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The strategic management literature emphasizes the concept of business intelligence (BI) as an essential competitive tool. Yet the sustainability of the firms’ competitive advantage provided by BI capability is not well researched. To fill this gap, this study attempts to develop a model for successful BI deployment and empirically examines the association between BI deployment and sustainable competitive advantage. Taking the telecommunications industry in Malaysia as a case example, the research particularly focuses on the influencing perceptions held by telecommunications decision makers and executives on factors that impact successful BI deployment. The research further investigates the relationship between successful BI deployment and sustainable competitive advantage of the telecommunications organizations. Another important aim of this study is to determine the effect of moderating factors such as organization culture, business strategy, and use of BI tools on BI deployment and the sustainability of firm’s competitive advantage.

This research uses combination of resource-based theory and diffusion of innovation (DOI) theory to examine BI success and its relationship with firm’s sustainability. The research adopts the positivist paradigm and a two-phase sequential mixed method consisting of qualitative and quantitative approaches are employed. A tentative research model is developed first based on extensive literature review. The chapter presents a qualitative field study to fine tune the initial research model. Findings from the qualitative method are also used to develop measures and instruments for the next phase of quantitative method. The study includes a survey study with sample of business analysts and decision makers in telecommunications firms and is analyzed by partial least square-based structural equation modeling.

The findings reveal that some internal resources of the organizations such as BI governance and the perceptions of BI’s characteristics influence the successful deployment of BI. Organizations that practice good BI governance with strong moral and financial support from upper management have an opportunity to realize the dream of having successful BI initiatives in place. The scope of BI governance includes providing sufficient support and commitment in BI funding and implementation, laying out proper BI infrastructure and staffing and establishing a corporate-wide policy and procedures regarding BI. The perceptions about the characteristics of BI such as its relative advantage, complexity, compatibility, and observability are also significant in ensuring BI success. The most important results of this study indicated that with BI successfully deployed, executives would use the knowledge provided for their necessary actions in sustaining the organizations’ competitive advantage in terms of economics, social, and environmental issues.

This study contributes significantly to the existing literature that will assist future BI researchers especially in achieving sustainable competitive advantage. In particular, the model will help practitioners to consider the resources that they are likely to consider when deploying BI. Finally, the applications of this study can be extended through further adaptation in other industries and various geographic contexts.

Last decades scholars in the field of human resource management (HRM) have intensely examined the contribution of HRM to organizational performance. Despite their efforts, at least one major research shortcoming can be identified. In general, they have devoted far too little attention to an aspect of HRM potentially beneficial for organizational performance: worker participation, and especially its indirect or representative forms. In contrast, for academics embedded in the industrial relations tradition, worker participation is a prominent theme, even though less emphasized in its relationship with company objectives. One might defend traditional scholars' reservations by arguing that participations main goal concerns workplace democratization and not organizational prosperity. However, several writers state that industrial democracy involving worker participation can channel conflicts of interest between employees and employers and stimulate desired employee attitudes and behavior, consequently enhancing organizational performance (e.g., Gollan, 2006; Ramsay, 1991; Taras & Kaufman, 1999). And, indeed, several studies have shown positive effects of both direct participation (e.g., European Foundation for the Improvement of Living and Working Conditions, 1997) and indirect participation (e.g., Addison et al., 2000, 2003; Frick & Möller, 2003) on organizational performance.

Nevertheless, to date, the absence of an integrated model explaining the connection between worker participation and organizational performance leads to the following question that still is in need of an answer: how do direct and indirect forms of participation – separate as well as in combination – affect organizational performance? This chapter aims to contribute to the filling of the aforementioned knowledge gaps. In so doing, we focus on direct and indirect, nonunion participation on the firm level, using a Western European and especially Dutch frame of reference.

Among the prominent economic trends in recent decades is the exponential increase in flows of goods and capital driven by technological progress and falling of restrictions. A key driver of this phenomenon has been the cross-border production, foreign investment, and trade both final and intermediate goods by multinational corporations. Research has sought to understand how foreign direct investment (FDI) affects host economies. This paper reviews the main theories and empirical evidence of two streams of literature: the mechanisms by which multinational activity might create positive effects and externalities to countries and the role of complementary local conditions, also known as “absorptive capacities,” that allow a country to reap the benefits of FDI paying particular attention to the role of factor markets, reallocation effects, and the linkages generated between foreign and domestic firms. The survey focuses mainly on work related to developing countries.

This paper aims to investigate spillover effects of public capital stock in a production function model that accounts for spatial dependencies. In many settings, ignoring spatial dependency yields inefficient, biased and inconsistent estimates in cross country panels. Although there are a number of studies aiming to estimate the output elasticity of public capital stock, many of those fail to reach a consensus on refining the elasticity estimates. We argue that accounting for spillover effects of the public capital stock on the production efficiency and incorporating spatial dependences are crucial. For this purpose, we employ a spatial autoregressive stochastic frontier model based on a number of specifications of the spatial dependency structure. Using the data of 21 OECD countries from 1960 to 2001, we estimate a spatial autoregressive stochastic frontier model and derive the mean indirect marginal effects of public capital stock, which are interpreted as spillover effects. We found that spillover effects can be an important factor explaining variations in technical inefficiency across countries as well as in explaining the discrepancies among various levels of output elasticity of public capital stock in traditional production function approaches.

This paper tests the feasibility and empirical implications of a spatial econometric model with a full set of interaction effects and weight matrix defined as an equally weighted group interaction matrix applied to research productivity of individuals. We also elaborate two extensions of this model, namely with group fixed effects and with heteroskedasticity. In our setting, the model with a full set of interaction effects is overparameterised: only the SDM and SDEM specifications produce acceptable results. They imply comparable spillover effects, but by applying a Bayesian approach taken from LeSage (2014), we are able to show that the SDEM specification is more appropriate and thus that colleague interaction effects work through observed and unobserved exogenous characteristics common to researchers within a group.

Smart card-based E-payment systems are receiving increasing attention as the number of implementations is witnessed on the rise globally. Understanding of user adoption behavior of E-payment systems that employ smart card technology becomes a research area that is of particular value and interest to both IS researchers and professionals. However, research interest focuses mostly on why a smart card-based E-payment system results in a failure or how the system could have grown into a success. This signals the fact that researchers have not had much opportunity to critically review a smart card-based E-payment system that has gained wide support and overcome the hurdle of critical mass adoption. The Octopus in Hong Kong has provided a rare opportunity for investigating smart card-based E-payment system because of its unprecedented success. This research seeks to thoroughly analyze the Octopus from technology adoption behavior perspectives.

Cultural impacts on adoption behavior are one of the key areas that this research posits to investigate. Since the present research is conducted in Hong Kong where a majority of population is Chinese ethnicity and yet is westernized in a number of aspects, assuming that users in Hong Kong are characterized by eastern or western culture is less useful. Explicit cultural characteristics at individual level are tapped into here instead of applying generalization of cultural beliefs to users to more accurately reflect cultural bias. In this vein, the technology acceptance model (TAM) is adapted, extended, and tested for its applicability cross-culturally in Hong Kong on the Octopus. Four cultural dimensions developed by Hofstede are included in this study, namely uncertainty avoidance, masculinity, individualism, and Confucian Dynamism (long-term orientation), to explore their influence on usage behavior through the mediation of perceived usefulness.

TAM is also integrated with the innovation diffusion theory (IDT) to borrow two constructs in relation to innovative characteristics, namely relative advantage and compatibility, in order to enhance the explanatory power of the proposed research model. Besides, the normative accountability of the research model is strengthened by embracing two social influences, namely subjective norm and image. As the last antecedent to perceived usefulness, prior experience serves to bring in the time variation factor to allow level of prior experience to exert both direct and moderating effects on perceived usefulness.

The resulting research model is analyzed by partial least squares (PLS)-based Structural Equation Modeling (SEM) approach. The research findings reveal that all cultural dimensions demonstrate direct effect on perceived usefulness though the influence of uncertainty avoidance is found marginally significant. Other constructs on innovative characteristics and social influences are validated to be significant as hypothesized. Prior experience does indeed significantly moderate the two influences that perceived usefulness receives from relative advantage and compatibility, respectively. The research model has demonstrated convincing explanatory power and so may be employed for further studies in other contexts. In particular, cultural effects play a key role in contributing to the uniqueness of the model, enabling it to be an effective tool to help critically understand increasingly internationalized IS system development and implementation efforts. This research also suggests several practical implications in view of the findings that could better inform managerial decisions for designing, implementing, or promoting smart card-based E-payment system.

This study contributes to the understanding of the health effects of pesticides exposure and of how pesticides have been and should be regulated.

This study presents literature reviews for the period 2000–2013 on (i) the health effects of pesticides and on (ii) preference valuation of health risks related to pesticides, as well as a discussion of the role of benefit-cost analysis applied to pesticide regulatory measures.

This study indicates that the health literature has focused on individuals with direct exposure to pesticides, i.e. farmers, while the literature on preference valuation has focused on those with indirect exposure, i.e. consumers. The discussion highlights the need to clarify the rationale for regulating pesticides, the role of risk perceptions in benefit-cost analysis, and the importance of inter-disciplinary research in this area.

This study relates findings of different disciplines (health, economics, public policy) regarding pesticides, and identifies gaps for future research.

We are interested in modeling the impact of spatial and interindustry dependence on firm-level innovation of Chinese firms The existence of network ties between cities imply that changes taking place in one city could influence innovation by firms in nearby cities (local spatial spillovers), or set in motion a series of spatial diffusion and feedback impacts across multiple cities (global spatial spillovers). We use the term local spatial spillovers to reflect a scenario where only immediately neighboring cities are impacted, whereas the term global spatial spillovers represent a situation where impacts fall on neighboring cities, as well as higher order neighbors (neighbors to the neighboring cities, neighbors to the neighbors of the neighbors, and so on). Global spatial spillovers also involve feedback impacts from neighboring cities, and imply the existence of a wider diffusion of impacts over space (higher order neighbors).

Similarly, the existence of national interindustry input-output ties implies that changes occurring in one industry could influence innovation by firms operating in directly related industries (local interindustry spillovers), or set in motion a series of in interindustry diffusion and feedback impacts across multiple industries (global interindustry spillovers).

Typical linear models of firm-level innovation based on knowledge production functions would rely on city- and industry-specific fixed effects to allow for differences in the level of innovation by firms located in different cities and operating in different industries. This approach however ignores the fact that, spatial dependence between cities and interindustry dependence arising from input-output relationships, may imply interaction, not simply heterogeneity across cities and industries.

We construct a Bayesian hierarchical model that allows for both city- and industry-level interaction (global spillovers) and subsumes other innovation scenarios such as: (1) heterogeneity that implies level differences (fixed effects) and (2) contextual effects that imply local spillovers as special cases.

The role of money and monetary policy of the central bank in pursuing macroeconomic stability has significantly changed over the period since the end of World War II. Globalization, liberalization, integration, and transition processes generally shaped the crucial milestones of the macroeconomic development and substantial features of economic policy and its framework in Europe. Policy-driven changes together with variety of exogenous shocks significantly affected the key features of macroeconomic environment on the European continent that fashioned the framework and design of monetary policies.

This chapter examines the key basis of the central bank’s monetary policy on its way to pursue and preserve the internal and external stability of the purchasing power of money. Substantial elements of the monetary policy like objectives and strategies are not only generally introduced but also critically discussed according to their accuracy, suitability, and reliability in the changing macroeconomic conditions. Brief overview of the Eurozone common monetary policy milestones and the past Eastern bloc countries’ experience with a variety of exchange rate regimes provides interesting empirical evidence on origins and implications of vital changes in the monetary policy conduction in Europe and the Eurozone.

This chapter estimates heterogeneous productivity growth and spatial spillovers through industrial linkages in the United States and China from 1981 to 2010. The authors employ a spatial Durbin stochastic frontier model and estimates with a spatial weight matrix based on inter-country input–output linkages to describe the spatial interdependencies in technology. The authors estimate productivity growth and spillovers at the industry level using the World KLEMS database. The spillovers of factor inputs and productivity growth are decomposed into domestic and international effects. Most of the spillover effects are found to be significant and the spillovers of productivity growth offered and received provide detailed information reflecting interdependence of the industries in the global value chain (GVC). The authors use this model to evaluate the impact of a US–Sino decoupling of trade links based on simulations of four scenarios of the reductions in bilateral intermediate trade. Their estimation results and their simulations are as mentioned based on date that ends in 2010, as this is the only KLEMS data available for these countries at this level of industrial disaggregation. As the GVC linkages between the United States and China have expanded since the end of their sample period their results can be viewed as informative in their own right for this period as well as possible lower bounds on the extent of the spillovers generated by an expanding GVC.