Customer reviews reduce search cost and uncertainty about a product’s quality. Hence, the quantity and quality of reviews has positive impacts on purchase intentions, sales, and customer satisfaction. In order to increase review quality, retailers and online platforms employ different monetary incentives. We experimentally compare two different incentive schemes: an incentive scheme in which reviewers receive a flat salary, which is independent of review quality, and a tournament incentive scheme in which the reviewer who wrote the most helpful review receives a bonus payment. Helpfulness ratings are assigned by the other reviewers. In our experiment, adverse consequences arise under the tournament incentive scheme. Strategic considerations give rise to strategic downvoting, so that reviewers assign low helpfulness ratings to others’ reviews in order to maximize their expected payoffs. Review writing behavior remains unaffected: the tournament incentive scheme does not affect review quality. However, it does destroy the signaling power of helpfulness ratings.
In the present research, we test the mechanisms (Studies 1a and 1b, conducted online), consequences, and limitations (Study 2, conducted in the lab) of anthropomorphizing autonomous (vs. manual) products. Building on previous theoretical and empirical research on product anthropomorphism, we argue and find that anthropomorphism is perceived to be more congruent with autonomous products than with manual products. Furthermore, we show that anthropomorphism increases the liking of autonomous products, given that consumers have no prior experience with autonomous products. Increased liking of autonomous products due to anthropomorphism, in turn, increases purchase intentions and positive evaluations of outcomes obtained by the autonomous product. The findings are discussed with regard to optimal marketing and design of autonomous products.
Shares of open-end real estate funds are typically traded directly between the investor and the fund management company. However, we provide empirical evidence for the growth of secondary market activities, i.e., the trading of shares on stock exchanges. We find high trading levels in situations where the fund management company suspends the issue or redemption of shares. Shares trade at a discount when the fund management company suspends the redemption, whereas shares trade at a premium when the fund management company suspends the issue. We also find evidence that secondary market trading activity is increasing since German regulation introduced a minimum holding period and a mandatory notice period for open-end real estate funds.
We set up a multiperiod, CAPM-type model with imperfect competition between investors in case of an additional price-insensitive market participant. The motivation for this additional actor comes from the ECB's announcement to buy a substantial amount of securities "whatever it takes" which reflects the willingness to trade in a entirely price-inelastic way. Our model explains the effects on demand functions, equilibrium prices, portfolio holdings and investors' expected utility. The interaction of price-inelastic additional demand by the ECB, on the one hand, and imperfect competition, on the other hand, causes differentiated results regarding timing strategies, development of prices over time, and utility implications.
In the present research, we test the mechanisms (Studies 1a and 1b, conducted online), consequences, and limitations (Study 2, conducted in the lab) of anthropomorphizing autonomous (vs. manual) products. Building on previous theoretical and empirical research on product anthropomorphism, we argue and find that anthropomorphism is perceived to be more congruent with autonomous products than with manual products. Furthermore, we show that anthropomorphism increases the liking of autonomous products, given that consumers have no prior experience with autonomous products. Increased liking of autonomous products due to anthropomorphism, in turn, increases purchase intentions and positive evaluations of outcomes obtained by the autonomous product. The findings are discussed with regard to optimal marketing and design of autonomous products.
Smart service systems enable innovative value propositions based on smart products and data-driven value creation. Grounded in service-dominant logic as our theoretical lens, we argue that smart service innovation takes place in ecosystems of collaborating actors, as a single actor does not possess all required resources and competencies. We empirically explore smart service innovation using an interview study of 14 experts who were involved in real-world smart service systems engineering projects. As a result, we conceptualize 17 roles that describe the resources and competencies required for smart service innovation at an abstract level. Through the analysis of actor-role constellations in our sample of projects, we further identify four patterns that exhibit different strategic approaches to smart service innovation. Our results advance the theoretical understanding of smart service systems through an empirically grounded systematization of roles, which reflect the resources and competencies required for smart service innovation. With this study, we shed light on the multi-actor and inter-organizational settings of service innovation processes, which have been under-researched so far. Our insights are further helpful for practitioners, who participate in the smart service innovation and who need to analyze their strategic position in service ecosystems.
Mobile location-based services (LBS) represent a promising opportunity for inner-city retailers and service providers to react to changes in customer behavior due to digitalization. To gain competitive advantages, mobile LBS must offer customers high value-in-use and help them reach their shopping goals during their inner-city visits. Shopping goals differ depending on shopping patterns; thus, these patterns may influence customers’ evaluation of mobile LBS during inner-city visits. Since value-in-use is not only a context-specific but also a temporally dynamic construct, customers’ user experience must also be considered. Therefore, this study investigates the influence of customers’ shopping patterns and current user experience on their evaluation of mobile LBS’ value-in-use during inner-city visits. Moreover, the impacts of the offers transmitted through mobile LBS on the value-in-use are examined. Using field test data, we empirically verify a conceptualization of mobile LBS and determine a comprehensive view of mobile LBS’ value-in-use during shopping trips with different shopping patterns and user experience within a mixed-method analysis. Our results identify both utilitarian and hedonic value-in-use components as being empirically relevant for high value-in-use evaluations regarding mobile LBS in inner cities. Furthermore, the relevance of monetary benefits, fun benefits, and irritation on value-in-use vary according to customers’ user experience. A customer’s shopping pattern affects the value-in-use of mobile LBS; however, this effect is not as differentiated as expected. Moreover, the number of relevant monetary and non-monetary offers transmitted during an inner-city visit are shown to represent a potential, albeit limited, management instrument for affecting mobile LBS’ value-in-use.
Along the energy value chain where produced energy is delivered for consumption within individual households, physical devices are being replaced by smart and connected products referred to as the Internet of Things. These smart products generate large volumes of data that can enable new data-driven business models. In the energy sector, consumers produce data by consuming energy, which is monitored and controlled by different smart energy products like microgeneration units or home automation devices. Although smart energy business models have been subject to academic research, the business value of data, which is created from smart energy products, remains unclear. Against this background, the paper presents a practitioners' perspective on the data-driven potential of smart energy technologies for new business models, the constituting elements of these business models, and the challenges associated with their implementation. By doing this, we provide trajectories for the future of the energy industry and draw guiding implications for developing data-driven smart energy business models.
This paper conceptualizes organizational rare events and proposes a research methodology to explore them. To achieve this endeavour, we use case of the closure of CBA as an empirical field which allowed us to explore and discuss the theme. Existing literature suggests an organization rare event as an occurrence which presents a historical character and generates propagation in media and social mobilization. Our research contribution adds to this definition the emotional dimension of the organizational rare event. It means the relevance of the feelings and experiences of people involved in this particular situation. As a result, we enrich the definition and comprehension of rareness of an organizational event. In addition to this, we argue that organizational rare events demand a mix of qualitative research methods using interviews, observation, photographs, drawings and documental research in social media and newspapers.
In this note, I discuss the article of Dorner et al. who experimentally study the issue of generating high-quality online product reviews under two different incentive schemes. I first classify their work in the existing literature on marketing and information systems and highlight their contribution. I then argue that the existence of cognitive dissonance costs serve as a reasonable explanatory factor for their main results. Two further critical issues warn against the limited generalizability of the present study to the real review market and ability to provide practical implications.
The current Corona crisis makes us almost forget that about eight years ago a severe euro crisis shook the financial markets.It was Mario Draghi who, with his nowwinged word of "whatever it takes", made sure that market participants regained their confidence.However, it was not only the dictum that helped to strengthen the markets.Rather, the establishment of the Securities Markets Program, and later the asset purchase program (APP), had the effect of providing sufficient liquidity in the markets and achieving price stability.Theoretical economists do not often deal with current political issues.For while it was understandable that the above-mentioned programs work in financial markets, details and effects on prices and market equilibrium are not so obvious.It is precisely these issues that are at the heart of Koziol and Neus' work.It should be noted, and the authors also refer to this at the beginning of their introduction, that the results of the paper do not only refer to the ECB programs.Other cases of price-inelastic demand are also conceivable, such as stock repurchase programs or funds that strictly follow an asset savings plan.In this respect, this is not only a discussion of current political decision, but also a very basic theoretical question.The authors make use of the tools that we regularly use in the financial sector.They model a multi-period exchange equilibrium in which market participants trade in a CAPM-like manner, but a market participant (more precisely the ECB) undertakes to buy government bonds or securities under all circumstances in order
We implement the Fama-French five-factor model and enhance it with a momentum factor for the German market using recent monthly data from 2002 to 2019. We construct the factors associated with the market, size, value, profitability, investment, and momentum for the CDAX constituents and examine to what extent this six-factor model captures the return premia in the German market. Our preliminary analysis does not document any significant evidence on the profitability or investment premium. The results on the six-factor model compared with the three-factor model reveal that the additional factors do not add significant explanatory power to the analysis. We conclude that the relevance of the profitability and investment factors within the context of international asset pricing studies cannot be transferred to the country- specific case of the German market.
Despite the increasingly active role of civic actors, there is often no possibility for them to participate in project planning and decision-making. This discrepancy leads to costly conflicts and even failures. Unfortunately, the literature on project stakeholder management does not have sufficient theoretical substantiation to address this issue. To fill this knowledge gap, we integrate the concepts of stakeholder salience, public participation, and nonmarket strategy, and apply them to two urban infrastructure projects in Germany. This study contributes to the literature in two dimensions. First, it offers a dynamic and conceptual model for project stakeholder management, providing explanations for different conflict intensities. Second, it advances each individual area of research. Examples include the identification and clustering of so-called nonmarket assets, an examination of the influence of nonmarket strategies on managers’ perceptions of stakeholder salience, and the study of public participation in a corporate–political context, rather than a purely political one.
Previous experiments observe a chain of unkindness: unkindly treated people treat an innocent third party unkindly. As a remedy, it has been proposed that the unkindly treated person engages in emotional regulation by writing a letter to the unkind person. Indeed, subjects who received little money were willing to leave more to a third person when they were writing a letter rather than waiting. Here, we examine whether emotional regulation is indeed behind this observation. In line with emotional regulation, we find that letter writing also leads to more giving if the person is treated unkindly by being assigned to a frustrating rather than a pleasant job. Being able to write, however, does not affect self-reported happiness differently from having to wait. Even more strikingly, subjects assigned to pleasant jobs also give more when writing rather than waiting. This is not consistent with emotional regulation.
Vertical disintegration in manufacturing industries has been an increasing trend since the 1990s in many countries. According to a prevailing management paradigm of focusing on core competencies, firms should have vertically disintegrated (i.e. outsourced non-core competencies) to achieve cost savings, enhance competitiveness and improve firm performance. In line with this management paradigm, most empirical studies therefore hypothesized a negative linear relationship between the degree of vertical integration and firm performance, expecting performance to rise when vertical integration decreases. In contrast to previous studies, finding mixed results, we assume an inverted u‑shaped relationship, theoretically based on transaction cost economics and the resource-based view of the firm, and by considering advantages and disadvantages of vertical integration, with an optimal level of vertical integration, where firms with a too low degree of vertical integration could achieve higher performance by vertical integration, while firms with too broad vertical integration could achieve higher performance by vertical disintegration. With respect to our data based on a sample of 434 German manufacturing firms between 1993 and 2013 we find a decreasing trend of vertical integration over time. Applying multiple regression analysis, our findings suggest a positive, but diminishing relationship between the degree of vertical integration and financial performance. These two findings describe a paradox of vertical disintegration. The decreasing trend mainly emerges because lower performing firms outsourced their activities significantly whereas high performing firms do not show such a development. Overall, our results indicate that German manufacturing firms might have gone too far in in their vertical disintegration strategy by following a management paradigm which needs much more critical reflection.
Despite its benefits, municipalities frequently struggle to take advantage of accrual accounting as a basis for managerial decisions. We assume that the reason for this is that municipalities technically implement accrual accounting but sometimes keep it decoupled from daily decision making. To identify factors that facilitate a more sophisticated usage of accrual accounting in German public administrations, we examined the influence of the municipality’s contextual situation, organizational structure, and resource provision on the degree of sophistication in the use of accrual accounting. We found that the most relevant driver for a more sophisticated use of accrual accounting is the contextual situation in which the municipality is embedded. In our research model, a municipality’s contextual situation consists of fiscal stress, its political competition and culture, and the relevant legal system. Another important factor is the adequate provision of resources, such as an IT system that delivers easily accessible and accurate accounting information. Notably, the specific organizational structure of the municipality, which is often regarded as highly bureaucratic and the main obstruction to reforms, is not significant.
This paper examines how the involvement of family members in family firms affects the roles of supervisory boards in two-tier board systems. Taking an agency and resource-based perspective, we argue that the occurrence of monitoring and advisory tasks of the board depends on the entanglement of family management and family ownership. This entanglement creates special governance requirements for family firms in two-tier board systems. We use a unique dataset of 186 German family firm observations to show that family involvement in management as well as a high family ownership reduces the occurrence of the monitoring tasks that the supervisory board performs. Moreover, we show that a growing number of owning family branches increases the monitoring tasks. We also provide evidence that family involvement increases the occurrence of the advisory tasks in relation to the monitoring ones.
Given the increasing role of socially responsible investing (SRI), but still limited participation of individual (i.e. small, retail) investors, the objective of this study is twofold: (i) We aim to identify investment barriers regarding SRI for individual investors and analyze to what extent these barriers vary across different investor groups. (ii) We analyze to what extent sustainability or transparency labels can help to overcome these barriers. To this end, we empirically analyze data from a survey and a stated choice experiment for a broad sample of financial decision makers in German households. The results suggest that a considerable amount of respondents can imagine to invest in a socially responsible manner, which is promising for policymakers and practitioners who aim to foster sustainable development and SRI. However, too high information costs are a severe barrier for potential future investors and a considerable share of respondents distrusts providers of socially responsible investment products. Banks, who could help to solve this problem, appear not to fulfill their role as intermediaries. But we find that labels might serve as a complement to banks. Especially sustainability certificates that confirm the consideration of sustainability criteria could decrease information costs and overcome at least some barriers for some investor groups, particularly for new investors. However, the results also suggest that a certain degree of basic knowledge and trust in providers of socially responsible investment products is required before labels work efficiently.
The impact of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) on firm performance is an important issue in organizational research and has been discussed for decades. Only lately, scholars turned their attention towards aspects on an individual level, like the relation between CSR and work satisfaction or work engagement. However, still our understanding of how CSR activities shape organizational outcomes by affecting employees' motivation remains piecemeal. The present paper adds to this stream by analyzing the impact of CSR activities on employees' intrinsic and extrinsic motivation. Findings indicate that CSR activities both on a firm and on a supra-organizational level have a positive impact on intrinsic motivation, while not affecting extrinsic motivation, i.e. CSR neither fosters nor impedes extrinsic motivation. As a consequence the commitment to CSR can be applied as an effective instrument to induce intrinsic motivation without compromising extrinsic motivation. Furthermore, results point to a non-additive impact of CSR engagement at both levels, which indicates a complex joint impact of CSR engagement on different organizational levels on employees' intrinsic motivation.
