Intra-industry diversification effects under firm-specific contingencies on the demand side

How do firm-specific, demand-related factors influence the relationship between intra-industry diversification (IID) and performance? Recent findings regarding the performance effects of IID depict a complex picture with curvilinear relationships and several contingencies. However, firm-specific contingencies on the demand side have remained unexplored. We analyze how IID relates to firm performance (market share) in the German automotive industry using panel data between 1999 and 2008. We specifically focus on a firm's high-quality brand image as a demand-side contingency. We find support for our hypotheses of complex curvilinear relationships as well as for moderating effects of brand quality. Our results have significant theoretical implications for the IID literature.     

Groups discipline resource use under scarcity

Theory and Decision - Scarcity sharpens the conflict between short term gains and long term sustainability. Psychological research documents that decision makers focus on immediate needs under...     

Spatial Inequality in Mortality in France over the Past Two Centuries

This article analyzes the evolution of spatial inequalities in mortality across 90 French territorial units since 1806. Using a new database, we identify a period from 1881 to 1980 when inequalities rapidly shrank while life expectancy rose. This century of convergence across territories was mainly due to the fall in infant mortality. Since 1980, spatial inequalities have levelled out or occasionally widened, due mainly to differences in life expectancy among the elderly. The geography of mortality also changed radically during the century of convergence. Whereas in the 19th century high mortality occurred mainly in larger cities and along a line from North-west to South-east France, it is now concentrated in the North, and Paris and Lyon currently enjoy an urban advantage.     

A population sample registry for public health survey investigations: methods,lessons, and successes

Public health relies on sample surveys to monitor the health of populations and investigate factors that contribute to population health and illness. Such investigations require surveying individuals who are selected in ways that support statistical inference to the population. Faced with rising costs and declining participation, survey researchers are exploring economical ways to recruit samples that validly represent larger populations. The current report describes an innovative resource, the Colorado Adult Population Sample–Survey Research Registry, which maintains survey access to respondents from a probability-based state health survey. We describe recruitment and retention strategies, explore representativeness, report several studies that used the registry, and discuss future directions.     

Bounds for the traveling salesman paths of two-dimensional modular lattices

We present tight upper and lower bounds for the traveling salesman path through the points of two-dimensional modular lattices. We use these results to bound the traveling salesman path of two-dimensional Kronecker point sets. Our results rely on earlier work on shortest vectors in lattices as well as on the strong convergence of Jacobi–Perron type algorithms.     

Writing Distinction – Eine illegitime Kultur als subkulturelles Feld

Graffiti is an illegitimate culture, yet with high potential for distinction and abstract aesthetic principles. The article considers these characteristics as result of the process of the autonomization of graffiti as subcultural field and aims to reconstruct its field logic.     

Impacts of urban sprawl on species richness of plants,butterflies, gastropods and birds: not only built-up area matters

Urban growth is a major factor of global environmental change and has important impacts on biodiversity, such as changes in species composition and biotic homogenization. Most previous studies have focused on effects of urban area as a general measure of urbanization, and on few or single taxa. Here, we analyzed the impacts of the different components of urban sprawl (i.e., scattered and widespread urban growth) on species richness of a variety of taxonomic groups covering mosses, vascular plants, gastropods, butterflies, and birds at the habitat and landscape scales. Besides urban area, we considered the average age, imperviousness, and dispersion degree of urban area, along with human population density, to disentangle the effects of the different components of urban sprawl on biodiversity. The study was carried out in the Swiss Plateau that has undergone substantial urban sprawl in recent decades.Vascular plants and birds showed the strongest responses to urban sprawl, especially at the landscape scale, with non-native and ruderal plants proliferating and common generalist birds increasing at the expense of specialist birds as urban sprawl grew. Overall, urban area had the greatest contribution on such impacts, but additional effects of urban dispersion (i.e., increase of non-native plants) and human population density (i.e., increases of ruderal plants and common generalist birds) were found. Our findings support the hypothesis that negative impacts of urban sprawl on biodiversity can be reduced by compacting urban growth while still avoiding the formation of very densely populated areas.     

Resolving conflict over salespeople’s brand adoption in franchised channels of distribution

Many franchise-based retail outlets offer both the franchisor-owned brand and brands of competitors or independent suppliers. As salespeople may influence customers’ brand choices considerably, an important concern for franchisors is how to raise salespeople’s selling preferences for the franchisor-owned brand. However, the channel administration literature suggests that salespeople may not automatically favor the franchisor’s brand over other brand lines. While a large body of research examines franchise–channel relationships, previous investigations have conspicuously overlooked this channel conflict. In proposing a conceptual model grounded in the behavioral sciences, this study analyzes how franchisors can induce salespeople to advocate their brand by fostering the intention to promote the franchisor-owned brand (IFOB) in customer interaction. The results of an empirical field study show that individual brand promotion depends on factors such as salespeople’s identification with the franchisor and their tenure with the organization, as well as on the franchisor’s prestige and administration of the franchise. Moreover, we find that franchisees’ IFOB transfers to salespeople, but only if franchisees display a charismatic leadership style. We discuss these findings in light of extant theory and empirical evidence and derive several managerially relevant implications for the administration of franchised retail channels.     

Consistent Probabilistic Social Choice

Two fundamental axioms in social choice theory are consistency with respect to a variable electorate and consistency with respect to components of similar alternatives. In the context of traditional non‐probabilistic social choice, these axioms are incompatible with each other. We show that in the context of probabilistic social choice, these axioms uniquely characterize a function proposed by Fishburn (1984). Fishburn's function returns so‐called maximal lotteries, that is, lotteries that correspond to optimal mixed strategies in the symmetric zero‐sum game induced by the pairwise majority margins. Maximal lotteries are guaranteed to exist due to von Neumann's Minimax Theorem, are almost always unique, and can be efficiently computed using linear programming.