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This study focuses on the relationship between innovation and customer equity drivers and the moderating effect of advertising appeals on this relationship. First, the authors divided innovation into incremental innovation and radical innovation, and explained the influences of each type of innovation on drivers of customer equity based on literature review. Second, the authors tested the conceptual model using structural equation modeling find out the effects of innovation. Third, the authors also tested the effect of advertising appeal using moderating regression. The results indicate that both incremental innovation and radical innovation can positively influence value equity, relationship equity, and brand equity. Functional advertising appeal is more useful than emotional advertising appeal for radical innovation. On the contrary, emotional advertising appeal is more useful than functional advertising appeal for incremental innovation.

The objective of this research is to explore the relationship between brand experience and customer equity (value equity, brand equity, and relationship equity). We examine the impacts of different contact points’ experiences (media contact, physical environment contact, people contact, and product usage contact) and different dimensions of brand experience on customer equity. Further we investigate the possible moderating effects of different brand positioning and strategies – hedonic and utilitarian, on this relationship. The data which are collected via online survey includes 410 observations with brand experience and 83 without brand experience, 493 valid samples in total. We found that positive and strong brand experience is the key factor for building strong customer equity. Although the impacts of all four contact points’ brand experiences are significant, product usage contact has the most powerful influence on customer equity and its individual drivers. The results also indicate that the different brand positioning strategies do have moderating effects. For utilitarian brand, only brand experience at product usage contact point has significant impact on customer equity and its three drivers. For hedonic brand, all four contact points’ experiences have significant relationships with customer equity. Finally, the four experience dimensions (sensory, affective, intellectual, and behavioral) have different impacts on customer equity and its three drivers at different experience contact points.

Stakeholders often engage in actions aimed at either benefitting or punishing firms for their behaviour. Such behaviours can have very serious implications for various types of firm performance, including financial performance. Though one might expect that the investigation of possible precursors of such “stakeholder action” would be a priority of researchers in stakeholder theory, to date research within the stakeholder literature directed towards understanding stakeholder behaviour has been somewhat scarce. In this chapter, I present common themes and assumptions that prevail in the existing research on stakeholder action, identify certain important questions concerning such assumptions and suggest avenues for future research on stakeholder behaviour.

Companies in all industries are searching for new sources of competitive advantage since the competition in their marketplace is becoming increasingly intensive. The resource-based view of the firm explains the sources of sustainable competitive advantages. From a resource-based view perspective, relational based assets (i.e., the assets resulting from firm contacts in the marketplace) enable competitive advantage. The relational based assets examined in this work are brand image and corporate reputation, as components of brand equity, and customer value. This paper explores how they create value. Despite the relatively large amount of literature describing the benefits of firms in having strong brand equity and delivering customer value, no research validated the linkage of brand equity components, brand image, and corporate reputation, simultaneously in the customer value–customer loyalty chain. This work presents a model of testing these relationships in consumer goods, in a business-to-business context. The results demonstrate the differential roles of brand image and corporate reputation on perceived quality, customer value, and customer loyalty. Brand image influences the perception of quality of the products and the additional services, whereas corporate reputation actions beyond brand image, estimating the customer value and customer loyalty. The effects of corporate reputation are also validated on different samples. The results demonstrate the importance of managing brand equity facets, brand image, and corporate reputation since their differential impacts on perceived quality, customer value, and customer loyalty. The results also demonstrate that companies should not limit to invest only in brand image. Maintaining and enhancing corporate reputation can have a stronger impact on customer value and customer loyalty, and can create differential competitive advantage.

In the literature on product branding, significant attention is given to brand equity in the consumer context, but relatively little attention is paid to the application of the concept in the business-to-business (B2B) context. Even less research exists on the role of brand equity in the retailing context. Retailers are often seen as irrelevant to the source of brand value, resulting in manufacturers not targeting retailers to help them build stronger brands. Potential occurs, therefore, for some channel conflict to exist between manufacturers and retailers. On the one hand, retailers tend to focus on building their own, private brands to differentiate themselves from other retail competitors and to increase their power in relation to manufacturer brands. At the same time, most retailers still need to create a good image in the consumer marketplace by selling famous, manufacturer-branded products. In other words, retailers often have to sell famous brands even if they would prefer to sell other brands including their own. Manufacturers tend to focus their brand-building efforts on the consumer market to entice consumers to insist that retailers stock their brands, rather than placing any real emphasis on building a strong and positive brand relationship with the retailer directly.

We examine the empirical relationship between direct equity agency costs measures and corporate governance control mechanisms to control equity agency costs. We measure the three direct agency cost proxies commonly used in the literature: the operating expense; asset turnover; and selling, general, and administrative (SGA) ratios. Internal corporate governance control mechanisms examined are inside ownership (IO), outside ownership concentration (OC), the size of the board of directors (BODs), and the composition of the BODs (proportion of nonexecutive (NE) directors and separation of chief executive officer (CEO) and board chair). The external corporate governance control mechanism examined is the size of bank debt (short-term debt). Univariate and multivariate tests reveal that the only statistically significant relationship between corporate governance control mechanisms and direct equity agency cost measures is the negative relationship between the proportion of IO and direct agency costs. The asset utilization ratio (asset turnover) ratio is the best proxy for direct equity agency costs and can be useful for event studies of announcement period excess returns.

In this paper, we review the literature on pay variation (e.g., pay dispersion, pay compression, pay range) in organizations. Pay variation research has increased markedly in the past two decades and much progress has been made in terms of understanding its consequences for individual, team, and organizational outcomes. Our review of this research exposes several levels-related assumptions that have limited theoretical and empirical progress. We isolate the issues that deserve attention, develop an illustrative multilevel model, and offer a number of testable propositions to guide future research on pay structures.

We examine the benefits for firms participating in collaborations funded via minority equity placements. Selling firms, on average, realize significant increases in share value – strongly correlated with the size of the equity stake, its beta, and the relatedness of the two firms (by industry). Shares of purchasing firms, though, show neutral responses on average (but positive response for R&D intensive alliances). Further, purchasing firms have better financial performance than their industry peers in the years surrounding the announcement (suggesting, unlike joint ventures, that poor performance is not their motivation). Selling firms, however, may be motivated by poor operating performance.

This paper examines how the determinants of bank performance and profitability were affected by the recent systemic banking crisis. We explore the contemporaneous determinants of U.S. regional banks’ performance and profitability before, during, and after the crisis years.

We analyze the determinants of three measures of profitability: return on assets, return on equity, and net interest margins.

We found evidence of lowered bank profitability, credit quality, and scale of lending activities well after the defined crisis period. This coincides with historical evidence that downturns associated with a financial crisis are more severe than downturns due to short-run fluctuations in the business cycle. Banks responded to the crisis by increasing their equity and liquidity levels.

This paper is the first to compare the determinants of bank profitability during the precrisis, crisis, and postcrisis periods. Our study extends previous work by using data from U.S. banks, adding coverage of the years since the banking crisis ended, and considering profitability determinants not previously explored in studies on the effects of the crisis.

Over the past two decades, scholars have noted an increasing global convergence in the policy and practice of education that predominantly contains Western ideals of mass schooling serving as a model for national school systems (Bieber & Martens, 2011; Goldthorpe, 1997; Spring, 2008). A number of transnational organizations contribute disproportionately to global educational discourse, particularly the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) through its international comparative performance measure, the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA). This study conducted a critical discourse analysis of the OECD document PISA 2012 Results: Excellence through Equity (OECD, 2013) to examine the ways that PISA and the OECD conceive of educational equity in a global context. Given the growing convergence of global educational policy, the way that transnational educational organizations address equity has crucial implications for the ways that the world intervenes in schooling to promote or diminish equitable outcomes. Analysis revealed that the OECD and the PISA foreground economistic notions of educational equity, which diminishes the role of other factors (i.e., race/ethnicity, gender, immigration status, language) that mediate equity in schools. Findings and implications are discussed.