Business Commons^™

Contextualising Csr In Asia: Corporate Social Responsibility In Asian Economies, Bindu Sharma

Lien Centre for Social Innovation: Research

This publication seeks to present a narrative about the practice of CSR in ten Asian economies – China, India, Indonesia, Japan, Malaysia, Philippines, Singapore, South Korea, Taiwan and Thailand. The aim is to present a uniquely Asian perspective on the CSR story in these countries that will inform CSR practitioners, researchers and interested corporate stakeholders. Drawing on historical and traditional notions of business responsibility and engagement, the research looks at modern day drivers of CSR in these countries such as the government, civil society, globalisation and enlightened self-interest. The research also throws light on other underlying influences and looks at …

Core Versus Peripheral Information Technology Employees And Their Impact On Firm Performance, Ling Liu, Daniel Q. Chen, Nan Hu, Indranil Bose, Garry D. Bruton

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Scholars have widely argued, but not previously examined, that core employees with firm specific skills are critical to the firm's strategic success. This argument has led to the belief that employees whose skills are not firm specific can be readily replaced in the external market and are peripheral to the firm's strategic goals. Employing a resource based view of the firm, we find that the core information technology (IT) employees with firm specific skills are value-adding resources that aid the firm's performance whereas peripheral employees with less firm specific skills provide no value to the firm's performance. Examining the issue …

Using Digital Storytelling To Engage Student Learning, Themin Suwardy, Gary Pan, Poh Sun Seow

Research Collection School Of Accountancy

No one really knows what the first story ever told in human history was, but storytelling is an art that spans many civilizations and cultures, and continues to be a major part of our modern lives. More recently, storytelling has gone digital with advances in technology and connectivity. Educators have also rediscovered how storytelling can be an effective teaching pedagogy for engaged student learning. A digital story can engage students' visual and auditory senses in a way that the written word alone cannot. This article describes such an effort. The Movie-Door-2-Door.com (MD2D) is a digital story spanning 12 episodes. The …

Are The Loan Loss And Fair Value Components Of Bank Income Rationally Priced?, Chu Yeong Lim, Edward Lee, Martin Walker

Research Collection School Of Accountancy

This paper examines if the market rationally prices the loan loss provisions, and the fair value gains and losses of US banks. We also model the discretionary components of loan loss provisions and fair value gains and losses, and test if the discretionary components are priced differently from their non-discretionary counterparts. We find little evidence that the market misprices operating cash flows, non-discretionary loan loss provisions, or fair value gains and losses (discretionary or otherwise). However we do find evidence of significant mispricing of discretionary loan loss provisions. This evidence remains significant even after controlling for the fact that loan …

Getting What You Need: How Reputation And Status Affect Team Performance, Hiring, And Salaries In The Nba, Gokhan Ertug, Fabrizio Castellucci

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

We study how the reputation and status of resource providers affect the two organizational outcomes of product quality and revenues, hiring decisions, and prices paid to resource providers. We argue that reputation and status have different effects on outcomes: reputation has a stronger effect on product quality, and status has a stronger effect on revenues. Building on this, we argue that actual quality mediates the effect of reputation on revenues more than the effect of status on revenues. Moreover, reputation and status have different effects on how organizations acquire resources: when their product quality is low relative to their aspiration …

Decision Support For Lead Time And Demand Variability Reduction, Xin Fang, Cheng Zhang, David J. Robb, Joseph D. Blackburn

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

Companies undertaking operations improvement in supply chains face many alternatives. This work seeks to assist practitioners to prioritize improvement actions by developing analytical expressions for the marginal values of three parameters – (i) lead time mean, (ii) lead time variance, and (iii) demand variance – which measure the marginal cost of an incremental change in a parameter. The relative effectiveness of reducing lead time mean versus lead time variance is captured by the ratio of the marginal value of lead time mean to that of lead time variance. We find that this ratio strongly depends on whether the lead time …

Uncovering Hedge Fund Skill From The Portfolio Holdings They Hide, Vikas Agarwal, Wei Jiang, Yuehua Tang, Baozhong Yang

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

This paper studies the “confidential holdings” of institutional investors, especially hedge funds, where the quarter-end equity holdings are disclosed with a delay through amendments to Form 13F and are usually excluded from the standard databases. Funds managing large risky portfolios with nonconventional strategies seek confidentiality more frequently. Stocks in these holdings are disproportionately associated with information-sensitive events or share characteristics indicating greater information asymmetry. Confidential holdings exhibit superior performance up to 12 months, and tend to take longer to build. Together the evidence supports private information and the associated price impact as the dominant motives for confidentiality.

Team Innovation Processes: An Examination Of Activity Cycles In Creative Project Teams, Kenneth T. Goh, Paul S. Goodman, Laurie R. Weingart

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

This study investigates cycles of planning, enacting, and reviewing activities over time in teams engaged in creative projects. Drawing on longitudinal case studies of two interactive media development teams, two distinct cycles of planning, enacting, and reviewing activities are identified: experimentation cycles and validation cycles. Experimentation cycles are discovery-oriented processes where teams gather insights into project requirements, constraints, and design specifications through trial-and-error. Validation cycles are correction-oriented processes where teams align their output with project requirements through incremental modifications. These findings are then built on to develop testable propositions about the relationship between the duration of planning, enacting, and reviewing …

Tax Aggressiveness And Auditor Resignation, Yoonseok Zang, Beng Wee Goh, Chee Yeow Lim, Terry Shevlin

Research Collection School Of Accountancy

We examine the relation between client tax aggressiveness and auditor‟s resignation decision. Consistent with the agency view of tax avoidance which suggests that client tax aggressiveness can increase litigation and reputational risk to auditors and increase the potential conflict with managers, we find a positive association between our proxies for tax aggressiveness and the likelihood that an auditor resigns from an audit engagement. Further, this association is stronger when external monitoring of the client firm is less effective, when there is greater potential for agency problems in the client firm, and when the economic importance of the fees received from …

Can Us Economic Variables Predict Chinese Stock Market?, Jeremy C. Goh, Fuwei Jiang, Jun Tu, Yuchen Wang

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

In the last few decades, we observed a significant increase in global economic activities and these activities may have an impact on both China’s economy and stock market. Given the potential impact, we empirically examine whether US economic variables are leading indicators of the Chinese stock market. Prior to China joining the World Trade Organization (WTO) in the end of 2001, we find no statistical relationship between US economic variables and the Chinese stock market returns. However, we find US economic variables have statistically significant predictive power for periods after China's admission into the WTO. In addition, we show that …

Bridging The Mutual Knowledge Gap: Coordination And The Commercialization Of University Science, Reddi Kotha, Gerard George, Kannan Srikanth

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

We examine why commercialization of interdisciplinary research, especially from distant scientific domains, is different from commercialization of inventions from specialized or proximate domains. We argue that anticipated coordination costs arising from the need to transfer technology to licensee firms and from the need for an inventor team's members to work together to further develop a technology significantly impact commercialization outcomes. We use a sample of 3,776 university invention disclosures to test whether variation in the types of experience of the scientists on a team influences the likelihood that an invention will be licensed. We proffer evidence to support our hypotheses …

Trust Between International Joint Venture Partners: Effects Of Home Countries, Gokhan Ertug, Ilya Cuypers, Niels G. Noorderhaven, Ben M. Bensaou

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

Trust is an important factor in interorganizational relations. Interorganizational trust in cross-border relationships is likely to be influenced by the home countries of both partners. Using data on 165 international joint ventures (IJVs), we show that the perceived trustworthiness of an IJV partner is influenced by the general propensity to trust in the trustor's home country. Moreover, the trustworthiness perceived by a focal parent firm is also affected by the home country of the other IJV partner. This second effect is mitigated by experience between the partners.

Social Capital, Informal Governance, And Post-Ipo Firm Performance: A Study Of Chinese Entrepreneurial Firms, Jerry X. Cao, Yuan Ding, Hua Zhang

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

This paper explores the links between entrepreneurs' social capital and post-IPO firm performance in China's unique capital market and regulatory setting. Using hand-collected data on entrepreneurs' political connections and firm financial information, we construct original measures for various types of social capital and examine their roles in determining the accounting and financial performance of entrepreneurial firms after an IPO. On one hand, firm accounting performance is enhanced by entrepreneurs' bridging social capital, such as political connections or a willingness to share power with external investors. On the other hand, bonding social capital such as intra-group related party transactions causes performance …

The Transformation Of Urban Vegetable Retail In China: Wet Markets, Supermarkets, And Informal Markets In Shanghai, Qian Forrest Zhang, Zi Pan

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

The state-monopolised system of vegetable retail in socialist urban China has transformed into a market-based system run by profit-driven actors. Publicly owned wet markets not only declined in number after the state relegated its construction to market forces, but were also thoroughly privatised, becoming venues of capital accumulation for the market operators now controlling these properties. Self-employed migrant families replaced salaried state employees in the labour force. Governments’ increased control over urban public space reduced the room for informal markets, exacerbating the scarcity of vegetable retail space. Fragmentation in the production and wholesale systems restricted modern supermarkets’ ability to establish …

Csr: Good Intentions And Wild Dreams Are Not Enough, Singapore Management University

Perspectives@SMU

When Mariam Al Foudery graduated over a decade ago, the people recruiting aggressively on campus were from investment banking and management consulting firms. But that’s changed, giving rise to more opportunities in corporate social responsibility and social entrepreneurship.

Once More With Feeling …The Art Of Wooing The Public, Singapore Management University

Perspectives@SMU

Public relations is an art, declares Rose Tan, the doyenne of Singapore’s own sports public relations industry. And although it’s changing rapidly as communications cross multiple platforms, it’s still something that needs to come from the heart.

Penchant For Property Drives Buoyant Market, Singapore Management University

Perspectives@SMU

The catch phrase “location, location, location” is often cited by the real estate industry as crucial to closing a deal. In the case of land-scarce Singapore, its citizens’ penchant for property is giving Mr Patrick Liew, CEO of real estate company HSR Property Group, much cause for optimism as he says he is “very excited” at the opportunities available in the robust property market.

The House That Jack Built: Tales Of A Serial Entrepreneur, Singapore Management University

Perspectives@SMU

Over the years Charles Goetz has built nine businesses and has experienced the ups and downs of entrepreneurial life. Even now, he tells Perspectives@SMU, there’s still nothing like the thrill of a new business to get him going in the morning.

Customer Satisfaction Index Of Singapore 2012: Full Year Overview, Institute Of Service Excellence, Smu

Research Collection Institute of Service Excellence (2007-2024)

The Customer Satisfaction Index of Singapore (CSISG) computes customer satisfaction scores at the national, sector, subsector, and company levels. The CSISG serves as a quantitative benchmark of the quality of goods and services produced by the Singapore economy over time and across countries. Singapore’s performance in the CSISG relative to a select group of countries that deploy the same or similar methodologies, are shown in Figure A for reference.

This results overview concludes the scores of CSISG 2012 that comprises nine services sectors.

Smu Launches Southeast Asia’S First Regional Institute Focused On Family Businesses, Singapore Management University

SMU Press Releases and News

The Singapore Management University (SMU) today launched Southeast Asia’s first regional institute set up specifically to serve the needs of business families in this part of the world. The Business Families Institute, or BFI@SMU, will be an educational, engagement and research platform to bring together business families in Asia. SMU will leverage on the vast experience of faculty who have worked closely with business families and thus understand their strengths and challenges, as well as the University’s strong expertise in business and management, to help them deal with business family-specific issues such as family ownership, business succession, business diversification and …

Confidence Weighted Mean Reversion Strategy For Online Portfolio Selection, Bin Li, Steven C. H. Hoi, Peilin Zhao, Vivekanand Gopalkrishnan

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Online portfolio selection has been attracting increasing attention from the data mining and machine learning communities. All existing online portfolio selection strategies focus on the first order information of a portfolio vector, though the second order information may also be beneficial to a strategy. Moreover, empirical evidence shows that relative stock prices may follow the mean reversion property, which has not been fully exploited by existing strategies. This article proposes a novel online portfolio selection strategy named Confidence Weighted Mean Reversion (CWMR). Inspired by the mean reversion principle in finance and confidence weighted online learning technique in machine learning, CWMR …

Pcaob Inspection Reports And Audit Quality, Katherine A. Gunny, Tracey Chunqi Zhang

Research Collection School Of Accountancy

With the creation of the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board (PCAOB), audit firm oversight shifted away from self-regulation to independent regulation. The inspections program is the central feature of the PCAOB. We examine whether PCAOB inspections are able to distinguish actual audit quality (as opposed to perceived) during the period inspected to better understand this important regulatory tool. We use three measures that proxy for actual audit quality: abnormal accruals, restatements, and the propensity to issue a going concern opinion. For triennially inspected auditors, we find that PCAOB inspections are associated with lower audit quality when the reports are seriously …

Global Companies And Global Society: The Evolving Social Contract, Ann Florini

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

Globalization, privatization, and CHANging ideas about the roles of business and government are transforming the social contract under which business is allowed to operate. Global companies are also policy-makers and public goods providers, governments seek profits through state-owned enterprises and sovereign wealth funds, and everyone is trying to figure out how to partner with everyone else. As a result of global economic and social integration, more and more of the business-society interaction has played out at a transnational rather than purely national level, involving transnational corporations, transnational civil society networks and organizations, and inter-governmental organizations. Experiments with codes of conduct, …

The Effect Of Crm Outsourcing On Shareholder Value: A Contingency Perspective, Kalaignanam Kartik, Tarun Kushwaha, Jan-Benedict E. M. Steenkamp, Kapil R. Tuli

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

CRM refers to processes that involve interaction with end-users or customers. The increased emphasis on CRM today stems from changes in the business environment, availability of large amounts of data and advances in information technology.Outsourcing of customer relationship management (CRM) processes is rapidly becoming a competitive imperative for firms. However, there is little evidence on why the performance implications of outsourcing CRM processes differ so much across firms. In this study, the authors examine the impact of CRM outsourcing on shareholder value. The authors draw on insights from agency theory and the resource-based view of the firm in an international …

Situation Assessment As An Ignored Factor In The Behavioral Consistency Paradigm Underlying The Validity Of Personnel Selection Procedures, Anne Jansen, Klaus G. Melchers, Filip Lievens, Martin Kleinmann, Michael Brandli, Laura Fraefel, Cornelius J. Konig

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

This study contributes to the literature on why selection procedures that are based on the behavioral consistency logic (e. g., structured interviews and assessment centers) are valid predictors of job performance. We rely on interactionist theories to propose that individual differences in assessing situational demands explain true variance in performance in selection procedures and on the job. Results from 124 individuals in a simulated selection process showed that the assessment of situational demands was related to both selection and job performance. Individual differences in assessing situational demands also contributed to the criterion-related validity of assessment center and structured interview ratings, …

Walmart In China [Book Review], John A. Donaldson

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

No abstract provided.

Regret Salience And Accountability In The Decoy Effect, Terry Connolly, Jochen Reb, Edgar E. Kausel

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

Two experiments examined the impact on the decoy effect of making salient the possibility of post-decision regret, a manipulation that has been shown in several earlier studies to stimulate critical examination and improvement of decision process. Experiment 1 (N = 62) showed that making regret salient eliminated the decoy effect in a personal preference task. Experiment 2 (N = 242) replicated this finding for a different personal preference task and for a prediction task. It also replicated previous findings that external accountability demands do not reduce, and may exacerbate, the decoy effect. We interpret both effects in terms of decision …

Category Divergence, Straddling, And Currency: Open Innovation And The Legitimation Of Illegitimate Categories, Oliver Alexy, Gerard George

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

The organizational literature is increasingly interested in the origins and consequences of category emergence. We examine the effects of being affiliated with categories initially considered illegitimate (‘divergence’), and of organizational attempts to blur the boundaries between categories (‘straddling’), on capital market reactions to firm announcements. We develop arguments for how these effects likely vary with increasing legitimation (‘currency’) of the category. We apply event study methodology to the complete population of firms' announcements of open source activities, an open innovation model for software development that is novel and defies the extant dominant logic of software production and valorization. Over a …

Institutional Voids: Black Hole Or Opportunities?, Singapore Management University

Perspectives@SMU

Emerging markets and their institutional voids offer great growth potential for corporates and organisations seeking an exit strategy from the gloomy European market, says Harvard professor Tarun Khanna. ‘Institutional voids’, a phrase coined by Khanna in his book "Winning in Emerging Markets, refers to the absence of intermediaries like market research firms and credit card systems to efficiently connect buyers and sellers. This creates daunting obstacles for companies trying to operate in emerging markets. According to Khanna, understanding these voids – and learning how to work with them in specific markets – is the key to success

Resource-Constrained? Just Wing It., Singapore Management University

Perspectives@SMU

Some four years ago, when the economic recession started in the West, Navi Radjou was convinced that the way ahead meant companies had to innovate and become faster, better and cheaper if they were to survive. Enter Jugaad. Jugaad is a Hindi word which means “an innovative fix; an improvised solution born from ingenuity and resourcefulness” and is now the name of a new approach to innovation.