Search results

This paper discusses the factors that will influence a publisher's choice of cost‐effective electronic and media delivery techniques while allowing growth potential that serves the needs of end‐users. The paper describes the use of diskettes, Bernoulli removable cartridge disks, CD‐ROMs, modems using dial‐up phone lines, leased phone lines, satellites, and FM subcarriers. Sample data sizings evaluated include spreadsheet and word processing application programs, catalog distribution, CAD and accounting data files, online databases, news and financial information, and database updates. The economics of each delivery technique are given as well as the advantages and disadvantages.

Rather than organize as traditional firms, many of today’s companies organize as platforms that sit at the nexus of multiple exchange and production relationships. This chapter considers a most basic question of organization in platform contexts: the choice of boundaries. Herein, I investigate how classical economic theories of firm boundaries apply to platform-based organization and empirically study how executives made boundary choices in response to changing market and technical challenges in the early mobile computing industry (the predecessor to today’s smartphones). Rather than a strict or unavoidable tradeoff between “openness-versus-control,” most successful platform owners chose their boundaries in a way to simultaneously open-up to outside developers while maintaining coordination across the entire system.

The purpose of this paper is to identify research themes in service operations that have great potential for exciting and innovative conceptual and empirical work. To frame these research themes, the paper provides a systematic literature review of operations articles published in the Journal of Service Management (JOSM). The thorough review of published work in JOSM and proposed research themes are presented in hopes that they will inspire impactful research on service operations. These themes are further developed in a companion paper, “Service operations: what’s next?” (Field et al., 2018).

The JOSM Service Operations Expert Research Panel conducted a Delphi study to generate research themes where leading-edge research on service operations is being done or has yet to be done. Nearly 700 articles published in JOSM from its inception through 2016 were reviewed and classified by discipline focus. The subset of service operations articles was then further categorized according to the eight identified research themes plus an additional category that primarily represented traditional manufacturing approaches applied in service settings.

From the Delphi study, the following key themes emerged: service supply networks, evaluating and measuring service operations performance, understanding customer and employee behavior in service operations, managing servitization, managing knowledge-based service contexts, managing participation roles and responsibilities in service operations, addressing society’s challenges through service operations, and the operational implications of the sharing economy. Based on the literature review, approximately 20 percent of the published work in JOSM is operations focused, with earlier articles predominantly applying traditional manufacturing approaches in service settings. However, the percentage of these traditional types of articles has been steadily decreasing, suggesting a trend toward dedicated research frameworks and themes that are unique to the design and management of services operations.

The paper presents key research themes for advancing conceptual and empirical research on service operations. Additionally, a review of the past and current landscape of operations articles published in JOSM offers an understanding of the scholarly conversation so far and sets a foundation from which to build future research.

In this research we test the generalizability of an existing model for classifying information‐intensive services that can be globally disaggregated to Internet services. This categorization allows us to judge which types of Internet Initial Public Offerings (IPOs) are likely to have superior performance. Specifically, we hypothesize that Internet firms with higher information intensity, lower physical presence and lower customer contact needs will have a greater probability of generating larger risk‐adjusted returns. We test these hypotheses on 340 Internet IPOs and find partial support for the model. In particular, Internet firms with high information intensity and low customer contact need yield superior performance. However, firms with low physical presence underperform in our sample.

The study re-examines if lean production manufacturing practices (i.e. TQM and JIT) interact with the compensation system (incentive vs. fixed compensation plans) and information system (i.e. attention directing goals and performance feedback) to reduce production costs (in terms of manufacturing and warranty costs) using a recursive partitioning model. Decision trees (i.e. recursive partitioning algorithm using Chi-square Automatic Interaction Detection or CHAID) are constructed on data from 77 U.S. manufacturing firms in the electronics industry. Overall, the “decision tree” results show significant interaction effects. In particular, the study found that better manufacturing performance (i.e. lower production costs) can be achieved when lean production manufacturing practices such as TQM and JIT are used along with incentive compensation plans. Also, synergies do result from combining TQM/JIT with more frequent performance feedback along with attention directing goals. These findings suggest that if organisational infrastructure and management control systems are not aligned with manufacturing practices, then the potential benefits of lean manufacturing (i.e. TQM and JIT) may not be fully realised.

This study on the airline industry covers the period from 1990 to 2006 and finds that “complaints” is a leading indicator of future financial performance as measured by return on sales (ROS) one-quarter ahead. Results also indicate that this effect persists into longer-term future performance (i.e., the average of one-quarter and two-quarter-ahead) as measured by return on assets (ROA) and ROS. Findings also indicate that service recovery effort in reducing mishandled baggage, is associated with higher future financial performance as measured by one-quarter-ahead ROA. Similarly, service recovery efforts, in reducing mishandled baggage and complaints, are found to be associated with both short-term and longer-term future financial performance as measured by ROA or ROS. Nevertheless, this relationship diminishes when flights have a higher “load factor” (or higher enplanements). Literature on service operations states that although service failure (such as flight cancellations, delays, misconnections, mishandled baggage, or over boarding) can negatively affect customer repurchase intentions, employees' ability to diagnose and respond to problems at the critical moment can overcome negative effects of a service failure. This suggests that management should consider having trained frontline employees and flight attendants provide comfort, assurance, empathy, support, and assistance to customers following service failures. This should help to enhance repurchase behavior and brand loyalty thereby improving future financial performance.

This paper aims to investigate, through the lens of the principal–agent problem, the relationship between payment of National Hockey League (NHL) salaries and player performance during the period of 2005-2011 and explore the inherent issues within the NHL player compensation and incentive structure.

The research adopts a pragmatic philosophy with deductive reasoning. This paper focuses on the NHL season 2005-2011 and undertake analysis of historical player contracts and performance data of 670 players across 29 clubs to undertake liner regression analysis.

This paper quantifies potential inefficiencies of NHL league contracts and defines the parameters of the principal–agent problem. It is identifies that player performance generally increases with salary, is higher in the first year of a contract and despite decreasing over the life of the contract, will usually peak again in the final year of the contract.

The research is based around figures from 2005-2011 and secondary statistical data. The study captures quantitative data but does not allow for an exploration of the qualitative perspective to the problem.

Entry-level or first contracts are good for all teams and players because they provide incentive to perform and a reduction of risk to the team should a player not perform to expectations. The same can be said for players at the other end of the spectrum. Although not typically used much, performance bonuses for players over the age of 35 allow clubs to “take a chance” on a player and the player can benefit by reaching attainable bonuses. These findings therefore provide contributions to the practicing managers and coaches of NHL teams who can consider the results to help shape their approach to management of players and the planning of teams and succession planning for talent.

The paper presents a comprehensive and current perspective of the principal–agent problem in NHL and extends the work of Purcell (2009) and Gannon (2009) in understanding player performance enhancement.

The purpose of this paper is to provide new evidence on the choice of performance measures used in dual-class firms to incentivize CEOs.

This paper uses coarsened exact matching and propensity score matching to match the dual-class firm sample with a control group of single-class firms. This study uses matching estimators to provide an analysis of how a dual-class structure affects the design of performance measures in performance-based stock awards. In addition, regression models are used to investigate the effect of a dual-class structure on performance measure choices.

This paper finds that market-based metrics are less likely to be used by dual-class firms relative to single-class firms. In addition, peer-based measures are much less common for dual-class than single-class firms. This study also finds that the length of the CEO’s performance evaluation period does not differ between dual-class and single-class firms.

This paper attempts to investigate the choice of performance measures to find out the extent to which the board of directors focuses CEO efforts on firms’ long-term versus short-term objectives.

The findings reveal the relationships between the dual-class stock structure and the contractual features of CEO performance-based stock awards, provide empirical evidence for the company’s compensation committee and provide implications for the evolving practices of performance measures regarding CEO stock compensation. The findings are also useful to regulators, compensation consultants and firms pursuing efficient design of executive compensation.

This paper is among the first to study the determinants of compensation contracts. Second, prior literature seldom controls for CEO stock ownership, but this study matches dual-class firms to a control group of single-class firms that are similar in terms of CEO stock ownership and other important firm characteristics. Finally, these findings suggest that dual-class firms shield their executives from short-term market pressures and design stock compensation contracts that deemphasize volatile stock prices.