Exit Option Research Articles

Security practices in retail properties in a developing economy: a logistic analysis of impacts on customers’ satisfaction and patronage

PurposeThe purpose of this study is to examine the impact of a soft facility practice in the organized retail sector. In specifics, it draws context from a security practice and assesses its effect on customers’ satisfaction and patronage in retail properties.Design/methodology/approachThe research method is quantitative. The study used a survey research design with the use of a structured questionnaire for data collection. The data were collected from the head of households who purchase items in the retail shops. It applied a logistic regression model to estimate customers’ satisfaction and the effect of the current security practice on patronage.FindingsContrary to expectation, descriptive analysis of data shows that respondents were satisfied with the security procedure with weighted means scores (3.62, 3.74, 3.78 and 3.66) above average for bag check at exits, reconciliation of receipts with purchase, the attitude of security personnel during exit checks and time taken during exit checks. With specific reference to bag checks at the exit, logit shows that 32% were neutral while 8% were dissatisfied with the security practice. Among the dissatisfied, logit shows an odds ratio of 0.059, which implies that they are likely to verbally express their dissatisfaction with the shop. On the other hand, the chances that they would not do this are more likely with an odds ratio of 162818201.343. Further, continuous patronage (Loyalty) is strongly less likely with an odds ratio of 1.250E-22. This was corroborated by a similar odd ratio of 4.068E-11 estimated for those that would take the exit option due to the bag’s check.Research limitations/implicationsThe limitation of this study is that samples were randomly drawn from an unknown population of customers. However, the study was guided by Cochran (1963) to select a valid representative sample and support the reliability of the research findings.Practical implicationsThe findings on satisfaction imply that the convenience and swiftness associated with shopping in a retail shop had been eroded by the current security facility practices which may lead to a reduction in the growth and retail sector turnover. While many dissatisfied customers would have exited if there are alternative shops with more customer-friendly security practices, the limited number of organized retail shops in the study area will prevent this from happening.Originality/valueLiterature on the management of facilities in real estate is quite vast; however, not much attention has been paid to the management of security in the retail sector particularly in Nigeria. This study is, therefore, novel, as it provides seminal evidence on this important topic and will serve as a reference for further research in Nigeria.

A model for wind farm management with option interactions

A renewable energy site can expand its power generation capacity by an endogenous amount but may also want to shut down to save on fixed operating costs and interest payments if the market prospects deteriorate. We model such circumstances and derive managerial implications that help us explain real‐world conundrums, illustrating the intricate interactions between the operational decision to build up capacity and the financial decision to exit an industry. Shutting down may be delayed in the hope of expanding capacity upon recovery; an expansion may also be delayed in the presence of a valuable exit option. Numerical extensions provide further managerial insights. In particular, the presence of fixed or proportional financing costs may lead the firm to delay its expansion decision, but the scale of investment will only be affected by proportional costs. If herding behavior causes equipment prices to increase (respectively, decrease) when electricity prices are high (respectively, low), managers should invest earlier (respectively, later) and more (respectively, less) while equipment prices are low (respectively, high). Furthermore, although volume swings (due to capacity decommissionings and expansions) are marked in a homogeneous industry (when the default and expansion thresholds are reached), heterogeneity in the population of wind farms smooths out such effects.

One foot on shore: An analysis of global millionaires' demand for U.S. investor visas.

Each year, around 10,000 foreigners obtain a U.S. residence visa after investing half a million dollars or more. Who are the millionaires that acquire these visas and what motivates them to leave their home countries? To answer this question, I analyzed an original data set that combines U.S. visa statistics with data on global millionaire populations. The analysis produced three key findings. First, demand for investor visas was led by millionaires from countries that ranked lower in the global hierarchy of citizenship value. Second, most of the visas were acquired by Chinese millionaires, who recorded the world's highest application rate. Third, when the quality of democracy in a country declined, visa applications surged. These findings suggest that investor visas are used by elites in less developed countries to hedge against the risks associated with authoritarian rule. Such elites perceive investor visas as a foothold in a stable and democratic country that can provide an insurance policy or exit option.

Joint effects of voluntary participation and group selection on the evolution of altruistic punishment.

It is puzzling how altruistic punishment of defectors can evolve in large groups of nonrelatives, since punishers should voluntarily bear individual costs of punishing to benefit those who do not pay the costs. Although two distinct mechanisms have been proposed to explain the puzzle, namely voluntary participation and group-level competition and selection, insights into their joint effects have been less clear. Here we investigated what could be combined effects of these two mechanisms on the evolution of altruistic punishment and how these effects can vary with nonparticipants’ individual payoff and group size. We modelled altruistic punishers as those who contribute to a public good and impose a fine on each defector, i.e., they are neither pure punishers nor excluders. Our simulation results show that voluntary participation has negative effects on the evolution of cooperation in small groups regardless of nonparticipants’ payoffs, while in large groups it has positive effects within only a limited range of nonparticipants’ payoff. We discuss that such asymmetric effects could be explained by evolutionary forces emerging from voluntary participation. Lastly, we suggest that insights from social science disciplines studying the exit option could enrich voluntary participation models.

Should refugees in the European Union have voting rights?

ABSTRACT Most refugees residing in the European Union (EU) do not retain their voting rights in states of origin or lack the means to exercise them effectively. Most member states of the EU do not extend voting rights to refugees. This leaves a large population of refugees residing within the borders of the EU in a unique state of disenfranchisement. In this article, I consider this problem from a democratic perspective. Should refugees in the EU have voting rights? My answer turns on three aspects characterizing the circumstances of refugees: First, refugees reside in member states for an indeterminate, and typically protracted, amount of time without any exit options. Second, the political governance of the EU and its member states significantly shapes the lives of refugees. And third, refugees lack effective voting rights, and consequently, a meaningful political membership, in any political community across the world. In turn, based on an all-subjected principle of democratic inclusion, I argue that refugees should be secured state-level voting rights in member states, albeit with a condition of the period of residency. Moreover, they should have immediate voting rights at the supranational institutions of the EU such as the European Parliament.

Development of multimode gas-fired combined-cycle chemical-looping combustion-based power plant layouts.

Operation of power plants with carbon dioxide capture and sequestration (CCS) and without carbon dioxide capture and storage modes and energy penalty or energy utilization in such operations is of great significance. This work reports on two gas-fired pressurized chemical-looping combustion (CLC) power plant layouts with two inbuilt modes of flue gas exit, namely, one with carbon dioxide capture mode and the second mode is letting flue gas (consists of carbon dioxide and water) without capturing carbon dioxide. Without CCS mode, the higher thermal efficiencies of 54.06 and 52.63% are obtained for natural gas and syngas, respectively. In carbon capture mode, a net thermal efficiency of 52.13% is obtained with natural gas and 48.78% with syngas. The operating pressure of the air reactor is taken to be 13bar for realistic operational considerations, and that of the fuel reactor is 11.5bar. Two power plant layouts were developed based on combined-cycle chemical-looping combustion (CC CLC) for natural gas and syngas fuels. A single layout is developed for two fuels with a possible retrofit for dual fuel operation. The CLC power plants can be operated with two modes of flue gas exit options, and these operational options make them higher thermal efficient power plants.

Krym. Rossiya…Navsegda? Critical Junctures, Critical Antecedents, and the Paths Not Taken in the Making of Crimea’s Annexation

AbstractRussia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014 is widely framed as an outside-in process, not only enabled but also enacted by the Kremlin. Prevailing accounts privilege geopolitical analysis and place those developments in a broader narrative of tension and competition between the West and Russia. Such a narrative downplays the involvement of local actors and the importance of the choices they made prior to and during those events. This article revisits the period leading up to March 2014 through a focus on critical junctures, critical antecedents, a near miss, and the path not taken. It argues that a full account of Crimea’s incorporation into Russia – while acknowledging Moscow’s role – cannot ignore the local contingencies that preceded and shaped it. We understand the region’s annexation as a key moment of institutional change in Ukraine and focus our attention on explaining how that outcome was determined, identifying the path to such a political outcome. Yanukovych’s decision to “catapult” political-economic interest groups from Makeevka and Donetsk into the peninsula led to the marginalization of the local elite. Regime change in Kyiv and a slow and cumbersome response from the new authorities in February-March 2014 triggered, but did not cause, Crimea’s exit option.

Subsurface Technology Pivoting from Oil and Gas to Geothermal Resources: A Sensitivity Study of Well Parameters

Summary There is enough geothermal energy several miles underneath to supply more power globally than the entire oil and gas industry. Geothermal energy is renewable, abundant, and has a minimal carbon footprint. However, the current geothermal energy use is only 1% of the global energy production. To scale it up, several technical problems need to be solved, addressing how, where, and when to harness it safely, efficiently, and cost-effectively. In this paper, the synergies and differences between the hydrocarbon and geothermal wells are reviewed and an opportunity assessment and management framework are proposed to improve the outcomes of diverse geothermal hydrocarbon projects. Producing geothermal energy from existing hydrocarbon wells, as electricity and/or low-temperature waste heat, can yield significant advantages over traditional geothermal wells, especially in terms of reduced capital expenditure. Geothermal and hydrocarbon well studies related to geothermal hydrocarbon field development are reviewed, presenting the similarities and differences between the geothermal and hydrocarbon wells, and the challenges for economical geothermal hydrocarbon field development. To unlock the potential of geothermal hydrocarbon field development, several areas of research are identified and explored. There are many hydrocarbon wells drilled worldwide that are either abandoned or will be abandoned in the future. This inherently brings exit options repurposing these wells in terms of extracting residual value in an environmentally friendly way. There is a great potential to extract energy in the form of low-temperature waste heat and/or work with the right power fluids, including CO2. In this study, a numerical solution and several analytical solutions are presented for closed-loop wells (i.e., concentric pipes in wells). They can be extended to enhanced geothermal systems (EGSs) (i.e., injecting and producing casedhole wells with perforations along vertical, inclined, and horizontal sections) by allowing fluid inflow into the wells. The time- and space-dependent temperature solutions for all well configurations are obtained for time- and space-dependent fluid and flow properties. A sensitivity study is then performed, showing the effects of several parameters on the flowing fluid temperature for such parameters as the fluid flow rate, well length, inner tubing and annulus diameters, geothermal temperature, and overall heat transfer coefficients. Existing hydrocarbon fields produce larger volume of waste water over their lives, increasing their operating costs owing to greater water management expenditure. Conceptually, those operating costs could be reduced by electricity and/or heat coproduction. The proposed modeling approach is useful for the design of EGSs and closed-loop systems. It can also be used as an operational tool to monitor the well and reservoir performance over the life of a deep geothermal resource. Last but not least, it can be used to assess the conditions for economically converting abandoned oil and gas wells for sustainable geothermal energy production.

Tuition-free secondary education and women's attitudes toward intimate partner violence: Evidence from Sub-Saharan Africa

Intimate partner violence against women (IPVAW) is devastatingly common around the world. It rose further during the pandemic, increasing the urgency of finding interventions to prevent IPVAW and supporting women's ability to exit violent situations. Interventions that prevent violence and eliminate views among perpetrators that violence is acceptable should be top priority. It is also critical to study women's attitudes toward IPVAW as these shape women's responses to the abuse and their exit options. Moreover, research shows that these attitudes have a direct impact on women's health outcomes. We examine the effect of tuition-free secondary education on women's attitudes toward IPVAW across 29 Sub-Saharan African countries using data from the Demographic and Health Surveys conducted between 2000 and 2019. Using the difference-in-difference-in-differences strategy, we estimate the change in women's attitudes toward IPVAW in countries that implement tuition-free secondary policy compared with countries with tuition-free primary alone and those without any tuition-free policy during the study period. We find that while tuition-free primary education policy alone did not reduce the probability of IPVAW being perceived as justified, tuition-free secondary reduced it significantly. The probability that IPVAW was perceived as justified under at least one circumstance declined by 5.3 percentage points more on average in countries that adopted tuition-free policy up to the secondary level relative to those that adopted only up to the primary level. Tuition-free secondary affects four of the five circumstances under which IPVAW was perceived as justified — if she goes out without telling the husband, argues with him, neglects children or refuses sex. We observed no declines for when she burns food, suggesting different factors affecting this outcome. Our findings underscore the importance of making a stronger commitment toward policies that make secondary education more accessible to not only benefit education outcomes but also advance population health.

Venture Capital in the Rise of Sustainable Investment

In recent years, the world has witnessed a soaring inflow of capital into sustainable investment. This is particularly so following the devastating COVID-19 pandemic. However, while a growing amount of literature has been deliberating debt financing in sustainable investment, less ink has been spilt on equity financing in this area, and even less scholarship has explored the role of government and law in supporting sustainable venture capital (‘VC’) funds. This paper proposes a dualist approach towards facilitating the development of sustainable VC funds encompassing a contractarian strategy with government support. The contractarian approach includes effective contracting covering the entire VC cycle in sustainable investment. It aims to provide strong incentives for all participants, ranging from investors, entrepreneurs and fund managers, to credit-rating agencies and evaluation firms. In the same vein, this paper seeks to craft a role for regulators that facilitates the simultaneous availability of several factors in a sustainable VC cycle (i.e., fund raising, investment and exit). In the fund-raising stage, governments can play an active role by expanding the source of financing for sustainable VC funds and enacting detailed and targeted legislation. In the VC investment stage, sustainable VC funds should make full use of their strong corporate governance rights and monitoring tasks to ensure that start-ups deliver on their sustainable promises. In the exit stage, a specialised sustainability board is strongly recommended to offer viable exit options, together with greater standardisation and comparability in sustainability information disclosure, and regulatory support for trustworthy sustainable impact rating agencies to sustain investor confidence.

Partisan External Borrowing in Middle-Income Countries

AbstractWhy do middle-income country governments use costlier sovereign debt markets when cheaper finance is available from official creditors? This research note argues that left-leaning governments with labor and the poor as core constituencies are likely to prioritize markets in their annual foreign borrowings. This is because markets provide an exit option from official creditor conditions that have disproportionately negative effects on working classes. This finding puts limits on disciplinary assumptions that left-leaning governments should have relatively less access to sovereign debt markets and thus use them less. Instead, left-leaning middle-income countries are likely to use proportionally more market finance as they fulfill annual foreign borrowing needs. This, in turn, shapes which middle-income countries are likely to become relatively more exposed to global debt market costs and pressures as they accumulate external debt over time.

Homeowner associations and city cohesion

Homeowner Associations (HOAs) are an increasingly common form of attempts to provide localized public goods to a subset of residents in a city. As HOAs have increased in size and scope, there have been substantial debates about their benefit, and in particular, their impact on citizens who are not HOA members. One argument against HOAs has been a perception that they lessen city cohesion by setting some citizens o⁄ from others. We investigate one channel through which HOAs might improve city cohesion: their ability to dull the desire for wealthy city residents to attempt to leave or secede from a city. We also examine the degree to which poor residents might take the secession option of wealthy residents into account when they form their preferences regarding tax levels for the city. We conduct an economic experiment aimed at eliciting preferences people may have under these different circumstances. We find that HOA-like options can reduce the desire of the wealthy to exit a city and that the presence or absence of an exit option or an HOA option can also impact the tax requests by the poorer residents in a city. Both results suggest a previously unexamined benefit of allowing HOAs.

The Treatment Exit Options for Uveitis (TOFU) Registry: Involving Patients in the Generation of Evidence

Uveitis comprises a group of rare diseases characterised by intraocular inflammation which may cause vision impairment and blindness and mostly affects people of working age. Non-infectious uveitis involving the posterior pole or the entire eye is often treated with different immunomodulating or disease-modifying anti-rheumatic drugs (DMARDs). However, the evidence on long-term management strategies and reduction/termination of treatment is limited. To help develop treatment exit strategies for patients with quiescent uveitis on long-term DMARD treatment, the Treatment Exit Options for Non-infectious Uveitis registry was initiated by the German ophthalmological society. A key aspect of the registry is active participation of patients (patient-reported outcomes, PROs). In a pilot study involving members of patient organizations, a combination of questionnaires covering vision- and general health-related quality of life, adherence to treatment, productivity and effects of treatment were evaluated. As the pilot study showed coverage of relevant patient-related aspects of the disease and its effect on daily life, the evaluated questionnaires were implemented in the registry's patient module. The registry including the patient module uses the electronic data capture (EDC) software REDCap (Version 9, Vanderbilt University, USA). By involving patients in both conceptualization and ongoing data collection, the TOFU registry emphasizes the patients' perspectives, and the inclusion of patient-relevant evidence for such as the development of guidelines and treatment recommendations is ensured.

Sexing the Child

Sexing the Child

Understanding the effects of institutional diversity on irrigation systems dynamics

Comparative institutional analyses of social-ecological systems (SESs) have advanced our understanding of features and performances of single institutions such as state, market, and self-organized institutions. However, such studies have hardly extended our understanding of institutional diversity to combinations of different institutions and their joint impacts on the dynamics of SES. We address this gap by focusing on government-managed irrigation systems as a quintessential example of SESs. We developed a formal stylized model to examine how institutions affect social processes in a government-managed irrigation system. More specifically, we examine how infrastructure dynamics and farmers-agency interactions are affected under the coexistence of two institutions: groundwater market and participatory institutions. The former institutionalizes the use of private irrigation infrastructures as an exit option to the public infrastructure managed by a government agency (exit). The latter institutionalizes farmers' voicing of concerns and participation as a pressure mechanism on the agency (voice). The model results show that the joint effects of those institutions on system outcomes vary with the agency's reactions to the exit and voice. We also demonstrate that the silence option – use of neither option – is a double-edged sword. Silent farmers can impede infrastructure improvement, but in some cases, help it dramatically.

Type of Successful Cross-Border VC Exit: The Influence of Venture Age, US VCs, and Market Potential

We investigate the influence of venture age, influence of US VCs in syndicates, and market potential on the type of successful VC exit (trade sale and IPO) from cross-border venture investments. We theorize that VCs’ exit behavior would be motivated by returns from a specific exit as well as longer term benefits from the exit via accretion to their reputation, which leads to improved deal flow and lower search costs in the future. We also investigate how US VCs’ strength in the syndicate and market potential of the region influences venture timing and the exit type. We test our hypotheses in a sample of 995 exits outside the US by VC syndicates with US VCs as one of the partners. Our analysis controls for a variety of country, VC firm, VC fund, and portfolio firm (venture) level influences, as well as tests for potential selection bias. We find that venture age has a positive effect on the choice of TS as an exit option over IPO. Further, the strength of the US VC firms in the syndicate moderates this relationship toward favoring an IPO exit. Finally, we find support for the notion that VCs are more willing to wait for an IPO exit in fast-growing and high potential Asia Pacific region to build their reputation in the market than in the mature and slow-growth European market.

How Do Divided Societies Come About? Persistent Inequalities, Pervasive Asymmetrical Dependencies, and Sociocultural Polarization as Divisive Forces in Contemporary Society

The article looks at divisive forces in contemporary societies and links them to the unfulfilled hopes of the revolutions at the beginning of modernity: the hopes for equality, freedom, and fraternity/solidarity. There are, first, in the twenty-first century situation, persistent inequalities that emerge in all the function systems of society and that become divisive as soon as a discontinuous split arises in the distribution of rewards, a split that makes it improbable that someone might switch from one to the other side of a distribution. There are, second, strong asymmetrical dependencies that are connected to an escalation of controls by which persons and groups control resources wanted by others and furthermore build up controls regarding the actions, communications, exit options, and ways of perceiving the world available to these other ones. The more control dimensions are implied in a specific social relation, the stronger and more pervasive asymmetrical dependencies become and then definitely separate in society those who exercise controls from those who are objects of control. There is, third, as a structure of division, the rise of sociocultural polarization that creates a split between significant subcommunities of a society, on the basis of which communities perceive the members of other communities as strangers and as dangerous for the values and ways of life one regards as essential for one’s own community. The article finally explains these societal divisions by studying them as forms of inclusion and exclusion. Inequalities come from cumulations in the inclusion dynamics of function systems; asymmetrical dependencies emerge in institutions and groups that absorb persons that are being excluded from relevant participations; polarizations are based on reciprocal and totalizing exclusions by which communities define the members of other communities as radical “others.”

Resource Redeployment and Divestiture as Strategic Alternatives

What should the managers of a multibusiness firm do when their company’s resources are not used profitably? Research on redeployment proposes that managers should withdraw those resources from the business where they are underutilized and switch them to a business where they can be used more profitably, whereas the literature on divestiture advocates that managers should divest the business containing those resources. In this study, we investigate the factors that lead managers to choose resource redeployment over divestiture as a mode of exit and vice versa. Using a formal model, we establish that the two exit modes act as intertemporal substitutes, whereby redeployment dominates for earlier exits but divestiture dominates for later exits. Although both redeployment and divestiture are inversely related to their implementation costs, redeployment costs amplify the effect of divestiture costs on the likelihood of exit, and divestiture costs amplify the effect of redeployment costs on the likelihood of exit. Finally, we derive a series of results that show that disregarding one of these two exit options as a strategic alternative to the other may lead to misspecifications of empirical models that seek to predict the likelihood of redeployment, divestiture, or exit. Overall, our work contributes to the corporate strategy literature by uniting two streams of research that have largely remained disparate, yet whose insights have significant implications for each other.

Do exit options increase the value for money of public–private partnerships?

AbstractWe study the effects of granting an exit option allowing the private party to terminate a Public–Private Partnerships contract early if it turns out to be loss‐making. In a continuous‐time setting with hidden information about the private returns on investment, we show that an exit option, acting as a risk‐sharing device, can soften agency problems and, in so doing, spur investment and increase the government's expected payoff, even while taking into account the costs that the public sector will have to meet in the future to resume the project.

Access to Justice in Clientelist Networks

AbstractDespite its importance for poverty reduction, the poor face barriers when accessing justice. However, the literature, looking mostly at developed countries, focuses on the institutional underpinnings of these restrictions, and thus ignores social structural barriers. This paper deals with one type of social barrier; clientelism and its impact on poor clients’ access to justice. I argue that asymmetric power distribution enables patrons to bar clients from accessing formal institutions. Such barriers can’t be rectified through institutional reforms. Making use of an original dataset from Pakistan this paper recommends an unorthodox policy solution; increasing connectivity. I demonstrate how exit options, brought about through connectivity, alter bargaining powers, thereby limiting patrons’ ability to block clients from accessing formal justice institutions.