Rivalry and strategic groups: what makes a company a rival?

Strategic group literature has generated a significant amount of research over recent decades. However, the rivalry implications of strategic group have remained unclear. This paper analyses rivalry and strategic groups in the house building industry in a small town from a cognitive approach. We consider rivalry as a subjective and directional phenomenon. Estimating rivalry as the direct identification of competitors we try to explain whether similarity affects rivalry and what factors make a company a “rival”. Results show that perceived rivalry is strongly related to size, past performance, subjective similarity and strategic group structure.

Speed in the Internationalization Process of the Firm

While firm internationalization processes have been understood as being dynamic, the dimension of speed has rarely been the main focus of research efforts, which, until a decade ago, focused principally on explaining sequences of entry modes and choices of markets. The emergence of the study of international entrepreneurship has enhanced the role of speed, although this has usually been measured in terms of the time lag between a firm's foundation and its initial international action, with little attempt at defining and explaining the speed of the process once it is under way. This study reviews the concept of speed from an internationalization perspective, describes the multidimensional nature of the concept and sets out the different aspects that link timescales with the types of changes – continuous and discontinuous – that take place during internationalizing processes. The paper concludes with a research agenda as a guide for future work on considering the role of speed in the internationalization process.     

Waste identification diagrams

Value Stream Mapping (VSM) is a very popular tool in lean environments to represent production flows, mapping value stream of a product or family of products, and helps to identify some types of waste. Although very popular, this tool has some limitations as already described in many publications, especially in terms of restrictions in showing most types of waste as well as in its inability to represent various production routes. The purpose of this study is to introduce the waste identification diagram (WID), a new tool to represent production units with its different forms of waste, which overcomes some VSM limitations. The originality of WID comes from the use of its symbols’ dimensions to convey, in a visual and immediate way, relevant information about a production unit. In this paper, WID is applied on a production unit of a lift manufacturer, for testing its performance and comparing it to VSM. The main findings are that WID is in general more effective than VSM in terms of representation of complex production units and in terms of identification of more forms of waste. WID must however overcome some of its limitations such as the lack of information-flow representation and the links to suppliers and clients.     

The price of risk with incomplete knowledge on the utility function*

When a risk is exchanged, the exact value for the minimum price (positive or negative) that the purchaser (investor, or insurer) is willing to pay is given by the certainty equivalent wealth level, which in turn depends on his specific utility function. When this utility function is unknown, then only a sufficient condition on the price can ever be found. This paper provides methods for calculating such a sufficient condition, when only limited information on the utility function is known.     

Aggregating Political Dimensions: Of the Feasibility of Political Indicators

Political indicators are widely used in academic writing and decision making, but remain controversial. This paper discusses the problems related to the aggregation functions they use. Almost always, political indicators are aggregated by weighted averages or summations. The use of such functions is based on untenable assumptions (existence of homogeneous substitution rates, total compensation, and strict monotonicity). We show through concrete examples how these hidden assumptions are likely to produce results that are basically an artifact of ad hoc decisions, which additionally contradict very fundamental notions common to all credible political theories. We suggest, also through example, that some—necessarily partial—solutions are possible.     

Who Settles for Less? Subjective Dispositions,Objective Circumstances,and Housing Satisfaction

In recent years there has been growing interest in individuals’ self-perceptions of their wellbeing on the grounds that these complement well-established objective indicators of welfare. However, individuals’ assessments depend on both objective circumstances and subjective, idiosyncratic dispositions, such as aspirations and expectations. We add to the literature by formulating a modelling strategy that uncovers how these subjective dispositions differ across socio-demographic groups. This is then tested using housing satisfaction data from a large-scale household panel survey from Australia. We find that there are significant differences in the way in which individuals with different characteristics rate the same objective reality. For instance, male, older, migrant, and Indigenous individuals rate equal housing conditions more favourably than female, younger, Australian-born, and non-Indigenous individuals. These findings have important implications for how self-reported housing satisfaction, and wellbeing data in general, are to be used to inform evidence-based policy.     

The Impact of Public Services Expenditure on the Spanish Income Distribution

This paper performs an assessment and imputation of the benefits produced to the individuals and households well-being by the public services provision. This analysis is very relevant in the current framework of economic crisis of the European economies. Although most of the papers in the literature compare countries, decentralization processes are included in this paper by accounting the effect of public expenditure on regional health care and education upon the levels of inequality and rates of poverty in each Spanish region. This case is relevant because of the high decentralization degree of the Spanish political structure and the persistent regional disparities. The results show a clear downward tendency in both phenomena following imputation, although education shows a greater impact. Furthermore, a decomposition, used in this context for the first time, of the effects shows the very relevant redistributive effect of this public expenditure.     

QUALITY DIFFERENCES,THIRD‐DEGREE PRICE DISCRIMINATION,AND WELFARE

We propose a model with two markets to analyze the welfare implications of price discrimination with quality differences. In each market a local firm that operates in that market only competes against a global firm that operates in both markets. Local firms produce higher‐quality goods than the global firm. If the quality levels of the local firms' products are the same, price discrimination is never welfare‐decreasing. If they differ, discrimination is welfare‐increasing if quantity increases. Because of a positive allocation effect of price discrimination, there are parameter values such that welfare increases while total output decreases with price discrimination. (JEL D43, D60)     

The Slaughtered and the Survivors: Collaboration Between Social Economy Organizations as a Key to Success in Times of Financial Crisis

The objective of this study is to analyze the aspects that allowed a critical part of Social Economy Organizations (SEOs) to survive a recession period, especially participation in collaborative networks. The financial stress of an SEO will depend on the resources and capabilities available to the organization. To analyze the financial stress of Spanish SEOs, we defined a sample of 714 SEOs. Approximately half of these organizations suffered from financial stress in the analyzed period (2009–2012). The results obtained in this study reveal the existence of three factors that distinguish organizations under financial stress: (a) a high dependence on government funding; (b) changes in the relationship between staff and volunteers; and (c) a lack of access to markets. The combination of these three elements results in an unsustainable situation for the organization. The development of a collaborative profile increases the SEO’s probability of surviving the adverse manifestations of its environment.     

Parenting and children’s negative emotionality,self‐regulation,and academic skills: The moderating role of fathers’ residency

We examined whether fathers’ residency modified the associations among mothers’ supportiveness, father involvement, children’s negative emotionality during toddlerhood and children’s academic skills in pre‐kindergarten via children’s self‐regulation. Participants were 2,291 mothers (M_age = 23.24 years) and children (M_age = 14.99 months at Wave 1; 50.7% girls) in the Early Head Start Research and Evaluation Project. Results revealed distinctive associations by fathers’ residency: self‐regulation mediated the association between mothers’ supportiveness and academic skills only in resident‐father‐families. Self‐regulation mediated the association between negative emotionality and academic skills only in nonresident‐father‐families. The findings highlight the family processes of mothers, fathers, and children in low‐income family contexts that contribute to children’s academic skills, and how those family processes may vary by fathers’ residency status.