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In this return on investment (ROI) for customer relationship management (CRM) case scenario, students must calculate the ROI for analytic CRM enabled by an enterprise data warehouse. The case is based upon a real-life consulting engagement with a major Fortune 100 telecommunications company. In this case the executive management team's strategic objective is to grow the customer base by 5 percent annually by customer acquisition. The internal rate of return calculated from the data given in the case is more than 800 percent for one year, and sensitivity analysis shows this is a robust projection, suggesting it should be funded without question. However, the strategy of the firm is customer acquisition in an environment of high customer churn. As a result of these dynamics, the revenues and net income of the firm are actually decreasing by hundreds of millions of dollars each year. A better solution would realize that the executive team has the incorrect strategic objective. Customer acquisition is the wrong approach in an environment of high customer churn and executives should focus on customer retention and cross-sell and up-sell to high-value customers. The case discussion therefore takes students beyond CRM ROI to focuses on the key strategic concepts of customer relationship management.

Students learn how to calculate return on investment (ROI) for analytic customer relationship management (CRM) initiatives. The case also discusses in detail the difference between operational CRM and analytic CRM. The case solution is relatively straightforward with a very good ROI. However, the true learning of the case is for students to understand the strategic context of analytic CRM and to question assumptions in any ROI model.

This case is based on a real-life consulting engagement with a major Fortune 100 telecommunications company. The name of the firm has been disguised for confidentiality reasons. Completing the case teaches students how to develop a cost-containment ROI analysis and develop a business case for a large enterprise technology project. The class discussion focuses on strategies to understand and manage the risks of the project and organizational issues. In addition, the case teaches students good questions to ask when reviewing a complex project business case, and how to present a project for funding approval. This case is the second in a series of three cases designed to teach students ROI analysis for technology projects; the first is “B&K Distributors: Calculating Return on Investment for a Web-Based Customer Portal” and the third is the case “ROI for a Customer Relationship Management Initiative at GST.”

The case objective is for students to learn how to compute a return on investment (ROI) analysis for a large cost-containment technology project. Students learn the best practice of computing the range of possible outcomes (the best, worst, and expected case), and how to present the results to senior management. In addition, students learn how to incorporate important management issues of personnel reduction and technology project risk into an ROI analysis.

Technology projects are inherently risky; research shows that large IT projects succeed as originally planned only 28 percent of the time. Building flexibility, or real options, into a project can help manage this risk. Furthermore, the management flexibility of options has value, as the downside risk is reduced and the upside is increased. The case is based upon real options analysis for an enterprise data warehouse (EDW) and analytic customer relationship management (CRM) program at a major U.S. firm. The firm has been disguised as Global Airlines for confidentiality reasons. The data mart consolidation or EDW marginally meets the hurdle rate for the firm as analyzed using a traditional net present value (NPV) analysis. However, different tactical deployment strategies help mitigate the risk of the project by building options into the project, and the traditional NPV is expanded by the real option value. Students analyze the different deployment strategies using a binomial model compound option Excel macro, and calculate the volatility using Monte Carlo analysis in Excel. A step-by-step tutorial is provided to teach students how to accomplish the real options analysis for a simplified project, and this tutorial is easily generalized by students to the case scenario. In addition to the tactical options, the case also has the strategic growth option of analytic CRM. Students must therefore analyze both the tactical and strategic growth options and make a management recommendation on funding the project and also recommend an optimal deployment strategy to manage the project risk.

The case teaches real options for technology projects. Students learn how to calculate real option values, where the key input of volatility is obtained by Monte Carlo analysis in Excel. Students also learn that the real option value is “real,” resulting from active management mitigating the risk of the project and improving the upside. Most important, students understand the difference between tactical vs. strategic growth options and the important management issues to consider.

Psychological contracts represent unofficial or informal expectations that an individual holds, most commonly applied to an employer–employee relationship. Understanding psychological contracts helps explain the consequences of unmet expectations, including increased budgetary slack and reduced audit quality. This chapter reviews and synthesizes accounting behavioral research that discusses psychological contracts and that was published in academic and practitioner journals in the areas of financial accounting, management accounting, auditing, taxes, non-profit organizations, accounting education, and the accounting profession itself. Despite the prevalence of psychological contracts in the workplace and the applicability to behavioral research, accounting literature remains limited regarding applications of psychological contracts. This chapter aggregates research across all areas of accounting to provide suggestions for use of psychological contracts in future research and thus create a connected research stream.

This research provides accounting-ethics authors and administrators with a benchmark for accounting-ethics research. While Bernardi and Bean (2010) considered publications in business-ethics and accounting’s top-40 journals this study considers research in eight accounting-ethics and public-interest journals, as well as, 34 business-ethics journals. We analyzed the contents of our 42 journals for the 25-year period between 1991 through 2015. This research documents the continued growth (Bernardi & Bean, 2007) of accounting-ethics research in both accounting-ethics and business-ethics journals. We provide data on the top-10 ethics authors in each doctoral year group, the top-50 ethics authors over the most recent 10, 20, and 25 years, and a distribution among ethics scholars for these periods. For the 25-year timeframe, our data indicate that only 665 (274) of the 5,125 accounting PhDs/DBAs (13.0% and 5.4% respectively) in Canada and the United States had authored or co-authored one (more than one) ethics article.

In July 2000, two founders of this new web-hosting company are contemplating raising $5 million to $15 million in a second-round financing from venture capitalists. The task for the student is to forecast the firm's cash receipts and disbursements in an effort to determine the firm's “burn rate” (i.e., the rate of cash consumption and how long the financing will sustain the firm). The new economy setting of this case permits the instructor to extend well-known financial skills and concepts to an industry that attracts high student interest.

In crafting Auditing Standard No.3 (AS3), a primary objective of the PCAOB was to reduce auditors' exposure to litigation by raising the standard of care for audit documentation. We examine whether the increased documentation requirements of AS3 affect legal professionals' perceptions of audit quality and auditor responsibility in the event of an audit failure. Our experiment consists of a 3 × 2 between-participants design with law students serving as proxies for legal professionals. The results of our experiment indicate that when an audit procedure, namely the investigation of inconsistent evidence, is not required to be documented, legal professionals perceive the performance of the work itself but not its documentation to significantly increase audit quality and reduce the auditor's responsibility for an audit failure. When documentation of the procedure is required, as per AS3, legal professionals perceive enhanced audit quality and reduced auditor responsibility only if the performance of the work is documented.

The purpose of this paper is to revisit our original paper published over 20 years ago and reflect on its purpose, contribution and what we can glean that might have implications for future research.

A Google Scholar search showed that the article was cited 74 times. We discuss some of the contexts in which it was cited and identify two research themes that have emanated from this paper and hold promise for future research.

We discuss two of the several contexts in which our research is discussed. These include the differential ways in which cues are used in a services context, including the ways in which different cues are used to evaluate services and how cues are used to develop consumer expectations.

The study, which was cited 74 times according to Google Scholar, was formative in terms of discussion of, for example, how a variety of cues influence customer expectations and service evaluation, and how categories of cues, such as marketer controlled versus non-marketer controlled and personal versus non-personal, impact outcomes. The retrospective analysis was helpful in both reflecting on the status quo on some of these issues and suggesting directions for future research.

While Dalton and Radtke (2013) examine the effects of Machiavellianism and an organization's ethical environment within a low moral intensity setting, I examine the effects of Machiavellianism and an organization's ethical environment across both low and high moral intensity settings. Using a sample of 192 MTurk workers (i.e., online labor pool participants from Amazon's Mechanical Turk) and 127 undergraduate accounting students, the results using the full-sample of participants indicate the following: (1) Machiavellianism is negatively associated with whistle-blowing intentions across both low and high moral intensity scenarios; (2) an organization's ethical environment is positively associated with whistle-blowing intentions across both low and high moral intensity scenarios; and (3) in the low moral intensity scenario (but not the high moral intensity scenario), I find an interaction between Machiavellianism and the strength of the ethical environment. Implications for research and practice are discussed.

The proliferation of various interpretations of the marketing concept suggests a lack of unanimity as to its meaning. This article outlines five definitional “schools” of the marketing concept.