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The purpose of this study is to analyze the effects of the metaphor of verticality on how individuals assess prices, having regulatory focus as a moderator of this relationship.

Two experiments were conducted with a 2 × 2 between-subjects design (metaphor of verticality: physically higher vs physically lower × regulatory focus: promotion vs prevention). The second study performed moderated mediation by incorporating the self-esteem variable.

The results show that the treatment group consisting of prevention-focused individuals who consider themselves physically higher assessed prices according to what was proposed for the study compared to the group consisting of promotion-focused individuals who consider themselves physically lower. Participants in Treatment Group 1 attributed the lowest prices to products, demanded more significant discounts to go to another store searching for a product and considered the prices more unfair.

The primary contribution of this study is to reveal that the position of one's body on the vertical axis influences their thoughts and, therefore, their decision-making in the scope of products and services prices. Moreover, regulatory focus can attenuate such effects.

This paper compares the productivity of large and small Brazilian supermarkets from 1994 to 1998. The authors’ findings, based on the application of Data Envelopment Analysis, or DEA, support an initial hypothesis that assumes not only that the productivity of larger supermarkets is much higher, but the production gap between smaller and larger chains is increasing.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the impact of ISO 9000 certification on three dimensions of firm performance that are theoretically derived to have a relationship with the adoption of ISO 9000 standards, namely, sales revenue, cost of goods sold/sales revenue, and the asset turnover ratio (sales/total assets).

Employing a panel data approach covering all publicly traded companies in Brazil that had adopted the ISO 9000 standards from 1995 to 2006, the authors investigate the impact of the certification on firm performance using three categories of economic regression models: the pooling of cutting data with ordinary least squares, the fixed effects and the random effects.

ISO 9000 certification is found to be associated with an increase in sales revenues, decrease in cost of goods sold/sales revenue and increase in the asset turnover ratios of the certified firms.

The research findings suggest that companies large or small, irrespective of their capital structure (i.e. debt/equity) and cutting across industries will benefit from the adoption of ISO 9000 standards. However, the extent to which firms benefit from such adoption is likely to vary. Moreover, the generalizability of the research findings is limited by the size of the sample.

The paper's chief contribution lies in the validation of the signaling theory in the context of business organizations and extending the domain of research on this topic to emerging markets generally.

The paper aims to evaluate the relative importance of various factors that influenced the flow of foreign direct investment (FDI) into Brazil in recent years. Analysis of empirical data indicates that evolution of the consumer market and strength of consumer sales are more important in explaining capital movements into Brazil than other frequently offered explanations such as exchange rates and country risk.

The paper uses two‐stage least squares regression to estimate the coefficients of a system of simultaneous equations relating FDI flows into Brazil to various influential factors.

The results indicate that internal market growth represented by aggregate consumer sales was a significant determinant of FDI into Brazil. Increase in interest rate on consumer financing was negatively related and the attractiveness of the Brazilian market had no impact on FDI flows during the captioned period.

While factors such as inflation and exchange rates might be more important for smaller, less stable markets, in the case of larger emerging markets such as Brazil, multi‐national firms might be less concerned with short‐term fluctuations and more guided by internal market growth that affords greater opportunities to achieve economies of scale and scope.

The findings suggest that policy planners in big emerging markets should try to stimulate their internal markets rather than tweak fiscal and monetary policies to attract FDI.

The paper extends and expands the knowledge of international capital flows and provides a more nuanced understanding of the importance of internal market dynamism in attracting FDI into emerging markets.

In an emerging global competitive environment, the Malaysian semiconductor industry is facing threats from low cost countries with limited innovative capabilities. It urges for improvement in competitiveness of the Malaysian semiconductor industry. This study focuses on the perspectives of the managers towards the enhancement of competitiveness. Through a focus group interview and data collected from 200 managers working in semiconductor‐manufacturing units in Malaysia, the study identified twenty‐two competitive factors for the improvement of competitiveness of the semiconductor industry in Malaysia. Since the collected data did not form a normal distribution, nonparametric tests such as Chi‐squire test and Mann‐Whitney U test were used to test the framed hypotheses. Based on the analysis, ten key competitive factors were identified out of the identified twenty‐two competitive factors through focus group interview. Further, the study also highlighted the differences in the opinion of competitive factors of technical and non‐technical job functioning managers.