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Plus Factors have long played an important role in inferring a price agreement from the totality of the evidence. In response to changes in the case law, economists have proposed two alternative paths for the future of price fixing analysis. This paper evaluates the suggested approaches and recommends retaining the enhanced Plus Factor methodology.

By carefully defining the Plus Factor concept, three key components of the analysis emerge: (1) information on communications associated with the alleged agreement, (2) economic considerations affecting market competition, and (3) characteristics that serve to differentiate explicit from tacit collusion.

Developments rationalizing the Plus Factor concept show promise, as the methodology is not more closely related to economic theory. On the other hand, replacement of the Plus Factor methodology with one focused on market performance seems problematic. By abandoning the Plus Factor concept, the economist loses a key institutional constraint on over-aggressive enforcement.

Until advocates can address the difficulties associated with using performance evidence to identify price fixing, the standard Plus Factor concept appears more appropriate. Thus, antitrust analysts should continue to use the Plus Factor methodology to infer agreements in price fixing investigations, as long as the economic rationalization of the specific Plus Factor is clearly presented.

The paper synthesizes a number of recent contributions to the price fixing literature and addresses key issues of interest to the enforcement community. By providing a critique of the proposed policy shift to use performance evidence to infer price fixing liability, the study serves to justify continued application of the Plus Factor methodology.

This monograph seeks to summarise the key influences of a role‐based perspective on leadership when making decisions as to how organisational resources can best be deployed.

Application of new frameworks provides insight into the leadership roles executives can adopt when part of formal, informal and temporary groups within the organisation's senior management team and those parts of the organisation for which they are responsible. The methodology adopted is qualitative, focusing on application of previously developed frameworks.

Adoption of an appropriate leadership role, and the timely switch from one role to another as circumstances change, are found to facilitate improvement in the ability of executives to mobilise organisational resources, and in so doing effectively address those challenges with which the organisation is faced.

A one‐organisation intensive case study of a multinational engineering company engaged in the design, development and manufacture of rotating turbomachinery provides the platform for the research. The research intent is to validate two frameworks in a different organisation of a similar demographic profile to those in which the frameworks were developed. The frameworks will require validating in organisations of different demographic profiles.

The concepts advanced, and implications discussed, provide an insight into the role‐based nature of leadership. The practical steps individual executives can take to develop their ability to adopt different leadership roles are highlighted.

This monograph is an investigation into, and study of the contribution of theory that provides insight into, the process by which executives effectively mobilise organisational resources. This differs from the original contributions to theory, which focused on methodology, data gathering and validation in contrast with the current study that is focused on practical application.

Employee dissatisfaction with merit pay is a long‐standing problem. This study introduces four explanatory constructs, based on decisional and interactional fairness notions, that describe how supervisors implement merit pay and predict merit pay satisfaction. Multigroup confirmatory factor analyses, applied to a sample of American employees (N = 415) and a sample of Venezuelan employees (N = 239), show that the five constructs introduced here are distinct from each other and that their measures generalize across countries (cultures and languages).

This paper aims to examine the investment performance of pension funds in the UK using the three standard performance measurement models, the capital asset pricing model (CAPM), Fama-French model and the Carhart model.

The authors use the CAPS-Mellon survey data for the period 1990-2008 and employ the three standard performance measurement models, the CAPM, Fama-French model and the Carhart model in assessing the investment performance of the pension funds.

The authors show that the abnormal returns of pension funds cannot be fully explained by size, book-to-market values, market returns, momentum and the term spread. The authors find larger abnormal returns in bond than in equity portfolios and that smaller funds outperform larger funds. The paper also shows that the addition of the momentum factor does not improve on the three-factor Fama-French model. The authors find that pension funds exhibit superior performance relative to the linear factor models.

First, this study contributes to the extant literature on pension funds performance. Future research may also extend the authors' work to incorporate economic, tax, political and legal differences across the countries on the performance of pension funds. Second, due to data constraints, this study excludes the default probability of corporate bonds as an additional variable in their tests on bond returns. Future work may add the default probability as an additional variable whilst examining bond returns.

The authors believe that the findings will be considerable food for thought for fund managers who continuously attempt to explore opportunities to provide a higher return to investors.

To the authors' knowledge, this is the first comprehensive study that investigates the performance of UK equity and bond pension funds relative to standard linear factor models such as the CAPM, Fama and French, and Carhart.

The purpose of this paper is to study performance and market timing ability of equity real estate investment trusts (REITs).

The authors use classical regression‐based framework and their multi‐index, multifactor, and conditional extensions to jointly detect asset selectivity and market timing ability of equity REITs and their subcategories. These results are then validated by a nonparametric test.

It is found that equity REITs in aggregate have some housing market timing ability. Various equity REIT subcategories perform differently: office REITs can discover underpriced properties, while retail, industrial, and office REITs have poor timing ability. Nonparametric tests confirm that equity REITs do not have ability to predict real estate market movements.

Research in REIT performance evaluation is still limited to the asset selectivity aspect. This paper intends to fill this gap by providing empirical evidence of market timing ability of equity REITs using an array of parametric and nonparametric methods.

This study aims to report on an investigation into decision-making leading to a UK firm’s first export order. It demonstrates the application of appreciative inquiry (AI) as an underutilised research method in marketing investigations.

An AI research approach was undertaken in a firm that had not started exporting at the commencement of the study whereby the interventionist approach allowed the management team to overcome negative perceptions in their decision-making. From a research perspective, marketing decision-making could be understood in real time as opposed to in hindsight.

While the key decision-maker is likely to be the owner/manager in small newly internationalising firms, a variety of factors will affect the decision to start exporting including the influence of the management team. In particular, the management team’s perceptions towards a combination of effectuation- and causation-based decision-making where risk/reward considerations in exploiting various international marketing opportunities are undertaken in light of perceived affordable losses, as well as against evolving objectives.

The contribution is to demonstrate the AI methodology, which to date has received attention in management domains other than marketing; it offers an interventionist approach to help managers overcome barriers and move positively forward in decision-making. It offers researchers an opportunity to understand marketing decision-making in real time.

Lai, Li, Conover, and Wu (2010) propose a four-factor financial distress model to explain stock returns in the U.S. and Japanese markets. We examine this model in the stock markets of Australia, and six Asian markets (Hong Kong, Indonesia, Korea, Malaysia, Singapore, and Thailand). We find broad empirical support for the four-factor financial distress risk asset-pricing model in those markets. The four-factor financial distress asset pricing model improves explanatory power beyond the Fama–French (1993) three-factor asset pricing model in six of the seven Asian-Pacific markets (12 of 14 portfolio groupings), while the Carhart (1997) momentum-based asset pricing model only improves explanatory power beyond the Fama–French model in three of the seven markets (4 of 14 portfolio groupings).

We examine explicitly priced financial distress risk in post-1990 equity markets. We add a financial distress risk factor to Fama and French's (1993) three-factor model, based on Griffin and Lemmon's (2002) findings that financial distress is not fully captured by the book-to-market factor. We test three-factor and four-factor capital asset pricing models using both annual buy-and-hold analysis and monthly time series analysis across portfolios adjusted for common book-to-market, size, and financial distress factors. We find empirical support for an Ohlson (1980) O-score-based financial distress risk four-factor asset pricing model in the U.S. and Japanese markets.

The purpose of this paper is to determine the best conditional asset pricing model for the Tokyo Stock Exchange sample by utilizing long‐run daily data. It aims to investigate whether there are any other firm‐specific variables that can explain abnormal returns of the estimated asset pricing model.

The individual firm sample was used to conduct various cross‐sectional tests of conditional asset pricing models, at the same time as using test portfolios in order to confirm the mean variance efficiency of basic unconditional models.

The paper's multifactor models in unconditional forms are rejected, with the exception of the five‐factor model. Further, the five‐factor model is better overall than the Fama and French model and other alternative models, according to both the Gibbons, Ross, and Shanken test and the Hansen and Jagannathan distance measure test. Next, using the final conditional five‐factor model as the de facto model, it was determined that the turnover ratio and the size can consistently predict Jensen's alphas. The book‐to‐market ratio (BM) and the past one‐year returns can also significantly predict the alpha, albeit to a lesser extent.

In the literature related to Japanese data, there has never been a comprehensive test of conditional asset pricing models using the long‐run data of individual firms. The conditional asset pricing model derived for this study has led to new findings about the predictability of past one‐year returns and the turnover ratio.