Editorial

Citation

Charles, V. (2016), "Editorial", Journal of Centrum Cathedra, Vol. 9 No. 1, pp. 2-3. https://doi.org/10.1108/JCC-10-2016-0017

The aim of the Journal of CENTRUM Cathedra (JCC): The Business and Economics Research Journal is to become an evergreen, favorable journal through disseminating high-quality scholarly research articles to the pool of knowledge seekers in the field of business and economics. It also aims to play a vital role as a medium of exchange for transmitting and simulating the frontiers of thought and enhancing business and economics research between Latin American and non-Latin American countries with its well-balanced research framework.

This issue of the JCC: The Business and Economics Research Journal includes four research articles by authors from Canada, France, Italy and the USA. It spans a spectrum of research areas such as risk and risk marketing, business strategy, product innovation, productivity, performance, team coordination, payoff differentials, grey relational analysis, analytic hierarchy process, data envelopment analysis, fuzzy numbers and multiple attribute decision-making. As always, this issue fulfills its aims.

Today’s global economy is characterized by increased competition. Strategic management has, thus, become a vital factor in the competitiveness of firms. To compete, firms generally have two different business strategies to choose from: product innovation and cost-cutting strategies. In the paper titled “Product Innovation, Cost-Cutting and Firm Economic Performance in the post-crisis context: Canadian Micro Evidence”, Zhan Su and Jianmin Tang use Canadian micro data to study the economic performance of firms. The findings highlight that Canadian firms are more inclined to adopt business strategies based on product innovation, which, in turn, leads to higher productivity. The paper has implications for policymakers interested in encouraging business innovation to drive the growth of the Canadian economy and improve the well-being of its citizens.

The modern world is growingly perceived as uncertain, and all products tend to be considered as conveying potential hazards. This, in turn, challenges marketing scope and methods. In the paper titled “Risk Marketing”, Jérôme Boutang and Michel De Lara evaluate 50 years of research on risk in the literature on marketing, cognitive sciences, behavioral economics and evolutionary psychology, under the premise that consumer research could benefit more widely from psychological and evolutionary-grounded risk theories. In this sense, the paper attempts to identify potential applications, among which risk positioning and communication, as two domains of marketing, are of particular interest. Among others, the authors propose to build perceptual maps describing people on both aspiration and risk attitude axis and to design communication tools according to psychological research on message framing and biases. Avenues for further research are also proposed.

One of the main research topics in agency theory concerns the coordination of incentives within a group of heterogeneous decision-makers. This implies that some monitoring capacity should exist in the firm, which would allow the evaluation of the individual contribution, based upon which the strategic payoffs would be allocated accordingly. In the paper titled “Managing Team Coordination Incentives: The Effect of Payoff Differentials”, Madjid Tavana, Debora Di Caprio and Francisco J. Santos-Arteaga aim to introduce a formal model illustrating how payoff imbalances among the members of a team of decision-makers, who must develop a coordinated project, condition the final outcome obtained by the firm. The authors also suggest extensions of the proposed model that would allow future research to consider additional stochastic scenarios, within different management settings.

Grey relational analysis (GRA) is suitable for solving a variety of multiple attribute decision-making problems; nevertheless, assigning equal weights to attributes for each alternative (which is the norm) may turn out to be unrealistic, because each alternative counts with its own characteristics. In the paper titled “An Integrated Approach to Grey Relational Analysis, Analytic Hierarchy Process and Data Envelopment Analysis”, Mohammad Sadegh Pakkar proposes an integration of the analytic hierarchy process (AHP) and data envelopment analysis (DEA) methods in a multiattribute GRA methodology, in which the attribute weights are completely unknown and the attribute values take the form of fuzzy numbers. The author highlights the usefulness of the proposed approach with an illustrated example of a nuclear waste dump site selection. This research positions itself as a step forward to overcome the current shortcomings in the weighing schemes of attributes in a fuzzy multiattribute GRA methodology.

The many academics and researchers who contributed articles and the experts within the field who reviewed the articles have made this issue of the journal possible. We thank you. We further extend our gratitude to the administrative and editorial staff of JCC: The Business and Economics Research Journal and Emerald Publishing. Special recognition goes to Professor Fernando D’Alessio, the Director General of CENTRUM Católica Graduate Business School, for his extensive support.

The articles published in this issue of the JCC: The Business and Economics Research Journal should be of considerable interest. We wish you, our readers, informative reading.