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I Love Smu: Heart, Life, Passion, Soul [Advertisment], Singapore Management University

SMU Press Releases

Celebrating the unconventional, the intriguing, the undaunted. Experience the SMU spirit. Heart: Jenny Foo; Life: Tan Chee Wee; Life: Joven Lai; Soul: Jeremy Nguee; Passion: Richard Ho, Johny Tay.

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The Demand And Supply-Side Impact Of The Kimberly-Clark, Scott Paper Products Merger In The Facial Tissues Category, Andre Bonfrer, Jagmohan S. Raju

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

We investigate how market behavior changed in the facial tissues category, following the 1995/1996 Kimberly-Clark merger with Scott Paper Products in the paper products industry. The facial tissues category is of interest because the US Department of Justice (DOJ), anticipating reduced competition after the merger, imposed a consent decree, requiring that Scotts’ facial tissues brands be licensed out to a third party. We utilize a two-stage budgeting demand system developed by Deaton and Muellbauer (1980a), coupled with general form supply-side first order conditions to compare demand and competitive behavior before and after the merger. Our findings indicate that the merger …

The Structure Of Affect: Reconsidering The Relationship Between Negative And Positive Affectivity, Russell Cropanzano, Howard M. Weiss, Jeff M. S. Hale, Jochen Reb

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

During the past decade organizational scientists have devoted considerable research attention to the topic of workplace affect. Despite important advances, continued progress depends on a better understanding of the structure of affective experience. The goal of this paper is to review progress to date. In particular, we review evidence pertaining to four constructs that have been widely used to organize research on affect: positive affectivity, negative affectivity, hedonic tone, and affect intensity. We review various structural models pertaining to these four constructs, devoting special attention to integrative frameworks and future research needs. Corresponding au

Kill A Brand, Keep A Customer, Nirmalya Kumar

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

Kill a Brand, Keep a CustomerMost brands don't make much money. Year after year, businesses generate 80% to 90% of their profits from less than 20% of their brands. Yet most companies tend to ignore loss-making brands, unaware of the hidden costs they incur.That's because executives believe it's easy to erase a brand; they have only to stop investing in it, they assume, and it will die a natural death. But they're wrong. When companies drop brands clumsily, they antagonize loyal customers: Research shows that seven times out of eight, when firms merge two brands, the market share of the …

Assessing The Relative Informativeness And Permanence Of Pro Forma Earnings And Gaap Operating Earnings, Nilabhra Bhattacharya, Erv Black, Ted Christensen, Chad Larson

Research Collection School Of Accountancy

This study investigates whether market participants perceive pro forma earnings to be more informative and more persistent than GAAP operating income by analyzing a sample of 1,149 actual pro forma press releases. We find that pro forma announcers report frequent GAAP losses and are mostly concentrated in the service and high-tech industries. Our analyses of short-window abnormal returns and revisions in analysts’ one-quarter-ahead earnings forecasts indicate that pro forma earnings are more informative and more permanent than GAAP operating earnings. Our evidence suggests that market participants believe pro forma earnings are more representative of “core earnings” than GAAP operating income.

Modularity And The Product Lifecycle, Peter Cebon, Oscar Hauptman, Chander Shekhar

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

Product lifecycle theory, which underlies theories of technical innovation in economics, strategy, marketing, and operations management, is based implicitly on the assumption that products are integrated wholes. The modularization of products undermines the specific synergies which drive the product lifecycle, and this undermining has impacts spanning from the structure of individual organizations to the structure of economies and the definition of industries.

Nurse Rostering Problems: A Bibliographic Survey, Brenda Cheang, Haibing Li, Andrew Lim, Brian Rodrigues

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

Hospitals need to repeatedly produce duty rosters for its nursing staff. The good scheduling of nurses has impact on the quality of health care, the recruitment of nurses, the development of budgets and other nursing functions. The nurse rostering problem (NRP) has been the subject of much study. This paper presents a brief overview, in the form of a bibliographic survey, of the many models and methodologies available to solve the NRP.

The Performance Implications Of Ownership Driven Governance Reform, Toru Yoshikawa, Phillip H. Phan

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

This paper explores the performance impact of recent changes in foreign shareholdings and boardroom reforms in Japan. Empirical research on the impact of reform on the Japanese corporate governance system could provide useful lessons for their European counterparts who are themselves facing similar pressures to reform. We found that although participation of outside directors in strategic decision-making was associated with positive stock returns, the increase in the ratio of outside directors, the separation of the board members and executive officers, and the reduction of board size were not related to firm performance.

To Pester Or Leave Alone: Lifetime Value Maximization Through Optimal Communication Timing, Xavier Dreze, Andre Bonfrer

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

The marketing literature has long acknowledged the importance of a customer’s lifetime value in customer relationship management. More recently, researchers have turned their attention to the links between satisfaction and both customer acquisition and retention strategies. In this paper, we are interested in understanding the impact of communication frequency on customer retention and ultimately on lifetime value. We develop a theoretical framework for managing a customer database and addressing the tradeoffs between value extraction and customer retention. An empirical application of this framework is conducted for permission-based email marketing in the entertainment industry. This application recognizes the customization ability underlying …

Displaying Group Cohesiveness: Humour And Laughter In The Public Lectures Of Management Gurus, David Greatbatch, Timothy Adrian Robert Clark

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

As perhaps the highest profile group of management speakers in the world, so-called management gurus use their appearances on the international management lecture circuit todisseminate their ideas and to build their personal reputations with audiences of managers. This article examines the use of humour by management gurus during these public performances. Focusing on video recordings of lectures conducted by four leading management gurus (Tom Peters, Rosabeth Moss Kanter, Peter Senge and Gary Hamel), the article explicates the verbal and nonverbal practices that the gurus use when they evoke audience laughter. These practices allow the gurus to project clear message completion …

An Investigation Of Consumer Online Trust And Purchase-Repurchase Intentions, Dan J. Kim, Donald Ferrin, Raghav Rao

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

There is little research on trust and satisfaction in the electronic commerce from a longitudinal (pre- and postpurchase) perspective. Based on previous frameworks and theories, this study developed a combined model of consumer trust and satisfaction in the context of Internet shopping. From the valance framework and expectation-confirmation theory, several prepurchase and post-purchase factors such as risk, benefit, consumer trust, expectation, confirmation, and satisfaction are investigated as research variables affecting consumer repurchase intention.

The results of the study show that trust is the strongest predictor of the consumer’s purchase intention. In addition, as in traditional consumer satisfaction studies, it holds …

Measuring Attraction To Organizations, Scott Highhouse, Filip Lievens, Evan F. Sinar

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

Organizational attraction measures are commonly used as surrogate assessments of organizational pursuit. Despite the range in content often encompassed by such instruments, no research has systematically examined the assumptions underlying their use. The authors address this issue by empirically distinguishing items assessing attractiveness, prestige, and behavioral intentions and by modeling their effects on organization pursuit. Undergraduates (N = 305) were randomly assigned to recruitment literature from one of five well-known companies and were asked to respond to a series of items commonly used in past research. Analyses of the item responses suggested that three components of organizational attraction can be …

Prospect Theory And Institutional Investors, Melvyn Teo, Paul G. J. O'Connell

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

There is ample evidence that past performance affects the trading decisions of individual investors. This paper looks at this issue using a detailed database of currency trading decisions of institutional investors. Past performance manifestly affects currency risk-taking in this group, but the sign and magnitude of the effect runs counter to much of the existing theory and evidence. There is no evidence whatsoever of disposition effects; rather, the dominant characteristic is aggressive risk reduction in the wake of losses. This effect is more prominent later in the year, and among older and more experienced funds. A modified version of the …

Task Allocation Via Multi-Agent Coalition Formation: Taxonomy, Algorithms And Complexity, Hoong Chuin Lau, L. Zhang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Coalition formation has become a key topic in multiagent research. In this paper, we propose a preliminary classification for the coalition formation problem based on three driving factors (demands, resources and profit objectives). We divide our analysis into 5 cases. For each case, we present algorithms and complexity results. We anticipate that with future research, this classification can be extended in similar fashion to the comprehensive classification for the job scheduling problem.

Manpower Allocation With Time Windows And Job Teaming Constraints, Xi Li, Yan Zhi Li, Andrew Lim, Brian Rodrigues

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

In the Manpower Allocation Problem with Time Windows and Job-Teaming Constraints (MAPTWTC), we have a set of jobs located at various locations where each job requires a team of workers. Each job has a time window and a job duration, during which everyone on the team has to be present. The job requirement is satisfied if and only if the required composite team works for long enough duration within the job's time window. The objective of the problem is find a schedule to minimize a weighted sum of the total number of workers, the total travelling distances of all workers …

The Enhancement Bias In Consumer Decisions To Adopt And Utilize Product Innovations, Shenghui Zhao, Robert J. Meyer, Jin K. Han

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

The ability of consumers to anticipate the value they will draw from new product generations that expand the capabilities of incumbent goods is explored. Drawing on previous research in affective forecasting, the work explores a hypothesis that consumers will frequently overestimate the benefits they envision drawing from new added product features and underestimate the learning costs required to realize those benefits. This hypothesis is tested using a computer simulation in which subjects are trained to play a Pacman-like arcade game where icons are moved over a screen by different forms of tactile controls. Respondents are then given the option to …

Entrepreneurship And Social Endeavours In Singapore, Wee Liang Tan

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

Many people would confine entrepreneurship to the business arena and entrepreneurs to profit enterprises. In truth, entrepreneurship can extend to all aspects of human activity as defined by Raymond Kao as “the process of doing something new and/or different to create wealth for oneself and to add value to the society” (Kao, 1993). Apart from entrepreneurship that is solely “for profit” and in the business sphere, there is social entrepreneurship. Social entrepreneurship spans a continuum of community-based enterprises and entrepreneurial activities by volunteers for the good of their communities. It also includes philanthropic acts by successful individuals. While many may …

Multi-Agent Coalition Via Autonomous Price Negotiation In A Real-Time Web Environment, Hoong Chuin Lau, Wei Sian Lim

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In e-marketplaces, customers specify job requests in real-time and agents form coalitions to service them. This paper proposes a protocol for self-interested agents to negotiate prices in forming successful coalitions. We propose and experiment with two negotiation schemes: one allows information sharing while the other does not.

Incorporating Diversification Into Risk Management, Mitchell Craig Warachka, A. Purnanandam, Y. Zhao, W.T. Ziemba

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

No abstract provided.

Corporate Social Responsibility Reputation Effects On Mba Job Choice: Controlling For Region Of Origin, David B. Montgomery, Catherine A. Ramus

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

In a preliminary study with 279 MBA’s from two European and three North American business schools we find that reputation-related attributes of caring about employees, environmental sustainability, community/stakeholder relations, and ethical products and services are important in job choice decisions. We use an adaptive conjoint analysis survey tool to discover the relative weighting of a new set of social responsibility job search criteria, including these attributes with traditional job search criteria like financial package, geographical location, etc. In addition, our results show that more than ninety percent of the MBAs in the sample were willing to forgo financial benefits in …

Store Brands: Who Buys Them And What Happens To Retail Prices When They Are Introduced?, Andre Bonfrer, Pradeep K. Chintagunta

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

In this paper we study store brand demand behavior by examining a panel of household level and store-level data in five stores located in a competing market area. We seek to address three fundamental questions from this data. First, is there a link between store loyalty and brand loyalty? Second, does store loyalty raise store brand choice probabilities? Third, if a store brand is introduced into a category, what happens to the retail prices of the incumbent brands in the category? We find that store loyalty is negatively associated with brand loyalty, and that store loyalty increases the likelihood of …

A Renewable-Resource Approach To Database Valuation, Xavier Dreze, Andre Bonfrer

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

We demonstrate in this paper that firms should view customers in a database as a renewable resource when valuating them. Indeed, customer names flow in and out of the firm’s databases, and the goal of the firm is to optimize the overall customer acquisition/cultivation/attrition process. The renewable resource approach to the problem of maximizing the profits generated by a flow of customer names is more appropriate than the traditional Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) approach. We show that CLV underestimates the true value of names (by more than 400% in some cases) and leads to sub-optimal customer relationship management and acquisition …

Stock Exchange Governance And Market Quality, Chandrasekhar Krishnamurti, John M. Sequeira, Fangjian Fu

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

We show that organization structure of a stock exchange matters by utilizing the unique setting prevailing in India. India has two major stock markets, the Bombay Stock Exchange (BSE) and the National Stock Exchange (NSE). These two exchanges adopt similar trading systems, trade essentially identical stocks, and follow the same trading hours. However, these exchanges have different organizational structures: BSE is mutualized whereas NSE is demutualized. Using the Hasbrouck [Review of Financial Studies 6 (1993) 191] measure of market quality we show that NSE provides a better quality market than BSE. This result is consistent with the work of Domowitz …

Reading The Voice Of The Customer: A Content Analysis Of Consumer Reviews, Seshan Ramaswami, Susheela Abraham Varghese

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

Online consumer reviews are an increasingly prominent source of interpersonal influence on consumer preferences. We discuss similarities and differences between these reviews and conventional word-of- mouth sources. A content analysis of 180 online consumer reviews reveals important insights for both academics and managers into the consumer search and influence processes.

Acceptance Of Golden Rice In The Philippine Rice Bowl, Mark Chong

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

Few science issues in recent years have elicited such polarized public reactions as modern biotechnology and its agricultural applications. Although a new study conducted by the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and the International Service for the Acquisition of Agri-biotech Applications (Ithaca, NY, USA) indicates that Southeast Asian stakeholders generally hold positive views about agricultural biotechnology.

Trading Your Neighbor's Etfs: Competition Or Fragmentation?, Beatrice Boehmer, Ekkehart Boehmer

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

On July 31, 2001, for the first time in its history, the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) began trading three unlisted securities. The DIA, SPY, and QQQ are the most actively traded Exchange Traded Funds (ETFs) and are listed on the American Stock Exchange. On April 15, 2002 another 27 ETFs followed. These two events provide a unique experiment for studying the impact of a new entrant on market quality. In contrast to recently revived concerns about the adverse impact of market fragmentation, we document that the NYSE entry leads to a dramatic improvement in liquidity that we attribute to …

Does Underwriter Reputation Affect The Performance Of Ipo Stocks?, Chunchi Wu, Sheen Liu, Junbo Wang

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

In this paper we examine the relationship between performance of the Chinese IPO firms and the reputation of investment bankers underwriting their stocks. Similar to previous studies on well-developed stock markets, we find that the initial return on the first day of trading is strongly positive for Chinese IPO stocks due to underpricing. This initial return is negatively related to the underwriter's reputation, suggesting that the better the reputation of the underwriter, the less underpricing and hence, the lower the initial return of the IPO stock. Extending the analysis to a ten-day window after the first trading day, we find …

Singapore's Regionalization Gambit: Insights Form The Suzhou-Wuxi Experiment, Caroline Yeoh, Jerel Chye Hock Lee, Clare Yenping Lee

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

No abstract provided.

Reasoning About Competitive Reactions: Evidence From Executives, David B. Montgomery, Marian Chapman Moore, Joel E. Urbany

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

Much of the empirical research on competitive reactions describes how or why rivals react to a firm’s past actions, but stops short of examining whether managers attempt to predict such reactions, which we call strategic competitive reasoning. In three exploratory studies, we find evidence of managers’ thinking about competitors’ past and future behavior, but little incidence of strategic competitive reasoning. Competitive intelligence experts and other experienced managers assessment of the results suggests the relatively low incidence of strategic competitor reasoning is due to perceptions of low returns from anticipating competitor reactions more than to the high cost of doing so. …

Asymptotic Dynamics And Value-At-Risk Of Large Diversified Portfolios In A Jump-Diffusion Market, Kian Guan Lim, Xiaoqing Liu, Kai Chong Tsui

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

This paper studies the modelling of large diversi ed portfolios in a nancial market with jump-di usion risks. The portfolios considered include three categories: equal money-weighted portfolios, risk minimizing portfolios, and market indices. Reduced-form dynamics driven jointly by one Brownian Motion and one Poisson process are derived for the asymptotics of such portfolios. We prove that derivatives written on a portfolio can be priced by treating the asymptotic dynamics as the underlying process if the number of assets in the portfolio is su ciently large. Analytical and Monte Carlo Value-at-Risk (VaR) can be computed for the portfolios based on their …