Business Disciplines (business + discipline)

Distribution by Scientific Domains
Business, Economics, Finance and Accounting100%

Selected Abstracts

Realizing the Potential of Real Options: Does Theory Meet Practice?

JOURNAL OF APPLIED CORPORATE FINANCE, Issue 2 2005
Alexander Triantis
The idea of viewing corporate investment opportunities as "real options" has been around for over 25 years. Real options concepts and techniques now routinely appear in academic research in finance and economics, and have begun to influence scholarly work in virtually every business discipline, including strategy, organizations, management science, operations management, information systems, accounting, and marketing. Real options concepts have also made considerable headway in practice. Corporate managers are more likely to recognize options in their strategic planning process, and have become more proactive in designing flexibility into projects and contracts, frequently using real options vocabulary in their discussions. Thanks in part to the spread of real options thinking, today's strategic planners are more likely than their predecessors to recognize the "option" value of actions like the following: , dividing up large projects into a number of stages; , investing in the acquisition or production of information; , introducing "modularity" in manufacturing and design; , developing competing prototypes for new products; and , investing in overseas markets. But if real options has clearly succeeded as a way of thinking, the application of real options valuation methods has been limited to companies in relatively few industries and has thus failed to live up to expectations created in the mid- to late-1990s. Increased corporate acceptance and implementations of real options valuation techniques will require several changes coming together. On the theory side, we need more realistic models that better reflect differences between financial and real options, simple heuristic methods that can be more easily implemented (but that have been carefully benchmarked against more precise models), and better guidance on implementation issues such as the estimation of discount rates for the "optionless" underlying projects. On the practitioner side, we need user-friendly real options software, more senior-level buy-in, more deliberate diffusion of real options knowledge throughout organizations, better alignment of managerial incentives with long-term shareholder value, and better-designed contracts to correct the misalignment of incentives across the value chain. If these challenges can be met, there will continue to be a steady if gradual diffusion of real options analysis throughout organizations over the next few decades, with real options eventually becoming not only a standard part of corporate strategic planning, but also the primary valuation tool for assessing the expected shareholder effect of large capital investment projects. [source]

Publishing in the Majors: A Comparison of Accounting, Finance, Management, and Marketing,

CONTEMPORARY ACCOUNTING RESEARCH, Issue 1 2004
EDWARD P. SWANSON
Abstract Business schools evaluate publication records, especially for the promotion and tenure decision, by comparing the quality and quantity of a candidate's research with those of peers within the same discipline (intradisciplinary) and with those of academics from other business disciplines (interdisciplinary). A recently developed analytical model of the research review process provides theory about the norms used by editors and referees in deciding whether to publish research papers. The model predicts that interdisciplinary differences exist in quality norms, which could result in disparity among business disciplines in the number of top-tier articles published. I examine the period from 1980 to 1999 and, consistent with the theory, find that significant differences exist in the number of articles and proportion of doctoral faculty who published in the "major" journals in accounting, finance, management, and marketing. Most notably, the proportion of doctoral faculty publishing a major article is 1.4 to 2.4 times greater in the other business disciplines than in accounting (depending on the set of journals). The theory also predicts an upward drift over time in the quality norms used by referees. Consistent with a drift, the number of articles published has declined substantially in marketing and, to a lesser extent, in the other business disciplines. [source]

Learning From the Pros: Influence of Web-Based Expert Commentary on Vicarious Learning About Financial Markets,

DECISION SCIENCES JOURNAL OF INNOVATIVE EDUCATION, Issue 1 2007
Matthew W. Ford
ABSTRACT Web-based financial commentary, in which experts routinely express market-related thought processes, is proposed as a means for college students to learn vicariously about financial markets. Undergraduate business school students from a regional university were exposed to expert market commentary from a single financial Web site for a 6-week period. When compared to a control group, students in the experimental group were found to possess higher levels of financial market awareness. Degree of engagement, as approximated by measures of project exposure time and effort, was significantly related to market awareness. Finance majors were found to be more engaged in the process than nonfinance majors. Although this study should be considered exploratory in nature, findings support the notion of using Web-based vicarious learning processes in financial education. Future research can extend the generalizability of these findings, as well as shape vicarious learning mechanisms for use across business disciplines. [source]

SO YOU ALREADY HAVE A SURVEY DATABASE?,A SEVEN-STEP METHODOLOGY FOR THEORY BUILDING FROM SURVEY DATABASES: AN ILLUSTRATION FROM INCREMENTAL INNOVATION GENERATION IN BUYER,SELLER RELATIONSHIPS

JOURNAL OF SUPPLY CHAIN MANAGEMENT, Issue 4 2010
SUBROTO ROY
Across business disciplines, the importance of database research for theory testing continues to increase. The availability of data also has increased, though methods to analyze and interpret these data lag. This research proposes a method for extracting strong measures from survey databases by a progression from qualitative to quantitative techniques. To test the proposed method, this study uses the Industrial Marketing and Purchasing (IMP) survey database, which includes data from firms in several European countries. The proposed method consists of two phases and seven steps, as illustrated in the context of the firm's incremental innovation generation for buyer,seller relationships. This systematic progression moves from a broad but valid empirical case study to the development of a narrow and reliable measure of incremental innovation generation in the IMP database. The proposed method can use supply chain survey databases for theory development without requiring primary data collection, assuming certain conditions. [source]