Erasmus Research Institute of Management - ERIM Events

The Blessing and Tyranny of Brand Risk: Making CSR and Profitability Commensurable in MNCs' Supply Chains

Tue, 09 Feb 2010 14:00:00 GMT

Speakers:
Niklas Egels-Zandén (School of Business, Economics and Law, University of Gothenburg)

Location: T10-67
Type: ERIM Research Seminar

Central to the Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) field is the conceptual idea that companies can do well by doing good. Still, limited knowledge exists about how managers work to render CSR issues commensurable with profitability. Drawing on an in-depth study of how managers at a Swedish MNC extend their code of conduct to suppliers, this paper shows how managers use “brand risk” as a conceptual tool to make the disparate institutional logics of workers’ rights having intrinsic value and maximizing profitability commensurable. By introducing brand risk as a common metric, managers were able to conduct supplier risk assessments and decide what suppliers to audit. However, while the brand risk metric simplified decision making, it also transformed workers from ends to means. The consequence of this was that workers’ rights aspects that were hard to assimilate to the brand risk metric were considered irrelevant. The paper concludes with a discussion of how these findings contribute to new institutional literature and advances our understanding of MNCs’ supply chain practices.

Niklas Egels-Zandén is the Director of Centre for Business in Society at the School of Business, Economics and Law at University of Gothenburg, Sweden. His areas of research are corporate social responsibility, international business, strategic management and firm-stakeholder interaction, especially in relation to multinational corporations in developing countries. He has published in Journal of Business Ethics, Business Ethics: A European Review, Business Strategy and the Environment, Journal of Corporate Citizenship, Corporate Social Responsibility and Environmental Management, and Journal of Current Issues in Globalization.

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Dr.ir. E.M. van Raaij

Hedge Funds as Distributors of Equity Exposure

Wed, 10 Feb 2010 09:30:00 GMT

Speakers:
Patrick Verwijmeren (University of Melbourne, Faculty of Economics & Commerce, University of Melbourne)

Location: T3-42
Type: ERIM Research Seminar

Convertible arbitrage hedge funds combine a long position in convertibles with a short position in stock. By creating these short positions in the open market, hedge funds distribute the equity exposure of the firm to a large number of well-diversified investors. We find that the distributive power of hedge funds provides financing opportunities for firms that find it relatively costly to attract investors who are willing to bear large equity exposure to the firm. Instead of directly issuing shares, these firms obtain indirect equity financing by privately placing equity-like convertibles to hedge funds.

Contact information:

Myra Lissenberg

Online Traveling Salesman Problems with Flexible Services

Thu, 11 Feb 2010 11:00:00 GMT

Speakers:
Patrick Jaillet (Sloan School of Management, Massachusetts Institute of Technology)

Location: T10-67
Type: ERIM Research Seminar

The Traveling Salesman Problem (TSP) is a well-known combinatorial optimization problem. We are concerned here with online versions of a generalization of the TSP on metric spaces where the server doesn't have to accept all requests. Associated with each request (to visit a point in the metric space) is a penalty (incurred if the request is rejected). Requests are revealed over time to a server, initially at a given origin, who must decide which requests to serve in order to minimize the time to serve all accepted requests plus the sum of the penalties associated with the rejected requests.

In the first online version of this problem, called the basic version, we assume that the server's decision to accept or reject a request can be made any time after its release date. In the second online version of this problem, called the real-time version, we assume that the server's decision to accept or reject a request must be made exactly at its release date.

In this talk, we provide an optimal online algorithm for the basic version of the problem in a general metric space, improving all known results to date. We then consider the real-time version of the problem. We first provide an optimal polynomial time online algorithm on the non-negative real line. We also consider the case of a general metric space and show that there can't be any finite competitive online algorithm. We finally describe an asymptotically optimal online algorithm for this general case.

(*) Joint work with Xin Lu, ORC, MIT

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Prof.dr. S.L. van de Velde

Dissecting Drayage: An Examination of Structure, Information, and Control in Drayage Operations

Fri, 12 Feb 2010 10:30:00 GMT

Speakers:
Jordan Srour (Rotterdam School of Management (RSM), Erasmus University Rotterdam)

Location: Senate Hall, Woudestein Campus
Type: PhD Defense ERIM Doctoral Programme

The term dray dates back to the 14th century when it was used commonly to describe a type of very sturdy sideless cart . In the 1700s the word drayage came into use meaning “to transport by a sideless cart”. Today, drayage commonly refers to the transport of containerized cargo to and from port or rail terminals and inland locations. With the phenomenal growth of containerized freight since the container’s introduction in 1956, the drayage industry has also experienced significant growth. In fact, according to the Bureau for Transportation Statistics, the world saw total maritime container traffic grow to approximately 417 million twenty foot equivalent units (TEUs) in 2006.

Unfortunately, the drayage portion of a door-to-door container move tends to be the most costly part of the move. There are a variety of reasons for this disproportionate assignment of costs, including a great deal of uncertainty at the interface of modes. For example, trucks moving containers to and from a port terminal are often uncertain as to how long it will take them to pick up a designated container coming from a ship, from the terminal stack, or from customs. This uncertainty leads to much difficulty and inefficiency in planning a profitable routing for multiple containers in one day. We study this problem from three perspectives using both empirical and theoretical techniques.

Download PhD thesis (available after PhD defense)

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Olga Novikova

Green Logistics: Assessment of Freight Market Shifts using a Dynamic Intermodal Network Analysis Methodology

Fri, 12 Feb 2010 08:30:00 GMT

Speakers:
Hani Mahmassani (McCormick School of Engineering and Applied Science, Northwestern University)

Location: T10-67
Type: ERIM Research Seminar

Growing interest in sustainable practices and carbon footprint reduction is prompting policy makers to consider greater reliance on rail-based intermodal services in moving goods. We present an intermodal freight network modeling capability, intended for application to large-scale international networks, which allows evaluation of various intermodal service supply strategies under varying operational and policy scenarios. The methodology considers shipper decisions disaggregated to the individual shipment level, and uses a dynamic micro-assignment approach with joint mode, path, service and carrier choice decisions. The methodology is applied to evaluate the market potential for international rail-based intermodal services spanning 11 countries from the Baltic (Scandinavia) to the Mediterranean (Greece) through the Accession countries of the European Union (EU), termed the REORIENT Corridor. Scenarios examined include new services and greater carrier cooperation through collaborative decision-making schemes, as well as improvements in technology and border processing times.

Dr. Mahmassani is Director of the Transportation Center, and the William A. Patterson Distinguished Professor in Transportation at Northwestern University, which he joined on September 1, 2007, with joint appointments in the McCormick School of Engineering and the Kellogg School of Management. Previously, he was the Charles Irish Sr. Chaired Professor in Transportation Engineering and Director of the Maryland Transportation Initiative at the University of Maryland. Before that, he served for 20 years on the faculty at the University of Texas at Austin. Dr. Mahmassani has nearly 30 years of professional, academic and research experience in the areas of multimodal transportation planning and network modeling, freight and logistics systems analysis, homeland security and emergency systems operations, intelligent transportation systems, econometric modeling and applications to travel and freight demand forecasting, integrated systems management, travel and shipper behavior analysis.

Dr. Mahmassani is Associate Editor and past Editor-in-Chief of Transportation Science, and Associate Editor of Transportation Research C (Emerging Technologies), and the IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Transportation Systems. He serves on several NAS and NRC committees and panels, and is a member of steering committee of ITS America Forum for academia and consultants as well as a former Coordinating Board Member, ITS America. He serves as evaluator and advisor to various university research and academic entities, national research institutes, government research programs, and corporate R&D units. He is a consultant to several companies and government agencies in the areas of intelligent transportation systems, transportation network modeling and simulation, evacuation planning, emergency response and real-time decision making, strategic systems planning, operations and logistics.

Contact information:

Prof.dr. S.L. van de Velde

Customer-Base Analysis in a Discrete-Time Non-contractual Setting

Mon, 15 Feb 2010 11:00:00 GMT

Speakers:
Bruce Hardie (London Business School (LBS), University of London)

Location: T3-39
Type: ERIM Research Seminar

Many businesses track repeat transactions on a discrete-time basis. These include: (1) companies where transactions can only occur at fixed regular intervals, (2) firms that frequently associate transactions with specific events (e.g., a charity that records whether or not supporters respond to a particular appeal), and (3) organizations that simply use discrete reporting periods even though the transactions can occur at any time. Furthermore, many of these businesses operate in a non-contractual setting, so they have a difficult time differentiating between those customers who have ended their relationship with the firm versus those who are in the midst of a long hiatus between transactions. We develop a model to predict future purchasing patterns for a customer base that can be described by these structural characteristics. Our beta-geometric/beta-Bernoulli (BG/BB) model captures both of the underlying behavioural processes (i.e., customers’ purchasing while “alive”, and time until each customer permanently “dies”). The model is easy to implement in a standard spreadsheet environment, and yields relatively simple closed-form expressions for the expected number of future transactions conditional on past observed behaviour (and other quantities of managerial interest). We apply this discrete-time analog of the well-known Pareto/NBD model to a dataset on donations made by the supporters of a charity located in the Midwestern United States. Our analysis demonstrates the excellent ability of the BG/BB model to describe and predict the future behaviour of a customer base.

Bruce Hardie is Professor of Marketing at London Business School. He holds B.Com and M.Com degrees from the University of Auckland (New Zealand), and MA and PhD degrees from the University of Pennsylvania.

His primary research interest lies in the development of data-based models to support marketing analysts and decision makers, with a particular interest in models that are easy to implement. Most of his current projects focus on the development of probability models for customer-base analysis. Bruce's research has appeared in various marketing, operations research and statistics journals, and he currently serves on the editorial boards of the International Journal of Research in Marketing, the Journal of Interactive Marketing, and Marketing Science.

Contact information:

Dr. S. Puntoni

Team Diversity

Mon, 15 Feb 2010 10:00:00 GMT

Speakers:
Daan van Knippenberg (Rotterdam School of Management (RSM), Erasmus University Rotterdam)

Location: M1-06
Type: ERIM Research Seminar

The key question in diversity research is how differences between group members affect work group processes and performance. Over 50 years of research have made clear that diversity can have positive as well as negative effects on performance, but research and practice are still struggling to formulate models that are able to make sense of these diverging effects and that offer clear guidance in how to manage diversity. The Categorization-Elaboration Model (CEM; van Knippenberg, De Dreu, & Homan, 2004) addresses this issue. The CEM proposes that the effects of work group diversity on group performance should be understood in terms of two processes that have independent and interactive effects: elaboration of task-relevant information and social categorization. Diversity may have positive effects on performance to the extent that it engenders the exchange and integration of task-relevant information (elaboration). At the same time, diversity may be detrimental to performance to the extent that it engenders “us-them” distinctions (social categorization) and intergroup biases – especially because these intergroup biases disrupt information elaboration processes. The CEM also identifies the factors on which the occurrence of elaboration and social categorization processes is contingent, factors that may offer clear angles for the management of diversity. In this presentation, I outline the CEM and review recent empirical evidence that supports the model.

Contact information:

Daan van Knippenberg

Corporate Governance and the Information Environment: Evidence from State Antitakeover Laws

Tue, 16 Feb 2010 14:30:00 GMT

Speakers:
Daniel Cohen (Stern School of Business, New York University)

Location: T3-42
Type: ERIM Research Seminar

In this paper we examine the relationship between corporate governance and firms’ information environments. We use the passage of state antitakeover laws in the U.S., which have been found to entrench management, as a source of an exogenous variation in corporate governance in order to identify changes in financial reporting attributes. We find an increase in financial statement informativeness and a decrease in information asymmetry following the adoption of state antitakeover laws. This evidence is consistent with managers improving their firms’ information environments in response to changes in corporate governance. Finally, our results suggest that information quality is a substitute for corporate governance mechanisms.

Contact information:

Paolo Perego

A Kalman Filter Approach to Analyze Multivariate Hedonic Pricing in Dynamic Supply-Chain Markets

Wed, 17 Feb 2010 15:00:00 GMT

Speakers:
Gianfranco Lucchese (Rotterdam School of Management (RSM), Erasmus University Rotterdam)

Location: T9-67
Type: ERIM Research Seminar

to be announced

Contact information:

Meditya Wasesa

Two Human Adaption Conflicts: A Review and a Demonstration with Achievement Goals Theory

Thu, 18 Feb 2010 14:30:00 GMT

Speakers:
Avraham Kluger (Jerusalem School of Business Administration , Hebrew University of Jerusalem)

Location: T8-69
Type: ERIM Research Seminar

A curious regularity is frequently observed when comprehensive sets of measures of concepts such as motivations (Ronen, 1994), values (Schwartz, 1992), organizational effectiveness (Quinn & Rohrbaugh, 1983), leadership behaviors (Lawrence, Lenk, & Quinn, 2009), and goals (Grouzet et al., 2005) are subjected to multidimensional scaling. Specifically, a two-dimension solution frequently emerges in which two consistent oppositions are noticed: Preservation (security, maintenance) opposing Change (self-actualization, development), and Competition (power, self-interest) opposing cooperation (self-transcendence, affiliation). We suggest that this regulatory reflects basic and conflicting adaptation challenges. Therefore, we predict that two or three factor theories of motivations (e.g., Higgins, 1997) could be understood as a subset of the four poles of these two conflicts. To demonstrate the viability of our position, we demonstrate how our position shed a new light on goal-orientation theory (Dweck & Leggett, 1988; Elliot & Church, 1997). Specifically, we demonstrate that the meaning of the much debated construct of performance-approach (proving) goal orientation can be understood as a reflection of the competition side of the competition-cooperation conflict and that the theory can benefit from adding a construct of amity goal orientation. For this demonstration, we show both patterns of correlations of goals with values, consistent with our model, and spatial arrangement that replicates the two-dimensional structure observed by other researchers who applied multidimensional scaling in similar domains.

Contact information:

Will Felps