934 resultados para Democratic management. School managers. Government department


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Mikael Juselius’ doctoral dissertation covers a range of significant issues in modern macroeconomics by empirically testing a number of important theoretical hypotheses. The first essay presents indirect evidence within the framework of the cointegrated VAR model on the elasticity of substitution between capital and labor by using Finnish manufacturing data. Instead of estimating the elasticity of substitution by using the first order conditions, he develops a new approach that utilizes a CES production function in a model with a 3-stage decision process: investment in the long run, wage bargaining in the medium run and price and employment decisions in the short run. He estimates the elasticity of substitution to be below one. The second essay tests the restrictions implied by the core equations of the New Keynesian Model (NKM) in a vector autoregressive model (VAR) by using both Euro area and U.S. data. Both the new Keynesian Phillips curve and the aggregate demand curve are estimated and tested. The restrictions implied by the core equations of the NKM are rejected on both U.S. and Euro area data. These results are important for further research. The third essay is methodologically similar to essay 2, but it concentrates on Finnish macro data by adopting a theoretical framework of an open economy. Juselius’ results suggests that the open economy NKM framework is too stylized to provide an adequate explanation for Finnish inflation. The final essay provides a macroeconometric model of Finnish inflation and associated explanatory variables and it estimates the relative importance of different inflation theories. His main finding is that Finnish inflation is primarily determined by excess demand in the product market and by changes in the long-term interest rate. This study is part of the research agenda carried out by the Research Unit of Economic Structure and Growth (RUESG). The aim of RUESG it to conduct theoretical and empirical research with respect to important issues in industrial economics, real option theory, game theory, organization theory, theory of financial systems as well as to study problems in labor markets, macroeconomics, natural resources, taxation and time series econometrics. RUESG was established at the beginning of 1995 and is one of the National Centers of Excellence in research selected by the Academy of Finland. It is financed jointly by the Academy of Finland, the University of Helsinki, the Yrjö Jahnsson Foundation, Bank of Finland and the Nokia Group. This support is gratefully acknowledged.

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Microfinance institutions (MFIs) are constrained by double bottom-lines: meeting social obligations (the first bottom-line) and obtaining financial self-sufficiency (the second bottom-line). The proponents of the first bottom-line, however, are increasingly concerned that there is a trade-off between these two bottom-lines—i.e., getting hold of financial self-sufficiency may lead MFIs to drift away from their original social mission of serving the very poor, commonly known as mission drift in microfinance which is still a controversial issue. This study aims at addressing the concerns for mission drift in microfinance in a performance analysis framework. Chapter 1 deals with theoretical background, motivation and objectives of the topic. Then the study explores the validity of three major and related present-day concerns. Chapter 2 explores the impact of profitability on outreach-quality in MFIs, commonly known as mission drift, using a unique panel database that contains 4-9 years’ observations from 253 MFIs in 69 countries. Chapter 3 introduces factor analysis, a multivariate tool, in the process of analysing mission drift in microfinance and the exercise in this chapter demonstrates how the statistical tool of factor analysis can be utilised to examine this conjecture. In order to explore why some microfinance institutions (MFIs) perform better than others, Chapter 4 looks at factors which have an impact on several performance indicators of MFIs—profitability or sustainability, repayment status and cost indicators—based on quality-data on 353 institutions in 77 countries. The study also demonstrates whether such mission drift can be avoided while having self-sustainability. In Chapter 5 we examine the impact of capital and financing structure on the performance of microfinance institutions where estimations with instruments have been performed using a panel dataset of 782 MFIs in 92 countries for the period 2000-2007. Finally, Chapter 6 concludes the study by summarising the results from the previous chapters and suggesting some directions for future studies.

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One of the most fundamental and widely accepted ideas in finance is that investors are compensated through higher returns for taking on non-diversifiable risk. Hence the quantification, modeling and prediction of risk have been, and still are one of the most prolific research areas in financial economics. It was recognized early on that there are predictable patterns in the variance of speculative prices. Later research has shown that there may also be systematic variation in the skewness and kurtosis of financial returns. Lacking in the literature so far, is an out-of-sample forecast evaluation of the potential benefits of these new more complicated models with time-varying higher moments. Such an evaluation is the topic of this dissertation. Essay 1 investigates the forecast performance of the GARCH (1,1) model when estimated with 9 different error distributions on Standard and Poor’s 500 Index Future returns. By utilizing the theory of realized variance to construct an appropriate ex post measure of variance from intra-day data it is shown that allowing for a leptokurtic error distribution leads to significant improvements in variance forecasts compared to using the normal distribution. This result holds for daily, weekly as well as monthly forecast horizons. It is also found that allowing for skewness and time variation in the higher moments of the distribution does not further improve forecasts. In Essay 2, by using 20 years of daily Standard and Poor 500 index returns, it is found that density forecasts are much improved by allowing for constant excess kurtosis but not improved by allowing for skewness. By allowing the kurtosis and skewness to be time varying the density forecasts are not further improved but on the contrary made slightly worse. In Essay 3 a new model incorporating conditional variance, skewness and kurtosis based on the Normal Inverse Gaussian (NIG) distribution is proposed. The new model and two previously used NIG models are evaluated by their Value at Risk (VaR) forecasts on a long series of daily Standard and Poor’s 500 returns. The results show that only the new model produces satisfactory VaR forecasts for both 1% and 5% VaR Taken together the results of the thesis show that kurtosis appears not to exhibit predictable time variation, whereas there is found some predictability in the skewness. However, the dynamic properties of the skewness are not completely captured by any of the models.

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The increased availability of high frequency data sets have led to important new insights in understanding of financial markets. The use of high frequency data is interesting and persuasive, since it can reveal new information that cannot be seen in lower data aggregation. This dissertation explores some of the many important issues connected with the use, analysis and application of high frequency data. These include the effects of intraday seasonal, the behaviour of time varying volatility, the information content of various market data, and the issue of inter market linkages utilizing high frequency 5 minute observations from major European and the U.S stock indices, namely DAX30 of Germany, CAC40 of France, SMI of Switzerland, FTSE100 of the UK and SP500 of the U.S. The first essay in the dissertation shows that there are remarkable similarities in the intraday behaviour of conditional volatility across European equity markets. Moreover, the U.S macroeconomic news announcements have significant cross border effect on both, European equity returns and volatilities. The second essay reports substantial intraday return and volatility linkages across European stock indices of the UK and Germany. This relationship appears virtually unchanged by the presence or absence of the U.S stock market. However, the return correlation among the U.K and German markets rises significantly following the U.S stock market opening, which could largely be described as a contemporaneous effect. The third essay sheds light on market microstructure issues in which traders and market makers learn from watching market data, and it is this learning process that leads to price adjustments. This study concludes that trading volume plays an important role in explaining international return and volatility transmissions. The examination concerning asymmetry reveals that the impact of the positive volume changes is larger on foreign stock market volatility than the negative changes. The fourth and the final essay documents number of regularities in the pattern of intraday return volatility, trading volume and bid-ask spreads. This study also reports a contemporaneous and positive relationship between the intraday return volatility, bid ask spread and unexpected trading volume. These results verify the role of trading volume and bid ask quotes as proxies for information arrival in producing contemporaneous and subsequent intraday return volatility. Moreover, asymmetric effect of trading volume on conditional volatility is also confirmed. Overall, this dissertation explores the role of information in explaining the intraday return and volatility dynamics in international stock markets. The process through which the information is incorporated in stock prices is central to all information-based models. The intraday data facilitates the investigation that how information gets incorporated into security prices as a result of the trading behavior of informed and uninformed traders. Thus high frequency data appears critical in enhancing our understanding of intraday behavior of various stock markets’ variables as it has important implications for market participants, regulators and academic researchers.

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Market microstructure is “the study of the trading mechanisms used for financial securities” (Hasbrouck (2007)). It seeks to understand the sources of value and reasons for trade, in a setting with different types of traders, and different private and public information sets. The actual mechanisms of trade are a continually changing object of study. These include continuous markets, auctions, limit order books, dealer markets, or combinations of these operating as a hybrid market. Microstructure also has to allow for the possibility of multiple prices. At any given time an investor may be faced with a multitude of different prices, depending on whether he or she is buying or selling, the quantity he or she wishes to trade, and the required speed for the trade. The price may also depend on the relationship that the trader has with potential counterparties. In this research, I touch upon all of the above issues. I do this by studying three specific areas, all of which have both practical and policy implications. First, I study the role of information in trading and pricing securities in markets with a heterogeneous population of traders, some of whom are informed and some not, and who trade for different private or public reasons. Second, I study the price discovery of stocks in a setting where they are simultaneously traded in more than one market. Third, I make a contribution to the ongoing discussion about market design, i.e. the question of which trading systems and ways of organizing trading are most efficient. A common characteristic throughout my thesis is the use of high frequency datasets, i.e. tick data. These datasets include all trades and quotes in a given security, rather than just the daily closing prices, as in traditional asset pricing literature. This thesis consists of four separate essays. In the first essay I study price discovery for European companies cross-listed in the United States. I also study explanatory variables for differences in price discovery. In my second essay I contribute to earlier research on two issues of broad interest in market microstructure: market transparency and informed trading. I examine the effects of a change to an anonymous market at the OMX Helsinki Stock Exchange. I broaden my focus slightly in the third essay, to include releases of macroeconomic data in the United States. I analyze the effect of these releases on European cross-listed stocks. The fourth and last essay examines the uses of standard methodologies of price discovery analysis in a novel way. Specifically, I study price discovery within one market, between local and foreign traders.

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Perhaps the most fundamental prediction of financial theory is that the expected returns on financial assets are determined by the amount of risk contained in their payoffs. Assets with a riskier payoff pattern should provide higher expected returns than assets that are otherwise similar but provide payoffs that contain less risk. Financial theory also predicts that not all types of risks should be compensated with higher expected returns. It is well-known that the asset-specific risk can be diversified away, whereas the systematic component of risk that affects all assets remains even in large portfolios. Thus, the asset-specific risk that the investor can easily get rid of by diversification should not lead to higher expected returns, and only the shared movement of individual asset returns – the sensitivity of these assets to a set of systematic risk factors – should matter for asset pricing. It is within this framework that this thesis is situated. The first essay proposes a new systematic risk factor, hypothesized to be correlated with changes in investor risk aversion, which manages to explain a large fraction of the return variation in the cross-section of stock returns. The second and third essays investigate the pricing of asset-specific risk, uncorrelated with commonly used risk factors, in the cross-section of stock returns. The three essays mentioned above use stock market data from the U.S. The fourth essay presents a new total return stock market index for the Finnish stock market beginning from the opening of the Helsinki Stock Exchange in 1912 and ending in 1969 when other total return indices become available. Because a total return stock market index for the period prior to 1970 has not been available before, academics and stock market participants have not known the historical return that stock market investors in Finland could have achieved on their investments. The new stock market index presented in essay 4 makes it possible, for the first time, to calculate the historical average return on the Finnish stock market and to conduct further studies that require long time-series of data.

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The trade of the financial analyst is currently a much-debated issue in today’s media. As a large part of the investment analysis is conducted under the broker firms’ regime, the incentives of the financial analyst and the investor do not always align. The broker firm’s commercial incentives may be to maximise its commission from securities trading and underwriting fees. The purpose of this thesis is to extend our understanding of the work of a financial analyst, the incentives he faces and how these affect his actions. The first essay investigates how the economic significance of the coverage of a particular firm impacts the analysts’ accuracy of estimation. The hypothesis is that analysts put more effort in analysing firms with a relatively higher trading volume, as these firms usually yield higher commissions. The second essay investigates how analysts interpret new financial statement information. The essay shows that analysts underreact or overreact to prior reported earnings, depending on the short-term pattern in reported earnings. The third essay investigates the possible investment value in Finnish stock recommendations, issued by sell side analysts. It is established that consensus recommendations issued on Finnish stocks contain investment value. Further, the investment value in consensus recommendations improves significantly through the exclusion of recommendations issued by banks. The fourth essay investigates investors’ behaviour prior to financial analysts’ earnings forecast revisions. Lately, the financial press have reported cases were financial analysts warn their preferred clients of possible earnings forecast revisions. However, in the light of the empirical results, it appears that the problem of analysts leaking information to some selected customers does not appear systematically on the Finnish stock market.

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Topics in Spatial Econometrics — With Applications to House Prices Spatial effects in data occur when geographical closeness of observations influences the relation between the observations. When two points on a map are close to each other, the observed values on a variable at those points tend to be similar. The further away the two points are from each other, the less similar the observed values tend to be. Recent technical developments, geographical information systems (GIS) and global positioning systems (GPS) have brought about a renewed interest in spatial matters. For instance, it is possible to observe the exact location of an observation and combine it with other characteristics. Spatial econometrics integrates spatial aspects into econometric models and analysis. The thesis concentrates mainly on methodological issues, but the findings are illustrated by empirical studies on house price data. The thesis consists of an introductory chapter and four essays. The introductory chapter presents an overview of topics and problems in spatial econometrics. It discusses spatial effects, spatial weights matrices, especially k-nearest neighbours weights matrices, and various spatial econometric models, as well as estimation methods and inference. Further, the problem of omitted variables, a few computational and empirical aspects, the bootstrap procedure and the spatial J-test are presented. In addition, a discussion on hedonic house price models is included. In the first essay a comparison is made between spatial econometrics and time series analysis. By restricting the attention to unilateral spatial autoregressive processes, it is shown that a unilateral spatial autoregression, which enjoys similar properties as an autoregression with time series, can be defined. By an empirical study on house price data the second essay shows that it is possible to form coordinate-based, spatially autoregressive variables, which are at least to some extent able to replace the spatial structure in a spatial econometric model. In the third essay a strategy for specifying a k-nearest neighbours weights matrix by applying the spatial J-test is suggested, studied and demonstrated. In the final fourth essay the properties of the asymptotic spatial J-test are further examined. A simulation study shows that the spatial J-test can be used for distinguishing between general spatial models with different k-nearest neighbours weights matrices. A bootstrap spatial J-test is suggested to correct the size of the asymptotic test in small samples.

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In the thesis we consider inference for cointegration in vector autoregressive (VAR) models. The thesis consists of an introduction and four papers. The first paper proposes a new test for cointegration in VAR models that is directly based on the eigenvalues of the least squares (LS) estimate of the autoregressive matrix. In the second paper we compare a small sample correction for the likelihood ratio (LR) test of cointegrating rank and the bootstrap. The simulation experiments show that the bootstrap works very well in practice and dominates the correction factor. The tests are applied to international stock prices data, and the .nite sample performance of the tests are investigated by simulating the data. The third paper studies the demand for money in Sweden 1970—2000 using the I(2) model. In the fourth paper we re-examine the evidence of cointegration between international stock prices. The paper shows that some of the previous empirical results can be explained by the small-sample bias and size distortion of Johansen’s LR tests for cointegration. In all papers we work with two data sets. The first data set is a Swedish money demand data set with observations on the money stock, the consumer price index, gross domestic product (GDP), the short-term interest rate and the long-term interest rate. The data are quarterly and the sample period is 1970(1)—2000(1). The second data set consists of month-end stock market index observations for Finland, France, Germany, Sweden, the United Kingdom and the United States from 1980(1) to 1997(2). Both data sets are typical of the sample sizes encountered in economic data, and the applications illustrate the usefulness of the models and tests discussed in the thesis.

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A defining characteristic of most service encounters is that they are strongly influenced by interactions in which both the consumer and the service personnel are playing integral roles. Such is the importance of this interaction that it has even been argued that for the consumer, these encounters are in fact the service. Given this, it is not surprising that interactions involving communication and customer participation in the service encounters have received considerable attention within the field of services marketing. Much of the research on interactions and communication in services, however, appear to have assumed that the consumer and the service personnel by definition are perfectly able to interact and communicate effortlessly with each other. Such communication would require a common language, and in order to be able to take this for granted the market would need to be fairly homogenous. The homogenous country, however, and with it the homogenous market, would appear to be gone. It is estimated that more than half the consumers in the world are already speaking more than one language. For a company entering a new market, language can be a major barrier that firms may underestimate, and understanding language influence across different markets is important for international companies. The service literature has taken a common language between companies and consumers for granted but this is not matched by the realities on the ground in many markets. Owing to the communicational and interaction-oriented nature of services, the lack of a common language between the consumer and the service provider is a situation that could cause problems. A gap exists in the service theory, consisting of a lack of knowledge concerning how language influences consumers in service encounters. By addressing this gap, the thesis contributes to an increased understanding of service theory and provides a better practical understanding for service companies of the importance of native language use for consumers. The thesis consists of four essays. Essay one is conceptual and addresses how sociolinguistic research can be beneficial for understanding consumer language preferences. Essay two empirically shows how the influence of language varies depending on the nature of the service, essay three shows that there is a significant difference in language preferences between female and male consumers while essay four empirically compares consumer language preferences in Canada and Finland, finding strong similarities but also indications of difference in the motives for preferring native language use. The introduction of the thesis outlines the existence of a research gap within the service literature, a gap consisting of the lack of research into how native language use may influence consumers in service encounters. In addition, it is described why this gap is of importance to services and why its importance is growing. Building on this situation, the purpose of the thesis is to establish the existence of language influence in service encounters and to extend the knowledge of how language influences consumers on multilingual markets.

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A Continuation of the Happiness Success Story: Does Happiness Impact Service Quality? The effects of long-term happiness on various outcomes for the individual and society have been studied extensively in psychology but the concept has so far received limited research attention in marketing. Happiness is defined as a summary judgment of one’s life. Previous research has shown that happiness is a relatively stable perception of happiness in one’s life. Thus, happiness in this thesis is long-term and more global as a phenomenon than in the marketing literature, where happiness is commonly conceptualized as an emotion, feeling or momentary state of happiness. Although there is plenty of research on consumer affect and its impact on service responses, there are no studies on the effect of long-term happiness on service evaluation. As empirical evidence suggests that happy people perceive smaller and bigger events in life more positively than less happy people and that happy people are more prone to experience positive feelings and less of negative feelings it was hypothesized that happiness affects service quality directly but also indirectly through mood. Therefore, in this thesis, it was set out to explore if happiness affects customer-perceived service quality. A survey method was adopted to study the relationship between happiness, mood and service quality. Two studies were conducted with a total of 17 investigated services. Out of the 17 different investigated cases, happiness was found to positively affect service quality in only four cases. The results from the two studies also provide weak support for a positive relationship between mood and service quality. Out of the 17 cases, mood was found to positively affect service quality in only three cases and the results provide additional evidence for the stream of literature arguing that affect plays no or only a minimal role in service quality. Based on the collective results in this study, it can be concluded that the evidence for a positive relationship between happiness, mood and service quality is weak. However, in this thesis, it was recognized that the happiness concept is relevant for marketers and serve potential to explain marketing related phenomena. Marketing researchers who are interested in studying happiness are advised to focus research attention on consumer well-being.

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Värdeforskningen inom marknadsföringen har traditionellt fokuserat på utbyten och det upplevda värdet av företagets produkter. Den gängse synen på värde har därför också utmärkts av en produktions- och transaktionsorienterad syn där värde anses produceras i företagets processer och sedan överlåts till kunden i samband med ett utbyte. I den här studien betraktas värde i stället ur ett kund- och relationsbaserat perspektiv. Utgångspunkten är att värde för kunden är något som företaget vare sig kan producera eller leverera. Kunden betraktas i den här studien därför som subjekt i sin egen värdeskapande process, medan varor, tjänster och kundens relationer till olika företag betraktas som resurser eller objekt i kundens egna värdeskapande aktiviteter. Tyngdpunkten flyttas från företaget som värdeskapare till kunden som värdeskapare vilket innebär en omarbetad logik för värdeskapande. Det relationsbaserade perspektivet på värde vidgar ytterligare synen på hur värde uppkommer för kunden. Studien visar att kundens värdeskapande kontext omfattar mer än enbart produkten och den värdebedömning som görs i en köpsituation. Detta påtalar behovet av att man analyserar hur värde uppkommer för kunden över tiden och ur ett helhetsperspektiv. Studiens syfte är att analysera hur värde uppkommer för kunden – i vilka aktiviteter och med vilka resurser. Målet är att finna en balans i synen på relationen mellan kund och företag och att lära om hur företagets marknadsföringsprocesser kan utvecklas genom att kundens egna värdeskapande aktiviteter analyseras. Studien är inriktad på konsumentmarknaden och den empiriska miljön utgörs av bilägare som intervjuats med en longitudinell ansats. Avhandlingen utmynnar i en teoretisk referensram om hur värde uppkommer för kunden. Olika dimensioner av värdebegreppet identifieras och analyseras och en kund- och relationsbaserad värdeterminologi utvecklas. I stället för att analysera det upplevda värdet av företagets produkt uppmanas marknadsföraren här att analysera hur värde uppkommer för kunden som individ över tiden. Detta uppnås genom att företaget lär känna kundens värdeskapande kontext i syfte att förstå var (i vilka aktiviteter) och hur (under vilka premisser) värde uppkommer för kunden. På basis av denna information kan företaget ta ställning till sin roll i kundens värdeskapande process och även visionera om vilken roll företaget kunde ha.

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Marknadsföringen till äldre konsumenter har länge varit en grå zon. Konsumtionsvilja och penningstyrka är två sätt att beskriva dagens äldre konsument, och i avhandlingen bildar dessa omdömen och många andra beskrivningar fem diskurser som har benämnts senior, radikal, förlängd ungdom, hedonist och lyx och själfull och erfaren. Diskurserna baserar sig på analysen av intervjuer med reklambyråer och tidskrifter riktade till marknadsförare. Diskurserna är exempel på hur man bygger upp en identitet för den äldre konsumenten i marknadsföringens värld. Identiteterna erbjuder möjligheter till ett mångsidigare åldrande men de kan också skapa nya stereotyper. Resultaten i avhandlingen visar hur vår språkanvändning och vårt sätt att avbilda människor påverkar kategoriseringen och stereotypiseringen av dem. Avhandlingen erbjuder ett sätt att lära sig bemöta den äldre konsumenten, och egentligen vilken konsument som helst, med en så dynamisk uppfattning om denna som möjligt. Tidigare har marknadsförare främst utgått från konsumentens kronologiska ålder och diskussionen har kretsat kring när någon kan klassas som en äldre konsument. Att försöka bestämma när någon är gammal eller äldre utesluter det faktum att ålder skapas och återskapas i vårt sätt att tala om den. I denna skapelseprocess spelar marknadsförarens handlingar en viktig roll. Om ålder enbart ses som ett slags åldersgräns påtvingas vi färdiga kategorier och stereotyper som både stämplar och begränsar. Avhandlingen inför begreppet kulturell ålder där kulturens olika processer som skapar en åldersidentitet för konsumenten poängteras. Åldrande är en pågående, självuppfyllande process som ständigt omformas, definieras och förstärks av de bilder som finns runt omkring oss och sättet att tala om det (språk och representation). När vi känner till de ideologiska skiftningarna kan vi skapa en mera dynamisk kommunikation med konsumenten. Vi förstår också bättre vår roll vid uppkomsten av stereotyper och andra rigida konstruktioner. Avhandlingen har utnyttjat diskursanalytiska begrepp i kombination med ett kultursynsätt. Kombinationen kan utnyttjas då man analyserar sättet att konstruera identiteten hos olika konsumentgrupper i marknadernas olika dialoger. Därför borde man inte fråga ”Hur gammal är den äldre konsumenten?” utan ”Hur åldras konsumenten?”.

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Customer value has been identified as “the reason” for customers to patronize a firm, and as one of the fundamental blocks that market exchanges build upon. Despite the importance of customer value, it is often poorly defined, or seems to refer to different phenomena. This dissertation contributes to current marketing literature by subjecting the value concept to a critical investigation, and by clarifying its conceptual foundation. Based on the literature review, it is proposed that customer value can be divided into two separate, but interrelated aspects: value creation processes, and value outcome determination. This means that on one hand, it is possible to examine those activities through which value is created, and on the other hand, investigate how customers determine the value outcomes they receive. The results further show that customers may determine value in four different ways: value as a benefit/sacrifice ratio, as experience outcomes, as means-end chains, and value as phenomenological. In value as benefit/sacrifice ratio, customers are expected to calculate the ratio between service benefits (e.g. ease of use) and sacrifices (e.g. price). In value as experience outcomes, customers are suggested to experience multiple value components, such as functional, emotional, or social value. Customer value as means-ends chains in turn models value in terms of the relationships between service characteristics, use value, and desirable ends (e.g. social acceptance). Finally, value as phenomenological proposes that value emerges from lived, holistic experiences. The empirical papers investigate customer value in e-services, including online health care and mobile services, and show how value in e-service stems from the process and content quality, use context, and the service combination that a customer uses. In conclusion, marketers should understand that different value definitions generate different types of understanding of customer value. In addition, it is clear that studying value from several perspectives is useful, as it enables a richer understanding of value for the different actors. Finally, the interconnectedness between value creation and determination is surprisingly little researched, and this dissertation proposes initial steps towards understanding the relationship between the two.

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In the markets-as-networks approach business networks are conceived as dynamic actor structures, giving focus to exchange relationships and actors’ capabilities to control and co-ordinate activities and resources. Researchers have shared an understanding that actors’ actions are crucial for the development of business networks and for network dynamics. However, researchers have mainly studied firms as business actors and excluded individuals, although both firms and individuals can be seen as business actors. This focus on firms as business actors has resulted in a paucity of research on human action and the exchange of intangible resources in business networks, e.g. social exchange between individuals in social networks. Consequently, the current conception of business networks fails to appreciate the richness of business actors, the human character of business action and the import of social action in business networks. The central assumption in this study is that business actors are multidimensional and that their specific constitution in any given situation is determined by human interaction in social networks. Multidimensionality is presented as a concept for exploring how business actors act in different situations and how actors simultaneously manage multiple identities: individual, organisational, professional, business and network identities. The study presents a model that describes the multidimensionality of actors in business networks and conceptualises the connection between social exchange and human action in business networks. Empirically the study explores the change that has taken place in pharmaceutical retailing in Finland during recent years. The phenomenon of emerging pharmacy networks is highly contemporary in the Nordic countries, where the traditional license-based pharmacy business is changing. The study analyses the development of two Finnish pharmacy chains, one integrated and one voluntary chain, and the network structures and dynamics in them. Social Network Analysis is applied to explore the social structures within the pharmacy networks. The study shows that emerging pharmacy networks are multifaceted phenomena where political, economic, social, cultural, and historical elements together contribute to the observed changes. Individuals have always been strongly present in the pharmacy business and the development of pharmacy networks provides an interesting example of human actors’ influence in the development of business networks. The dynamics or forces driving the network development can be linked to actors’ own economic and social motives for developing the business. The study highlights the central role of individuals and social networks in the development of the two studied pharmacy networks. The relation between individuals and social networks is reciprocal. The social context of every individual enables multidimensional business actors. The mix of various identities, both individual and collective identities, is an important part of network dynamics. Social networks in pharmacy networks create a platform for exchange and social action, and social networks enable and support business network development.