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The case illustrates how environmental forces affect an industry’s profitability. PESTEL and five forces analyses can be used to examine the retail agricultural equipment industry.

Single case study.

Jonathan Sullivan has a decision to make. His company is struggling due to difficult industry conditions. He is questioning if the company can continue to survive. MEC is an agricultural equipment dealer. The industry has experienced boom-and-bust periods since the company was founded. But the current downturn seems different. The past five years have been difficult as manufacturers have changed their dealership practices. Jonathan has struggled with some of the new practices the manufacturers have implemented. These new practices could negatively impact the company’s ability to survive. Jonathan wonders, “What is the best path forward for the business?”

The case is designed to be used in an undergraduate strategic management course.

The purpose of this paper is to peer into the future of loyalty marketing and to offer marketers clear steps on how to shift focus and adapt to the coming consumer trends.

COLLOQUY delved into its years of loyalty marketing research and experience to pull out three top trends believed to take hold by 2030. COLLOQUY's views are supported by statistical background from Goldman Sachs, the US Department of Economic and Social Affairs and demographers.

Five over‐riding forces are creating a shift in future loyalty trends: an aging population; a burgeoning middle class; increasing extremes of wealth; more boom‐and‐bust cycles; and technology advances towards the seamless, instant and personal. Because of these forces, three new trends have emerged: the next new normal; the new “I‐network”; and the new marketing reality.

This case study offers marketers not only a look into the future of loyalty marketing, but also tips on how to embrace the new trends, including: what you can do now to meet the next new normal – start to test householding options. If households are dealing with multiple generations of parents, grandparents and kids, and the new localism in which the community is vitally important to customers comes to the fore, marketers must figure out how customers can pull their resources across their families, their friends, their networks and their communities to enjoy things relevant to all or most of them. Examples might include redeeming for event resources to host their local high school reunion, or for activities and resources to help a local community center, or simply letting the extended family get away for a ski trip. This needs to be tested now so that it can be determined how people engage, what is relevant, and how to start to prepare.

The paper provides insight on future trends and exclusive tips on how to adapt marketing strategy to thrive in 2030.

Both neoclassical and Keynesian economists have widely favored the use of equilibrium models to understand economic activity, but dramatic periods of change such as the current global economic downturn are poorly understood by assuming equilibrium. The economist Joseph Schumpeter tried to inject dynamism and disequilibrium into economic models by arguing for the role of entrepreneurs in creating microeconomic change, and for examining long-term macroeconomic change as represented in business cycles. No economist, including Schumpeter, has ever connected these two approaches to change and these approaches are not typically used as alternative and complementary ways of viewing transformation over time. We suggest that these theories can be connected in a “mesoeconomic” institutional analysis rooted in economic sociology; we demonstrate this connection by examining the US commercial building industry. This industry has changed in qualitatively distinct ways over the past two centuries in what we call market orders, economic orders sometimes lasting for decades or more. In each market order, entrepreneurs of different sorts are able to flourish and push forward institutional changes that result in long-term economic shifts. Credit and finance have been pivotal influences in each market order, a factor supporting Schumpeter's focus on entrepreneurial action and speculation and one not largely discussed today. We view the recent disruption of financial markets as a signal of the destruction of a reigning market order.

This paper examines the adverse selection problem associated with the pre‐completion marketing of property developments. When developers choose to finance their projects by pre‐selling in a pooling equilibrium, they pass on the risk of failure to the buyers and increase expected profits. Pre‐selling not only places buyers at a potential disadvantage if unexpected negative price shocks occur, but encourages more less‐profitable projects to be undertaken by bad developers. In addition, pre‐selling aggravates the building boom and bust cycle. However, the adverse selection problem can be eliminated if good developers choose to separate themselves by not pre‐selling under the appropriate conditions. This paper also examines interesting comparative statics and policy implications.

The chapter presents a timeline and an analysis of economic and social policy in Finland. Finland is an example of an étatiste late industrialiser, in which the post-war period up to the mid-1980s was a phase of catching up and energetic mobilisation of resources. The policy regime relied on vigorous State intervention comparable to that of the Asian tiger regimes, in Finland's case motivated also by the stringent geopolitical constraints of Cold War. Public saving contributed to a high rate of capital accumulation, credit was rationed to favour manufacturing investment and corporatist incomes policy was used to sustain the profitability of key export industries. Keynesian demand management was largely neglected, and the high growth rate was associated with large fluctuations and devaluations cycles. The credit and financial market liberalisation of the 1980s resulted in overheating, a deep recession and a failure of the attempted fixed exchange rate anchor. In the 1990s, incomes policy was used to boost the rise of the information technology sector, whereas monetary stability was sought by a strive towards EMU membership. Finland's long-run growth performance has been good, but economic policy will be challenged by the sharp deterioration of the dependency ratio as well as the politics of right-wing nationalism. The wage setting regime is in a state of flux.

The purpose of this paper is to compare and contrast the effect of individual and institutional sentiments on the US stock returns during a prolonged bull phase of ten years in the 1990s compared to shorter boom and bust cycles of the 2000s. The study is focussed on a set of stocks that are prone to sentiments and speculations.

To compare the dynamic interaction of individual and institutional sentiments and stock returns, the authors use the vector autoregression (VAR) approach. The VAR model has proven to be especially useful for describing the dynamic behavior of economic and financial time series because it does not impose a priori restriction on the structure of the system. Using impulse response function, the authors determine how stock returns respond over time to a shock in institutional and individual sentiments.

The authors find that sentiments of individual investors can affect returns mostly when there is a prolonged upward trend in stock prices, while sentiments of institutional investors can impact the returns when stock market is more volatile.

This paper compares the effect of noise traders and rational investors’ sentiment on stock returns during the persistent period of positive abnormal returns of the 1990s and the more volatile stock returns of the 2000s.

The purpose of this paper is to describe co-devolutionary processes of multinational enterprise (MNE)/emerging economy institutional relationships utilizing concepts from “old” institutional theory as well as the institutional aspects of socially constructed realities.

The authors develop a set of propositions that explore the new concept of a co-devolutionary relationship between MNEs and emerging economy institutions. Guided by prior research, the paper investigates MNE/emerging economy institutional co-devolution at the macro-(MNE home and host countries), meso-(MNE industry/host country regulative and normative institutions) and micro-(MNE and host country institutional actors) levels.

MNE/emerging economy institutional co-devolution occurs at the macro-level via negative public communications in the MNE’s home and host countries, at the meso-level via host country corruption and MNE adaptation, and at the micro-level via pressures for individual actors to cognitively “take for granted” emerging economy corruption, leading to MNE divestment and a reduction in new MNE investment.

By characterizing co-devolutionary processes within MNE/emerging economy institutional relationships, the research augments co-evolutionary theory. It also assists in developing more accurate specification and measurement methods for the organizational co-evolution construct by using institutional theory’s foundational processes to discuss MNE/emerging economy institutional co-devolution.

The research suggests the use of enhanced regulation, bilateral investment treaties and MNE/local institution partnerships to stabilize MNE/emerging economy institutional relationships, leading to more robust progress in building emerging economy institutions.

The research posits that using the concepts of institutional theory as a foundation provides useful insights into the “stickiness” of institutional instability and corruption in emerging economies and into the resulting co-devolutionary MNE/emerging economy institutional relationships.