nonlinear pricing to produce information we investigate the firm s dynamic nonlinear pricing problem when facing consumers whose tastes vary according to a scalar index we relax the standard assumption that the firm knows the distribution of this index in general the firm should determine its marginal price schedule as if it were myopic and produce information by lowering the price schedule bunching consumers at positive purchase levels should be avoided as a special case we also consider a market characterized by homogeneous consumers with a static but unknown demand curve we show that when there are repeat purchases the forward looking firm should tend towards penetration pricing otherwise its strategy should tend towards skimming we extend our insights to more general settings and discuss implications for pricing product lines

the influence of csr on firm value an application of panel smooth transition regression on taiwan abstractprevious studies on the relationship between corporate social responsibility csr and firm value generally belong to one of the two opposing schools of thought the social impact hypothesis and the shift of focus hypothesis this study however proposes that the relationship between csr and company value is non linear and neither wholly positive nor negative we employed the corporate social responsibility index crsi to test this hypothesis the panel smooth transition regression pstr model was used to analyse listed taiwanese firms from 2010 to 2012 and calculate the value transition threshold of csr using csri as the transition variable we then applied pstr to determine whether csri shows a two regime non linear relationship as inferred by our model empirical findings show that the threshold value of csri is 13 082 thus we concluded that investment in csr does not contribute to enhancing company value until it exceeds the value transition threshold

evaluating jointly constrained order quantity complexities for incremental discounts abstract in this paper we consider the purchasing decisions facing a buying firm which receives incrementally discounted price schedules for a group of items in the presence of constraints such as budgets and space limitations the constraints take the form of upper bounds on positively weighted linear combinations of order size dollar volume unit price and order frequency we adapt the solution procedures from an earlier paper naval res logis 40 2 1993 255 to treat this case the results show that simultaneous order quantities for multiple items offered with separate incremental discounts and subject to joint resource constraints can be calculated efficiently using a combination of lagrangean relaxation and as needed partial enumeration this problem proved to be no more and no less tractable than its counterpart with all units discounts

competitive nonlinear tariffs abstract this paper generalizes the study of nonlinear tariffs i e those depending nonlinearly on the quantity purchased to the case of a symmetric oligopoly competitive equilibria and the corresponding tariffs are analyzed in a cournot framework various equilibria are obtained which depend both upon the number of competing suppliers and the choice of market parameters used to characterize the competitors strategies buyers are classified by type each selecting an optimal consumption level in response to the prevailing tariff the phenomena of buyer self selection found in monopoly nonlinear pricing and the scaling of equilibrium demand elasticity found in cournot models both appear in the results

please or squeeze brand performance implications of constrained and unconstrained multi item promotions existing research on price promotions typically investigates the effects of single product promotions however brand managers often promote multiple items simultaneously to bolster the performance of a complete brand line this paper investigates the brand performance implications of such multi item promotions we distinguish between two types of multi item promotions traditional unconstrained multi item promotions that grant a discount irrespective of the size or composition of the purchase set and constrained multi item promotions that require consumers to purchase specific quantities self bundling or even predetermined combinations fixed bundling of promoted items using a normative consumer decision model the authors analyze the relative effectiveness of these promotions in terms of unit sales and revenue impact and show that promotion performance is moderated by consumers preference for variety the authors find that unconstrained multi item promotions outperform single item promotions especially in markets without variety seeking in markets with variety seeking unconstrained multi item promotions are not as effective in stealing extra sales from competition because consumers prefer to spread their purchases across all items including competitive ones however in those markets self bundling promotions are particularly effective because they force consumers to adopt larger amounts of the promoted items at the expense of competitors finally in neither type of market does fixed bundling substantially improve promotion performance

an empirical examination of institutional investor preferences for corporate social performance this study investigates the pattern of institutional shareholding in the u k and its relationship with socially responsible behavior by companies within a sample of over 500 uk companies we estimate a set of ownership models that distinguish between long and short term investors and their largest components and which incorporate both aggregated and disaggregated measures of corporate social performance csp the results suggest that long term institutional investment is positively related to csp providing further support for earlier studies by johnson and greening 1999 academy of management journal 42 564 576 and graves and waddock 1994 academy of management journal 37 1034 1046 disaggregation of csp into its constituent components suggests that the pattern of institutional investment is also related to the form which csp takes investigation of the impact of investment screens on the selection of stocks suggests that long term institutional investors select primarily through exclusion rejecting those firms which have the worst csp

a comparative study of inequality and corruption this article argues that income inequality increases the level of corruption through material and normative mechanisms the wealthy have both greater motivation and more opportunity to engage in corruption whereas the poor are more vulnerable to extortion and less able to monitor and hold the rich and powerful accountable as inequality increases inequality also adversely affects social norms about corruption and people s beliefs about the legitimacy of rules and institutions thereby making it easier for them to tolerate corruption as acceptable behavior this comparative analysis of 129 countries using two stage least squares methods with a variety of instrumental variables supports the authors hypotheses using different measures of corruption the world bank s control of corruption index and the transparency international s corruption perceptions index the explanatory power of inequality is at least as important as conventionally accepted causes of corruption such as economic development the autho

a framework to update hofstede s cultural value indices economic dynamics and institutional stability this study offers an update of the hofstede cultural value dimensions we argue that changes in economic conditions are the source of cultural dynamics while the endurance of institutional characteristics provides the foundation for cultural stability it is found that national wealth measured by gdp per capita has a curvilinear relationship with individualism long term orientation and power distance scores relatively speaking uncertainty avoidance and masculinity mainly reflect some rather stable institutional traditions such as language religion climate ethnic homogeneity and legal origin and are less likely to change over time

related lending and banking development does related lending have positive or negative effects on the development of banking systems we analyze a unique cross country data set covering 74 countries from 1990 to 2007 and find that related lending on average does not have any effect on the growth of credit we do find however that there are conditional relationships related lending tends to retard the growth of banking systems when rule of law is weak whereas it tends to promote the growth of banking systems when rule of law is strong we also find that related lending appears to be associated with looting when banks are owned by non financial firms but that it does not do so when non financial firms are owned by banks our results indicate that whether related lending is positive or pernicious depends critically on the institutional context in which it takes place there is no single best policy regarding related lending these findings are robust to alternative specifications including iv regressions

getting into the energy efficiency scene does corporate social responsibility matter for energy efficiency in smes a growing body of literature argues that improving energy efficiency is an essential step that firms must take to mitigate climate change issues it is assumed that corporate social responsibility

designing price contracts for boundedly rational customers does the number of blocks matter when designing price contracts one of the major questions confronting managers is how many blocks there should be in the contract we investigate this question in the setting of a manufacturer retailer dyad facing a linear deterministic consumer demand theoretical marketing models predict that the manufacturer s profits rise dramatically when the number of blocks in the contract is increased from one to two because both channel efficiency and its share of channel profits increase however increasing the number of blocks to three yields no incremental profits we test these predictions experimentally and find that increasing the number of blocks from one to two raises channel efficiency but not the manufacturer s share of profits surprisingly having three blocks in the contract increases channel efficiency even further and also gives the manufacturer a slightly higher share of profits we show that these results can be explained by a quantal response equilibrium model in which the manufacturer accounts for noisy best response due to nonpecuniary payoff components in the retailer s utility we also show that the retailer is sensitive to the counterfactual profits it could have earned if it were charged a lower marginal price for earlier blocks in the multiple block contract

managing channel profits a channel of distribution consists of different channel members each having his own decision variables however each channel member s decisions do affect the other channel members profits and as a consequence actions a lack of coordination of these decisions can lead to undesirable consequences for example in the simple manufacturer retailer consumer channel uncoordinated and independent channel members decisions over margins result in a higher price paid by the consumer than if those decisions were coordinated in addition the ensuing suboptimal volume leads to lower profits for both the manufacturer and the retailer this paper explores the problems inherent in channel coordination we address the following questions what is the effect of channel coordination what causes a lack of coordination in the channel how difficult is it to achieve channel coordination what mechanisms exist which can achieve channel coordination what are the strengths and weaknesses of these mechanism what is the role of nonprice variables e g manufacturer advertising retailer shelf space in coordination does the lack of coordination affect normative implications from in store experimentation can quantity discounts be a coordination mechanism are some marketing practices actually disguised quantity discounts we review the literature and present a simple formulation illustrating the roots of the coordination problem we then derive the form of the quantity discount schedule that results in optimum channel profits this article was originally published in marketing science volume 2 issue 3 pages 239 272 in 1983

a classification of literature on determining the lot size under quantity discounts abstract determining a lot size in the presence of either all units or incremental discounts has represented one of major interests of materials managers it is a common practice that the suppliers offer quantity discount to entice the buyers to purchase more and to achieve economies of scale for transportation and processing costs this paper will classify the literature on lot sizing determination under several types of discount schemes and discuss some of the significant literature in this area over two decades also some future research areas have been identified

nonlinear pricing in markets with interdependent demand this paper provides a mathematical framework for modeling demand and determining optimal price schedules in markets which have demand externalities and can sustain nonlinear pricing these fundamental economic concepts appear in the marketplace in the form of mutual buyers benefits and quantity discounts the theory addressing these aspects is relevant to a wide variety of goods and services examples include tariffs for electronic communications services pricing of franchises and royalty fees for copyrighted material and patents this paper builds on several previous results from microeconomics and extends nonlinear pricing to markets with demand externalities the implications of this price structure are compared to results obtained for flat rates and two part tariffs in a similar context a case study is described in which the results were applied to planning the startup of a new electronic communications service

consumption self control by rationing purchase quantities of virtue and vice consumers attempts to control their unwanted consumption impulses influence many everyday purchases with broad implications for marketers pricing policies addressing theoreticians and practitioners alike this paper uses multiple empirical methods to show that consumers voluntarily and strategically ration their purchase quantities of goods that are likely to be consumed on impulse and that therefore may pose self control problems for example many regular smokers buy their cigarettes by the pack although they could easily afford to buy 10 pack cartons these smokers knowingly forgo sizable per unit savings from quantity discounts which they could realize if they bought cartons by rationing their purchase quantities they also self impose additional transactions costs on marginal consumption which makes excessive smoking overly difficult and costly such strategic self imposition of constraints is intuitively appealing yet theoretically problematic the marketing literature lacks operationalizations and empirical tests of such consumption self control strategies and of their managerial implications this paper provides experimental evidence of the operation of consumer self control and empirically illustrates its direct implications for the pricing of consumer goods moreover the paper develops a conceptual framework for the design of empirical tests of such self imposed constraints on consumption in consumer goods markets within matched pairs of products we distinguish relative virtue and vice goods whose preference ordering changes with whet her consumers evaluate immediate or delayed consumption consequences for example ignoring long term health effects many smokers prefer regular relative vice to light relative virtue cigarettes because they prefer the taste of the former however ignoring these short term taste differences the same smokers prefer light to regular cigarettes when they consider the long term health effects of smoking these preference orders can lead to dynamically inconsistent consumption choices by consumers whose tradeoffs between the immediate and delayed consequences of consumption depend on the time lag between purchase and consumption this creates a potential self control problem because these consumers will be tempted to over consume the vices they have in stock at home purchase quantity rationing helps them solve the self control problem by limiting their stock and hence their consumption opportunities such rationing implies that per purchase occasion vice consumers will be less likely than virtue consumers to buy larger quantities in response to unit price reductions such as quantity discounts we first test this prediction in two laboratory experiments we then examine the external validity of the results at the retail level with a field survey of quantity discounts and with a scanner data analysis of chain wide store level demand across a variety of different pairs of matched vice regular and virtue reduced fat calorie or caffeine etc product categories the analyses of these experimental field and scanner data provide strong convergent evidence of a characteristic crossover in demand schedules for relative vices and virtues for categories as diverse as among others potato chips chocolate chip cookies cream cheese beer soft drinks ice cream and frozen yogurt chewing gum coffee and beef andturkey bologna vice consumers demand increases less in response to price reductions than virtue consumers demand although their preferences are not generally weaker for vices than for virtues constraints on vice purchases are self imposed and strategic rather than driven by simple preferences we suggest that rationing their vice inventories at the point of purchase allows consumers to limit subsequent consumption as a result of purchase quantity rationing however vice buyers forgo savings from price reductions through quantity discounts effectively paying price premiums for the opportunity to engage in self control thus purchase quantity rationing vice consumers are relatively price in sensitive from a managerial and public policy perspective our findings should offer marketing practitioners in many consumer goods industries new opportunities to increase profits through segmentation and price discrimination based on consumer self control they can charge premium prices for small sizes of vices relative to the corresponding quantity discounts for virtues virtue consumers on the other hand will buy larger amounts even when quantity discounts are relatively shallow a key conceptual contribution of this paper lies in showing how marketing researchers can investigate a whole class of strategic self constraining consumer behaviors empirically moreover this research is the first to extend previous theoretical work on impulse control by empirically demonstrating its broader implications for marketing decision making

quantity discounts under demand uncertainty to motivate buyers to increase their order quantity suppliers often rely on a well established and widely used approach they offer quantity discounts this practice is in large part driven to obtain improved economies in transportation through higher truckload utilization recently transportation rates which are increasing faster than other costs have become a larger portion of total net landed cost placing the traditional quantity discount practices under scrutiny many suppliers are left perplexed as to why their approach is not effective anymore and some are even concerned that their overall profits may have actually decreased due to their discount parameters in this paper we study a multiperiod model with a buyer facing stochastic end item demand and a supplier offering an all units quantity discount to him to understand better the dynamics of such systems we provide guidelines and insights on how to set effective discount parameters and when not to expect much from them we derive the opt

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

an approach for developing an optimal discount pricing policy this paper addresses the problem of why and how a seller should develop a discount pricing structure even if such a pricing structure does not alter ultimate demand the situation modeled is most appropriate where the seller s product does not represent a major component of the buyer s final product where the demand for the product is derived or where the price is only one of many factors considered in making a purchase decision a model of buyer reaction to any given pricing scheme is developed to show that there exists a unified pricing policy which motivates the buyer to increase its ordering quantity per order thereby reducing the joint buyer and seller ordering and holding costs as a result the seller is able to reduce its costs while leaving the buyer no worse off and often better off the model is extended to handle variable ordering and shipping costs and situations where the seller faces numerous groups of buyers each having different ordering policies finally a case study is presented explicitly showing how the proposed pricing policy can be applied to the situation of a large seller selling to a number of different buyer groups

coalition formation problem for sourcing contract design in supply networks abstract this article studies a coalition formation problem for cooperative replenishment with a single supplier and multiple firms we consider that a vertical cooperation between the supplier and the set of firms is already set using periodic individual contracts and we investigate the profitability of a horizontal cooperation between firms when designing collaborative contracts given the significant savings that can be realized thanks to horizontal collaboration the main interest of the potential collaborating firms is to figure out how the collaborating group should be formed and how stable alliances and coalitions should be generated in this article the two questions are studied in two business situations focusing either on the collaboration opportunities in the ordering or the transportation process in each collaborative situation a decision making approach is applied to assess the expected profitability of each firm and to determine if firms should form coalitions to maximize their profits an exact solution method based on a game theoretic approach is developed called cooperative replenishment algorithm cra which generates core stable coalitions for cost savings regarding all partner standpoints an analytical study of stability conditions regarding the ordering and transportation cost structures were performed to enhance the cra resolution procedure extensive experiments based on realistic instances are provided to validate the performance of the cra proposed in terms of solution stability and convergence the computational results also confirm the potential benefit of horizontal collaboration between firms in terms of profit maximization compared to the stand alone situation

heuristics for sourcing from multiple suppliers with alternative quantity discounts in this paper we analyze the impact of supplier pricing schemes and supplier capacity limitations on the optimal sourcing policy for a single firm we consider the situation where the total quantity to be procured for a single period is known by the firm and communicated to the supplier set in response to this communication each supplier quotes a price and a capacity limit in terms of a maximum quantity that can be supplied to the buyer based on this information the buyer makes a quantity allocation decision among the suppliers and corresponding to this decision is the choice of a subset of suppliers who will receive an order based on industry observations a variety of supplier pricing schemes from the constituent group of suppliers are analyzed including linear discounts incremental units discounts and all units discounts given the complexity of the optimization problem for certain types of pricing schemes heuristic solution methodologies are developed to identify a quantity allocation decision for the firm through an extensive computational comparison we find that these heuristics generate near optimal solutions very quickly data from a major office products retailer is used to illustrate the resulting sourcing strategies given different pricing schemes and capacity limitations of suppliers in this industry we find for the case of capacity constrained suppliers the optimal quantity allocations for two complex pricing schemes linear discount and incremental units discount are such that at most one selected supplier will receive an order quantity that is less than its capacity

which dimensions of culture matter for long run growth we present empirical evidence that among a variety of cultural dimensions the individualism collectivism dimension based on hofstede s 2001 data is the most important and robustly significant effect of culture on long run growth other dimensions that have a significant effect albeit less robust are generally strongly correlated with individualism and convey similar information we found no significant or robust effect on growth from cultural dimensions that are independent from the individualism collectivism cleavage

cronyism a cross cultural analysis the devastating economic effects of the asian financial crisis and us corporate scandals have underscored the need to strengthen corporate governance provisions although cronyism has been suggested as a leading cause of the two crises it has received little attention from scholars in this paper we analyze the concept of cronyism and argue that it comes in various guises arising from different motivational bases and power dependence relations we distinguish cronyism from related constructs and posit that it is a form of corruption with different dynamics from other forms we advance propositions on its likelihood of occurrence across cultures and develop a typology of cronyist exchanges

people s opium religion and economic attitudes since max weber there has been an active debate on the impact of religion on people s economic attitudes much of the existing evidence however is based on cross country studies in which this impact is confounded by differences in other institutional factors we use the worldvalues surveys to id entify the relationship between intensity of religious beliefs and economic attitudes controlling for country fixed effects we study several economic attitudes towardcooperation the government working women legal rules thriftiness andthe market economy we also distinguish across religious denominations differentiating on whether a religion is dominant in a country we find that on average religious beliefs are associated with good economic attitudes where good is defined as conducive to higher per capita income andgrowth yet religious people tendto be more racist andless favorable with respect to working women these effects differ across religious denominations overall we find that christian religions are more positively associatedwith attitudes conducive to economic growth r 2003 elsevier science b v all rights reserved jel classification a1 e0 n4 z1

optimal nonuniform prices we consider optimal nonuniform pricing schedules where the price depends upon the amount purchased such schedules are regularly used by public utilities and other services welfare optimal nonuniform prices are related to the theory of optimal uniform prices developed by ramsey we characterize situations in which upward or downward discontinuities in pricing schedules are optimal our results are applicable to a number of related problems including optimal taxation insurance and incentives economic theory has confined most of its attention to markets with uniform prices in which the price per unit charged is invariant to the level of a customer s purchases this focus is warranted when goods are resellable since any attempt to charge nonuniform prices could be circumvented by reselling amongst customers but when goods are not resellable nonuniform prices are not only possible but common public utilities have declining block pricing with lower unit charges for large levels of consumption many agencies providing services including communications transportation even education use two part pricing with a fixed entry or retainer charge and a further charge per unit consumption nonuniform price schedules can be expected to be ever more common as services become a larger fraction of total output the increasing prevalence of nonuniform pricing policies have made them the focus of recent public and economic attention oi 1971 feldstein 1972 and ng and weisser 1974 have examined optimal two part pricing policies leland and meyer 1976 examine block pricing and show by example that optimal welfare policies may require nonuniform prices if zero profit constraints are binding in this paper we consider arbitrary nonuniform pricing policies using variational techniques two part and block pricing schedules are of course special cases of the environment we consider the work most closely related to our examination is the seminal paper by spence 1978 and subsequent analysis by roberts 1979 spence however does not pay explicit attention to the key role played by constraints on optimal pricing schedules roberts considers upward price discontinuities which lead to bunching of consumers at a given level of consumption but not downward price discontinuities which lead to regions in which no consumer chooses to consume gaps bunching or gaps may appear in the optimal price schedule even when underlying demand and cost functions are smooth and well behaved the prevalence of discontinuous pricing schedules e g the block pricing structures of public utilities argues that these questions are of practical as well as theoretical interest

wealth culture and corruption this paper examines the impact of national wealth income distribution government size and four cultural variables on the perceived level of corruption in a country the study finds that corruption is significantly correlated to gnp per capita power distance masculinity and uncertainty avoidance significant interaction effects occur in collectivistic and high power distance countries suggestions for future research are developed

discount pricing decisions in distribution channels with price sensitive demand abstract in this paper we evaluate the effectiveness of quantity discounts and volume discounts as coordination mechanisms in distribution channels with demand that is price sensitive we consider a single vendor single retailer distribution channel demand for the product arises only at the retailer the demand faced by the retailer is assumed to be deterministic but price elastic the retailer in turn buys the product from the vendor the vendor and the retailer act independently and rationally each maximizing their own respective profit the equilibrium point that specifies the vendor s and buyer s inventory and pricing policy is determined by the solution to a stackelberg game we consider the cases when quantity discount and volume discount respectively are offered we develop methods to determine the optimal discount policy for these cases we then consider the case where both volume and quantity discounts are offered simultaneously and develop a method to determine the optimal simultaneous discount offer the relative performance of the alternative discount schemes is then evaluated through a numerical study the results of the study demonstrate that the effectiveness of volume discount as a coordination mechanism is higher when the sensitivity of demand to price changes is higher the effectiveness of quantity discount on the other hand is higher with lower price sensitivity of demand finally the results also demonstrate that perfect coordination is achieved when volume and quantity discounts are offered simultaneously

lost in translation the effect of cultural values on mergers around the world we find strong evidence that three key dimensions of national culture trust hierarchy and individualism affect merger volume and synergy gains the volume of cross border mergers is lower when countries are more culturally distant in addition greater cultural distance in trust and individualism leads to lower combined announcement returns these findings are robust to year and country level fixed effects time varying country pair and deal level variables as well as instrumental variables for cultural differences based on genetic and somatic differences the results are the first large scale evidence that cultural differences have substantial impacts on multiple aspects of cross border mergers

optimal pricing and inventory control policy with quantity based price differentiation a firm facing price dependent stochastic demand aims to maximize its total expected profit over a planning horizon in addition to the regular unit selling price the firm can utilize quantity discounts to increase sales we refer to this dual pricing strategy as quantity based price differentiation at the beginning of each period the firm needs to make three decisions replenish the inventory set the unit selling price if the unit sales mode is deployed and set the quantity discount price if the quantity sales mode is deployed or the combination of the two modes of sales we identify conditions under which the optimal inventory control policy and selling pricing strategy is well structured remarkably under a utility based demand framework these conditions can be unified by a simple regularity assumption that has long been used in the auction and mechanism design literature moreover sharper structural results are yielded for the optimal selling strategy we also examine the comparative advantag

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

coordination mechanisms of supply chain systems supply chain management scm has become an important management paradigm as supply chain members are often separate and independent economic entities a key issue in scm is to develop mechanisms that can align their objectives and coordinate their activities so as to optimize system performance in this paper we provide a review of coordination mechanisms of supply chain systems in a framework that is based on supply chain decision structure and nature of demand this framework highlights the behavioral aspects and information need in the coordination of a supply chain the identification of these issues points out several directions of future research in this area

unfair allocation of gains under the equal price allocation method in purchasing groups certain purchasing groups do not flourish a supposed reason for this is a creeping dissatisfaction among various members of a group with the allocation of the cooperative gains in this paper we analyze unfairness resulting from using the commonly used equal price ep method for allocating gains under the assumption of continuous quantity discounts we demonstrate that this unfairness is caused by neglecting a particular component of the added value of individual group members next we develop two fairness ratios and tie these to fairness properties from cooperative game theory the ratios show among other things that being too big a player in a purchasing group can lead to decreasing gains they can be used to assess if ep is an unfair method in specific situations finally we discuss measures a purchasing group could consider in order to attenuate perceived unfairness thereby the group may improve its stability and prosperity

transmission of csr requirements in supply chains investigating the multiple mediating effects of csr activities in smes in recent years scholars have increasingly turned their attention to the separate areas of corporate social responsibility csr and supply chain management scm however little scholarly attent

market segmentation self selection and product line design the purpose of this paper is to develop a theory of market segmentation based on consumer self selection the extant theory is based on the third degree price discrimination model of pigou central assumptions of which are that the firm can directly address individual segments and isolate them by using consumer self selection i am relaxing these assumptions in the context of a monopolist designing a product line i show that this relaxation has significant implications for how the products and prices are chosen and what they look like in particular segments may be aggregated even though there are no economies of scale furthermore consumer self selection enables us to model cannibalization and competition among firms

financial and legal constraints to growth does firm size matter using a unique firm level survey database covering 54 countries we investigate the effect of financial legal and corruption problems on firms growth rates whether these factors constrain growth depends on firm size it is consistently the smallest firms that are most constrained financial and institutional development weakens the constraining effects of financial legal and corruption obstacles and it is again the small firms that benefit the most there is only a weak relation between firms perception of the quality of the courts in their country and firm growth we also provide evidence that the corruption of bank officials constrains firm growth

the corporate social performance financial performance link strategic managers are consistently faced with the decision of how to allocate scarce corporate resources in an environment that is placing more and more pressures on them recent scholarship in strategic management suggests that many of these pressures come directly from sources associated with social issues in management rather than traditional arenas of strategic management using a greatly improved source of data on corporate social performance this paper reports the results of a rigorous study of the empirical linkages between financial and social performance corporate social performance csp is found to be positively associated with prior financial performance supporting the theory that slack resource availability and csp are positively related csp is also found to be positively associated with future financial performance supporting the theory that good management and csp are positively related 1997 by john wiley sons ltd

overconfidence ceo selection and corporate governance we develop a model that shows that an overconfident manager who sometimes makes value destroying investments has a higher likelihood than a rational manager of being deliberately promoted to ceo under value maximizing corporate governance moreover a risk averse ceo s overconfidence enhances firm value up to a point but the effect is nonmonotonic and differs from that of lower risk aversion overconfident ceos also underinvest in information production the board fires both excessively diffident and excessively overconfident ceos finally sarbanes oxley is predicted to improve the precision of information provided to investors but to reduce project investment

values versus regulations how culture plays its role this study examines the impact of culture on regulation and corruption our empirical results suggest that cultural values have significant effects on countries regulatory policies levels of corruption and economic development contrary to the conclusions drawn by others this study shows no significant relationship between the regulatory policies of countries and their perceived levels of corruption thus evidence of the public choice view toward entry regulation derived in related studies seems to be at least attenuated

modeling quantity discounts under general price sensitive demand functions optimal policies and relationships this paper presents models for determining optimal all unit and incremental quantity discount policies and investigates the effect of quantity discounts on increasing demand and ensuring pareto efficient transactions under general price sensitive demand functions the paper develops optimal quantity discount policies investigates their interrelationships and their benefits to both the supplier and the buyer and gains managerial insights for the scenarios of maximizing the supplier s profit and the joint profit we develop simple and efficient solution approaches for determining the all unit and the incremental optimal decision policies for general price sensitive demand functions we have three main findings first with price sensitive demand there are two incentives in offering quantity discounts increasing demand and ensuring pareto efficient transactions in most cases increasing demand dominates in justifying the offering of quantity discounts second using a single lot size associated with all efficient transactions as with the constant demand case does not hold with the price sensitive demand case third the optimal all unit quantity discount policy is equivalent to the optimal incremental quantity discount policy in benefiting both the supplier and the buyer

a new database on the structure and development of the financial sector this article introduces a new database of indicators of financial structure and financial development across countries and over time the database is unique in that it combines a wide variety of indicators that measure the size activity and efficiency of financial intermediaries and markets it improves on previous efforts by presenting data on the public share of commercial banks introducing indicators of the size and activity of nonbank financial institutions and constructing measures of the size of bond and primary equity markets this article introduces a new database the first to provide comprehensive measures of the development structure and performance of the financial sector this database is the first to define and construct indicators of the size and activity of nonbank financial intermediaries such as insurance companies pension funds and non deposit money banks it is also the first to include indicators of the size of primary equity markets and primary and secondary bond markets in constructing the database authors carefully deflate measures and match stock and flow variables

group buying on the web a comparison of price discovery mechanisms web based group buying mechanisms are being widely used for both business to business b2b and business to consumer b2c transactions we survey currently operational online group buying markets and then study this phenomenon using analytical models we build on the literatures in information economics and operations management in our analytical model of a monopolist offering web based group buying under different kinds of demand uncertainty we derive the monopolist s optimal group buying schedule under varying conditions of heterogeneity in the demand regimes and compare its profits with those that obtain under the more conventional posted price mechanism we further study the impact ofproduction postponement by endogenizing the timing of the pricing and production decisions in a two stage game between the monopolist and buyers our results have implications for firms choice of price discovery mechanisms in e markets and for the scheduling of production and pricing decisions in the presence and absence of scale economies of production

quantity discounts managerial issues and research opportunities marketing managers frequently administer pricing policies involving substantial quantity discounts however our understanding of the precise role of these discounts and their design is quite limited this paper reviews and integrates the economics and marketing literature and presents a detailed analysis of the policies of four firms in order to i specify the variety of motivations for quantity discounts ii provide guidelines to managers in designing quantity discount schedules and iii set out the most fruitful directions for future research

price competition with reduced consumer switching costs the case of wireless number portability in the cellular phone industry wireless number portability wnp is a telecommunication regulatory policy that requires cellular phone service providers to allow customers who switch service subscriptions to retain their original phone numbers the right to retain the number lowers the switching cost for a consumer thus the purpose of the policy is to induce more competition and facilitate the growth of new or small service providers in this paper we show that wnp drives market price downward as expected but with a surprising twistrather than helping the smaller firms grow the policy may accelerate the process of market concentration we find that the main contributing factor to this peculiarity is the discriminatory pricing scheme prevalent in the industrythat is a service provider charges a lower per minute fee for the calls initiated and received within the same network than for the calls connected across two networks under this pricing scheme a consumer who subscribes to a larger network would benefit more than if subscribing to a smaller network despite the relatively higher fixed access fee that the former may charge by lowering the barrier of switching wnp creates a market condition conducive for a larger network to gain market share we support our analysis with the empirical evidence gathered from hong kong where wnp was adopted in march 1999

do lenders favor politically connected firms rent provision in an emerging financial market corruption by the politically connected is often blamed for economic ills particularly in less developed economies using a loan level data set of more than 90 000 rms that represents the universe of corporate lending in pakistan between 1996 and 2002 we investigate rents to politically connected rms in banking classifying a rm as political if its director participates in an election we examine the extent nature and economic costs of political rent provision we nd that political rms borrow 45 percent more and have 50 percent higher default rates such preferential treatment occurs exclusively in government banks private banks provide no

underdevelopment and the economics of corruption a game theory approach abstract previous attempts to treat corruption are surveyed critically a game theory approach is preferred on the grounds that it can most effectively explain the basis for decisions of reasonable men to be corrupt a simple model is presented showing how bribery might be a dominant strategy a prisoner s dilemma type of situation emerges with the added complication that the judge and jailer may be corrupt other conclusions are that one official will not accept bribes from more than one firm it is impossible to predict which firm will win the contract no obvious solution emerges and legal remedies are discounted this paper then reviews the principal general equilibrium effects and concludes that their likely effect on economic development is negative

integration oriented strategies host market corruption and the likelihood of foreign subsidiary exit from emerging markets extant research has found that more pronounced levels of corruption in foreign host emerging markets increase the likelihood that subsidiaries established by multinational enterprises mnes from developed countries will exit we synthesize insights from the organizational perspective of corruption and the integration responsiveness paradigm to propose that integration oriented strategies will weaken the positive relationship between corruption and the likelihood of exit at high levels of host market corruption we develop and test hypotheses pertaining to the main effect of corruption on the likelihood of subsidiary exit as well as the moderating impacts of a firm s equity ownership strategy and its expatriate staffing strategy upon this relationship we theorize that uncertainty operates as the mechanism that underpins the corruption market exit relationship and that an mne s strategic choices with respect to its subsidiary investments contribute to reducing this uncertainty we find that an increase in the foreign investing mne s equity ownership share negatively moderates the positive relationship between corruption and the likelihood that foreign subsidiaries established by developed market mnes will exit host emerging markets when corruption is high however the marginal effects results do not support the expatriate staffing strategy hypothesis our work provides guidance to developed country mnes that seek insights with respect to the utility of strategies that might be implemented in host emerging markets characterized by more pronounced levels of corruption

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

culture legal origins and financial development this study proposes that countries with a cultural orientation toward individualism tend to enjoy a higher level of financial development estimates based on cross country data lend strong support to this hypothesis specifically the results indicate that existing disparity in the level of financial development is significantly correlated with variation in the extent of individualism across countries where a one standard deviation increase in individualism is associated with 0 631 standard deviations improvement in the level of financial development the results are robust to a number of considerations additional results provide some support to the notion that individualistic culture and legal origin may serve as complements rather than substitutes to each other jel o40 o50 z10

national culture the missing country level determinant of corporate governance it is well known that firm level corporate governance practices vary mainly between rather than within countries but country level factors such as legal and financial institutions explain less than 50 of this cross country variation in this article we show that two dimensions of national culture individualism and uncertainty avoidance capture about 90 of the country fixed effects and outperform the country level explanatory variables used in prior literature we argue that culture works through a tradeoff between managerial expertise and certainty of control a tradeoff largely overlooked by prior literature that captures a country s preference for the anglo saxon approach versus the direct control approach for governance consistent with this argument we find that the effect of culture on corporate governance varies across firms with different needs for managerial expertise and certainty of control we also find that culture interacts with other factors to determine firm level governance

supplier manufacturer coordination in capacitated two stage supply chains abstract manufacture to order is an increasingly popular strategy in commodity electronics and other similar markets where many different product configurations can be produced from common components to succeed in this environment manufacturers need to keep both cost and order fulfillment time low in this article we compare three different mechanisms that a manufacturer whose revenues depend on order delays may use to affect its component supplier s inventory decisions these mechanisms are specifying components inventory level offering a share of the earned revenues to the supplier called simple revenue sharing and offering a two part revenue sharing scheme we show that whereas the first two approaches do not lead to supply chain coordination the two part scheme does we demonstrate with numerical experiments that up to a point the component supplier benefits from having a high utilization of its production facility whereas the manufacturer benefits from having excess production capacity

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

comment managing channel profits comment in a recent paper in this journal jeuland and shugan jeuland a s shugan 1983 managing channel profits marketing sci 2 summer 239 272 proposed a quantity discount schedule as a way of coordinating a channel as they put it on p 253 of their paper a quantity discount schedule which would fix the retailer s and hence the manufacturer s profits to some fixed linear function of total channel profits would lead the channel to maximize profits the purpose of this note is to show that a quantity discount schedule is not necessary for channel coordination

eoq jit and fixed costs in the ready mixed concrete industry the successful implementation of just in time jit purchasing policy in many industries has prompted many companies that still use the economic order quantity eoq purchasing policy to ponder if they should switch to the jit purchasing policy despite existing studies that directly compare the costs between the eoq and jit purchasing systems this decision is however still difficult to be made especially when price discount has to be considered jit purchasing may not always be successful even though plants that adopted jit operations have experienced or can take advantage of physical space reduction hence the objective of this study is to expand on a classical eoq with a price discount model to derive the eoq jit cost indifference point the objective was tested and achieved through a survey and case study conducted in the ready mixed concrete industry in singapore

on supply chain coordination for false failure returns a quantity discount contract approach abstract a large proportion of consumer returns fall into the category of false failure returns which refer to returns without functional defects in this paper we consider profits resulting from exerting costly effort to reduce false failure returns in a reverse supply chain the supply chain as a whole has a strong incentive to reduce such returns for cost saving however retailers typically enjoy a full credit provided by suppliers for returns so they may not have sufficient incentives to exert enough effort for supply chain profit maximization in some scenarios retailers may even have the motivation to encourage such returns we suggest using a coordination contract to resolve this profit conflict we introduce a quantity discount contract which specifies a payment to the retailer with an amount exponentially decreasing in the number of returns we present explicit forms of such contracts given different assumptions about the distribution of the number of returns we also prove that the contract is pareto improving besides it is shown that when the contract is applied in a closed loop supply chain it can deter retailer s potential incentive to encourage returns moreover some modifications of the contract can lead to easy allocation of supply chain profit

morals or economics institutional investor preferences for corporate social responsibility this article presents the results of a study that analysed whether social responsibility had any bearing on the decision making of institutional investors being that institutional investors prefer socially aligned organizations this study explored to what extent the corporate actions and or social environmental investments influenced their decisions our results suggest that there are specific variables that affect the perceived value of the organization leading to decisions to not only invest but whether to hold or sell the shares and therefore having a consequential impact on the capital market s valuation

collectivism and corruption in commercial loan production how to break the curse recent research suggests that collectivism breeds corruption in bank lending this finding together with the stickiness of culture poses a direct challenge to economic growth in collectivist societies in this paper we address this grim outlook by examining the types of firms that are susceptible to the detrimental effect of collectivism on lending integrity and the formal institutions that can help alleviate such effect we find that the adverse effect of collectivism on bank corruption is more severe in small and medium sized firms privately owned firms and non exporting firms while it is considerably weaker in countries with more effective private monitoring a higher lower fraction of foreign owned government owned banks a more competitive banking sector better information sharing and stronger legal and political institutions our findings are robust to using alternative measures of collectivism and alternative dependent variables these results highlight how firm level characteristics and formal institutions interact with collectivism in affecting firms access to bank credit

a cooperative game theory model of quantity discounts quantity discounts offered by a monopolist are considered in the context of a bargaining problem in which the buyer and the seller negotiate over the order quantity and the average unit price all units and incremental quantity discounts that permit transaction at a negotiated outcome are described the effects of risk sensitivity and bargaining power on quantity discounts are discussed for alternative bargaining models

a taxonomy and research overview of perishable asset revenue management yield management overbooking and pricing this paper proposes the term perishable asset revenue management to denote the field that combines the areas of yield management overbooking and pricing for perishable assets after summarizing the characteristics common to problems in this field the paper discusses the objectives and constraints faced by decision makers then it offers a comprehensive taxonomy with 14 different elements and reviews the research that has been done related to each element finally it suggests some important areas of future research that can help bridge the gap between theory and application

chapter 11 pricing models in marketing publisher summary this chapter brings together a set of diverse efforts in the recent literature on the modeling of price decisions and related questions in marketing there has been an impressive growth in the array of topics investigated in the literature various trends in the development of pricing models are evident from the foregoing review first one trend has been to develop theoretical models to describe observed pricing strategies in the marketplace and to derive conditions under which certain strategies are optimal this trend is clearly evident when one considers the area of dynamic pricing models another trend is an attempt to develop pricing models in which certain aspects of consumer behavior e g asymmetric response to price increases versus price decreases are incorporated this development is quite recent and does offer a large potential a third dominant direction is the use of game theoretic models for developing equilibrium pricing strategies

strategic effects of three part tariffs under oligopoly the distinct element of a three part tariff 3pt compared with linear pricing lp or a two part tariff is its quantity target within which the marginal price is zero this quantity target instrument enriches the firm s strategy set in dictating the competition to a specific level even in the absence of a usual price discrimination motive with general differentiated linear demands the competitive effect of a 3pt in contrast to lp depends on the degree of substitutability between products competition is intensified when two products are more differentiated yet softened when two products are more substitutable

a procurement decision support system in business volume discount environments emergence of a new discount pricing schedule called business volume discount becomes a major obstacle for procurement managers in finding the best purchasing strategy in the context of business volume discount a supplier offers discounts on total dollar amount of sales volume not on the quantity or variety of the products purchased from the supplier this paper describes a procurement decision support system pdss that has been successfully implemented to improve the purchasing activities of regional bell telephone companies in most purchasing operations a flexible procurement plan is considered a necessity because of the uncertainties associated with product demand and procurement budget pdss provides this flexibility by combining two different purchasing strategies purchasing on an annual commitment basis and on an as ordered basis although the development of the system is motivated by a particular application procurement of transmission plug in in one of the regional telephone companies the system is being used for a variety of procurement decisions involving business volume discount in the telecommunications industry the results of the implementation indicate that cost savings of up to 15 are achieved pdss use is not limited to the companies in the telecommunications industry the pdss model is applicable to any organization having a centralized procurement operation with business volume discount

egalitarianism and international investment abstract this study identifies how country differences on a key cultural dimension egalitarianism influence international investment flows a society s cultural orientation toward egalitarianism is manifested by intolerance for abuses of market and political power and a desire for protecting less powerful actors we show egalitarianism to be based on exogenous factors including social fractionalization dominant religion circa 1900 and war experience from the 19th century we find a robust influence of egalitarianism distance on cross national flows of bond and equity issuances syndicated loans and mergers and acquisitions an informal cultural institution largely determined a century or more ago egalitarianism exercises its effect on international investment via an associated set of consistent contemporary policy choices but even after controlling for these associated policy choices egalitarianism continues to exercise a direct effect on cross border investment flows likely through its direct influence on managers daily business conduct

who owns the media the authors examine patterns of media ownership in 97 countries around the world they find that almost universally the largest media firms are controlled by the government or by private families government ownership is more pervasive in broadcasting than in the printed media government ownership is generally associated with less press freedom fewer political and economic rights inferior governance and most conspicuously inferior social outcomes in education and health the adverse effects of government ownership on political and economic freedom are stronger for newspapers than for television the adverse effects of government ownership of the media do not appear to be restricted solely to instances of government monopoly the authors present a range of evidence on the adverse consequences of state ownership of the media state ownership of the media is often argued to be justified on behalf of the social needs of the disadvantaged but if their findings are correct increasing private ownership of the media through privatization or by encouraging the entry of privately owned media can advance a variety of political and economic goals especially those of meeting the social needs of the poor

all units quantity freight discounts with disposals abstract this paper examines the effect of various freight rate structures and quantity discounts on the inventory policies of roi and profit maximizing firms with downward sloping price elastic demand lot sizing policies and price set at a markup on unit cost units not sold at the regular price are disposed of at a reduced price both the markup and the order quantity are decision variables numerical examples are used throughout to illustrate the properties of the model and the sensitivity of the optimal solutions to fluctuations in the parameters

bank supervision and corruption in lending abstract which commercial bank supervisory policies ease or intensify the degree to which bank corruption is an obstacle to firms raising external finance based on new data from more than 2500 firms across 37 countries this paper provides the first empirical assessment of the impact of different bank supervisory policies on firms financing obstacles we find that the traditional approach to bank supervision which involves empowering official supervisory agencies to monitor discipline and influence banks directly does not improve the integrity of bank lending rather we find that a supervisory strategy that focuses on empowering private monitoring of banks by forcing banks to disclose accurate information to the private sector tends to lower the degree to which corruption of bank officials is an obstacle to firms raising external finance in extensions we find that regulations that empower private monitoring exert a particularly beneficial effect on the integrity of bank lending in countries with sound legal institutions

supplier pricing and lot sizing when demand is price sensitive abstract the problem of co ordination between a vendor and a buyer is formulated as a two person fixed threat bargaining game the vendor decides on his lot size and the price schedule he is to offer to the buyer the buyer decides upon his lot size and the selling price in the market we have characterized pareto efficient solutions and the nash bargaining solution for the problem we have also proposed two pricing schedules for the vendor who is supplying to a large population of buyers the first one is based upon profit sharing the second one resembles the classical all unit quantity discount schedule we have thus provided for the supplier a procedure for setting all unit quantity discount schedule

the normalization of deviant organizational practices wage arrears in russia 1991 98 we apply a normalization of deviance model to understand the prevalence of the illegal practice of wage arrears the delayed payment of wages in russia during the 1990s viewing organizational dev

a choice model for packaged goods dealing with discrete quantities and quantity discounts utility maximizing solutions to economic models of choice for goods with either discrete quantities or non linear prices cannot always be obtained using standard first order conditions such as kuhn tucker and roy s identity when quantities are discrete there is no guarantee that derivatives of the utility function are equal to derivatives of the budget constraint moreover when prices are nonlinear as in the case of quantity discounts first order conditions can be associated with the minimum rather than the maximum value of utility in these cases the utility function must be directly evaluated to determine its maximum this evaluation can be computationally challenging when there exist many offerings and when stochastic elements are introduced into the utility function in this paper we provide an economic model of demand for substitute brands that is flexible parsimonious and easy to implement the methodology is demonstrated with a scanner panel data set of light beer purchases the model is used to explore the effects of price promotions on primary and secondary demand and the utility of product assortment

which model of capitalism best delivers both wealth and equality capitalism is the dominant economic system adopted throughout the global economy but there are many different models of capitalism practiced depending on what the society decides economic effectiveness is in this study we assert that an effective economy simultaneously achieves two seemingly divergent outcomes it 1 creates economic wealth efficiently and 2 shares that wealth equitably employing insights from whitley s national business systems framework and fuzzy set analysis we examine how national institutions collectively configure with respect to the overall level of equitable wealth creation within 48 developed and developing economies we find that three configurations are associated with relatively high levels of equitable wealth creation and another three are associated with relatively low levels as such our analysis supports the notion of equifinality that there is no one optimal model of capitalism furthermore we begin to demonstrate that these models of capitalism are constantly evolving but their evolution is generally slow even when considering the practice of capitalism before and after the 2008 global economic crisis we discuss the implications of these findings for the study of international business with a special emphasis on considering a more holistic context for exploring how multinational enterprises interact with their institutional environment s

collectivism and corruption in bank lending this paper examines how national culture and collectivism in particular influences corruption in bank lending we hypothesize that interdependent self construal and particularist norms in collectivist countries lead to a higher level of lending corruption through their influence both on the interactions between bank officers and bank customers and on the dynamics among bank colleagues using a sample covering 3835 firms across 38 countries we find strong evidence that firms domiciled in collectivist countries perceive a higher level of lending corruption than firms domiciled in individualist countries in terms of economic magnitude the effect of collectivism is substantially larger than the effects of other cultural dimensions uncertainty avoidance masculinity and power distance and institutional factors identified in prior studies bank supervision bank competition information sharing and media monitoring we further find that the positive relationship between collectivism and lending corruption is not driven by endogeneity and that it is robust to different measures of bank corruption different measures of collectivism and different estimation methods finally we find that the link between collectivism and lending corruption cannot be explained by the role of the government in the economy political connections biased responses from disgruntled borrowers or relationship lending

csr disclosure and sustainable supplier management a small to medium sized enterprises perspective the respective literatures on corporate social responsibility csr disclosure and sustainable supplier management have grown in recent years but little scholarly attention has been paid to the li

from the editors endogeneity in international business research this essay builds on the exposition by thomas et al and focuses on analyzing cause and effect in international business research we attempt to explain how endogeneity problems occur and why they are so prevalent in international business research in a non technical fashion we then discuss the importance of explicitly identifying how the chosen research design best approximates a randomized controlled experiment finally we provide some guidelines on achieving this goal and emphasize the practices that seem most relevant to jibs reviewers in evaluating high quality international business research

corruption in bank lending to firms cross country micro evidence on the beneficial role of competition and information sharing abstract building on the important study by beck demirguc kunt and levine 2006 bank supervision and corruption in lending journal of monetary economics 53 2131 2163 we examine the effects of both borrower and lender competition as well as information sharing via credit bureaus registries on corruption in bank lending using the unique world bank data set wbes covering more than 4 000 firms across 56 countries with information on credit bureaus registries assembled by djankov mcliesh and shleifer 2007 private credit in 129 countries journal of financial economics 84 299 329 and bank regulation data collected by barth caprio and levine 2006 rethinking bank regulation till angels govern cambridge university press new york to measure bank competition and information sharing we find strong evidence that both banking competition and information sharing reduce lending corruption and that information sharing also helps enhance the positive effect of competition in curtailing lending corruption we also find that the ownership structure of firms and banks legal environment and firm competition all exert significant impacts on lending corruption

channel coordination and quantity discounts this paper presents a model for analyzing the impact of joint decision policies on channel coordination in a system consisting of a supplier and a group of homogeneous buyers the joint decision policy characterized by the unit selling price and the order quantity is coordinated through quantity discounts and franchise fees both the annual demand rate and the operating cost including the purchase ordering and inventory holding costs depend on the joint decision policy employed this paper contributes by integrating work addressing quantity discounts on inventory and ordering policies and work focusing on the control mechanism provided by quantity discounts in channel coordination it is shown that the optimal all unit quantity discount policy is equivalent to the optimal incremental quantity discount policy in achieving channel coordination furthermore it is shown that quantity discounts alone are not sufficient to guarantee joint profit maximization the analyses of the general models are illustrated by specific analytical results obtained for a given demand function