international marketing policy a discussion of the standardization construct and its relevance for corporate policy a fundamental question in international marketing concerns the desirability and feasibility of standardizing marketing programs and procedures internationally the primary objective of this paper is to present an overview and evaluation of the standardization debate central issues of interest include a discussion of the standardization construct and an evaluation of the evidence regarding corporate implementation of standardization strategies

black agricultural economists in the labor market theoretical and empirical issues the american economic association aea and the american agricultural economics association aaea have had a long tradition of monitoring the labor market characteristics for economists and agricultural economists evaluations of labor market conditions for economists are represented by the works of breneman and kleinman clague and levine tolles jones and clague and tolles and melichar labor market characteristics for agricultural economists have been evaluated by helmberger melichar schotzko lee broder and ziemer and strauss and tarr it is somewhat surprising however given the emphasis on resource allocation efficiency and equity among economists that no comprehensive research has been conducted on the labor market characteristics of black economists and agricultural economists despite the failure of economists to apply their analytical tools to the issues of participation by blacks in the economists labor market it is significant that the aea demonstrated awareness of the problem and issues in this area in 1969 when it sponsored a session entitled increasing the supply of black economists at its annual meeting at this session boulding argued cogently that the cultureboundness of economists was an obvious factor associated with the profession s neglect of problems of particular interest to disadvantaged racial and cultural groups concurrently chandler addressed the status of blacks in the economics profession and presented an affirmative action plan for the profession

individual risk attitudes measurement determinants and behavioral consequences this paper studies risk attitudes using a large representative survey and a complementary experiment conducted with a representative subject pool in subjects homes using a question asking people about their willingness to take risks in general we find that gender age height and parental background have an economically significant impact on willingness to take risks the experiment confirms the behavioral validity of this measure using paid lottery choices turning to other questions about risk attitudes in specific contexts we find similar results on the determinants of risk attitudes and also shed light on the deeper question of stability of risk attitudes across contexts we conduct a horse race of the ability of different measures to explain risky behaviors such as holdings stocks occupational choice and smoking the question about risk taking in general generates the best all round predictor of risky behavior

risk preferences around the world we present results from a large scale international survey on risk preferences conducted in 53 countries in all countries we find on average an attitude of risk aversion in gains and of risk seeking in losses the degree of risk aversion shows significant cross country differences moreover risk attitudes in our sample depend not only on economic conditions but also on cultural factors as measured by the hofstede dimensions individualism and uncertainty avoidance the data may also serve as an interesting starting point for further research on cultural differences in behavioral economics data as supplemental material are available at http dx doi org 10 1287 mnsc 2013 1869 this paper was accepted by peter wakker decision analysis

language friction and partner selection in cross border r d alliance formation how does language friction affect alliance formation language friction is a form of cultural friction arising from structural differences in the respective languages used by potential partners to reason and solve problems together a little language friction may prompt partners to rethink solutions thereby enhancing collaboration but excessive friction may impede collaboration we develop a language friction index lfi to quantify relative differences in linguistic structure for any language pair utilizing a unique data set of semiconductor design activities 1988 2001 our empirical analysis finds an inverted u shaped relationship between partners lfi and the likelihood of cross border research and development rd 2 the effects of language friction are economically significant and strategically consequential 3 certain aspects of language friction occur independent of language proficiency and persist despite the use of lingua franca to reduce language barriers 4 linguistic diversity is an indirect marker of cognitive diversity which is useful in boosting creativity especially in first time collaborations 5 beyond r d alliances language friction may also influence other types of strategic interactions and organizational processes

standardization preferences a function of national culture work interdependence and local embeddedness both theoretical and empirical studies of professional service employee standardization preferences are relatively scarce using responses from 398 employees of an international public relations firm this study finds that employees from high power distance high uncertainty avoidance and high context cultures prefer greater standardization whereas employees from high individualism cultures prefer less standardization additionally work interdependence is positively associated with standardization preferences whereas local embeddedness is negatively associated with standardization preferences

determinants of agricultural economics faculty salaries in the spring of 1980 500 randomly selected agricultural economists at land grant universities were asked to complete a pretested mailed questionnaire the questionnaire was designed to secure individual information and preserve respondent anonymity the 311 returned questionnaires represented a response rate of nearly 60 two hundred and forty one of the respondents held ph d degrees these individuals formed the sample for the following analysis 2

interpreting societal culture value dimensions societal cultural value dimension scholarship can both learn from and inform the family of interrelated approaches to culture research in ib that appear in recent commentaries it can exchange insights about societal values and meaning systems with neo institutional and institutional logics research it can also exchange insights with dual processing cognition theories that are used to understand individuals in an international context by treating societal culture values and institutional characteristics as essential to interpreting personal values and attitudes rather than merging them integrating culture related specialties by exchanging insights can promote the further development of research in each of these societal and individual level fields

assets and actions firm specific factors in the internationalization of u s internet firms by providing a nearly instant connection among parties at opposite corners of the world and enabling a variety of commercial exchanges the internet emerged as the technology expected to create a truly global market space internet firms faced the challenge of capitalizing on this development in this paper we examine what firm specific factors are associated with the propensity of pure u s based internet firms to enhance their international presence on the internet by developing country specific websites despite the assertion that all internet firms are born global our findings show that the pursuit of internationalization by internet firms is related to the levels of their intangible assets and strategic activity two types of intangible assets reputation and website traffic are positively related to the degree of internationalization so are the levels of competitive and cooperative activity and the interaction effects between reputation and competitive and cooperative activity these findings suggest that ideas from both resource based theory and research on competitive dynamics can contribute to understanding the internationalization of internet firms

individualism and confucian dynamism a note on hofstede s cultural root to economic growth hofstede and his associates have presented statistical evidence purporting to identify a link between national culture and economic growth this note describes two problems with this line of research first two of the dimensions of culture used in this research individualism and confucian dynamism are treated as if they are independent when in fact they appear to be highly interrelated and second culture is not a sufficient condition to explain economic growth and is related to other important factors that play a role in determining economic growth the consequences of these problems on interpretation of the research findings are discussed and recommendations for future research directions are proposed

influence of formalization on role stress organizational commitment and work alienation of salespersons a cross national comparative study organizations rely on formalization to coordinate the efforts of employees however this practice has been found to have a negative influence on role stress organizational commitment and work alienation of salespersons though the negative influence of formalization in the united states has been known for some time we still cannot predict if similar relationships would should be observed in other countries because the rationale developed to explain these relationships in the united states did not consider the cultural factors that influence them with such knowledge it would become possible to anticipate the nature of the relationship in different cultural environments such an approach to developing cross national models has been often suggested but seldom implemented by emphasizing the role of culture this study generates practical guidelines for both practitioners and theorists

two period production planning and inventory control we study a single product two period production inventory model in which the demands at each period are independent random variables to optimally satisfy these random demands quantities can be produced at the beginning of each period using slow or fast production mode under capacity constraints in addition to the usual decision variables for such models we consider that a certain quantity can be salvaged at the beginning of each period such salvage processes are useful if the initial inventory of a period is considered to be too high the unsatisfied demands for each period are backlogged to be satisfied during the next periods after the end of the second period a last quantity is produced in order to satisfy remaining orders and to avoid lost sales the remaining inventory if any is salvaged we formulate this model using a dynamic programming approach we prove the concavity of the global objective function and we establish the closed form expression of the second period optimal policy then via a numerical solution approach we solve the first period problem and exhibit the structure of the corresponding optimal policy we provide insights via numerical examples that characterize the basic properties of our model and the effect of some significant parameters such as costs demand variabilities or capacity constraints

a cross national investigation of industrial salespeople s ethical perceptions this study examines ethical perceptions of industrial salespeople in the united states japan and south korea marketing ethics in general and selling ethics in particular have experienced increasing research attention many of the empirical studies have focused on ethical situations confronting marketing and sales practitioners despite the abundance of research in the general topic of marketing ethics as well as the globalization of competition in recent years a topic that has been virtually ignored is whether ethical perceptions of sales personnel are consistent across countries this paper reports a cross national comparison of business ethics of industrial salespeople across the three countries the findings indicate that nationality influences salespeople s beliefs about the ethics of selling practices and the need for company policies to guide those practices

on the determinants of household debt maturity choice this article jointly analyses a behavioural and a cultural concept to explain household debt portfolio choice the behavioural approach explores the role of time preferences on household debt maturity in a theoretical model and a numerical analysis we derive a positive relationship between the long term discount factor and the optimal maturity of household loans the cultural approach examines whether national culture is a reasonable predictor for household debt maturity we show that culture is an important factor for households borrowing decisions and has even more predictive power than time preferences countries with higher scores on the hofstede dimension of long term orientation tend to have shorter household debt maturity time preferences incur a primarily mediating role because the effect of national culture on the borrowing decision is reduced as the long term discount factor increases

cultural influences on managerial choice an empirical study of employee benefit plans in the united states the objective of this study is to determine the effect of culture on the provision of employee benefits cultural influences have been investigated from a variety of perspectives but not in the context of pension and welfare benefits using unique data this study analyzes the level of coverage of employee benefits in the united states results indicate that culture does have an effect on the provision of these benefits

nationality and subsidiary ownership patterns in multinational corporations this paper examines the notion that the multinational s nationality influences its foreign subsidiary ownership decisions it identifies theoretically meaningful constructs to represent nationality and examines under carefully controlled conditions their influence on subsidiary ownership preferences in american and european multinationals the paper concludes that there are indeed significant differences in ownership preferences among various nationalities that can be explained using cultural as well as economic variables but that these differences may become weaker in larger multinationals

reducing the cost of demand uncertainty through accurate response to early sales traditionally fashion products have incurred high losses due to stockouts and inventory obsolence because long lead times coupled with a concentrated selling season force all or at least most production to be committed before demand information is available under a quick response system lead times are shortened sufficiently to allow a greater portion of production to be scheduled in response to initial demand we model and analyze the decisions required under quick response and give a method for estimating the demand probability distributions needed in our model we applied these procedures with a major fashion skiwear firm and found that cost relative to the current informal response system was reduced by enough to increase profits by 60 relative to the cost that would have been incurred if no response were used optimized response reduces cost by enough to roughly quadruple profits

national culture and dividend policy this interdisciplinary study examines how national culture affects corporate dividend policies the dividend puzzle is one of the most studied yet unresolved issues in financial economics prior theoretical and empirical research has suggested several explanations of the dividend puzzle that are rooted mainly in agency asymmetric information bird in hand and pecking order theories the main intuition behind our analysis is that dividend policy may be determined not only by an objective assessment of the severity of agency and asymmetric information problems within a firm but also by management s and investors subjective perceptions of these problems which hinge on their national culture using schwartz s national culture dimensions conservatism and mastery we find that conservatism is positively related and mastery negatively related to dividend payouts for a sample of 27 462 firm years from 21 countries between 1995 and 2007 these effects are robust to controls for a wide variety of other determinants of dividend policy including investor protection stock market performance financial system configuration tax advantage economic development and dividend catering premium and to alternative culture proxies and sub period windows our findings that national culture affects perceptions of and responses to agency and information asymmetry have important implications for policymakers and multinational enterprises

assessing the effects of culture on managerial attitudes a three culture test cross cultural studies are inherently difficult because the typical research design fails to differentiate cultural from other environmental influences the present study uses a research design that attempts to isolate the influence of culture japanese chinese and mexican managers their ethnic american counterparts and anglo americans are used to test the model results indicate unique persistent cultural characteristics with the cultural effect varying among the three groups of managers

the impact of journals and authors on international business research a citational analysis of jibs articles in this paper we use citational analysis to examine the influence of individuals and disciplines on international business research we collected citational data over the ten year period 1984 to 1993 from every issue of the journal of international business studies we found that management economics marketing and finance disciplines have had significant influence on international business research and identified researchers such as dunning porter vernon casson rugman and hofstede as having made significant contributions to international business research

efficient supply contracts for fashion goods with forecast updating and two production modes we examine the problem of developing supply contracts that encourage proper coordination of forecast information and production decisions between a manufacturer and distributor of high fashion seasonal products operating in a two mode production environment the first production mode is relatively cheap but requires a long lead time while the second is expensive but offers quick turnaround we focus on contracts of the form w1 w2 b wherewi is the wholesale price offered for production modei andb is a return price offered for items left over at the end of the season we find that such a contract can coordinate the manufacturer and distributor to act in the best interest of the channel the pricing conditions needed to ensure an efficient solution vary depending on the degree of demand forecast improvement between periods and the manufacturer s access to forecast information we also examine whether these conditions ensure a pareto optimal solution with respect to two traditional production settings

labor market segmentation to what paradigm does it belong the dictionary defines a paradigm as a model or pattern in grammar an example of a conjugation or declension showing a word in all its inflectional forms a paradigm is thus a practical example which perfectly illustrates an abstract principle its hallmark in this dictionary definition is the complete correspondence between the abstract and the applied between theory and praxis the term was adapted to the discussion of scientific theory by thomas kuhn and its current vogue in economics is attributable directly to his book as kuhn used the term paradigm retains its double meaning of theory and of praxis but the relationship between the two becomes ambiguous scientists believe kuhn seems to argue that their inquiry is based upon a theory of how the world operates and how the investigation of its operation ought to proceed but normal science is in fact largely a set of practices in which members of a given scientific community customarily engage students seeking to follow their professors in careers in which the latter will judge them and ultimately determine their fate are not encouraged to andertake projects which depart radically from those which their professors conceive for them when suggestions for such projects trise either from students or competing nembers of the community they are as often reated by sarcasm and ridicule as the subect of seasoned discourse and debate in this rocess what students acquire is less an abtract understanding of what they are doing han a set of habits or instincts about what constitutes a legitimate mode of inquiry or a plausible explanation the disjuncture between theory and practice which arises in this way creates the potential for a scientific revolution to ask in this context about the paradigm to which notions of labor market segmentation belong is thus to ask a question about the relationship between that mode of research and the theory and practice of normal economics i never considered myself a revolutionary indeed quite the contrary but as an exponent of labor market segmentation in the community of normal economics i can assure you that labor market segmentation does not fit the paradigm the sentiments and reactions which kuhn tells us greet the abnormal and aparadigmatic in a discipline that is fury disdain resentment sarcasm and condescension have definitely greeted labor market segmentation this is a matter of fact an observation about praxis the question is then what aspect of the conceptual structure of the discipline accounts for this practical result in most discussions labor market segmentation is contrasted with human capital theory but this does not account for the hostile reception it has received it fails first because the treatment accorded market segmentation by the profession is not that different from the treatment accorded human capital when it first appeared gary becker describes his personal experience on this score in the introduction to his book of essays the economic approach to human behavior and the disdain and antagonism which he attributes to his colleagues are at least as great as anything experienced by the proponents of segmentation but perhaps more fundamentally the two views are not as we shall see shortly necessarily in conflict professor of economics mitsui professor for probems of contemporary technology massachusetts intitute of technology

national culture and corporate debt maturity abstract we investigate the influence of national culture on corporate debt maturity choice based on the framework of williamson we argue that culture located in social embeddedness level can shape contracting environments by serving as an informal constraint that affects human actors incentives and choices in market exchange we therefore expect national culture to be related to debt maturity structure after controlling for legal political financial and economic institutions using hofstede s four cultural dimensions uncertainty avoidance collectivism power distance and masculinity as proxies for culture and using a sample of 114 723 firm years from 40 countries over the 1991 2006 period we find robust evidence that firms located in countries with high uncertainty avoidance high collectivism high power distance and high masculinity tend to use more short term debt we interpret our results as consistent with the view that national culture helps explain cross country variations in the maturity structure of corporate debt

social interaction and stock market participation we propose that stock market participation is influenced by social interaction in our model any given social investor finds the market more attractive when more of his peers participate we test this theory using data from the health and retirement study and find that social households those who interact with their neighbors or attend church are substantially more likely to invest in the market than non social households controlling for wealth race education and risk tolerance moreover consistent with a peer effects story the impact of sociability is stronger in states where stock market participation rates are higher

national culture and life insurance consumption this cross disciplinary study examines the way national culture affects consumption patterns of life insurance across countries life insurance is a service that is abstract complex and focused on unsure future benefits because of the uncertainty and ambiguity inherent in the life insurance product consumers are more likely to respond according to their cultural prescriptions our research hypotheses are tested empirically using hofstede s cultural dimensions and data from 1976 2001 across 41 countries the findings show that individualism indeed has a significant positive effect on life insurance consumption whereas power distance and masculinity femininity have significant negative effects the results are robust even after controlling for economic institutional and demographic determinants

national culture and expatriate deployment we hypothesize that expatriate deployment is a control function predicted by home country culture dimensions with transaction cost and agency repercussions rather than culture in the aggregate this departure from the traditional conceptualization and measurement of cultural impact also yields a hypothesized asymmetrical effect which is tested for a multi country sample of 236 multinational subsidiaries using multiple measures of national culture hypotheses are supported with assertiveness and power distance confirmed as prime predictors of expatriate deployment

does culture influence asset managers views and behavior abstract this research enters new ground by presenting comparative survey evidence on asset managers views and behavior in the united states germany japan and thailand relying on hofstede s four cultural dimensions we find that cultural differences are most helpful in understanding country differences which cannot be explained by pure economic reasoning in short controlling for various determinants the dimension of more individualism predicts less herding behavior more power distance leads to older and comparatively less experienced managers in the upper hierarchy masculinity brings men into top positions and to higher volumes of assets under personal responsibility and uncertainty avoidance is related to higher safety margins against the tracking error allowed and relatively more research effort these consequences i e the culturally different importance of herding age experience gender tracking error and research effort clearly affect investment behavior although in a complex way

inventory model for an inventory system with time varying demand rate abstract the standard inventory problems of the multi period have been modeled under different situations specifically we have considered the demand subjects of a continuous distribution and a discrete distribution and whether the demand of each period is unchanged or not a method to get an economic order quantity in inventory systems with discrete and unchanged demand was presented in a previous paper and this method has been generalized to an inventory model with varying continuous demand however it was not achieved due to there being many classified cases in the general situations in this article the above method is discussed in the case discrete demand to determine whether it increases or decreases from period to period a theoretical method is presented by using previous results and some examples are given which suggest how the concept can handle on inventory system in order to make the decision an algorithm is also presented under some conditions and examples are shown by using the computer software program mathematica which helps to explain the findings in general cases we view the optimal policy in the inventory problems in only a few periods

does a dollar get you a dollar s worth of merchandise the impact of power distance belief on price quality judgments the role of cultural factors in influencing price perceptions is not understood well in the literature the present research seeks to fill this gap by examining the link between power distance belief the acceptance and endorsement of power disparities in society and the tendency to use the price of a product to judge its quality the underlying processes and boundary conditions three studies show that consumers high vs low in power distance belief have a greater tendency to use price to judge quality because they have a greater need for structure which makes them more likely to discriminate between brands and rank them based on price the relationships held regardless of whether the price to quality relation was assessed using a standard self report scale or via actual product judgments and whether power distance belief was measured or manipulated the effect was found to be independent of self construal holistic thinking and risk aversion was mediated by a need for structure and disappeared when the tendency to order was facilitated impeded by making price more less salient theoretical implications are discussed

the cultural relativity of organizational practices and theories this paper summarizes the author s recently published findings about differences in people s work related values among 50 countries in view of these differences ethnocen tric management theories those based on the value system of one particular country have become untenable this concept is illustrated for the fields of leadership organization and motivation a key issue for organization science is the influence of national cultures on introduction management twenty or even 10 years ago the existence of a relationship be management and tween management and national cultures was far from obvious to many and it national cultures may not be obvious to everyone even now in the 1950s and 60s the dominant be lief at least in europe and the u s was that management was something univer sal there were principles of sound management which existed regardless of na tional environments if national or local practice deviated from these principles it was time to change local practice in the future the universality of sound manage ment practices would lead to societies becoming more and more alike this ap plied even to the poor countries of the third world which would become rich as well and would be managed just like the rich countries also the differences be tween management in the first and second world capitalist and socialist would disappear in fact under the surface they were thought to be a lot smaller than was officially recognized this way of thinking which dominated the 1950s and 60s is known as the convergence hypothesis during the 1970s the belief in the unavoidable convergence of management prac tices waned it was too obviously in conflict with the reality we saw around us at the same time supranational organizations like the european common market which were founded very much on the convergence belief had to recognize the stubbornness of national differences even within existing nations regional dif ferences became more rather than less accentuated the welsh the flemish the basques the bangladeshi the quebecois defended their own identity and this was difficult to reconcile with a management philosophy of convergence it slowly became clear that national and even regional cultures do matter for management the national and regional differences are not disappearing they are here to stay in fact these differences may become one of the most crucial problems for man agement in particular for the management of multinational multicultural orga nizations whether public or private

salary patterns of agricultural economists in the early 1980s systematic explanation of wages in the service sector typically has been hampered by the absence of information on physical productivity of service workers frequently the analyst must rely on input information and make strong assumptions about the transformation of inputs and cost into outputs to model the long run pattern of wages in the service sector it may be sufficient to look primarily at relative wages and long term demand factors such as income and population a number of professions in the service sector have been successfully modeled using the familiar cobweb formulation for example hansen et al report the results of estimating a multiequation model of the long run supply and demand for economists generally and conclude among other things that the real salary of new ph d s will fall throughout this decade short run analysis of academic wages usually focuses on various sorts of earnings functions in which the natural log of earnings is regressed against a variety of human capital variables there is an extensive literature on the determinants of general economists salaries and on the determinants of salaries for agricultural economists on salary determinants see for example boddy hansen weisbrod and strauss strauss tolles and melichar and tuckman gapinski and hagemann among others which have examined various aspects of the general market for economists for agricultural economists salaries see for example broder and ziemer 1980 1982 fuller helmberger lane lee lundeen and clausen melichar peck and babb schotzko schrimper ziemer broder and spurlock and redman the more recent literature has emphasized the importance of using actual productivity measures such as publications in explaining variations in earnings along with human capital variables a deficiency in some of this second type of research involves the absence of a welldefined theoretical justification for particular statistical specifications and the reliance on single equation models the objective of this study is to take advantage of a new relatively underutilized data source on agricultural economists in order to examine the general characteristics of agricultural economists and to examine the determinants of their salaries in the early 1980s in particular we examine the 1981 registry of agricultural economists maintained by the american agricultural economics association and the illinois department of labor the registry when examined in conjunction with melichar and unpublished 1976 tabulations of the association s membership list indicate that it is broadly representative of the profession the plan of the paper is as follows the next section describes the data base and provides some general characteristics of agricultural economists in the early 1980s then we examine salary patterns of agricultural economists in various types of employment and focus in more detail on the salaries of academicians especially those who are from and at educational institutions with doctoral programs which have been ranked in terms of the quality of their faculty and in terms of the quality of their graduate programs special attention is paid to the salaries of female agricultural economists and differences in salaries attributable to the race ethnicity of agricultural economists we conclude with a prospectus on outstanding research issues robert p strauss is a professor of economics and public policy school of urban and public affairs carnegie mellon university michael j tarr is a student at cornell university the authors wish to express their gratitude to the aaea and dr emanuel melichar for making unpublished data available for this study and to farm foundation for financial support responsibility for the views and any errors in this paper rests solely with the authors

personal selling elasticities a meta analysis abstract this article presents a meta analysis of prior econometric estimates of personal selling elasticity that is the ratio of the percentage change in an objective ratio scaled measure of sales output e g dollar or unit purchases to the corresponding percentage change in an objective ratio scaled measure of personal selling input e g dollar expenditures the authors conduct a meta analysis of 506 personal selling elasticity estimates drawn from analyses of 88 empirical data sets across 75 previous articles they find a mean estimate of current period personal selling elasticity of 34 they also find that elasticity estimates are higher for early life cycle stage offerings higher from studies set in europe than from those set in the united states and smaller in more recent years in addition elasticity estimates are affected significantly by analysts use of relative rather than absolute sales output measures by cross sectional rather than panel data by omission of promotions by lagge

optimal policy structure characterization for a two period dual sourcing inventory control model with forecast updating a proposed single product stochastic two period inventory control model combines demand forecast updating with the flexibility of two supply sources demand is modeled by two independent random variables over a two period selling season at the beginning of the first period two quantities are ordered using two different supply options a local supplier who delivers the ordered quantity immediately and a second supplier who delivers the ordered quantity at the beginning of the second period the local supplier charges a higher cost per ordered unit the model considers an initial inventory so the decision maker has an opportunity at the beginning of the first period to return part of the available inventory to the supplier or sell it in a parallel market at the end of the first period any unsatisfied demand is backlogged to be satisfied in the next period at the beginning of the second period exogenous market information updates the second period demand forecast according to this updated forecast and the actual inventory level an additional quantity is ordered using the local procurement source or another quantity is returned to the supplier or sold in a parallel market with a dynamic programming approach this research exhibits the structure of the optimal policy characterized by order up to and salvage up to levels the findings provide the structure of the second period conditional optimal policy and analytical insights that characterize the first period optimal policy furthermore a numerical study reveals the impact of information quality on the optimal policy and the trade off between the two procurement options

national culture and the choice of exchange rate regime abstract based on the social analysis framework of williamson we argue that national culture especially the individualism collectivism dimension located in the social embeddedness level can guide behaviors and decisions in a country including the choice of exchange rate regime we argue that individualistic societies are more likely to choose floating regimes because their economic agents are independent overconfident and have higher levels of risk tolerance individualistic societies are also associated with better financial development fewer capital controls and more democratic institutions which are all tied to a higher probability of choosing a floating exchange rate regime we use data on 78 countries over the 1976 2014 period and we control for common determinants of exchange rate regimes we find that individualistic countries have a significantly higher probability of implementing a floating regime than a fixed regime our evidence is robust to using an instrumental variables approach an alternative estimation technique an alternative regime classification alternative proxies for culture a subsample analysis and additional controls we also find that other cultural dimensions uncertainty avoidance power distance and masculinity can influence the choice of exchange rate regime but their effect is weaker than that of individualism

why do so few hold stocks the authors investigate why 75 percent of u s households do not hold stocks despite the equity premium and predictions of expected utility models the question is relevant for privatization asset pricing and tax progressivity issues they show that risk aversion per se heterogeneity of beliefs habit persistence time nonseparability and quantity constraints on borrowing do not account for the phenomenon a wedge between borrowing and lending rates and minimum investment requirements are plausible but empirically weak factors more promising explanations are inertia and departures from expected utility maximization there is also qualified support for nondiversifiable income risk as a contributing factor copyright 1995 by royal economic society

an investigation of gender differences in leadership across four countries this study investigates the emphasis males and females place on leadership behaviors and styles across four countries characterized as two cultural dyads norway sweden and australia u s previous gender comparisons and cross cultural studies of leadership are reviewed a framework for exploring leadership consisting of five leadership behaviors and six leadership styles is then presented and tested with questionnaire data from 209 managers across the four countries results demonstrate significant effects for gender and country but no interaction effects post hoc analyses suggest that across all four countries male emphasize the goal setting dimension while females emphasize the interaction facilitation dimension australians scored significantly differently than leaders in the other countries on interaction facilitation benevolent autocratic style and laissez faire style these findings are discussed in light of gender characteristics and cultural values

a cultural explanation of the foreign bias in international asset allocation abstract this paper examines the foreign bias in international asset allocation following extant literature in behavioral finance we argue that a society s culture and the cultural distance between two markets play an important role in explaining the foreign bias in particular we hypothesize that the degree of a nation s uncertainty avoidance affects the foreign bias more uncertainty avoiding countries allocate less to foreign markets as does the degree of a country s individualism in individualistic countries performance is more directly attributed to a person and less to teams causing these individuals to be more aggressive in their foreign asset allocations we further expect that the degree of cultural distance between two countries affects the amount of money allocated to that market based on extensive robustness analyses we find support for our hypotheses on the role of culture in international asset allocation

determinants of non life insurance expenditure in developed and developing countries an empirical investigation the determinants of non life insurance expenditure in a panel data set covering 36 developed countries and 31 developing countries for the period 2000 2011 are analysed results of our instrumental variable analysis indicate that economic freedom income bank development urbanization culture and law systems are the key drivers of the non life insurance expenditure across countries however their impacts differ significantly between the groups of developed and developing countries suggesting that the heterogeneity among countries in terms of the level of development plays an important role the global financial crisis is also found to influence the direction of those effects especially in developed countries the article yields useful policy and economic implications for governments and multinational non life insurance companies with regard to the development of the non life insurance sector an important engine for economic growth and prosperity

influence of role stress on industrial salespeople s work outcomes in the united states japan and korea role theory espouses and extensive empirical research has found that role stress can have deleterious effect on work outcomes of sales personnel the findings of these investigations however are predicated on u s based samples of salespeople whether similar results would be obtained with samples of salespersons in other countries has not yet been determined this paper reports the results of a study that examined the impact of role stress on performance job satisfaction and organizational commitment of industrial salespeople from the united states japan and korea tests of cross national hypotheses indicate general consistency in the findings across the three countries

environmentally sustainable innovation expected attributes in the purchase of green products in a capitalist economy the principles values and behaviors of a great part of the population are centered on buying things on having goods thus in order to achieve sustainable development emphasis should be given to the creation and the promotion of environmentally sustainable products in view of that the present study investigates consumers purchase decision process regarding environmentally sustainable products this study sought identifying what the green product and process expected attributes are in automobile and furniture purchases as well as what the expanded and reduced risks are in offers with these characteristics to reach these objectives a qualitative research was initially performed and subsequently a quantitative research was carried out with the aim to confirm the mapped data in summary the results obtained indicate as important green attributes for automobiles items such as economy engine and new technologies regarding furniture important green attributes design origin label and origin of the raw material were indicated as important furthermore it could be verified that the purchase of green products may increase performance and time risks and mitigate financial and social risks in short this study allowed for advances in the theoretical comprehension regarding green products and decision making processes with medium and high involvement levels however once external factors such as culture and ethnicity tend to influence buyers decision making processes and considering the fact that this study was executed in brazil distinct results may be found in other countries

process standardization across intra and inter cultural relationships theory suggests that culture may hinder the ability to effectively standardize the process of relationship development strategies across intra and inter cultural relationships construct relationships between trust commitment conflict and satisfaction in manufacturer distributor relationships are examined intra i e within a single cultural type and inter culturally i e between different cultural types with a sample of distributors from canada chile mexico and the united states results support theoretical differences in the consequences of the trust commitment relationship between intra cultural and inter cultural relationships the results suggest process standardization based upon cultural type

optimal ordering decisions with uncertain cost and demand forecast updating we determine the optimal ordering policy for a retailer who has two instants to order a seasonal product from a manufacturer prior to a single selling season while the demand is uncertain the retailer can improve the forecast by utilizing the market signals observed between the first and second instants however because of the nature of the manufacturing environment the unit cost at the second instant is uncertain and could be higher or lower than the unit cost at the first instant to determine the profit maximizing ordering strategies at both instants the retailer has to evaluate the trade off between a more accurate forecast and a potentially higher unit cost at the second instant we present a nested newsvendor model for determining the optimal order quantity at each instant and characterize the conditions under which it is optimal for the retailer to delay its order until the second instant

the effect of borrowing constraints on consumer liabilities this paper explores the effects of liquidity constraints on consumer liabilities while much empirical evidence attests to the importance of liquidity constraints in the u s economy evidence about the effects of borrowing constraints on consumer balance sheets is scarce using the 1983 survey of consumer finances data we estimate desired borrowing for unconstrained households we then evaluate the gap between predicted and observed debt for the sample of liquidity constrained consumers predicted debt is 75 percent higher than actual debt in the liquidity constrained sample thus the effect of removing borrowing constraints has quantitatively important implications for the allocation of debt in the household portfolio the removal of borrowing constraints would raise aggregate household liabilities by 9 percent copyright 1993 by ohio state university press

explaining diversity in the worldwide diffusion of codes of good governance extending earlier literature on diffusion of codes of good governance cggs by integrating the effect of national culture this study offers a novel perspective on cross national diversity in the worldwide diffusion of corporate governance best practices we argue that particular cultural dimensions affect the indicators i e total number of codes per country and identity of issuing organizations of such diffusion for a sample of 67 countries our analysis reveals that individualist cultures have a stronger tendency to develop cggs in cultures with a high receptivity to power differences there is a higher probability that the first issuers are the government directors or professional associations whereas with low receptivity the stock exchange and investors groups of issuers are more likely to initiate the first code the effects of culture remain significant even after accounting for differences in legal systems and economic institutions indicating that national culture may serve as a comprehensive indicator of the regulatory stance with respect to good governance indeed the effect size is large enough to give pause e g to a location choice and possibly has relevance for strategic decision making by international companies