Big Data and Performance: What Can Management Research Tell us?

The special issue focuses on the theory and evidence linking the use of Big Data related technologies by businesses with their performance. Here we connect the papers accepted for the special issue to the overarching theme of Big Data as an emerging concept within the business management literature. We present two prominent case studies examining the use Big Data technologies on performance and strategy, followed by a discussion on how themes around Big Data and Performance may be examined from a theoretical perspective. Finally, based on a synthesis of papers in the current issue, we discuss the emerging issues and trends within the academic literature, relevant for future research.     

Reproducing authoritarian neoliberalism in Turkey: urban governance and state restructuring in the shadow of executive centralization

ABSTRACT

The implosion of popular struggles against the erosion of economic and democratic rights in the Middle East has thrown into sharp relief the co-constitutive character of neoliberal reforms and authoritarian state practices. This article zooms in on this relationship, and traces the consolidation of a core component of authoritarian statisms by examining how the ruling AKP government in Turkey has facilitated executive centralization. This process refers to a form of state restructuring whereby key decision-making powers are increasingly concentrated in the hands of the central government while democratic avenues to contest government policies are curtailed through legal and administrative reforms, and the marginalization of dissident social forces. I unpack the mechanisms of executive centralization in Turkey by exploring the transformation of urban governance under AKP rule, which has promoted a spectacular degree of state-led commodification of land and housing while simultaneously recentralizing key decision-making powers. The investigation demonstrates that executive centralization in urban governance has paved the way for the swift implementation of contested urban transformation projects marked by a non-participatory approach to urban ‘renewal’, the reconfiguration of the state’s redistributive function vis-à-vis low-income households, and a tendency to exacerbate existing patterns of inequalities in the housing market.     

Technical Note – Pricing Below Cost Under Exchange‐Rate Risk

Pricing below cost is often classified as “dumping” in international trade and as “predatory pricing” in local markets. It is legally prohibited from practice because of earlier findings that it leads to predatory behavior by either eliminating competition or stealing market share. This study shows that a stochastic exchange rate can create incentives for a profit‐minded monopoly firm to set price below marginal cost. Our result departs from earlier findings because the optimal pricing decision is based on a rational behavior that does not exhibit any malicious intent against the competition to be considered as violating anti‐trust laws. The finding is a robust result, because our analysis demonstrates that this behavior occurs under various settings such as when the firm (i) is risk‐averse, (ii) can postpone prices until after exchange rates are realized, (iii) is capable of manufacturing in multiple countries, and (iv) operates under demand uncertainty in addition to the random exchange rate.     

Authoritarian neoliberalism: trajectories of knowledge production and praxis

ABSTRACT

This introduction to the special issue takes as its point of departure three centres of gravity that have shaped the study of neoliberalism but have also established barriers to further progress in these debates. By promoting an intersectional materialist research agenda which challenges extant ideational, modernist and empiricist tendencies in scholarship on neoliberalism, the essay contextualizes the special issue articles by outlining and clarifying key aspects of our understanding of authoritarian neoliberalism. In particular, we reflect on themes related to conceptualization and periodization, which are of importance for both this special issue but also for broader questions of knowledge production and praxis. Through doing so, we argue that there are two distinct yet connected trajectories within the research agenda on authoritarian neoliberalism: one which focuses on the intertwinement of authoritarian statisms and neoliberal reforms; and another which traces various lineages of transformation of key societal sites in capitalism (e.g. states, households, workplaces, urban spaces). Recognition of this spectrum of authoritarian neoliberal practices is important as it helps us uncover how inequalities of power are produced and reproduced in capitalist societies, and pushes us to consider more fully how other worlds can be made possible. Nevertheless, it is affirmed that we must remain open to what an emancipatory society might look like, and what struggles would be most appropriate, in and across various socio-spatial contexts.     

Within inequality characteristics and adaptation of immigrants in the United States

Until recently, in works of literature, the assimilation of immigrants had been viewed as an individualistic rather than a community-based process. However, Hatton and Leigh (2011) showed that immigrants integrate to their host country as communities, not as individuals; hence, group characteristics play as much of a role as individual characteristics in terms of adaptation. This paper introduces another dimension to the immigrant adaptation proxies that reflect community-based characteristics. The fundamental assertion of this paper is that inequality can be used as a proxy of adaptation within immigrant groups. Immigrant groups that exhibit income and education distributions similar to those of the natives can be regarded as well-adapted groups, while those who exhibit vastly different distributions should be considered to be groups with limited adaptation. Using the American Community Survey (ACS) 2010 cohort, this paper presents the initial findings of the within-group inequality of immigrants. Then, a cross-sectional regression analysis is employed to analyze the determinants of inequality across these immigrant groups. The results suggest that immigrant community-based characteristics, such as average income, education, and number of years that the immigrants have spent in the US, can indeed explain most of the variation in inequality.     

Information in Tender Offers With a Large Shareholder

We study takeovers of firms whose ownership structure is a mixture of minority block‐holders and small shareholders. We show that the combination of dispersed private information on the side of small shareholders and the presence of a large shareholder can facilitate profitable takeovers. Furthermore, our analysis implies that even if some model of takeovers predicts a profit for the raider, for example, due to private benefits, the profit will be underestimated unless the large shareholder and the dispersion of information among the small shareholders are modeled.     

Expected Utility Consistent Extensions of Preferences

We consider the problem of extending a (complete) order over a set to its power set. The extension axioms we consider generate orderings over sets according to their expected utilities induced by some assignment of utilities over alternatives and probability distributions over sets. The model we propose gives a general and unified exposition of expected utility consistent extensions whilst it allows to emphasize various subtleties, the effects of which seem to be underestimated – particularly in the literature on strategy-proof social choice correspondences.      

Model Selection and Shrinkage: An Overview

This special issue is concerned with model selection and shrinkage estimators. This Introduction gives an overview of the papers published in this special issue.     

Oracle Inequalities for Convex Loss Functions with Nonlinear Targets

This article considers penalized empirical loss minimization of convex loss functions with unknown target functions. Using the elastic net penalty, of which the Least Absolute Shrinkage and Selection Operator (Lasso) is a special case, we establish a finite sample oracle inequality which bounds the loss of our estimator from above with high probability. If the unknown target is linear, this inequality also provides an upper bound of the estimation error of the estimated parameter vector. Next, we use the non-asymptotic results to show that the excess loss of our estimator is asymptotically of the same order as that of the oracle. If the target is linear, we give sufficient conditions for consistency of the estimated parameter vector. We briefly discuss how a thresholded version of our estimator can be used to perform consistent variable selection. We give two examples of loss functions covered by our framework.