Yearly Archives: 2010

Information Systems

An Exploratory Study of Website Information Content

Joseph Hasley and Dawn G. Gregg
Journal of Theoretical and Applied Electronic Commerce Research, December 2010, 5(3), pp. 27-38.

This study describes and demonstrates the Website Information Content Survey (WICS), which is intended to provide practitioners and researchers with a means of systematically describing website information content. In an exploratory survey of twenty business-to-consumer websites across five e-commerce domains, we demonstrate how the survey can be used to make cross-website comparisons that can identify potential gaps in a website’s information content. The results of this study offer actionable guidance to practitioners seeking to match their website’s information mix to customer’s demands for product, company, and channel information. The WICS tool enables future investigation of hypothesized relationships between website information content and user-website interaction outcomes

Accounting

What Are the Essential Features of a Liability?

Murray, Dennis
Accounting Horizons; Dec. 2010, Vol. 24 Issue 4, p623-633.

The Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB) and the International Accounting Standards Board (IASB) are in the process of jointly re-examining their conceptual frameworks. The re-examination includes assessing the definition of a liability. The Boards’ existing liability definitions include three criteria: (1) a present obligation; (2) a past transaction or event; and (3) a probable future sacrifice of economic benefits. The Boards have recently proposed that a liability be defined as “a present obligation for which the entity is the obligor” (FASB 2008c, 2). The proposed definition mentions only one time dimension (the present). References to the past and future are omitted. This paper argues that these omissions are undesirable. Omitting a reference to the past removes the link between the definition and the tradition of historically based financial statements. More importantly, however, the failure to reference future sacrifices of economic benefits divorces the definition from the primary objective of financial reporting: to provide information about the “amount, timing and uncertainty of an entity’s future cash flows” (FASB 2008a, para. OB6). This paper offers an alternative definition that emphasizes the past and future rather than the present.

Entrepreneurship, Marketing

Do satisfied customers bad-mouth innovative products?

Parthasarathy, Madhavan and Forlani, David
Psychology & Marketing; Dec. 2010, Vol. 27 Issue 12, pp. 1134-1153

For many years marketing academics have recommended, and practitioners have implemented, organization-wide programs that measure customers’ levels of satisfaction with a firm’s offerings because it is believed that satisfied customers are both more likely to continue using a previously adopted product and less likely to engage in negative word-of-mouth communication. Given the ubiquity of product-review forums resulting from today’s increasing levels of e-commerce, this paper pairs cause constructs from the diffusion literature with effect constructs from the satisfaction and services literatures to reconsider that perspective. Specifically, it examines the relationships bet-ween six perceived innovation attributes known to influence a new product’s diffusion process and two post-adoption behaviors, satisfaction and negative word-of-mouth communication. The results quash previous assumptions that satisfaction mediates negative word-of-mouth communication and reveal that satisfied customers do speak ill of previously adopted products. Implications for both theory and practice are also presented.

Economics

Anti-Irish Job Discrimination circa 1880: Evidence from Major League Baseball

Eckard, F. Woodrow
Social Science History, Vol. 34, Issue 4, Dec. 2010, pp. 407-443.

Historians have generally presumed that Irish immigrants in the late nineteenth century suffered from ethnic job discrimination. However, empirical scholarship reports conflicting evidence. The present article presents new evidence on the issue based on data from Major League Baseball circa 1880. These data are unique in that “firms” (teams) and individual “employees” (players) can be identified along with “job assignments” (positions played) and “performance” (e.g., batting averages). Linking the players’ names with U.S. census enumeration records allows relatively accurate identification of ethnicity. I test various hypotheses derived from Gary S. Becker’s economic theory of discrimination. The main results are that Irish players outperformed non-Irish players both on average and at the margin, were (generally) relegated to less central positions in the field, were more often required to fill in at nonregular positions, and were less likely to be hired as managers. In addition, the proportion of Irish on ball clubs and in their host cities was positively correlated, and team win percentage had a (weak) positive correlation with the team’s proportion of Irish. Overall, the results generally support anti-Irish discrimination against skilled workers in this highly visible, albeit small, “industry.

Marketing

Do satisfied customers badmouth innovative products?

Madhavan Parthasarathy, David Forlani
Psychology & Marketing,Vol. 27, Issue 12, Pages: 1134-1153.

For many years marketing academics have recommended, and practitioners have implemented, organization-wide programs that measure customers’ levels of satisfaction with a firm’s offerings because it is believed that satisfied customers are both more likely to continue using a previously adopted product and less likely to engage in negative word-of-mouth communication. Given the ubiquity of product-review forums resulting from today’s increasing levels of e-commerce, this paper pairs cause constructs from the diffusion …
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Health Management

Ignorance Isn’t Bliss: Complaint Experience and Organizational Learning in the California Nursing Home Industry, 1997–2004

Vinit M. Desai
British Journal of Management,  Dec. 2010, Vol. 21 Issue 4, pp. 829-842.

Organizational learning theory suggests that complaints about products and services can promote organizational learning and change. However, evidence suggests that potentially valuable forms of experience may be ignored or discounted in organizations, and additional research is needed to determine why this happens. This study contributes to those efforts by examining how multiple forms of complaint experience interactively influence organizational outcomes. An empirical test on a longitudinal panel of Californian nursing homes finds that complaints about other issues may distract attention away from complaints about a focal issue, but only when complaints are provided anonymously. These findings forward organizational learning theories by suggesting that multiple types of experience may detract from rather than supplement each other in some cases. Additional implications and opportunities for further research are also discussed.

Information Systems

Dynamic interaction in knowledge based systems: An exploratory investigation and empirical evaluation

Beemer, Brandon and Gregg, Dawn
Decision Support Systems,  Vol. 49 Issue 4, November 2010, pp. 386-395.

In response to the need for knowledge based support in unstructured domains, researchers and practitioners have begun developing systems that mesh the traditional attributes of knowledge based systems (KBS) and decision support system (DSS). One such attribute being applied to KBS is dynamic interaction. In an effort to provide a mechanism that will enable researchers to quantify this system attribute, and enable practitioners to prescribe the needed aspects of dynamic interaction in a specific application, a measurement scale was derived from previous literature. Control theory was used to provide the theoretical underpinnings of dynamic interaction and to identify its conceptual substrata. A pretest and exploratory study was conducted to refine the derived scale items, and then a confirmatory study was conducted to evaluate the nomological validity of the measurement scale.

Information Systems

Information technology infrastructure, organizational process redesign, and business value: An empirical analysis

Ramirez, Ronald, Melville, Nigel and Lawler, Edward
Decision Support Systems; Nov. 2010, Vol. 49 Issue 4, pp. 417-429

We extend current research examining synergies between information technology, process redesign, and firm performance in three ways: analyze a firm”s entire IT and BPR portfolio, examine production and market value performance implications, and conduct analysis using a unique dataset of 228 firms between 1996 and 1999. We find a contingent association between IT, process redesign, and performance. The interaction of IT and BPR portfolios is positively associated with firm productivity and market value. However, we find mixed evidence of a difference in these impacts across different types of BPR. Insights for business investment in IT and process redesign are discussed.

Finance

Conditional coskewness in stock and bond markets: time-series evidence

Jian Yang, Yinggang Zhou, Zijun Wang
Management Science,Vol. 56, Issue 11, Pages: 2031-2049.

In the context of a three-moment intertemporal capital asset pricing model specification, we characterize conditional coskewness between stock and bond excess returns using a bivariate regime-switching model. We find that both conditional US stock coskewness (the relation between stock return and bond volatility) and bond coskewness (the relation between bond return and stock volatility) command statistically and economically significant negative ex ante risk premiums. The impacts of stock and bond coskewness on the …
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Health Management

Keys for successful implementation of total quality management in hospitals

Carman, James M.; Shortell, Stephen M.; Foster, Richard W.; Hughes, Edward F.X.; Boerstler, Heidi; O’ Brien, James L.; and O’Connor, Edward J.
Health Care Management Review Vol. 35, Issue 4, pp 283-293

This article reports the findings of an analysis of the implementation of continuous quality improvement (CQI) or total quality management (TQM) programs in 10 hospitals. This analysis is the result of a 2-year study designed to identify and assess the ingredients that lead to the successful implementation of CQI programs in acute care hospitals.

Business Analytics

A two-stage approach to solving large capacitated task allocation problems

Mark Lewis and Gary Kochenberger
International Journal of Mathematical Modelling and Numerical Optimisation, Vol. 1, Issue 4, Pages: 259-273

This paper presents a simple, two-stage method, implemented in the commonly available Excel spreadsheet program, for quickly finding high quality solutions to larger, more difficult instances of the capacitated task allocation problem (CTAP) than have been previously reported. In Stage 1, an innovative modification of the approximation method of Griffith and Stewart is used to reformulate CTAP and find a near-integer solution. Based on the partial solution from Stage 1, the remaining tasks are allocated in a greatly reduced quadratic CTAP solved in Stage 2. Our results show that this approach yields very good solutions relatively quickly to very large problems (1,000 binary variables and 49,500 quadratic terms in the objective function). Ours is the first paper to modify the continuous approximation method of Griffith and Stewart to solve 0/1 problems and the first article to demonstrate the successful use of an Excel-based approach for solving very large CTAP problems.

Business Analytics

A note on optimal solutions to quadratic knapsack problems

Haibo Wang, Gary Kochenberger, and Yaquan Xu
International Journal of Mathematical Modelling and Numerical Optimisation Volume 1, Number 4, Pages: 344-351

In this note we report our success in applying CPLEX’s mixed integer quadratic programming (MIQP) solver to a set of standard quadratic knapsack test problems. The results we give show that this general purpose, commercial code outperformed a leading special purpose method reported in the literature by a wide margin.

Business Analytics, Information Systems

A Mashup Application to Support Complex Decision Making for Retail Consumers

Steven Walczak, Deborah Kellogg and Dawn Gregg
International Journal of Information Systems in the Service Sector, Vol. 2 Issue 4, October 2010, pp. 39-56.

Today’s purchase processes often require complex decision-making and consumers frequently use Web information sources to support these decisions.  Increasing amounts of information, however, can make finding appropriate information problematic.  This information overload, coupled with decision complexity, can increase the time to make a decision and reduce decision quality.  This creates a need for tools that support these decision-making processes. Online tools that bring together data and partial solutions are one option to improve decision-making in complex, multi-criteria environments.  An experiment using a prototype mashup application indicates that these types of applications may significantly decrease the time spent and improve the overall quality of complex retail decisions.

Accounting

No News is Bad News: Market Reaction to Reasons Given for Late Filing of Form 10-K

Carol Callaway Dee, William Hillison, and Carl Pacinic
Research in Accounting Regulation, Volume 22, Issue 2, Pp. 121–127

We examine the relation between reasons provided by management for late filing of Form 10-K and the market reaction to news of the late filing. We find negative abnormal returns for firms providing inadequate or boilerplate reasons for late filing (no attribution), and positive abnormal returns for firms that provide apparently legitimate reasons for late filing (attributions). Regression analyses show a positive relation between attributions and two-day CARs, after controlling for the type of earnings news in the notification of late filing found in Form 12b-25 (positive or negative news).

Risk Management

Capital-based regulation, portfolio risk and capital determination: Empirical evidence from the US property-liability insurers

Jeungbo Shim
Journal of Banking & Finance,Vol. 34, Issue 10, Pages: 2450-2461.

This paper examines the impact of capital-based regulation on the insurer’s risk and capital adjustments in the US property-liability insurance industry. We conduct the three-stage least squares (3SLS) procedure to estimate a simultaneous equations model. The key finding is that undercapitalized insurers increase capital to avoid regulatory costs and take more risks to generate higher returns. We also investigate firm characteristics that determine the insurer’s capital structure. The results indicate that insurers appear to rely heavily on …
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Marketing

A longitudinal exploratory study of changing perceptions toward an iconic brand in a developing country

Madhavan Parthasarathy, MaryLee Stansifer, and Rajeev Kumra
Journal of Indian Business Research, Vol. 2 Iss: 3, pp.138 – 152

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to explore the changing perceptions of an iconic American product, namely Levi Jeans, in a rapidly developing country, namely Costa Rica, over a 20-year period from 1988 to 2008.

Design/methodology/approach – Changing perceptions were measured with regard to product attributes (e.g. relative advantage, compatibility, trialability, observability, and risk), and experience-related attributes (e.g. product durability, fit, comfort, and price). Further, the changing influence of these variables on repurchase intentions was measured. Data collected in 1988 and again in 2008 at a large Costa Rican university were compared.

Findings – The results suggest that globalization, increased competition, and cultural individualization have reduced Levis’ attribute advantages and thus brand equity. Implications for branding in other developing countries, especially India, are provided.

Practical implications – Modern Indian consumers are more picky, and are more concerned with lifestyle fit and observability issues. This combined with the growing affluent youth market in India leads to specific suggestions on how Levi can approach marketing strategy in the Indian market.

Originality/value – The paper is unique in that it is a longitudinal study of changing perceptions with data collected over a 20-year time period. Further, it provides specific recommendations for apparel manufacturers aiming to enter the Indian and other rapidly developing markets.

Management

The effects of technical difficulties on learning and attrition during online training

Sitzmann, Traci; Ely, Katherine; Bell, Bradford S.; and Bauer, Kristina N.
Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied, Vol 16, Issue 3, Pages 281-292

Although online instruction has many potential benefits, technical difficulties are one drawback to the increased use of this medium. A repeated measures design was used to examine the effect that technical difficulties have on learning and attrition from voluntary online training. Adult learners (N = 530) were recruited online and volunteered to participate in a 4-hr training program on using computer spreadsheets. Technical difficulties were inserted in some of the training modules in the form of error messages. Using multilevel modeling, the results indicated that the presence of these technical difficulties impaired learning, such that test scores were lower in modules where trainees encountered technical difficulties than in modules where they did not encounter technical difficulties. Furthermore, the effect on learning was greater among trainees who eventually withdrew from the course than among trainees who completed the course. With regards to attrition, pretraining motivation provided a buffer against dropping out, especially when trainees encountered technical difficulties. Learning also predicted attrition from the subsequent module, such that attrition was higher among trainees with low test scores in the previous module. The current study disentangles some of the implications of technical difficulties and suggests that organizations should provide trainees with the technical support required to overcome technical difficulties in training. Furthermore, the findings contribute to our theoretical understanding of the implications of interruptions on performance in online training.

Information Systems

Utilization and Perceived Benefit for Diverse Users of Communities of Practice in a Healthcare Organization

Steven Walczak and Richard Mann
Journal of Organizational and End User Computing, Vol. 22, Issue 4, 27 pages
Communities of practice have been heralded as a powerful knowledge management tool, especially for geographically disparate workgroups. Research into knowledge management (KM) in healthcare organizations is a needed research focus, given that differences exist in knowledge and knowledge management processes between healthcare and other organization types. The research presented in this paper examines the effectiveness of communities of practice as a knowledge sharing tool in a large and geographically disparate healthcare organization. Findings suggest that job role affects community members’ perceptions of the benefit and impact of communities of practice as well as their participation in such communities.

Accounting

The Persistence and Market Valuation of Recurring Nonrecurring Items

William Cready, Thomas J. Lopez, and Craig A. Sisneros
THE ACCOUNTING REVIEW, Vol. 85, Issue 5, pp. 1577-1615

This study focuses on the persistence and market value implications of a subset of nonrecurring charges that are atypical due to repeated occurrence. The increased recurrence of supposedly nonrecurring items perhaps reflects managerial shifting of (more permanent) ordinary expenses to a transitory category or, alternatively, may reflect an environment where these items naturally occur more frequently. Either scenario suggests that these repetitive charges have future earnings implications dramatically different from truly nonrecurring events and should therefore be valued more like a recurring component of earnings. Consistent with this notion, we find that as the
frequency of reporting negative special items increases (measured by the presence of multiple prior charges), the persistence of these items significantly increases with respect to future earnings. Our evidence also suggests that the valuation multiple on such charges increases with frequency. That is, the market values “recurring nonrecurring” items more like the other components of recurring earnings.

Accounting

How to transition from assessing performance to enhancing performance with balanced scorecard goal action plans.

Albright, Thomas, Burgess, Christopher M, Hibbets, Aleecia R, and Roberts, Michael L.
Journal of Corporate Accounting & Finance,  Sep/Oct 2010, Vol. 21 Issue 6, pp. 69-74, 6p

The balanced scorecard (BSC) has achieved widespread acceptance as a strategic performance measurement tool. This article builds on the BSC process by showing how goal action plans can be used to help organizations translate strategic goals into actionable employee behavior to improve bottom-line performance.