empirically. The study also examines for the first time the interrelationship among the three business processes and their impact on the market value of firms. Further, the study examines the moderating influence of two organizational variables—size and age of the firm. Overall, the major contribution of the study is that it offers a process linkage between capabilities, process performance and financial performance. The results of this research will provide strategic insights to managers on optimal customer management, product development and supply chain strategies.

A testable model of consumption with externalities

This paper presents a nonparametric model of interdependent preferences, where an individual's consumption may act as an externality on the preferences of other consumers. We assume that individual price consumption data is observed for all consumers. It is known that the general consumption model with externalities imposes few restrictions on the observed data, where the consistency requirement is Nash rationalizability. We motivate potential games as an important sub class of games where the family of concave potential games is refutable and imposes stronger restrictions on observed data. We use this framework to extend the analysis of Brown and Matzkin [D. Brown, R. Matzkin, Testable restrictions on the equilibrium manifold, Econometrica 64 (1996) 1249-1262] on refutable pure exchange economies to pure exchange economies with externalities. Finally, we discuss an application of this model to inter-household consumption data.     

Exploiting International Stock Market Correlations with Open-end International Mutual Funds

Investors can exploit the correlations between international stock markets by trading no-load, open-end, international mutual funds. These investors in effect cheat passive investors because they buy the mutual funds at their net asset values, which do not reflect information released during the US trading day. The strategy we examine yields an annual rate of return 800 basis points above the S&P500, over a period of almost eight years.     

Optimality of balanced designs for minimum norm quadratic unbiased estimation of variance components

This paper develops an approximate theory for the optimality of balanced designs under minimum norm quadratic unbiased estimation of variance components in one-way classified data.