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The purpose of this paper is to examine whether and how product market relationships are related to firms’ real activities manipulation (RAM), which refers to managers’ aggressive operating practices. Given the importance of suppliers’ relationship-specific investments to a firm’s competitiveness, the need for suppliers’ relationship-specific investments is expected to influence a firm’s RAM.

This paper adopts Nunn’s (2007) proxy for relationship-specificity and four proxies for RAM. It employs an ordinary least squares regression model to test whether a firm decreases RAM when it has greater need for supplier relationship-specific investments. It also uses an instrumental variable approach to address endogeneity and conducts cross-sectional analyses.

This study finds that, with the exception of RAM through sales manipulation, the importance of relationship-specific investments by suppliers is negatively associated with firms’ aggressive operating decisions. It also finds that the association between relationship-specificity and RAM is less pronounced for firms that have a greater market share but more pronounced for firms that are relatively young, consistent with the notion that a firm is more likely to be under pressure from its suppliers to reduce RAM when it has less competitive advantages. The results suggest that product market relationships play an important role in influencing managers’ aggressive operating decisions.

This study complements earlier work on earnings quality and has important implications for investors, regulators and other stakeholders who are concerned with corporate earnings quality.

This paper contributes to the literature on product market relationships and earnings quality and on financial reporting quality and investment efficiency.

This case study exposes students to conflicts with distributors, escalated scenarios of a trade association and the possible repercussions of such a scenario. Upon completion of this case study, the students will be able to understand the critical success factors for a distribution setup and alignment of channels for driving growth; understand and manage the power dynamics with a stakeholder, like trade associations, distribution reach, fallacies in managing the distributors and identifying the gaps; critically evaluate negotiation opportunities when a trade association is not directly related to the principal organization.

This case study showcased a conflict between the distributor and Universal Heater Industries (UHI), a leading player in the water heater business in India. In 2015, the global leadership of UHI identified India as an emerging market and undertook a complete management overhaul to implement a new growth plan. Several measures were put in place that leveraged the global product portfolio and new people were appointed to push the agenda. Manish Singhal, the national sales head of UHI, selected Kerala as the pilot state to implement the new plan. However, the projects failed, as the distributor escalated the treatment meted out by UHI to the Electrical Trade Association (ETA). Trade associations have had a history of playing truant with players like UHI, and because of this, business came to a complete halt. The UHI and ETA teams met once; however, the suggested closure by ETA needed to be aligned with UHI’s interests. Singhal’s dilemma deepened, and they had to decide the next steps.

This case study is suitable for a postgraduate marketing course in a segment on managing channels, intermediaries, distribution management and channel conflicts. The uniqueness of this case is in the dimension of the trade association and managing the stakeholders.

Teaching notes are available for educators only.

CSS8: Marketing.

You can buy and use a personal computer without understanding the language—but it's a little hard to read these articles, and a lot harder to understand the Held thoroughly. The author starts a new sequence of Trailing Edge articles by denning some of the terms used in the articles and in the field and mentioning some of the other terms you'll see used but rarely defined. The author also provides notes from PC literature for July‐September 1992. For a year in which prices were supposed to stabilize, it's been a remarkable summer: the new general‐purpose machine is supposed to be a 50MHz 486DX2, a well‐equipped 486SX now goes for less than $2,000 complete, and even the hottest new machines are coming out at reasonable prices.

The purpose of this paper is to propose a practical method of performing maintenance in the offshore industry where engineers have to manage problems such as the high cost of operations, assuring an high availability of the plant, safety on board and environmental protection. Indeed an efficient maintenance method it is necessary in order to offer methods and criteria to select the rights maintenance strategies keeping in to account the environmental, safety and production constrains.

The paper provides an overview of reliability centered maintenance (RCM) and reliability, availability, maintainability methodologies and an integration of the two methodologies in a particular case study in the oil and gas sector.

This paper suggests an improvement of the well-established RCM methodology applicable to industries with high priority level. It is proposed an integration between a reliability analysis and an availability analysis and an application on the offshore oil and gas industry.

The methodology provides an excellent tool that can be utilized in industries, where safety, regulations and the availability of the plant play a fundamental role.

The proposed methodology provides a practical method for selecting the best maintenance strategy considering the equipment redundancy and sparing, the asset’s performance over long time scales, and the system uptime, downtime and slowdowns.

Quantum-dot cellular automata (QCA) has attracted computer scientists as new emerging nanotechnology for replacement the current CMOS technology because it has unique characteristics such as high frequency, extremely small feature size and low power consumption. The main building blocks in QCA are the majority gate and inverter so any Boolean function can be represented using these gates. Many important circuits were the target for implemented in this technology in an optimal form, such as random-access memory (RAM) cell. QCA-RAM cells were introduced in literature with different forms but most of them are not optimized enough. This paper aims to demonstrate QCA inherent capabilities that can facilitate the design of many important gates such as the XOR gate and multiplexer (MUX) without following any Boolean function to get an optimum design in terms of complexity and delay.

In this paper, a novel structure of QCA-MUX in an optimal form will be used to design two unique structures of a RAM cell. The proposed RAM cells are the lowest cost required compared with different counterparts. The presented RAM cells used a new approach that follows the new suggested block diagram. The presented circuits are simulated and tested with QCADesigner and QCAPro tools.

The comparison of the proposed circuits with the previously reported in the literature show noticeable improvements in speed, area, and the number of cells. The cost function analysis results for the proposed RAM cells show significant improvement compared to older circuits.

A novel structure of QCA-MUX in an optimal form will be used to design two unique structures of a RAM cell.

A quick search of the headlines of major newspapers reveals a treasure trove of technology procurement gone wrong. While the private sector seems to adopt and implement new technology seamlessly and quickly to deliver for customers, the government struggles to accomplish technology purchases and integrations with the same ease. As governments in the United States are looking to retain their current workforce and attract the next generation of workers, the technological capabilities and ethos of governments will be paramount. With nearly every industry being transformed by technology and Generation T being the first generation to have an ingrained “technology first” mindset, the ability of governments to attract these workers depends, in large part, on the ability to transform their government technology culture, policies, and practices.

In this chapter, the authors examine the administrative branch and observe two key components at the root of most technology failures: poor organizational structure in the bureaucracy and the lack of an empowered Chief Information/Technology Officer. Building upon case studies from Massachusetts and California, this chapter looks at the factors related to failure or success to understand the technology procurement culture. The chapter concludes by presenting four key “best practice” principles of public policy and administration that can be implemented by almost any governmental entity to improve their acquisition and implementation of technology.

Mobile phone network third-generation (3G) and fourth-generation (4G) modes are the most commonly used modes in many developing countries. This study aims to assess the impact of these network modes and other mobile phone attributes on their retail prices in Pakistan, the fifth most populous and developing country.

This study has been conducted in Punjab province, which shares about 53% of the Pakistan’s population. Hedonic price analysis was carried out on all new mobile phone attributes sold in Punjab’s markets at the retail level. Various econometric tests, that is, Ramsey regression equation specification error, Breusch–Pagan/Cook–Weisberg and variance inflation factor, were calculated to check the robustness of the results.

Results of this study indicated that the mobile phone prices were significantly higher for the sets having 4G network mode than the 3G mode. In addition to this, other mobile phone attributes that significantly influenced their prices were brand, weight, camera, random access memory (RAM), memory size, operating system, battery capacity and display size.

This study has implications for mobile phone sales and marketing strategies of the manufacturers, importers, retailers and others involved in the mobile phone business in developing countries like Pakistan. Mobile phone manufacturers/importers can increase their profits by producing/importing the 4G enabled devices.

Although many studies in the literature estimated the implicit price of mobile phone attributes, none of these had explicitly assessed the impact of network mode generation of mobile phones on their prices.

Recent Trailing Edge articles have discussed typefaces and graphics. This column discusses putting it all together: economical desktop publishing. There has never been a better time for libraries to become desktop publishers, and some will find that doing so requires no new software or hardware. The author discusses changes that have made desktop publishing such an appealing and reasonably‐priced proposition in 1994 and some of your options for getting started and moving on. He brings the typeface discussion up to date with a startling recent development and defines the difference between true desktop publishing and the spare‐no‐expense field that the “desktop publishing” magazines cover. A sidebar notes a series of desktop publishing workshops that the author is offering as part of LITA's regional institutes program. Finally, the author adds notes on the personal computing literature for January to March 1994, now including some Macintosh magazines and, soon, CD‐ROM/multimedia publications.

In order to distinguish their brands from other brands in the same category, most consumer products companies attempt to establish a unique personality for each brand. Rather than emphasize that it is a soft drink, Dr. Pepper emphasizes, through its name and advertising, that it is an “oddball” soft drink. This article recommends that these companies instead develop advertising and brand names that communicate the best qualities of the relevant product category. Dr. Pepper, for example, might emphasize that it tastes good and quenches thirst. This article suggests that marketers use free association tests to select advertising symbols and names that best communicate key product category benefits; it suggests that they use product categories and candidate symbols and names as stimuli, then match the answers across stimuli. In a sample test, for example, the stimulus “iced tea” drew the responses “refreshment,” “cool,” and “summer.” In a separate test, the stimulus “plunge into swimming pool” drew identical responses. The Nestle Nestea “plunge” (into a pool) campaign, therefore, is thought to be a highly effective one.