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The purpose of this paper was to document the development of a major regional department store from the firm’s start to the completion of a single block structure including the warehouses required to support its operations.

The study is based on a survey of historic materials including the recently available archival materials in the Oregon Historical Society Research Library.

The study reveals the interaction of vision, planning and risk taking in a family enterprise over two generations. It illustrates the search for information as to what was required and the importance of architectural elements in the construction and operation of their store.

The archival materials are extensive; however, over the years, much of the operating data were destroyed or lost. Although family members remain in Oregon, they are reluctant to discuss the store’s history, even though the matters that affected them took place many years after the study’s period.

Much of the information collected in the study had never been used in previous work.

This article aims to explore how and why the creation of technological innovation during a merger can end in failure. The objective is to propose new analytical elements to improve the formulation and execution of the integration process between an SME (small and medium enterprise) and a large enterprise.

The authors develop a theoretical framework based on the main research results from several fields, including technology transfer, innovation dissemination, and management. This case study then focuses on a merger in the IT sector in real time.

This study allowed the authors to test theoretical elements, especially the choice of the integration method, which may favour the creation of technological innovation during the integration period. The authors present new reasons for the failure of co‐created innovation between an SME and a large enterprise in the IT sector. This case study allowed them to test theoretical elements such as the choice of an integration method which could favour the creation of technological innovation during the integration period while enriching scientific knowledge by proposing a dynamic approach to the integration process.

Before managers can envisage symbiosis between two merging firms, they first need to go through a period of exploration, which may entail costly mistakes. Yet this exploration period may be necessary to enable them to discover the limitations of a strictly rational approach to the integration process and to broaden their normal frame of reference. For this in‐depth study, the authors benefited from free access to a substantial amount of information that is generally unavailable for scientific research, which greatly contributed to their work. The authors' theoretical framework is not exhaustive, but they tried to incorporate the most significant research results.

This paper aims to discuss ideas of factoring in external loss data to the internal loss data sets to obtain a true picture of operational losses for non-bank financial services firms, focusing on a case study of the interdealer brokers business and a specific Basel II category of the operational risk capital charges. As it transpires, financial services firms are increasingly required by regulators to merge external loss data with their internal data sets when using a loss distribution approach. However, there is a significant constrain on the availability and completeness of the external data for non-bank financial services firms.

Embarking on a modified Kaplan-Meier method is a clever way of factoring in external loss data into the internal data set. It allows non-bank financial firms to choose which fragments of the data constitute “the best fit”. In choosing the external data, this paper posits that such firms need to rely on loss-type events that display similar patterns in probabilities of occurrence. This method eliminates over-reliance on the external data that are specific for a different entity. One of the most important assumption underpinning the method presented in this paper is the fact that constant time intervals between the recorded operational loss events are assumed. Hereto, reaching a certain level of loss is used as the event of interest in both groups. For simplification purposes and to eliminate the noise and capture significant losses, we set this level as a multiplicity of the interdealer broker’s loss threshold.

Obtaining external loss data is difficult for the non-bank financial services firms. Furthermore, institutions operating as interdealer brokers are exposed to different levels of operational risk that affect their own Advanced Measurement Approach to capital charges under Basel II. The existing consortium data sets are not suitable for non-bank financial institutions. With this in mind, the non-bank firms should select only the parts of the external data that fit their business environment.

This paper should be of interest to any financial services firms that is required by regulators to merge its internal loss data sets with external loss data. Furthermore, this paper makes strong recommendations for regulators who should understand that the contemporary operational risk consortium data sets are not suitable for non-bank financial services firms.

This paper examines the dividend smoothing (DS) behaviour in the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries in emerging markets where the response to news and the economic environment are different from those of developed countries.

The authors examine the effect of share price informativeness on DS in the GCC markets using unbalanced panel data for a sample of 628 GCC-listed firms during 1994–2016. For the regression analysis, the hypotheses are tested using panel regressions and generalised method of moments (GMM) estimation.

First, the Lintner model shows that the DS degree in GCC firms is comparable to that of a developed market. Second, and importantly, the results reveal that the DS in GCC firms is sensitive to private information of share prices. Finally, the findings indicate that information asymmetry (IA) and agency-based models affect the tendency to smooth dividends in the GCC markets.

This study is the first study to measure the degree of DS using data for all GCC countries. The authors also identify other determinants of DS behaviour and test the agency and IA explanations for DS in GCC-listed firms. The findings are highly recommended to financial managers and analysts dealing with the GCC markets. This study helps financial analysts to use the share price informativeness as an indicator for the presence of the IA. The study results are beneficial to researchers in understanding the relationship between DS and share price informativeness.

Since the 1960s many alphanumeric to tactile data conversion methods have been investigated, mainly with the ultimate aim of assisting the blind. More recently, interest has been directed toward the display of pictures on haptically explorable surfaces – tactile imaging – for a range of medical, remote sensing and entertainment purposes. This paper examines the technologies which have been utilised for haptically explorable tactile displays over the past three decades, focussing on those which appear commercially viable in the immediate future.

This paper seeks to determine the relationship among school size, school culture and students' achievement at secondary level in Pakistan.

The study was descriptive (survey type). It was conducted on a sample of 90 secondary school head teachers and 540 primary, elementary and high school teachers working in the government boys secondary schools of Punjab province. Data was collected through three sources: first, statistics on education from Education Management Information System (EMIS) Punjab; second, annual results of grade 9 and 10 students of Boards of Intermediate and Secondary Education (BISEs) Punjab; and third, a questionnaire which contained 39 items at five‐point rating scale and ten items in yes/no form. The validity and reliability of the questionnaire were ensured through experts' opinions and pilot testing in early 2006; the overall reliability was established at 0.967.

There was a significant correlation between school size and school culture, and school size and students' achievement. Small schools revealed positive school culture and performed better than medium and large schools.

The policy makers, administrators and managers, and teachers at secondary level may improve school culture by bringing schools to a reasonable size, which may improve the students' achievement in Pakistan. The findings may be useful for other countries of almost similar socio‐economic status to improve the quality of teaching‐learning at secondary level.

This study aims to confirm earlier findings that differences between merger and acquisition (M&A) participant firms are a hurdle for successful mergers and shows that merger outcomes can also be affected by the post-merger integration duration (PMID).

Experimental research on distinct cultures developed within experimental pre-merger subject groups is used to compare pre- and post-integration performances.

This study finds that firm distance (i.e. inherent differences between pre-merger firms) negatively influences merger success; no significant relationship between firm distance and PMID exists and PMID is positively related to merger success. Specifically, a slower integration minimizes conflicts between merger partners, enhances trust-building and reduces the disruption of existing resources and processes in both firms, which may benefit M&As. By contrast, a fast integration that shortens the overall integration process may discourage the combined entity from recognizing the intended synergy quickly.

The new finding that PMID can affect merger outcomes invites empirical validation. This study presents experimental evidence that prolonged, well-structured post-merger integration may compensate for the negative time-variant issues associated with PMID.

Organizational support for collaborative learning between professional members should be a strategic consideration for firms so that acquiring business capabilities can be more natural and cost-efficient than building internal capabilities despite possibly slowing down the integration process. Encouraging a transfer of technical and client knowledge between the combined members can create value and understand differences in both the form and content of each firm’s knowledge base and the pre-existing mechanisms for sharing knowledge. It may lower the level of resistance in knowledge transfer.

While M&As may better facilitate the cost-effective expansion of business offerings than building capabilities internally, they can require considerable time, preventing many firms from realizing their intended outcomes. Nevertheless, less attention has been focused on PMID and its influence on M&As. This study is the first to use experimental research to examine the effects of PMID on merger success.

This study aims to analyzes the effects of the consumer-generated media (CGM) boom on hotel managers’ investment behavior concerning quality signals.

Survival analysis has been conducted, considering the permanence/dropout of the Spanish hotels in a quality certification system during the 1998–2020 period.

The number of hotels certified since 2010 has been progressively falling, pointing to a decreasing interest of the managers in these certifications. Nevertheless, this is not a generalized phenomenon: the hotel characteristics and the number and nature of reviews about them in CGM significantly affect their permanence decisions in certification systems.

The findings provide several keys to optimizing investment management in quality signals considering hotel characteristics and their positioning in CGM.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study that analyses the relationship between the presence of hotels in CGM and their investments in alternative quality signals. The results will allow future investment decisions based on previous real business experiences.

Although phone calls are widely used by debt collection services to persuade delinquent customers to repay, few financial services studies have analyzed the unstructured voice and text data to investigate how debt collection call strategies drive customers to repay. Moreover, extant research opens the “black box” mainly through psychological theories without hard behavioral data of customers. The purpose of our study is to address this research gap.

The authors randomly sampled 3,204 debt collection calls from a large consumer finance company in East Asia. To rule out alternative explanations for the findings, such as consumers' previous experience of being persuaded by debt collectors or repeated calls, the authors selected calls made to delinquent customers who had not been delinquent before and were being called by the company for the first time. The authors transformed the unstructured voice and textual data into structured data through automatic speech recognition (ASR), voice mining, natural language processing (NLP) and machine learning analyses.

The findings revealed that (1) both moral appeal (carrot) and social warning (stick) strategies decrease repayment time because they arouse mainly happy emotion and fear emotion, respectively; (2) the legal warning (stick) strategy backfires because of decreasing the happy emotion and triggering the anger emotion, which impedes customers' compliance; and (3) in contrast to traditional wisdom, the combination of carrot and stick fails to decrease the repayment time.

The findings provide a valuable and systematic understanding of the effect of carrot strategies, stick strategies and the combinations of them on repayment time. This study is among the first to empirically analyze the effectiveness of carrot strategies, stick strategies and their joint strategies on repayment time through unstructured vocal and textual data analysis. What's more, the previous studies open the “black box” through psychological mechanism. The authors firstly elucidate a behavioral mechanism for why consumers behave differently under varying debt collection strategies by utilizing ASR, NLP and vocal emotion analyses.

This paper aims to conceptualize two patterns of user recognition mechanisms and two kinds of user contribution behavior in enterprise-hosted online product innovation community and explain their relationships between user recognition mechanisms and user contribution behavior of online product innovation community.

A Chinese enterprise-hosted online innovation community and an American enterprise-hosted online innovation community are selected as research objects. Four Logit models are developed and some hypotheses are supposed from the perspective of prosocial behavior theory. Objective user data with three months from two online product innovation communities are collected to test with Logit regression analysis.

Findings show that there are obvious correlations between user recognition mechanisms and user contribution behavior, and there is also an obvious difference in community user activity level between the quantity-based user recognition mechanism community and the quality-based user recognition mechanism community. More specifically, in the online product innovation community with quantity-based recognition mechanism, both variables of peer recognition and community image motivation significantly affect user proactive contribution behavior. In the online product innovation community with quality-based recognition mechanism, the variable of peer recognition significantly affects both user proactive contribution behavior and user responsive contribution behavior; the variable of community image motivation significantly affects both user proactive contribution behavior and user responsive contribution behavior.

Although it is voluntary, online user voluntary contribution behavior still need to be presented, recognized and affirmed by community. For enterprise-hosted online community managers, they should pay more attention to design the reasonable online community user recognition mechanism with the coexistence of quantity and quality.

The theoretical contribution in this study is to enrich the existing research theme about enterprise-hosted online product innovation community. First, it conceptualizes two patterns of user recognition mechanisms. Second, it regards the variable of user contribution behavior as the co-existence of proactive contribution and responsive contribution. Third, from the perspective of prosocial behavior theory, it is an important supplement to explain the mechanism of user contribution behavior in enterprise-hosted online product innovation community. Fourth, it deepens the overall understanding of the relationship between user recognition mechanism and user contribution behavior. This study provides theoretical guidance for enterprises how to design reasonable and efficient online product innovation community platform. The theoretical contribution in this study is to enrich the existing research theme about enterprise-hosted online product innovation community. First, it conceptualizes two patterns of user recognition mechanisms. Second, it regards the variable of user contribution behavior as the co-existence of proactive contribution and responsive contribution. Third, from the perspective of prosocial behavior theory, it is an important supplement to explain the mechanism of user contribution behavior in enterprise-hosted online product innovation community. Fourth, it deepens the overall understanding of the relationship between user recognition mechanism and user contribution behavior. This study provides theoretical guidance for enterprises how to design reasonable and efficient online product innovation community platform.