Competitive advantage is a seemingly ubiquitous concept in business research. Its association with extraordinary firm performance results in interest from managerial audiences, as well as from economists, who hope to explain extraordinary value creation and appropriation
Recently any difficulty a financial institution found itself in seems to have been blamed on the global financial crisis. This paper, employing forensic case study analysis of finance companies in New Zealand rebuts this excuse
This paper considers the case of two fictional brands (‘Duff Beer’ and ‘Bertie Bott’s Every Flavor Beans’) and one computer-synthesized brand (‘Aimee Weber’) and the attachment of these brands to physical products in the real and virtual worlds. The authors contend these cases are not merely manifestations of the \"reverse product placement\" process but are representative of a wider phenomenon, labelled “brand precession”
After the recent scandals and the introduction of new corporate governance codes, non-executive directors (NED\'s) and supervisors have started playing an increasingly important role in providing the ‘checks and balances’ of organizations. Little is known about the way in which NED\'s fulfill their supervisory role
The failure of academic finance can be considered one of the symbols of the financial crisis. Two important underlying reasons why academic finance models systematically fail to account for real-world phenomena follow directly from two conventions (a) treating economics not as a ‘true’ social science, but as a branch of applied mathematics inspired by the methodology of classical physics, and (b) using economic models as if the empirical content of economic theories is not very low
This is the second in a series of articles that examines the practical applications of economic thought - its focus is on the most fundamental aspects of finance theory, namely asset pricing. We discuss the major pricing models developed during the past five decades and critically examine their practical applications
This paper extends the work of Taffler and Tuckett (2005) on Emotional Finance by proposing a new development, namely Emotional Corporate Finance. We argue that managers view their projects as phantastic objects and develop a formal approach that considers the effects of managerial phantasy on the investment appraisal decision, project performance and managerial entrapment in a losing project
This article analyses the methods of attracting customers to retail websites and then satisfying their needs. Porter’s value chain is adapted to the online retail environment to create a model termed “the click chain”, which analyses how users, termed “clicks”, come to a website identifying a variety of sources
It is often claimed that work opportunities decline with age, that hiring chances of older persons are poor. We investigate this by collecting questionnaire responses from personnel managers of German manufacturing firms, eliciting a hypothetical hiring decision based on three fictitious candidates
Aside from the decision to enter the equity market, the most fundamental question an investor faces is whether to passively hold the market portfolio or to do investment research. The thesis of this paper is that there is no scientifically reliable procedure available which can be applied to estimate the marginal product of investment research
This study addresses the research question why some companies do and others do not have women on their boards. This study provides evidence on the organizational characteristics that affect the likelihood of women being appointed