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The purpose of this paper is to evaluate the effectiveness of this legislative reform in the state of South Australia (SA) through an examination of the relationship between listed or advertised price and transaction prices before and after the changes in regulation. Between 2000 and 2008, legislative changes took place throughout Australia to make real-estate transactions more transparent and to deal with misleading conduct by real-estate agents. The practice of “charm” or “bait” pricing was targeted. This denotes the under-quoting of estimated selling prices in real-estate sale advertisements which can be considered deceptive or even fraudulent.

The study area is Adelaide, the state capital of SA and includes analysis of first and last advertised prices and eventual selling price for > 120,000 residential sales transactions over a nine-year period between 2003 and 2011. The analysis to test these hypotheses included, first, a descriptive evaluation of the percentage price difference over time and a spatial breakdown of mean percentage price difference before and after legislation. Second, for each hypothesis, the change was tested by measuring the variance of the percentage change, with significance established through the Levene and Brown–Forsythe tests, rather than by the mean percentage change.

The results, both descriptive and statistical, support the effectiveness of the reform in legislation.

The study has application in terms of agents as social gatekeepers and confirms the role of regulation to ensure market values are achieved and consumers not disadvantaged. With friction in the market, imperfect information and the possible behavioural responses of land agents, there may be incomplete market correction of underpricing strategies. This paper confirms the effectiveness of one such market intervention.

Some half a million dwellings are purchased in Australia every year. Annually, in the state of SA, some 53,000 dwellings are financed to be purchased or built. These levels of purchase reflect national home ownership rates of about 69 per cent, with some 33 per cent of Australians owning their houses outright and a growing number, some 36 per cent, owners with a mortgage. Australian households also move house relatively frequently. In 2008, 43 per cent of Australians reported moving in the previous 5 years, 15 per cent had moved 3 or more times. The most common reasons for moving were twofold, either to buy a house or to buy a bigger house. These levels of purchase, home ownership and mobility underpin the importance and viability of some 10,000 real-estate services businesses in Australia; a sector which, up to 2,000, was largely self-regulated.

This paper is one of the first in Australia to effectively quantify the success of legislative reform on residential agency behaviour.

Recent initiatives in business curricula have included emphases on global business communication and ethics. Combines these issues by comparing the ethical predisposition of business students in New Zealand and Singapore with their US counterparts. A sample of 373 students indicated that the students in the three countries generally hold high expectations for the behaviour of business. Of the 14 scenarios evaluated, only four exhibited significant differences between the two groups, i.e. USA compared with Singapore and New Zealand. In each of these four, students from New Zealand and Singapore expressed greater tolerance for the questionable business practice. However, there are several instances where Singapore is significantly different from the USA, but New Zealand is not. The relationship between ethics and business communication is well established, for instance ethical issues in advertising including Federal Trade Commission of the USA's concerns with advertising (and similar concerns elsewhere). Although this research was not designed to show this interconnection in an express manner, this relationship was borne in mind during the questionnaire design. The focus of this research is elsewhere but assumes that the interconnection is well understood.

This paper seeks to offer a retrospective look at an intellectual journey in and out of using actor‐network theory, which the author drew on to carry out an in‐depth case study of the troubled implementation of a computerised reservation system in a major transport company. The application of some key ANT concepts, i.e. human and non‐human actors, symmetry and translation, is reflected upon, highlighting their benefits and limitations.

The paper's aims are accomplished through a confessional account of how it was done, rather than a normative post hoc justification. Some empirical evidence is provided to illustrate the difficulties and problems encountered in travelling back and forth between theory, methodology and data.

In particular, ANT was very useful in focusing the paper on how to look at IS success and failure symmetrically and how social and technical distinctions are socially constructed, for instance in the conception and application of yield management software. Formulating a series of translations to encompass a large number of actors is shown to have provided some explanatory capacity. But a limitation is how to relate local and global actors, which is also a matter of power relations and politics.

The paper explains why, as a late and unplanned reaction to this, but also in contradiction with ANT principles, it ended up complementing ANT with Clegg's theory of power to bridge that gap. The paper concludes with a discussion of where the difficulties lie in using ANT and how it can be misused in IS research; the author argues that this is due to a lack of exposure to post‐structuralism in IS research, compared with other management‐related disciplines; and that recent efforts by scholars in the science and technology studies field to combine constructivist approaches such as ANT with critical social analysis should be considered.

Summarizes some of the findings of a two‐year research project concerned with how technology‐based companies can master market challenges and so improve their product strategy. Identifies best practices and some of the prerequisites of successful strategy development which have already been implemented with clients of the authors′ organization, Pittiglio, Rabin, Todd & McGrath.

This article aims to investigate whether intermediaries reduce loss aversion in the context of a high‐involvement non‐frequently purchased hedonic product (tourism packages).

The study incorporates the reference‐dependent model into a multinomial logit model with random parameters, which controls for heterogeneity and allows representation of different correlation patterns between non‐independent alternatives.

Differentiated loss aversion is found: consumers buying high‐involvement non‐frequently purchased hedonic products are less loss averse when using an intermediary than when dealing with each provider separately and booking their services independently. This result can be taken as identifying consumer‐based added value provided by the intermediaries.

Knowing the effect of an increase in their prices is crucial for tourism collective brands (e.g. “sun and sea”, “inland”, “green destinations”, “World Heritage destinations”). This is especially applicable nowadays on account of the fact that many destinations have lowered prices to attract tourists (although, in the future, they will have to put prices back up to their normal levels). The negative effect of raising prices can be absorbed more easily via indirect channels when compared to individual providers, as the influence of loss aversion is lower for the former than the latter. The key implication is that intermediaries can – and should – add value in competition with direct e‐tailing.

Research on loss aversion in retailing has been prolific, exclusively focused on low‐involvement and frequently purchased products without distinguishing the direct or indirect character of the distribution channel. However, less is known about other types of products such as high‐involvement non‐frequently purchased hedonic products. This article focuses on the latter and analyzes different patterns of loss aversion in direct and indirect channels.

This paper seeks to emphasise the importance of firms being responsible to society.

The paper examines firms' omissions and commissions in the various functional areas of management while they focused on profit. Examples of such omissions and commissions are also discussed. Support from businessmen and authors who share such a viewpoint is mentioned

In the long term, firms that are socially responsible are successful.

Practising social responsibility consciously, firms can make the world a better place for all people. It can be beneficial for the entire society.

Omissions and commissions arising out of being profit‐focused are the author's original contribution. The paper is of value to researchers and practitioners of corporate social responsibility and business ethics. Firms need to understand that they cannot succeed and excel for long if they neglect stakeholders other than shareholders.

This study aims to examine small-firm shifts in behavior during major supply chain disruptions that change supply chains permanently. The study focuses on small to mid-sized enterprise (SME) responses to suppliers’ opportunistic behaviors within a larger disruptive environment. The study addresses two broad research questions: how do small businesses adapt to supply chain disruptions, and under what conditions are such adoptions warranted?

This study used mixed methods, a qualitative netnography and a quantitative analysis of survey data. It tested a model based on responses from members of an online business-to-business community. The model development was driven by the findings from netnography and two theoretical lenses.

The responses suggested a strong relationship between the two theoretical approaches. The conditions described by the resource-based view (RBV) of the firm led to many real options. Supply chain disruptions and deceptive suppliers triggered rapid adaptation through traditional marketing tactics and strategies. Changes in the supply chain, and place, led to responses in price, promotion and product. Respondents hoarded, developed relationships with new, nonopportunistic suppliers and changed prices, products and product mixes. They developed cooperative relationships – coopetition – to deal with shared problems.

This study interprets supply chain disruptions through the lens of marketing in SMEs; it combines qualitative and quantitative methods to better understand supply chain disruptions in a marketing context; it applies the real options theory and the RBV of the firm to marketing in the context of supply chain disruptions, and it reflects real-time small-firm behavior in a crisis.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the relationship between formal ethics and ethics in practice in the empirical context of real estate agents (REAs) working in the residential housing market, including owner-occupied houses and owner-occupied apartments, in Sweden. The paper investigates problems with the Swedish middleman model of real estate agency with regard to the acceptance among REAs of borderline professional behavior.

We report on a survey distributed to all Swedish licensed residential REAs to investigate their attitudes towards eight scenarios displaying borderline ethical behavior. Firstly, the means of each scenario were calculated, investigating signs of distance between formal ethics and ethics in practice. Secondly, logistic regressions were run for each scenario separately, thereby investigating factors affecting misconduct among REAs.

The empirical results show a clear difference between formal ethics and ethics in practice and also illustrate that some scenarios of borderline ethical behavior are creating greater problems for the REAs.

In Sweden, the seller is the principal, assigning the REA to sell a house or apartment, but the regulation is clear on the role of the licensed REA as responsible for promoting an informed and fair sales process where the buyer is safe to act without their own representative. Our study contributes with information to policymakers on possible areas for the development of the middleman model.

The paper is the first to empirically investigate the middleman model of a Swedish real estate agency in relation to the business ethics of the agents. The use of scenarios in close relation to the everyday working context of REAs as tests of ethics of practice is also of original methodological value to investigate possible diversions of professionals from national regulations.

Since early 1990s, tremendous growth of e‐commerce has transformed the world retail infrastructure rapidly. Although the Internet burst between 2000 and 2002 which slowed down the rage in the financial market, the Internet infrastructure continues to grow and becomes an integral part of market strategic portfolio for many organizations. In order to be successful in the Internet niche, many retailers engage in business model reengineering to keep up with changes in how customers acquire goods and services. Based on in‐depth interviews and a follow‐up survey, the present study depicts a common online shopping process and identifies three common online shopping components: interactivity, transaction, and fulfillment. These components and their respective factors form one's online shopping experience. Managerial implications and future research directions are offered.

During the past decade Wall Street practitioners devised various methods for converting undervalued corporate shares into instant wealth. Their tactics, however, have had highly negative consequences for a number of companies. Many companies have, in fact, restructured with substantial debt with severe operational consequences. The purpose of this paper is to examine the reasoning behind such a boom in the hostile takeover activities. It will discuss the importance and implications of restructuring, causes for corporate hostile takeovers and the defense strategies that effectively resist external acquisition.