Markets today are flooded with an increasing number of products and brands, making it difficult for companies to track how their products compete in the market. In this article, the authors describe how they used clickstream data to visualize competition in product categories containing more than 1,000 products.
The investigations following the attacks of September 11, 2001, showed that our ability to verify a person’s identity is crucial to our national security. As pointed out by The 9/11 Commission Report (National Commission on Terrorists Attacks Upon the United States, 2004), travel documents are as important as weapons for terrorists. To carry out an attack on American soil, foreign terrorists must cross our borders—which requires passing an identification screening. A valid passport also allows a terrorist to obtain other valid documents (e.g., driver’s license, credit cards, health insurance card) that are important to performing normal life activities while maintaining a low profile and avoiding detection. Four projects, currently in different stages of implementation, use Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) or Machine-Readable Zones (MRZ) technologies for verification and validation of identity in the United States. These programs are (1) e-Passport, (2) PASS Card, (3) Real ID, and (4) Enhanced Driver’s License. The use of RFID enables data to be stored electronically in chips embedded in identification documents and shared quickly in digital format by law enforcement personnel. Documents with RFID chips and a secure networking environment to exchange data are deemed more secure and less prone to counterfeiting than conventional, non-electronic documents. However, there is still debate about how to best balance the security benefits from RFID-enabled identification documents with concerns about privacy.
In this paper, we build on research on the microfoundations of strategy and learning processes to study the individual underpinnings of organizational learning. We argue that once an individual has accumulated a certain amount of experience with a task, the benefit of accumulating additional experience is inferior to the benefit of deliberately articulating and codifying the experience accumulated in the past.
We study the problem of dynamically assigning jobs to workers with two key aspects: (i) workers gain or lose familiarity with jobs over time based on whether they are assigned or unassigned to the jobs, and (ii) the availability of workers and jobs is stochastic. This problem is motivated by applications in operating room management, where a fundamental challenge is maintaining familiarity across the workforce over time by accounting for heterogeneous worker learning rates and stochastic availability.
The essence of a brand is that it delivers on its promises. However, consumers’ trust in brands (CTB) has declined around the world in recent decades. As a result, CTB has become a major concern for managers. The authors examine whether CTB is influenced by marketing-mix activities (i.e., advertising, new product introduction, distribution, price, and price promotion) implemented by brands.
Higher education is in crisis and its leaders are handicapped by a lack of reliable data. We are entering an era that will require more informed decision making in higher education and unfortunately the underlying data, especially benchmarking performance information, do not exist to support such strategic thinking and change.
The coronavirus pandemic has been especially traumatic on our country’s African American working poor. From being disproportionately concentrated in low-wage hospitality and service sector jobs to struggling with caregiving and food insecurity issues due to shuttered daycare facilities and food banks, working-poor African Americans are facing an inequitable share of financial, social and psychological challenges. What can be done to ease the burdens of working-poor African Americans, both during the pandemic and moving forward? In this Kenan Insight, Urban Investment Strategies Center Director and William R. Kenan Jr. Distinguished Professor of Strategy and Entrepreneurship Jim Johnson invokes a little-known federal program, the Southeast Crescent Regional Commission (SCRC), as part of a strategic response to providing a coherent, place-based development plan.
It is common wisdom that practice makes perfect. And, in fact, we find evidence that when given a choice between practicing a task and reflecting on their previously accumulated practice, most people opt for the former. We argue in this paper that this preference is misinformed. Using evidence gathered in ten experimental studies (N = 4,340) conducted across different environments, geographies, and populations, we provide a rich understanding of the conditions under which the marginal benefit of reflecting on previously accumulated experience is superior to the marginal benefit of accumulating additional experience.
We study a longitudinal fit model of adaptation and its association with the longitudinal risk-return relationship. The model allows the firm to adjust its position in response to partial learning about a changing environment characterized by two path-dependent processes—a random walk and a stochastic trend.
Caller abandonment could depend on their past waiting experiences. Using Cox regressions we show that callers who abandoned or waited for a shorter time in the past abandon more in the future. However, Cox regression approach does not shed light on callers’ prior belief about the duration of their delays.
Since 2001, the number of one-quarter-ahead financial items forecasted by analysts and disseminated via FactSet and I/B/E/S data feeds has risen from 5 to 170+. We show that the income statement, cash flow statement, balance sheet, ratio/other, and KPI forecast surprises related to this dissemination are strongly associated with increases in the information content of earnings announcements.
In this paper, we compare several approaches of producing multi-period-ahead forecasts within the GARCH and RV families – iterated, direct, and scaled short-horizon forecasts. We also consider the newer class of mixed data sampling (MIDAS) methods.
Co-hosted by the North Carolina Office of the US Economic Development Administration and the North Carolina Outdoor Recreation Industry Office at the Economic Development Partnership of North Carolina, NCGrowth’s Blueway Guide provides communities the tools they need to leverage waterways for economic development and increased quality of life. Speakers will include outdoor industry businesses, economic development professionals and community leaders.
U.S. President Donald Trump’s administration has recently ramped up efforts to keep immigrants from entering the country and force out some who are already here – arguing these to be necessary measures to contain the spread of COVID-19 and protect American jobs. However, in this Kenan Insight, we summarize why these policies risk having exactly the opposite effect, harming the future health, social well-being and economic viability of our nation.
As the historic 2020 U.S. presidential election draws nearer, voters are taking stock of the impact the COVID-19 pandemic has had on their lives and livelihoods, and demanding that policymakers present their plans for economic recovery. In this Kenan Insight, we look at the major forces reshaping the U.S. economy and offer suggestions for forging an intentional and equitable path forward.
The emerging theory-based view depicts entrepreneurs as sophisticated thinkers who form, update, and act on rich causal theories. In support of this view, recent empirical work has demonstrated both (a) the value of theories as well as (b) the importance of experimentation for testing and refining theories. Yet, the process by which entrepreneurs initially form these theories remains largely unobserved.
As we approach the one-year mark of state-issued stay-at-home orders, the short- and long-term impact of the global COVID-19 pandemic on state coffers is still being assessed. With businesses forced to close and unemployment at near-record levels, state policymakers are scrambling to find ways to make up for lost tax revenue. In this Kenan Insight, we look at both the challenges and opportunities for balancing state budgets in light of this new economic reality.
In this week’s data commentary we’ll provide our usual review of health statistics, but primarily focus on what is an increasingly perilous juncture for both the U.S. and North Carolina economies. Specifically, the failure of Congress to agree on a new stimulus plan is feeling more and more like a game of chicken, with U.S. households standing between the onrushing vehicles. Hopefully, there is still time to slam the brakes on the rhetoric and approach the problem with solid economic logic.
An analysis shows the overall number of suppliers and countries supplying goods did not change significantly from 2019 to 2021. Companies did shift away from riskier countries like China, and delivery patterns also changed.