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This article uses cross-country unbalanced panel data of up to 146 countries from 1996–2015 to be the first study to identify potential determinants of a country's relative research output in Economics versus Business. This identification is important for students, professionals, universities, university departments, and research-funding agencies facing choices between profiles oriented towards economics and business. Consider the following concrete example. The finding that some distinct countries' characteristics hinder Economics relative to Business research is valuable information for a prospective professional when choosing her career path. We do a thorough literature review to single out country characteristics having the potential to determine the flourishing of economics research vis-à-vis business research and come out with the following three hypotheses: higher policy-related data availability, higher income inequality, and lower ethnic fractionalization relatively favour economics. The regressions' results confirm these hypotheses, and the findings are robust to two alternative fixed effects specifications, three alternative definitions of economics and business, two alternative measures of research output (publications and citations), the inclusion of meaningful control variables, and the consideration of developed and developing countries. Yet, the association between ethnic fractionalization and relative research output is limited to developing countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article brings into conversation foundational concepts in the sociology, anthropology, and geography of tourism, specifically those of the tourist gaze, tourism performance of place, the hospitality pact, tourist encounters, with the most recent tourism geopolitics. Historically the first four concepts contributed to legitimizing tourism as an object of social scientific research beyond business and economics. They provided important terminology to conceptualize tourism not merely as an industry, but also as a powerful social force. Yet, they also contributed to nurturing anthropocentric worldings that separate tourism from geopolitics and enact Western-centric, liberal, universalist, and optimistic ideas about nature, culture, and the self that remain problematic to date. Expanding on the conceptual matrix traced by these terms and with a stronger foundation in tourism geographies research, the concept of tourism geopolitics is conducive to otherwise worldings. It points at the historically specific and artificial barrier between tourism and geopolitics, laying the groundwork for nuanced vocabularies that explore the intimate relationships among tourism, power dynamics, geographical locations, the body, materiality, physicality, affective experiences, and imaginative processes within the field of tourism geographies research. I approach these concepts as part of the heterogeneous intellectual frameworks that understand tourism as an ultimately Euro-American spatial, cultural, political, and embodied milieu that is subject to questioning, critique, and transformation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study takes stock of business and economics research on Artificial Intelligence (AI) and provides a dynamic panorama of the overall knowledge structure of this ever-growing body of work ever since its inception in 1966. Our bibliometric analysis based on the full archive of 1024 studies identifies the main trends of and the major intellectual contributors to the extant knowledge of AI in business and economics research. Specifically, our results show that (1) AI-focused business and economics research wintnessed growth over three stages, particularly with a sharp increase after 2017. (2) While this body of research has gained tremendous momentum across the globe, the United States is by far the center of knowledge generation. (3) Research collaborations are still limited in this area. (4) Research topics flourished, ranging from early decision support systems, neural networks, and scheduling methods to more recent machine learning, automation, and big data. This study also identifies fruitful avenues for further business and economics research with an AI focus. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The second article in this Special Section reflects the actions of not one AI firm, but instead 1,387 publicly-traded companies in the People's Republic of China from 2007 to 2018. An interesting, empirically testable implication of the authors' theoretical analysis is whether different enforcement regimes, which result in differences of piracy cost, do result in the nuanced prevalence (or not) of product bundles on the local markets for information goods as it would be predicted by the model. The authors report that they found evidence for a causal link in the presence of higher-intensity AI investments proxied by the estimated AI applications of individual firms with their overall employment as well as higher employment of nonacademically-trained workers. The authors' results are developed as a function of product similarity (amounting to a valuation discount factor between 0 and 1) and (expected per-product) piracy cost, which provides a somewhat new perspective, as the set of parameters where bundling dominates becomes nonconvex - due to the newly discovered "wedge" of intermediate piracy costs and sufficiently high product similarity. [Extracted from the article]

Effective market mechanisms are important for supporting the high performance and profitability of digital commerce firms, just as they have been for traditional buyer-seller exchange networks that maximize overall welfare and optimize the distribution of goods and services so firms can sustain viable businesses [[5], [12]]. Interestingly however, there is no evidence that more post-campaign comments (suggesting ongoing creator-backer alignment) led to higher backer satisfaction, nor were experienced campaign creators likely to moderate the effects of low funding targets on backer satisfaction. [Extracted from the article]

EconBiz is a specialized academic information portal hosted by the Leibniz Information Center for Economics in Germany. It is freely accessible and facilitates discovery to a wide range of research publications, learning, and professional resources. This article will review EconBiz in the context of business and economics research and from an openness perspective. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As the moving parts of a given economy, all individual agents are sitting in the same boat. They cover: sharing economy product pricing and consumer choice of buying goods versus accessing them on a sharing market - paired with firms' incentives to provide product durability; and the value of insurance contracts for sharing intermediaries to decouple their rent-extraction problem from the underlying inter-agent moral-hazard problem. His optimization model, which includes the use of optimal control, implies that good product designs balance the trade-off between the respective demands for product reusability and aftermarket transferability. [Extracted from the article]

This debut work offers a stunning look at real vs nominal prices that consider more than just inflation. The inadequate examination of hospitality price comparison is investigated between two non-neighbouring Adriatic east coast countries – Slovenia and Montenegro – using the euro. Hospitality prices are an essential indicator in hospitality markets, destination marketing and management planning. Using 73 monthly time-series data for the economic crisis period from December 2008 to December 2014, this period covers one shock in a series. One of the key managerial features of cointegrated spatial hospitality price spread was that Montenegro followed Slovenian hospitality prices. Hospitality prices in Montenegro and Slovenia tend to be weakly integrated into the long term and seasonally driven in the short term. In addition, the econometric experimentation has given a theoretical novelty for underpinned and undermined tourism economy modelling in normalities. This state-of-the-art econometric feature is included in a customary vector error correction model (VECM). Robust applied results recognise that hospitality prices in Montenegro are domestic driven and in Slovenia Eurozone driven. This finding is relevant for applied economics on obtaining a normally distributed price model. Its theoretical and managerial implications are vital for hospitality economics, marketing and tourism management. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The destructive COVID-19 has emerged as the most lethal disease and dented the global economies in every aspect. Consequently, a large amount of research emerged to understand the dynamics of COVID-19. Using meta-literature approach with combination of both bibliometric (quantitative) and content analysis (qualitative) approach, this study aims to present a comprehensive review of COVID-19 business-related research of 477 articles. The results reveal the most the most relevant and influential scientific aspects of the literature such as authors, articles, institutions, journals, and countries. We also identify intellectual structure within six streams: 1) COVID-19 and global economy, 2) Dynamics of COVID-19 in business and management research, 3) COVID-19 and financial markets, 4) COVID-19 and its implication for tourism & hospitality industry, 5) Dynamic of supply chain and COVID-19 and 6) COVID-19 and functionality of government. Lastly, the review of the literature helps us to identify the research gaps and present 62 future research directions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines how change as a media management phenomenon is approached and understood in the research fields of media management, media business and media economics. By means of a systematic literature review and problematising methodology, the article unpacks the ways in which change as a phenomenon is comprehended in the extant research and elaborates on the implications of various schools of thought on the development of the research area. The findings of the study illustrate how different paradigmatic, contextual and pragmatic ways of understanding change are reflecting the current thinking and discussion about transformation in the media industry. As a contribution, the article adds to media management research by reviewing, identifying and critically reflecting on the dominant views of change in the area. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What are the major journals for wine economists? Which ones are the most influential? Journal rankings are intended to reflect the place of a journal within its field, the relative difficulty of being published in that journal, and the prestige associated with it. Since no consensus has been reached as to the superiority of a given methodology, the objective of this paper is to present a new peer evaluation methodology based on a Best-Worst scaling approach applied to the field of research in wine economics and business. The list of relevant journals was drawn from a citation-based analysis and a two-steps survey was launched in 2020 involving academic researchers in this field. The results support the idea that the Best-Worst approach is a useful tool to rank journals through peer evaluation in new fields of research. Further, this exercise is of potential interest for the field of wine economics and those active within it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To facilitate access of Vietnamese private firms to financing resources, the first Stock Exchange Center in Ho Chi Minh City (HOSE) was inaugurated on July 20 SP th sp , 2000, and the first transactions were launched on July 28 SP th sp , 2000 with only two types of shares (REE and SAM - two Vietnamese manufacturing firms participating at the very early stage of the Vietnamese equitization process). This failure could be explained by the bureaucratic budgetary allocation mechanism of the socialist state, by the absence of any competition, which is why the poor performance of the key players in the economy, which are mainly state-owned and run enterprises (SOEs). Modernising the economy and increasing the resources available for businesses also means changing the shareholding and the governance of state-owned enterprises, especially for technological firms, as this impacts their financing capacity and performance (Sahut et al., [15]). [Extracted from the article]

The study of tourism and hospitality has been carried out from different academic perspectives, disciplines and fields of knowledge. This paper has focused on the main disciplines in the Spanish tourism and hospitality. For this, the scientific output of the Spanish researchers in tourism and hospitality has been studied. The bibliometric analysis was performed using the Scopus database from 2002 to 2013. Findings showed that the fields of study in relation to Economics and Business stand out greatly in Spanish tourism and hospitality research. In particular, three relevant areas have been detected, such as Applied Economics, Marketing and Business Administration. However, no significant differences have been found between these three areas with respect to the bibliometric indicators used. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

I The United States Government Internet Directory 2021 i describes and offers access to the vast collection of websites maintained by the Executive, Judicial, and Legislative branches of the United States government. Organization and content There are details on approximately 1800 government and non-government websites arranged in 20 topical chapters that provide a concise and logical structure. [Extracted from the article]

In this article, we examine the innovative behaviour of private manufacturing firms using a unique Innovation Follow-up Survey (2015) first time conducted by the World Bank for the Pakistan economy. To model the structural relationship between R&D, innovation, firm performance, and export we specify an extended version of CDM model proposed by Crepon et al. (1998. Research, innovation and productivi [Ty: An econometric analysis at the firm level. Economics of Innovation and New Technology, 7(2), 115–158), modified by (Griffith, R., Huergo, E., Mairesse, J., & Peters, B. [2006]. Innovation and productivity across four European countries. Oxford Review of Economic Policy, 22(4), 483–498; Hall, B. H., Lotti, F., & Mairesse, J. [2009]. Innovation and productivity in SMEs: empirical evidence for Italy. Small Business Economics, 33(1), 13–33) and further extended by this study via introducing propensity to export stage. Our econometric results show that technological innovations (product and process innovation) have significantly positive impacts on firm performance which plays a key role in the firm's decision to engage in exporting activities. The elasticity of labour productivity with respect to process is slightly higher than the product innovation. Robustness analysis reports that, except for organisational innovation, the predicted research intensity has a positive impact on innovation output no matter which proxy is used for the firm-level innovation. Moreover, non-technological innovations (marketing and organisational innovation) have no impact on firm performance for all the alternative econometrical specifications and are mostly in line with the existing literature. The findings have practical implications for policymakers with respect to firm productivity and export propensity, and highlight the significance of innovation in empowering firms to increase economic performance and catch up. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study compares search results in Google Scholar (GS), Microsoft Academic (MA), Scopus, and Web of Science (WoS) for a set of fifteen business and economics journals, ten of which had impact factors, and five that did not. These results were analyzed to evaluate the relative performance of each database in identifying citations for articles, and to determine whether one source might be preferable to another in different circumstances. Results showed that Google Scholar and Microsoft Academic have nearly the same number of average citations, with GS only slightly higher, and each has twice as many as either Web of Science or Scopus. Even so, higher numbers did not automatically lead to an unequivocal recommendation to use the related databases without considering other aspects of each database, such as how citations are reported in each of these sources and the transparency that is provided in the fee-based databases. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Vince Dobilas, a retired senior technology executive in international finance, has nearly 30 years of IT experience working in the manufacturing, publishing, and finance industries. B I JGITM: i b I Please name and briefly describe some of your strategic IT applications in your roles at the international financial corporation. i B Dobilas: b Over my years of experience, it became increasingly evident to me that the cornerstone to successfully managing a global enterprise information technology function is the level of depth and robustness of the technology governance processes and strategic IT applications that enable them. These considerations lead to additional hosting challenges from a technical perspective for the overseas implementation of IT applications. B I JGITM: i b I What have been the key management challenges/issues in the overseas implementation of IT applications?. [Extracted from the article]

After the Asian currency crisis in 1998, Vietnam's economy entered a new period of economic growth. Using a unique dataset of 5,267 foreign firms with investments in Vietnam during the period 2005 to 2016, Quan and Nguyen investigate the entry mode choice of foreign investors when entering Vietnam. Nguyen and Vu analyze the degree of asset investment diversification that affects firm performance through the mediating effect of business diversification. [Extracted from the article]

Economic Research-Ekonomska Istraživanja is an international journal in the research field of business and economics and firstly published in 2007. In this paper, we make a bibliometric analysis of publications in Economic Research-Ekonomska Istraživanja from 2007 to 2019. According to Web of Science (WoS), we derive 831 publications in the journal after data pre-processing. First, we explore characteristics of publications and citations based on widely recognised bibliometric indicators. Second, we present the influential countries/regions and influential institutions of publications in the journal. Next, we illustrate science mapping analysis according to two visualisation tools that are VOS viewer and CiteSpace. Specifically, co-citation networks and co-authorship networks are conducted to analyse connection of items. We generate bust detection analysis to identify the emerging cited authors and cited journals. Co-occurrence analysis and timeline view analysis of keywords are developed to detect the hot topics and trend of the journal. Finally, we make some discussions about future challenges of the journal in terms of the above analysis. This paper helps in objectively understanding the development of Economic Research-Ekonomska Istraživanja and provides a valuable reference for the scholars in business and economics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although online business degrees and student enrollments have increased, course quality and outcomes remain a challenge. We designed a collaborative learning activity at a large public university involving student-produced materials in an online managerial economics class. The activity included two parts: student production of a problem-solving video and rating of peer work. Students were randomly-sorted across identical class sections with and without the new activity. The findings based on final exam scores show that peer learning provides a positive impact on overall learning, and the activity also improves knowledge with respect to the topic of the video made. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Credit union participation in the consumer lending market continues to grow as an increasing number of consumers and small businesses become members and open accounts. This study investigates the determinants of credit union loan rates during a period of economic expansion in the United States using fourth quarter 2015 data for 5,942 credit unions. Five different interest rate categories are analysed using nine potential loan rate determinants. Results indicate that loan rates tend to be lower as credit union size increases, while high ratios for net charge-offs and operating costs cause interest rates to increase. Opposite to what is expected, loan rates are positively correlated with regional unemployment rates. A possible explanation for this outcome is that weak labour markets are associated with elevated loan delinquency rates and, therefore, greater default risks resulting in higher interest rates. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When confronted with information that ordinary citizens do not care that strongly about efficiency, do economists change their views of optimal public policy? In a randomised experiment on tax preferences conducted among business and economics students in Tanzania, we supplied the treatment group with information that ordinary citizens disagree with implications of efficiency-based optimal tax theory. Tax preferences were then measured using discrete choice experiments. The results show that the treated students modify their position in the direction of public opinion, an effect driven by students with longer exposure to economics. An economics education hence seems to produce professionals who are part democrats and part technocratic paternalists. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Based on an applied thematic analysis, this study identifies data literacy education practices in the business and economics librarian profession. Five themes emerged from the interviews: Roles and Responsibilities; Expertise; Pedagogy and Teaching; Professional Development; and, Institutional Support. This article is for librarians who find themselves working with data and those who want to do so. The insights shared from participants offer trajectories for administrators to support the work of data literacy education. The article's recommended future research directions section provides areas to build community and develop inquiry for interested researchers' ongoing work in data literacy instruction and academic librarianship. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Is a web-based research platform that provides streamlined access to data from multiple vendors using a standard search interface. The WRDS Cloud, accessible via SSH, and additional remote access options using popular programming software are exclusively available to Faculty, Ph.D., Visitor, and Staff accounts. Despite this, WRDS provides easy access to data for research, and for the more than 75,000 WRDS users, the benefits outweigh the cost. [Extracted from the article]

In the first years of their economics degree programs, students will face many problems successfully dealing with a range of subjects with quantitative content. Specifically, in the field of statistics, difficulties to reach some basic academic achievements have been observed. Hence, a continuing challenge for statistics teachers is how to make this subject more appealing for students through the design and implementation of new teaching methodologies. The latter tend to follow two main approaches. On the one hand, it is useful for the learning process to propose practical activities that can connect theoretical concepts with real applications in the economic context. On the other hand, we should design multidisciplinary activities that link concepts from different subjects. With this goal in mind, in this article we propose a complete activity for first year students in business administration and economics degree programs, aimed to reinforce some basic statistical and economic concepts, while other basic transversal skills are also practiced, all within the subject of statistics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

I Mark Carney was Governor of the Bank of England from 2013 to 2020. These are the types of considerations that are coming into the financial markets which means three things for the markets: better disclosure, better risk management, and a much more comprehensive sense of what returns are that take into account climate risk and opportunities. The financial markets will be there to help with that transition, and the Bank of England will be there behind those financial markets and those financial institutions, to make sure they are there for you, as you lead us forward. [Extracted from the article]

Researchers have stressed that manufacturing system flexibility research requires a quantitative model allowing a manufacturing system to prioritize its flexibility dimension and promote the performance of the manufacturing system. A quantification model presented in the present research is demonstrated to assess the degree of environmental uncertainty and illustrates a method for delivering the requirement of flexibility improvement for the manufacturing system so that the company is able to prioritize the types of manufacturing flexibility which a manufacturing system requires in an uncertain environment. Quantitative approaches including quality function deployment (QFD), analytical hierarchy process (AHP), and grey relational analysis (GRA) have been employed to find a means for improving the flexibility of a manufacturing system to cope with environmental uncertainty. QFD is the focal approach for the deployment of the integrated structure of the research. AHP is applied to explore the relative weighted importance of environmental uncertainty factors, while GRA is used to find out the relationships between manufacturing flexibility and environmental uncertainty. A combination of these approaches reveals a useful tool for managers to prioritize the types of flexibility which a manufacturing system requires for coping with an uncertain environment. In particular, the present research studied the manufacturing flexibility requirements of a food company in Taiwan. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Bill Emmott is an independent writer and consultant who has had a long and distinguished career in journalism. He spent 26 years at The Economist, working as a correspondent and editor in various locations around the world. He has received honorary degrees from several universities and holds positions in various organizations. Emmott is also a prolific author, with a focus on topics such as Japan, Asia, Italy, and gender equality. His latest book, "Japan's Far More Female Future," explores the potential benefits of increasing gender equality in Japan. [Extracted from the article]

This paper develops a series of two-stage duopoly models of quality-price competition and a series of monopoly models of quality-price choice in order to examine the impact of information technology (IT) investments on firm profit, firm productivity, and consumer welfare. We solve the duopoly and monopoly models for four cost functions, where each function makes a different assumption about the form of the marginal cost of production. These models are used to conduct a two-by-four comparison [(monopoly, duopoly) x (four cost functions)] of the impact of IT investments on economic performance. The analysis reveals that together market structure and cost structure play a critical role in determining the form of the relationship between IT investment and economic measures. Specifically, moving from monopoly to duopoly and moving from zero marginal cost to marginal cost as a function of quality increase the number of economic measures for which the directional effects of IT investment are ambiguous, or depend on model parameter values. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As business-to-consumer online shopping grows, e-commerce channel providers will need to explore ways to anticipate consumers' needs to deliver an efficient shopping experience. Yet the consumers' decision-making process and its relationship to the selection of the online channel are not well understood. Utilizing Simon's decision-making model, we examined support for decision-making phases using 134 online consumers. We also extended the model to include consumers' cost savings and time savings, as well as their satisfaction with the e-commerce channel. Structural equation modeling results indicate that the online shopping channel supported the overall decision-making process. In particular, we found strong support for the design and choice phases of online consumers' decision-making process. Our results also indicate that support for the decision-making process was mediated by the cost savings and time savings gained by the online consumers and led to their greater channel satisfaction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Grounded in the technology–organization–environment (TOE) framework, we develop a research model for assessing the value of e-business at the firm level. Based on this framework, we formulate six hypotheses and identify six factors (technology readiness, firm size, global scope, financial resources, competition intensity, and regulatory environment) that may affect value creation of e-business. Survey data from 612 firms across 10 countries in the financial services industry were collected and used to test the theoretical model. To examine how e-business value is influenced by economic environments, we compare two subsamples from developed and developing countries. Based on structural equation modeling, our empirical analysis demonstrates several key findings: (1) Within the TOE framework, technology readiness emerges as the strongest factor for e-business value, while financial resources, global scope, and regulatory environment also significantly contribute to e-business value. (2) Firm size is negatively related to e-business value, suggesting that structural inertia associated with large firms tends to retard e-business value. (3) Competitive pressure often drives firms to adopt e-business, but e-business value is associated more with internal organizational resources (e.g., technological readiness) than with external pressure to adopt. (4) While financial resources are an important factor in developing countries, technological capabilities become far more important in developed countries. This suggests that as firms move into deeper stages of e-business transformation, the key determinant of e-business value shifts from monetary spending to higher dimensions of organizational capabilities. (5) Government regulation plays a much more important role in developing countries than in developed countries. These findings indicate the usefulness of the proposed research model and theoretical framework for studying e-business value. They also provide insight [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper deals with service level constraints which are defined over a fiscal period. Fiscal-period-based service level constraints are considerably more: complex than their lead-time counterparts and result in significantly different safety stock requirements. Thus, a confusion between a lead-time and fiscal-period perspective can result in substantial financial consequences and is therefore of managerial relevance. Although no generalizations are possible from the limited results presented, further computational experience suggests that the findings reported hold over a wide range of situations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

ADSPLIT is a computer-based, interactive, marketing model which optimally allocates a specified corporate promotional budget among individual brands competing for limited resources. The model requires either (a) regression-based response function coefficients based on historical data, or (b) judgments on what sales should be for different values of price and advertising expenditure for the brands, which the program then uses to estimate the function parameters. The advertising-sales response function is modeled through a flexible form that allows both concave and S-shaped relationships, while sales are related to price through a constant elasticity (Cobb-Douglas) function. The model uses the estimated or input functions to compute the optimal budget allocation for the brands, given an upper bound for the total promotional expenditures and upper- and lower-budget bounds for every brand, using nonlinear optimization heuristics. Optimal prices for the brands are also computed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The empirical results suggest a negative relationship between the quality of supervisory support and turnover intentions, mediated partially by employees' performance appraisal satisfaction." The third paper is entitled, "Determinants of working capital management for non-certified and certified firms from the EFQM Excellence Model" by Muhammad Yousaf (School of Business and Economics, Westminster International University in Tashkent, Uzbekistan). According to the authors, "this study examines the relationships among quality supervision, performance appraisal satisfaction, and employee turnover. [Extracted from the article]

The interaction between management and history is more extensive than people imagine from a glance. As Üsdiken and Kipping have shown, management history is often there even when people do not see it. In their book, Üsdiken and Kipping set themselves to find how much history has informed management and organisational research. [Extracted from the article]

Foresight at the fuzzy front end of the innovation process has become a widespread managerial practice to increase innovation capacity. Nevertheless, conducting foresight by focusing exclusively on internal know-how and capabilities might inhibit companies from maximising the full potential of this managerial practice. Therefore, opening up companies’ boundaries to look into the long term future jointly with other organisations and to share knowledge on possible future developments, is proposed as a promising approach against these limitations. Before committing to inter-organisational collaborations like collaborative open foresight, it is important to analyse whether the company possesses the necessary prerequisites. Findings from adjacent areas indicate that organisational culture and its influence on a company’s openness to engage in open approaches is an important precondition. So far, no clear evidence of a culture fostering openness for open foresight has yet been presented. Based on two in-depth case studies applying the Competing Values Framework for (organisational) culture analysis we identify cultural values that foster or inhibit openness: (1) A corporate culture characterised by a clan culture and adhocracy culture is fostering openness, whereas (2) a market and hierarchy culture inhibits openness for open foresight participation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although the term “corporate governance” is relatively new in the economist’s lexicon, the issues with which it is concerned are as old as the profession itself. In this article, first I try to illustrate this, and then I trace the development of the literature, including discussions of the so-called managerial discretion literature and the principal–agent literature. Following a discussion of asset bubbles, I illustrate the tension between concerns about corporate governance and neoclassical economics by examining the literature on managerial compensation and mergers. This literature reveals a wide gap between traditional neoclassical economics and more recent developments in behavioral economics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Empirical evidence shows that switching costs are important in many industries. We analyze the welfare effects of entry into markets with switching costs when firms can be run by managers and the entrant may be partially foreign-owned. We find that with profit-maximizing firms, the welfare effect of entry depends crucially on the ownership of the entrant firm. We also show that entry is less likely with managerial firms than it is with profit-maximizing firms. In the latter case, entry always reduces welfare if the share of the entrant firm owned by foreign investors is high. However, with managerial firms, entry always increases welfare. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Innovation is a process of knowledge recombination [Fleming, L. 2001. "Recombinant Uncertainty in Technological Search." Management Science 47: 119 p]. Extant literature highlights the importance of a firm's knowledge base for innovation, while little is known about the structure of a firm's knowledge base and how it affects the firm's explorative innovation. Based upon the perspective of network analysis, we portray a firm's knowledge base as an intra-organisational knowledge network and examine the effects of two structural features of the network - density and centralisation - on the firms' exploratory innovation. Using a manual collected dataset of 738 Chinese automobile manufacturers, we find that a firm explores fewer new knowledge elements when the firm holds a dense knowledge network or a centralised knowledge network. More importantly, with the increase of a firm's R&D collaborations with external actors, the negative effect of density is mitigated while the negative effect of centralisation is reinforced. Both theoretical and practical implications are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How do cultural workers deal with the tension between autonomy and control in their working lives? One answer, advanced in this journal by Mark Banks in 2010, is that cultural autonomy provides scope for self-realisation, and potentially for ways of working that challenge commercial and managerial constraints. It allows those with critical inclinations to resist unpalatable controls and initiate processes of struggle which may deliver improvements in the conduct and experience of work. More recent empirical studies have cast doubt on this interpretation, pointing to patterns of instrumental behaviour and conforming autonomy that reinforce earlier images of controlled or self-interested ‘creatives’. With most of the relevant research focused on commercial contexts, this article considers whether publicly funded art provides more fertile terrain for the destabilising autonomy thesis. Four years of fieldwork with community arts practitioners in Scotland and Northern Ireland captures the everyday pressures of struggling to survive and to resist neoliberal cultural policies, managerial controls and fluctuating incomes. It also reveals collective capacities to intervene that are consistent with the Banks image of dissenting activists for change. The abiding impression at the end of the research is of grinding struggle rather than progressive change, however, or even sustained relief. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In China, the fresh product supply chain is usually connected by a wholesale market. This feature, as well as the product's perishability, has a great influence on the chain. The market price is exogenous and stochastic because it is actually determined by the uncontrollable supply and demand in the market. The wholesaler reacts to the stochastic price, and based on his experience, he may refuse to sell and may retain fresh products with relatively long lifetime when the price is low. When purchasing at the market, the retailer is incapable of distinguishing the quality change during the delay caused by the wholesaler. However, the difference in quality becomes obvious with faster deterioration in the retail store, and the retailer's sales are influenced accordingly. The ' market' works well in pricing the products and matching supply and demand, but it cannot prevent the wholesaler delaying the sales due to the retailer's incapability. We explain this situation as a result of quality information asymmetry and fix it by coordinating the supply chain; we expect a cooperation mechanism in which the wholesaler cannot improve his profit by delaying the sales even when he has access to the market. The wholesaler's behavior under market price uncertainty is simplified and described. With the wholesaler's behavior taken into account, the average quality distribution in the market is approximately estimated. With the approximated description, we construct the model and design the mechanism to coordinate the wholesaler and retailer. A numerical experiment based on an actual market situation is developed and analyzed; the reason why most existing contracts fail is discussed, and managerial suggestions are provided for the practitioners. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This special issue of Eastern European Economics consists of articles by economics and business researchers at Babes-Bolyai University and their collaborators from other universities. Using moderation analysis, they find that tax literacy is one of the key elements shaping tax compliance. The level of tax literacy was estimated using a tax literacy index created for this purpose. [Extracted from the article]

The paper constitutes an analysis of the views of managers of service firms on positioning strategies in Ghana. The research employed a qualitative research method. Data were collected from 21 service managers and analyzed using content analysis procedures. The results indicate that for service managers, the perceived dominant positioning strategies of their organizations were: service quality, customer relationship, innovation, availability of service, community support, and leading organization, among others. The findings suggest that the dominant managerial views of Ghanaian service managers form a ‘hybrid’ of those of the Western manager. This research is important in clarifying this position. Additionally, as an exploratory piece, the study provides bases for further research on a topic in Ghana with a rather scant evidence of research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]