1991 Silver Plate winners. This year's nine IFMA award winners talk pride, politics and the future of the foodservice profession

What challenges lie ahead for the food-service industry? All nine candidates for the International Foodservice Manufacturers Association's 1991 Gold Plate share their views on building staff unity, improving government relations and other critical issues.     

Double Moral Hazard,Monitoring, and the Nature of Contracts

generalized double-sided moral-hazard model, with risk-averse parties who mutually monitor each other (to get a reasonable idea of outcome/effort). The model considers trade-off between monitoring costs and moral hazard costs, which are endogenously determined by the extent of monitoring. Using this model, we formally prove a generalized version of Coase's conjecture – that the optimal contract minimizes the agency and risk costs. We then show how varying assumptions about the feasibility or cost of monitoring of the outcome or the worker's effort lead to different contracts being optimal. The analysis is then used to explain the nature of contracts observed in practice under many different situations. We will give an explanation as to why industrial workers typically work under wage contracts, while share contracts are common in agriculture and will explain why profit sharing is more common for senior managers than for the production workers. Received September 19, 2000; revised version received October 30, 1997     

Determinacy with nominal assets and outside money

Summary. We build a finite horizon model with inside and outside money, in which interest rates, price levels and commodity allocations are determinate, even though asset markets are incomplete and asset deliveries are purely nominal.Received: 2 July 2003, Revised: 1 December 2004 JEL Classification Numbers: D50, E40, E50, E58.Correspondence to: J. Geanakoplos     

Exploring de-facto accountability regimes in Muslim NGOs

This paper aims to deepen and advance our understanding of the de-facto accountability processes and practices within Muslim non-governmental organisations (NGOs). We employ a three-fold accountability framework of felt, imposed and adaptive accountability, supported by insight from the Islamic perspective to elucidate our empirical findings. We adopt this framework because it enables us to localise the notions of accountability, allowing a more complete understanding of the de-facto nature of Muslim NGO accountability to emerge within the context of religious ideals and between accountabilities that are externally imposed and those that are internally generated.     

Product innovation for the people's car in an emerging economy

As product offerings of multinational enterprises (MNEs) continue to primarily serve the relatively well-to-do consumers in emerging economies, innovations to meet the unique affordability and acceptability criteria of masses at the base of the pyramid (BoP) continues to remain a daunting challenge. The academic literature is sparse on comprehensive in-depth studies about the intricate processes involved in shaping and managing technology development for the masses. Focusing on product innovation by Tata Motors of India with the Nano—the world's cheapest car, our case study aims to understand how the innovator's choices regarding the use of technology, product design and organizational practices for new product development enabled it to meet the challenge of innovation for India's masses. Drawing on Christensen's work on disruptive innovations, our analysis shows how frugal use of resources through a new combination of existing component technologies created a new modular product to achieve the unique price–performance requirements demanded by the BoP. Our findings show that collaboration with suppliers for component design and their early integration in the design phase substantially lowered costs and helped eliminate unnecessary frills whilst incorporating features valued by mass markets. Our study has important managerial implications for MNEs and provides critical insights into the processes for a new blueprint for an untapped market segment in the automobile industry.     

Herding behaviour and the declining value relevance of accounting information: evidence from an emerging stock market

This article sheds light on the underlying mechanisms behind the changes in the value relevance of accounting information in the Karachi Stock Exchange (KSE) during the 1999–2010 period. We find that neither changes in earnings quality nor the earnings lack of timeliness hypothesis can explain the decline in the value relevance of accounting information in the KSE. Based on the stylized facts associated with the growth of the KSE and the broader economics literature, we argue that the reduction in the explanatory power of accounting information vis-à-vis stock returns was caused by herding behaviour. Empirical estimates from state-space model of herding behaviour confirm the existence of herding, and we find that the value relevance of accounting information is significantly lower in periods characterized by herding behaviour. This article is also amongst the first attempts to empirically demonstrate that an expansionary monetary policy and increases in foreign portfolio investment lead to increased levels of herding.     

Awareness Advertising and International Market Segmentation

In recent years, multinational corporations have increasingly employed advertising in markets where their products are not available. Such ‘awareness advertising’ is only in small part for products that are likely to be introduced in those markets in the near future. A significant and larger part of awareness advertising is for products that are unlikely to be sold in the particular market because of government restrictions on commercial importation and sale. In this paper, we will analyse the motivation behind the use of awareness advertising, the benefits that multinational firms may receive from such advertising and its implications for international market segmentation. The paper concludes with a discussion of areas for fruitful future research on awareness advertising.     

LIQUIDITY AND MATURITY EFFECTS AROUND NEWS RELEASES

We study the effects of liquidity and term-to-maturity following macroeconomic news announcements. To do this we select five instruments that differ in liquidity, or term-to-maturity, or both, and examine their response to the release of macroeconomic news. The results from this study suggest that variance on announcement days is higher in more liquid, longer term-to-maturity instruments. When instruments differ in both term-to-maturity and liquidity, term-to-maturity effects dominate. Tests for persistence in higher volatility in the five instruments following news releases show that most of the effects of the announcements seem to be well absorbed within fifteen minutes of the announcements. However, the evidence also suggests that the effects persist for longer periods in instruments that are more liquid. Term-to-maturity appears to have little or no effect in this instance.