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In manual order picking systems, temporary workers are often employed to handle demand peaks. While this increases flexibility, it may hamper productivity, as they are usually unfamiliar with the processes and may have little experience. It is important for managers to understand how quickly inexperienced workers arrive at full productivity and which factors support workers in improving their productivity. This paper aims to investigate how learning improves the performance of order pickers, and how their regulatory focus (RF) and monetary incentives, as management actions, influence learning.

Data was collected in two case studies in controlled field-lab experiments and statistically analysed. This allowed evaluating the validity of hypotheses through an ANOVA, the calculation of correlation coefficients and the application of regression models.

A monetary incentive based on total order picking time and pick errors has a positive influence on order picking time, but not on pick quality. The incentive influences initial productivity, but not the learning rate. A dominant promotion-oriented RF increases the effect of the incentive on initial productivity, but it does not impact worker learning.

This study contributes to behavioral and human-focused order picking management and supports managers in setting up work plans and developing incentive systems for learning and productivity enhancement, considering worker RF.

This work is among the few to empirically investigate the effect of monetary incentives on learning in interaction with RF. It is the first study to investigate these concepts in an order picking scenario.

Attempts to draw together some main implications arising from studying usage of survey data forecasting the demand for durables. Posits that re‐interview tests are important, shedding light on the influences on consumer demand, by perhaps identifying respects in which purchasers and non‐purchasers differ. Suggests that predictive models, which have some foundation, stand a better chance of confident usage. Points out that some studies appear to show cross‐sectional investigations perform reasonably well in explaining individual household behaviour, both in terms of level of outlay on consumer durables and in identifying purchasers of particular commodities. Aims to describe overall patterns of results in more general terms and to draw them together by focusing specifically on what they suggest about the nature of individual behaviour and decisions regarding consumer durables.

Claims use of legislation and government regulations as a means of protecting consumers has been subject to considerable controversy in many countries over recent years. Examines the UK's efforts to encourage voluntary self‐regulation by business — the most important manifestation of this has been the adoption of codes of practice in numerous trades — a code of practice being a statement of desirable trading practices. Says that data for analysis here is based on monitoring studies and other reports produced by the Office of Fair Trading and Consumers' Association and also direct interviews with trade associations and companies, supplemented by a postal questionnaire survey. Further discusses the rationale and lists and examines the most likely criteria to be used. Concludes that, overall, codes of practice are likely to have been beneficial, this does not necessarily imply that they are the best means of attaining the consumer policy objectives they embody.

Considers the main arguments on the question of the effect of the adoption of trading stamps on retail prices. Reveals from the studies that under normal conditions trading stamps are an effective and worthwhile form of promotion to the retailer and the consumer.

The content of this paper is adapted from two studies of contested takeover bids. These studies, and this paper, are attempts to add to the limited research conducted in the UK into the share price performance of companies involved in mergers and acquisitions. Research directed specifically at defended takeover bids is even more limited and only one piece of research (Holl and Taffler, 1988) to date has addressed this particular topic in the UK.

Analyses the approach of the Price Commission to its task by means of examining its early reports. Draws attention to areas which a similar body that might be in its infancy should pay particular attention to.

The hypothesis that the percentage growth rates of firms over a certain period of time are independent of their initial sizes — the Law of Proportionate Effect, alias Gibrat's Law — has attracted the attention and stimulated the efforts of a great number of economists. This is due to several striking implications of the Law. Firstly, “if such a law of proportionate growth held without any restriction the consequence would be a continual increase in the dispersion of the sizes, that is to say, the concentration of industry would increase over time” (Hart and Prais, 1956, p. 171). Secondly, “if the law was confirmed … it would suggest that there was no optimum size of firm from the point of view of growth since all sizes of firm were equally likely to benefit from growth” (Pickering, 1974, p. 116). Thirdly, “it would be very difficult to adopt a deterministic explanation of the growth of firms” (Pickering, 1974, pp. 116–7), since according to the Law, growth is a purely stochastic phenomenon that arises from the cumulative effect of the random operation of a large number of factors acting independently of each other. Lastly, “there will be no continuity in the growth pattern of firms” (Eatwell, 1971, p. 402). This means that the growth rate of a firm in a certain period has no influence on the growth rate in subsequent periods.

Understanding the challenges and opportunities of policy coherence when dealing with wicked problems is a particularly relevant approach to policy analysis. Coherence and complexity condition each other in the context of the different policy domains, jointly offering an enabling debate angle to account for and unbox policy success and failure. A complexity perspective invites an analysis of the interdependencies between the different elements of a system (Argyris & Schön, 1996). This is very similar to the ambition of policy coherence of promoting synergies between policy domains in order to encourage policy success (Nilsson et al., 2012). The current chapter looks at the nexus between policy coherence and complexity, analyzing lessons learned from the UK context while aiming to fulfill policy commitments related to the policy goals of the Sustainable Development Framework. Looking at the United Kingdom's policy journey includes analyzing the ambitions of the United Kingdom as a European country with global presence, aiming for policy coherence and integrating, for example, its security, defense, development, and foreign policy strategies, through the Integrated Review, therefore creating the institutional arrangements for materializing ambitions across different policy domains.

The analysis developed here uses an outward perspective to understand how a complexity reading of the United Kingdom's efforts for achieving the SDGs can unveil an understanding of how and if its nature as a global governance actor within the Sustainable Development Framework has changed in significant ways and which are the potential related challenges.

The authors investigate the pre-merger process, defined as the period between the announcement and completion of an M&A (mergers and acquisitions) deal. Specifically, the authors examine if the timing of the announcement in a merger wave affects whether or not the M&A deal is completed, and how long this pre-merger process takes. The authors conduct a textual analysis of the 150 largest abandoned M&A deals in the sample. From this, the authors find that competing bidders, regulatory concerns, and shareholder opposition from the acquirer are major roadblocks in the pre-merger process, and that these hurdles often occur jointly. Subsequently, the authors examine a sample of 2,802 announced M&As across four industry waves and find that M&A deals initiated earlier in a merger wave are more likely to be completed and are completed more speedily.

Since the seminal contributions of Chandler and Williamson, a substantial body of research in industrial organization has examined the performance benefits of the organizational innovation of divisionalization. While existing empirical work has, for the most part, utilized a static framework to analyse the performance effects of divisionalization, adopts a dynamic approach, thereby allowing the intertemporal nature of any such performance benefits to be examined. Presents results from the UK manufacturing industry; the model estimated uses a spline function to incorporate differing organizational regimes over time. The results obtained are less supportive of the benefits of divisionalization than certain of the earlier empirical studies; thus the evidence presented lends no support to the view that organizational change provides unambiguous performance benefits for the firm.