Promotion Incentives Research Articles

Career Concerns and 'Unpaid' Executives

A significant portion of CEOs in publicly-listed Chinese state-owned enterprises receive zero pay from the companies for which they work. Instead, they are paid directly by their controlling shareholder, which can be the Chinese government or parent firms that are controlled by the Chinese government. We explore how these “unpaid” executives are motivated and whether the outcomes of this unusual incentive mechanism differ from the conventional approach. Consistent with career concerns as their main incentive mechanism, we find that these CEOs have a significantly higher probability of future promotion than other CEOs. This result holds when we look at sub-samples in which individual CEOs switch payment regimes. We also find that compared to their peers with paid CEOs, firms with unpaid CEOs in general have higher return on assets, higher asset turnover, higher asset growth, and engage in less tunneling. To mitigate concerns of that our results are driven by CEO selection and to further investigate the use of implicit incentives, we conduct an event study using the Split Share Structure Reform in 2006. The Reform liberalized the Chinese stock market, thus strengthening the role of the market as an incentive mechanism. This mechanism provides a potential replacement for promotion incentives. Our evidence is generally consistent with a reduction in the strength of promotion incentives following the reform.

Financial incentives for a healthy life style and disease prevention among older people: a systematic literature review.

BackgroundTo motivate people to lead a healthier life and to engage in disease prevention, explicit financial incentives, such as monetary rewards for attaining health-related targets (e.g. smoking cessation, weight loss or increased physical activity) or disincentives for reverting to unhealthy habits, are applied. A review focused on financial incentives for health promotion among older people is lacking. Attention to this group is necessary because older people may respond differently to financial incentives, e.g. because of differences in opportunity costs and health perceptions. To outline how explicit financial incentives for healthy lifestyle and disease prevention work among older persons, this study reviews the recent evidence on this topic.MethodsWe applied the method of systematic literature review and we searched in PUBMED, ECONLIT and COCHRANE LIBRARY for studies focused on explicit financial incentives targeted at older adults to promote health and stimulate primary prevention as well as screening. The publications selected as relevant were analyzed based on directed (relational) content analysis. The results are presented in a narrative manner complemented with an appendix table that describes the study details. We assessed the design of the studies reported in the publications in a qualitative manner. We also checked the quality of our review using the PRISMA 2009 checklist.ResultsWe identified 15 studies on the role of explicit financial incentives in changing health-related behavior of older people. They include both, quantitative studies on the effectiveness of financial rewards as well as qualitative studies on the acceptability of financial incentives. The quantitative studies are characterized by a great diversity of designs and provide mixed results on the effects of explicit financial incentives. The results of the qualitative studies indicate limited trust of older people in the use of explicit financial incentives for health promotion and prevention.ConclusionsMore research is needed on the effects of explicit financial incentives for prevention and promotion among older people before their broader use can be recommended. Overall, the design of the financial incentive system may be a crucial element in their acceptability.Electronic supplementary materialThe online version of this article (doi:10.1186/s12913-016-1517-0) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

Exploring continued use of mobile shopping channel in China: the effects of active coping and its antecedents

Online B2C retailers in China rely heavily on exclusive promotions for mobile shopping to attract new consumers and to promote their mobile shopping channels. However, it is unknown what factors may drive new consumers to continuously do mobile shopping without further promotional incentives. Motivated by the theoretical gap and practical salience of this question, in this study we propose a research model based on coping theory that highlights the critical role of active coping in handling mobile shopping procedures, and further identifies important dispositional traits of consumers and situation-specific factors that are either beneficial or harmful to their coping efforts. We recruited participants for a real mobile shopping task and collected pre-task and post-task survey data to test the research hypotheses. The results reveal important factors that are influential to consumers' continued use of mobile shopping through a coping mechanism, which contributes to deepening the understanding of user behavior in mobile shopping both from an academic perspective and in practice.

Sustainability analysis of the electric vehicle use in Europe for CO2 emissions reduction

Electric vehicles are considered the most promising alternative to internal combustion engine vehicles towards a cleaner transportation sector. Having null tailpipe emissions, electric vehicles contribute to fight localized pollution, which is particularly important in overpopulated urban areas. However, the electric vehicle implies greenhouse gas emissions related to its production and to the electricity generation needed to charge its batteries. This study focuses the analysis on how the electric vehicle emissions vary when compared to internal combustion engine vehicles, depending on the electric power plant fleet and the efficiency during the use-phase. For this to be done, the Global Warming Potential (GWP) associated to the electricity generation on the electric vehicle most selling European countries are calculated. Similarly, electric vehicle's use-phase energy efficiency is calculated under a wide range of driving conditions using the Monte Carlo method. The results from energy production and energy use-phases are compared to the GWP calculated for internal combustion engine vehicles for six different driving cycles, to obtain the threshold values for which electric vehicles provide GWP reduction. These threshold values are then matched with the current electricity power plant fleet and the electric vehicle promotion incentives of the European countries considered in the study, showing that some countries (e.g. France or Norway) are better-suited for electric vehicles adoption, while countries like Spain or Portugal should boost electric vehicle promotion policies. Furthermore, other countries in Europe, such as Germany or the UK that are doing an effort on decarbonizing their power plant fleet, do not offer immediate greenhouse gas emission reductions for the uptake of electric vehicles instead of conventional cars.

Liking and Following and the Newsvendor: Operations and Marketing Policies Under Social Influence

We consider a monopolistic firm selling two substitutable products to a stream of sequential arrivals whose purchase decisions can be influenced by earlier purchases. Before demand realizes, the firm faces a newsvendor problem for the two products with economies of scale in production for each. When consumers are responsive to others’ decisions, social influence amplifies demand uncertainty, leading to a lower profit for the firm. We propose three solutions for the firm to better cope with or even benefit from social influence: influencer recruitment and a reduced product assortment either before demand realization (ex ante) or under production postponement (ex post). First, the firm can offer promotional incentives to recruit consumers as influencers. We reveal an operational benefit of influencer marketing that a very small fraction of such influencers is sufficient to diminish sales’ unpredictability. Second, as the potential substitutability between products increases due to social influence, the firm may leverage the increased substitutability and enjoy lower cost in production by reducing product assortment before demand realization. Last, under production postponement, the firm can take advantage of the way that social influence results in demand herding and reduce product varieties by reacting to preorder information. This paper was accepted by Martin Lariviere, operations management.

Local government innovation diffusion in China: an event history analysis of a performance-based reform programme

The performance-based reform programme launched by Fujian province in 2000 has been adopted by many other Chinese provinces, including Zhejiang, Hebei, Anhui and Sichuan, over the past 12 years. This article aims to explore the antecedents of the adoption of this programme, in particular, the effects of senior figures' political promotion incentives and diffusion mechanisms. Specifically, event history analysis based on probit regression is used to examine data from 31 Chinese provinces for the 2000–2012 period. The results show that leaders' relative age and chances of being appointed to the Politburo, and distance to the general election, are significantly negatively correlated with the reform programme's adoption, but top-down diffusion is significantly positively correlated with it. Points for practitioners This study confirms that the nomenklatura system in China shapes the diffusion of innovations through the mechanisms of political promotion incentives and intergovernmental interactions. Thus, the dynamics of innovation diffusion are, to some extent, rooted in particular political institutions and shaped by political contexts. Furthermore, the desire for political promotions may figure as a general deep reason for decisions about whether to adopt innovations; therefore, strengthening these incentives for adopting reforms becomes a key strategy.

Online airline ticket purchasing: Influence of online sales promotion type and Internet experience

PurposeThe aim is to assess which type of online promotional incentive (that is, a price discount, a luggage set, or two nights' hotel accommodation) is the most effective at achieving purchase intention for airline tickets, depending on the user's level of Internet experience (characterized as novice or expert user). Design/methodology/approachA Univariate General Linear Model is conducted, based on data obtained via an experimental design with three levels: monetary online sales promotion, non-monetary utilitarian online sales promotion and non-monetary hedonic online sales promotion. FindingsThe findings indicate that, in the case of acquiring an airline ticket online, discounts are more appealing to novice Internet users, while free hotel accommodation is preferred by expert users. Originality/valueThe present study breaks new ground in that it examines, in the airline sector, the effectiveness of online sales promotions at prompting the individual to purchase online, in a comparative analysis based on online sales incentive type (monetary, non-monetary utilitarian, non-monetary hedonic). The work contributes to the literature on the online airline sector by analyzing how the user's level of Internet experience affects the effectiveness of each type of online sales promotion.

Career Concerns and 'Unpaid' Executives

A significant portion of CEOs in publicly-listed Chinese state-owned enterprises receive zero pay from the companies for which they work. Instead, they are paid directly by their controlling shareholder who can be the Chinese government or parent firms controlled by the Chinese government. While their actual pay is unobservable, it is known to be low and contain few performance-based incentives. We explore how these parent-paid executives are motivated and whether the outcomes of this unusual incentive differ from conventional compensation. Consistent with career concerns as their main incentive, we find that these CEOs have a significantly higher probability of future promotion than other CEOs. We also conduct an event study using the Split Share Structure Reform in 2005. The reform liberalized the Chinese stock market and enhanced the role of the market mechanisms that potentially replaced promotion incentives in executive compensation contracts. Our evidence is generally consistent with a reduction in the strength of promotion incentives following the reform. Further analyses indicate that, compared to peers that directly pay their CEOs, firms with parent-paid CEOs have higher return on assets and asset growth, and they experience less tunneling by their shareholders.

Planowanie komunikacji mobilnej marki

The growing popularity of mobile devices is accompanied by a systematic increase in their share of the consumer’s contact time with mass media. Managers aware of those changes spend an increasing proportion of budgets on mobile communication. Its uniqueness is primarily due to contextual nature of mobile communication, as the messages on the screens of smartphones and tablets have a chance to appear just before deciding to purchase a product or even while the consumer is in store. Mobile com-munication creates a great opportunity to test a variety of message platforms and nature of promotional incentives so that later only those that prove to be effective can be used on a mass scale. Traditional approach to marketing communication planning, in which managers try to match characteristics of media audience to the (mainly) demographic characteristics of target audience turns out to be inadequate to the specifics of mobile communications. The article suggests to take as a starting point for mobile communications’ planning process the diagnosis of “mobile maturity” of target audience and inclusion of the stage on “consumer journey” in which she is subjected to the influence of mobile communication. Possibilities for its use are in fact very different at various stages, with the widest to be at the stage of active consideration of competing brands and during purchase at the store. Selected tools (eg mobile applications) can be extremely effective at other stages of the journey (in this particular case - at the stage of brand relationship building). If you also manage to combine different mobile actions with realization of sales targets there is a chance for implementation of the requirement of calculating return on investment of mobile brand communications.

International Scientific Publication in ISI Journals: Chances and Obstacles

Recently, many universities have started to do their best to enhance their contribution in the scientific publication.Thus, researchers and faculty members have been offered many various financial and promotional incentives forpublishing their papers in international journals, particularly the ISI ones. The present study aims to identify theopportunities and obstacles that faculty members at Najran University can obtain by publishing in ISI journals. Inaddition, distinction of the most important obstacles that can hinder such publication was another aim of the presentstudy. Based on intensive review of related literature and a series of structured interviews, a questionnaire wasdeveloped, validated and verified. A stratified sampling method was used to choose participants of this study.Findings revealed that the contribution of ISI Journals to the identification of globally well-known journals, thedevelopment of participants’ skills of refereed scientific publication in international journals, and the provision ofpositive attitudes towards scientific publication were the most important opportunities researchers have got. However,high standards of ISI journals, mastery of foreign languages, mainly English, and the originality of high intellectualtopics were the most important barriers or obstacles that faculty members encountered when trying to publish theirarticle papers in ISI journals. No statistically significant differences due to study variables regarding theopportunities were found. Nevertheless, significant differences due to specialization and previous knowledge ofpublication in ISI Journals were found.

Promotion Incentives, Performance Pay, and Human Capital Acquisition

The paper provides empirical evidence how promotion incentives and performance pay are related to nonverifiable human capital acquisition contingent on its grade of firm specificity. Consistent with Prendergast (1993), I document that promotion incentives are positively related to nonverifiable firm-specific human capital acquisition whereas individual performance pay (i.e., piece rates or productivity payments) is not related to such acquisition. If human capital is general rather than firm-specific, i.e., can also be utilized in other firms (Becker, 1962), I find that individual performance pay is positively related to such general human capital acquisition and there is no such relation for promotion incentives.

IT Contract Flexibility and Negotiator Incentives

Information Technology outsourcing contracts are plagued by inflexibility. We develop an economic model to explain how the contract negotiator's incentives influence contract flexibility. We show that neither wage nor one‐time commission type pay gives any preference for flexibility. However, a promotion incentive, where the bonus is an ongoing bonus, does give the negotiator a preference for less flexible contracts. The preference for less flexible contracts increases as the discount rate increases. The preference for less flexible contracts increases as the number of competitors for the promotion increases. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Water Pollution Progress at Borders: The Role of Changes in China's Political Promotion Incentives

At political boundaries, local leaders have weak incentives to reduce polluting activity because the social costs are borne by downstream neighbors. This paper exploits a natural experiment set in China in which the central government changed the local political promotion criteria and thus incentivized local officials to reduce border pollution along specific criteria. We document evidence of pollution progress with respect to targeted criteria at province boundaries. Heavy metal pollutants, not targeted by the central government, have not decreased in concentration after the regime shift. Using data on the economic geography of key industrial water polluters, we explore possible mechanisms. (JEL D72, O13, O18, P25, P28, Q25, Q53)

Politicians' Promotion Incentives and Bank Risk Exposure in China

This paper shows that politicians’ pressure to climb the career ladder increases bank risk exposure in their region. Chinese local politicians are set growth targets in their region that are relative to each other. Growth is stimulated by debt-financed programs which are mainly financed via bank loans. The stronger the performance incentive the riskier the respective local bank exposure becomes. This effect holds primarily for local banks which are under a certain degree of control of local politicians and it has increased with the release of recent stimulus packages requiring local co-financing.

Assessing Risky Behavior of PWIDs in Georgia - Comparable Analyses of Two Samples

Background: Consumption of injecting drugs (mostly home-made drugs) and correspondingly needle sharing practice remains the main factor of spreading HIV among people who inject drugs (PWID) (55%) in Georgia. According to last BSS studies there are estimated 45 000 injecting drug users in the country [1,2]. Significant amount of PWID still are beyond existing needle and syringe Programs (NSP) and have never tested on HIV (75%) [3]. The most hidden group for NSP programs are female and young PWIDs who are been considered to be one of the most vulnerable sub-population in this group. Needle and syringe program is being operating in 11 cities of Georgia and is represented by 14 harm reduction sites throughout the country. The program ensures coverage of significant portion of PWIDs (10,000-12,000 per month), and offers different services for HIV/AIDS prevention. Among delivered services Peer Driven Intervention (PDI) is one of the meaningful efforts to attract drug users to HIV prevention programs from more hidden sub-populations [4]. PDI is the comparatively newly developed model for attraction the population of difficult availability for AIDS prevention programs, to facilitate distribution and consideration of the correct information, PDI reveals effective in the direction of HIV-AIDS educational prevention. Recruiting the drug users by the peers is carried out by means of monetary, promotional incentives -however it is comparatively cheap, compared to the traditional outreach model and is successfully applied for covering the large sample of the various groups of drug users - female and young drug users [5]. Peers attracted by PDI are mostly never reached by any HIV programs, accordingly their knowledge and risky behavior stayed relatively unfavorable and poor.

Tastes of Home in Mid-Twentieth-Century Ireland: Food, Design, and the Refrigerator

This article focuses on promotional incentives to embed new technologies—represented in this case by the refrigerator—and modern kitchen design in mid-twentieth-century Irish homes to consider how taste might have stimulated the trajectory through which these incursions of modernity ultimately became normalized in the Irish domestic foodscape. Strategies that called upon taste both as a gustatory experience and as a quality associated with some sanctioned manifestation of architecture and design were employed and became interdependent in these projects. Three examples derived from Irish popular culture—a full-scale model kitchen created for exhibition purposes, an advertisement that appeared in a weekly magazine, and a selection of cookbooks—are examined to investigate how the introduction of refrigerators in the domestic foodscape might have affected changes in taste and foodways. The rationale for studying tastes of home in this way is to underscore the efficacy of thinking about both direct as well as more remote stimuli for changes in food habits and practices, some of which are to be found outside predictable production, distribution and consumption systems.

Expert vs. novice users: Comparative analysis of the effectiveness of online discounts and gifts

This study analyzes whether experienced and new Internet users react differently to online discounts and gifts. The results obtained in a multi-group SEM analysis show that experienced users are more influenced by online sales promotions and have a greater purchase intention than new users. However, although both groups of Internet users show a predisposition to purchase the promoted service, experts form an opinion about the Web advertisements when they see an online discount and they change their attitude toward the brand when they see an online gift, while no significant differences are observed in the novice users’ response to promotional incentives. The findings of this research help us understand better the way Internet users process different types of promotional incentives communicated through banners, and to what extent the experience in the use of Internet affects that process.

Promotion Incentives in the Public Sector: Evidence from Chinese Schools

We provide the first evidence that promotion incentives can influence effort of employees in the public sector by studying China’s system of annual evaluations and promotions for teachers. Theoretical predictions from a tournament model of promotion incentives are tested using panel data on primary and middle school teachers in western China. Consistent with theory, we find that promotions are associated with significant wage increases, that higher wage increases are associated with higher effort, that teachers increase effort in the years leading up to promotion eligibility but reduce effort if they are repeatedly passed over for promotion, and that increasing the number of competitors reduces the relative performance of those at the extremes of the skill distribution. Evaluation scores are positively associated with time spent on teaching and with student test scores, diminishing concerns that evaluations are manipulated.

Prescribing practices of non teaching general practitioners of private clinics and physicians of a tertiary care teaching hospital: a comparative cross sectional study

Background: Doctor’s prescription provides vivid information and instruction to the patient. In spite of the WHO programs, irrational prescribing is still a common practice. Aim: To evaluate and compare the prescribing pattern of private practitioners and physicians of a tertiary care teaching hospital in a semi urban area and detect their rationality. Materials & methods: 150 prescriptions, each prescribed by private practitioners and physicians of a tertiary care hospital were collected over a period of two months and evaluated. Information regarding the drugs used, drugs from the essential drug list, the use of injections, fixed dose combinations, drug prescribed by generic names were observed. Results: The average number of drugs per prescription prescribed by the private practitioners was 2.47 compared to 1.58 by the physicians of a tertiary care hospital. 82% of prescriptions of private practitioners had one injection prescribed in the prescription compared to 12% by physicians of a tertiary care hospital. 30 unnecessary drugs, 46 unnecessary injections and 8 irrational fixed dose combinations were prescribed by the private practitioners, whereas only 6 unnecessary drugs and 2 unnecessary injections were prescribed by the physicians of a tertiary care hospital respectively. There was no irrational fixed dose combination prescribed by them. The private practitioners prescribed 12 (3.2%) drugs by generic names, whereas the physicians of a tertiary care hospital prescribed 72 (30.3%) drugs by generic names. (P<0.000). 36 (9.7%) drugs prescribed by the private practitioners were not included in the essential drug list and only 2 (0.8%) drugs prescribed by the physicians of a tertiary care hospital were not included in the essential drug list. Conclusion: Private practitioners prescribe more irrational prescriptions on comparison with the physicians of a tertiary care teaching hospital. This may be due to the promotional pharmaceutical incentives, lack of professional updates and lack of standard treatment guidelines to the private practitioners motivating them towards irrational drug therapy to survive the competition. Competitions can be conducted for the budding medical undergraduates to inculcate the importance of rational drug therapy at early ages.

Political Promotion, CEO Incentives, and the Relationship Between Pay and Performance

Both theory and empirical evidence suggest that managers’ career concerns can serve as an important source of implicit economic incentives. We examine how incentives for political promotion are related to compensation policy and firm performance in Chinese state-owned enterprises. We find that the likelihood that the CEO receives a political promotion is positively related to firm performance. We also find that CEOs with a higher likelihood of political promotion have lower pay levels and lower pay–performance sensitivity. Overall, the evidence suggests that competition in the political job market helps mitigate weak monetary incentives for CEOs in China. Data are available at https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2017.2966 . This paper was accepted by Lauren Cohen, finance.