Publications

Governments promote pro-environmental behavior explicitly, through regulatory provisions, or implicitly, by setting general environmental objectives without explicit requirements. Shared values and commitment to government objectives supposedly help towards greener behavior. We argue that the lack of explicit guidance counteracts, especially if green options are perceived as conflicting with strict regulatory requirements on other issues. In Russian public procurement, organizations are subject to either a rigid procurement law, or a flexible law, or both; neither law formalizes environmental priorities or approaches. We design a survey on practices of green procurement, collecting 223 responses from the whole range of organizations subject to public procurement regulation. Results from probit regressions, robustified on further 800 responses from an additional survey and 250 000 official procurement records, show that regulatory rigidity hinders green practices. Federal authorities are more likely to apply environmental criteria than local governments, but this is rather due to the expertise of their staff than to their commitment to governmental objectives. Publicly funded institutions are less likely to adopt green procurement than state corporations. Caution and avoidance of unintended contraventions seem to impede adoption of green procurement. Provision of information, guidance and improved expertise can help overcome this effect.  

Background/Objectives

The study considers the problem of the inclusion of people with obesity in the context of the growing role of computer-based work. Negative stereotypes about people with obesity still hold even when they are irrelevant in tasks that require little physical activity.

Subjects/Methods

Using data from the realm of competitive video gaming (eSports) and image recognition-based metric of body mass index metric derived from artificial intelligence, we examine the individual performance depending on weight. The sample includes 821 players and 127,533 player performance observations.

Results

For shorter tasks, individuals with normal weight performed better than individuals with obesity. For longer tasks, however, people with Class III (severe) obesity outperformed all others, and their advantage increased with task duration.

Conclusions

Our findings shed light on an understanding of how actually body features are related to objective individual performance in a competitive context.

Several disciplines claim interest in the subject of public–private partnerships (PPPs) – including medicine, healthcare, public administration, management, economics, urban studies, accounting, law and others, in no particular order. Academic texts that use ‘public–private partnership’ and simultaneously one of the above discipline names (as a proxy for a subject inclination of the text) grow exponentially and roughly at the same pace across all subjects; see Figure 4.1(a). The interest in this topic among major publishing houses that print academic journals also seems to be roughly equal (Emerald being the only exception) – Figure 4.1(b) shows that the percentage of papers that mention ‘public–private partnership’ steadily grows from the 1980s onwards. All this might give a happy and glamourous picture of a sustained growth in interdisciplinary research on the topic, uniformly covering a variety of perspectives and critical angles.

Purpose

This study examines whether CEO power influences the book-based and market-based performance of Russian companies when it is restricted by the presence of essential shareholders, namely, state and influential businessmen.

Design/methodology/approach

Managerial power is divided into structural, ownership, expert, and prestige. The proposed power metrics include not only CEOs but also the Bboard of directors'’ characteristics that may restrict or enhance CEO power. The empirical analysis is based on the sample of 90 large traded Russian firms, which shares are included in the Moscow Stock Exchange Broad Market Index (MICEX BMI), observed from 2012 to 2019.

Findings

Panel data analysis suggests that higher board ownership and tenure may restrict CEO power, which in turn would be beneficial for corporate performance. the authorsWe also see that in companies owned by influential businessmen, CEO power influence on M/B value is more negative, while state ownership does not moderate it. CEO power metrics, based on political experience and tenure, affect corporate performance differently in companies affiliated with extractive industries.

Originality/value

First, wethe authors consider two channels through which a company in emerging markets may get additional resources: CEOs and influential owners. Second, the authorswe develop power metrics based on Finkelstein's managerial power classification (1992) and the idea of relative power proposed by Bebchuk et al. (2011). It allows identifying whether the Bboard of directors'’ may constrain or enhance CEO power to raise corporate performance. Third, the authorswe analyze developing Russian markets that represent a good ground for testing theour question, whereas empirical research on Russia is relatively scarce (Grosman and Leiponen, 2018). Fourth, the authorswe pay particular attention to the CEO power in the extractive industry, strategically important for the Russian economy.

The paper aims to reveal the attitude of the Russian competition authorities towards cross-border mergers involving foreign buyers. The study addresses the following question: Is the probability of Russian competition authorities’ intervention significantly different when a foreign buyer takes part in the merger? This is the key test to reveal whether competition authorities gravitate towards “economic nationalism” or “promotion of foreign investments”. The discrete choice model is applied to the dataset of 7,607 merger cases investigated by the Russian competition authorities between 2012 and 2017. The probability of competition authorities’ intervention, such as merger correction by using remedies or deal rejection, is used as a measure of special attention. The study finds out favoritism patterns of the regulator with regard to foreign companies. In particular, the deals involving a foreign buyer had less chance of intervention, i.e. imposition of remedies, from national competition authorities. The sanctions period does not moderate the probability of approval of a crossborder merger with foreign buyers by the Russian competition authorities. The paper contributes to merger control literature by addressing the political economy issues. It discovers that, besides regulation by the law, there are hidden motives, such as protectionism or favoritism of foreign companies, which could drive the regulator’s decision. Therefore, the studies of crossborder mergers provide an opportunity to investigate the political issues of merger control through the identification of a special attitude to foreign companies and analysis of regularities that might explain such a policy.

Purpose

Focusing on managerial problems related to the measurement of intangibles, this paper develops and validates a hedonic-pricing methodology for the evaluation of the intangible resources of companies obtaining their shadow prices.

Design/methodology/approach

The paper adapts a hedonic-pricing methodology developed primarily for markets in real estate and secondhand cars to define how much intangibles may contribute to companies' market value. A certain calibration of the original tool has been developed to make this methodology appropriate for interpretation and practical use. The main advantage of this approach is that it allows for an evaluation of the shadow prices of intangible resources. These prices can be interpreted as the market value of the intangible resources which are not reflected on the balance sheet.

Findings

The results of this study demonstrate that hedonic pricing with a self-selection correction generates robust estimates. As one can see, the positive contribution of a high endowment of intangibles for all shadow prices is confirmed through estimations using two different techniques. Meanwhile, the negative effect of a low endowment is even more evident for the baseline model. This model shows consistent negative shadow prices for the majority of underinvested intangibles. Brands have the highest shadow prices in the introduced models; human capital, as measured by the qualification of top management and investments in employees, has likewise demonstrated high prices. However, most structural resources seem to be not reflected to a large degree in companies' market value.

Practical implications

This paper brings new opportunities to obtain the monetary value of intangible resources based on estimated market prices of a corporation's resource portfolio. These prices may be used for several purposes – for example, benchmarking for performance management, capital budgeting or knowledge-management practices. Moreover, by having methodological value, this study opens ways to evaluate any other intangibles which are not explicitly discussed in the empirical test of this particular study.

Originality/value

This study primarily contributes to the methodological advancement of evaluation of corporate intangible resources. It departs from the conventional hedonic-pricing mechanism to identify cogent estimates to intangibles in monetary terms. Importantly, this mechanism implies individual shadow prices for specific intangible resources which makes the contribution of this study unique for the existing literature, both within resource-based and value-based views.

Tournament theory has been supported by many pieces of empirical research in different fields. However, tournament theory literature focuses largely on the incentives of individual competitors. In our paper we develop a model the organizer choice between team and individual tournament and suggest a model of rank-order tournaments between teams. We test its implications using eSports (competitive video gaming) data. We show that both team and individual results follow tournament theory, however, there is a difference between the motivation of groups and individuals. Our study provides insights on the optimal reward structure, which should maximize effort of contestants, and, in the case of sports tournaments, entertainment value of the events.

This article contributes to the development of contestable market theory by investigating how competitiveness in the eSports industry influences the size of this industry, as measured by the volume of monetary prizes. We use data on each gamer's prize earnings for each tournament from 1999 to 2015 to estimate panel vector autoregression (VAR) model with fixed effects. The main finding is that competition does not increase industry size. This result confirms the hypothesis from the contestable market theory that perfect competition does not always facilitate better development, especially in industries where natural barriers result in a small number of leading firms or teams.

Purpose: This study examines the impact of influential shareholders, namely, state and influential businessmen, on the dividend policies of firms. A special focus is made on the causal effect of exogenous changes: general and personal economic sanctions leading to toughened state policies concerning dividends. 

Design/methodology/approach: Ninety Russian firms included into the Moscow Stock Exchange Broad Market Index were examined for a period from 2009 to 2019 using a generalized method of moments and tobit model. The effect of personal sanctions was elucidated with the use of difference-in-differences method with multiple time periods. 

Findings: The analysis showed that, government or businessmen’s ownership does not affect dividend payments. However, after 2014, state-owned companies began to increase their payments. At the same time, owing to a series of changes triggered by general economic sanctions, businessmen-owned companies decrease their dividends payout ratio. Personal sanctions imposed do not have long-term effect on Russian companies’ dividends.

Originality/value: This study estimates the effect of ownership structure on dividend payouts after an exogenous changes. The results show that there is heterogeneity in influential owners' decisions regarding dividends and changes strengthening it.

Crowd-sourcing of information has become popular in the years since James Surowiecki published The Wisdom of Crowds: why the many are smarter than the few and how collective wisdom shapes business, economies, societies, and nations. In sports, crowd-sourced estimates of players’ values and abilities are common, particularly in football where salary information is generally unavailable. The analysis here first considers the characteristics of a good crowd-sourced value then turns to an empirical analysis which applies those characteristics and their implications to assess the quality of the commonly used crowd-sourced values from Transfermarkt. Our empirical results show systematic influences from some obvious factors indicating that the crowd-sourced transfer fees are biased as predictors of the true market determined fees. The findings are useful because they address the question of whether these values can reasonably be used as proxies for unknown salary in academic research. Additionally, because Transfermarkt values are often used in negotiations between clubs and players, it is useful to both parties to know the accuracy and the bias of the crowd-sourced values.

Timely evaluation of cardioembolic stroke (CES) caused by atrial fibrillation is critical from the point of view of the possibility of prescribing effective secondary prevention with oral anticoagulants. Insular lesion is considered as a promising neuroimaging marker of CES.

Objective: to analyze the role of insular cortex lesions using magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) of the brain as a potential neuroimaging marker of the pathogenetic subtype of ischemic stroke (IS).

Patients and methods. 225 patients in the acute period of IS were examined. Depending on the stroke etiology, patients were divided into three groups: cryptogenic stroke (CS; n=99), CES (n=45), and non-CES (n=81). All patients underwent an MRI of the brain to analyze the insular cortex lesions. In 57 patients, foci of cerebral infarction were additionally marked manually on axial slices of diffusion-weighted MRI using the Anatomist software. The calculated MRI characteristics of foci for CES and non-CES groups were used to construct a decision tree in the WEKA 3.6 package. Echocardiographic markers of atrial cardiopathy were assessed in all patients – the left atrium (LA) emptying fraction and LA function index; in 68 patients, the concentration of serum NT-proBNP was also assessed.

Results and discussion. The insula was affected in 12% of patients: most often in CES (33%), significantly less often in CS and non-CES (6 and 7.4%, respectively), without significant differences between the latter groups. The presence of insula lesion in relation to CES has a sensitivity of 33% and a specificity of 93% (p=0.002); odds ratio 6.25; 95% confidence interval 2.22–17.63. In most patients, the posterior insular cortex was involved in the pathological process. Isolated insular infarction occurred in only one patient with CES, while the involvement of the insula and adjacent zone, and the combination of insular infarction with territorial infarction, were observed more often. The group of patients with insular lesions was distinguished by the predominance of women, greater severity of stroke at admission, less deficit at discharge, larger LA diameter, lower LA emptying fraction, and functional index. CES was four times more common in the insular lesion group, while CS was two times more common in those without insular lesions. Insula involvement identifies three out of five CES patients according to the decision tree. Further analysis of the total lesion volume can locate almost all remaining patients with CES: they are characterized by the indicator >12 sm3.

Conclusion. Insular lesions allow reliable differentiation of patients with CES and non-CES and can be considered a potential marker of the cardioembolic subtype of IS, which requires further investigation.

The paper is aimed to analyse the most recent and relevant research on boards of directors in BRIC. Existent reviews on the board of directors do not focus on BRIC and do not consider the specifics of their corporate governance model. Therefore, the current review fills this gap by analysing 111 research papers from Scopus/Web of Science published between 2015 and 2020. Firstly, we provide a content analysis of abstracts to find the most frequent research topics and compare them to the developed countries’ studies. Secondly, based on the content analysis findings, we provide a qualitative analysis of three research directions: board composition, social capital, and board functioning, divided further into ten smaller research topics. Thirdly, we compare the research output with the developed countries’ studies and the statistics provided by the Spencer Stuart Board Indexes to analyse whether they are coherent. The results confirm the topicality of board research in BRIC and overlapping topics between the BRIC and the more developed countries. As a result, we formulate a research agenda for further studies on boards in BRIC.

In this paper, we study choice under uncertainty with belief functions. Belief functions can capture par- tial information by describing what is objectively known about the probabilities of events. State-contingent acts together with a belief function over states induce belief functions over outcomes. We assume that de- cision makers have preferences over belief functions that reflect both their valuation of outcomes and the information available about the likelihood of outcomes. We provide axioms characterizing a preference rep- resentation for belief functions that captures what is (objectively) known about the likelihood of outcomes and combines it with subjective beliefs according to the “principle of insufficient reason” whenever the likelihood of events is unknown. This treatment of partial information yields a natural distinction between ambiguity and ambiguity attitudes. The approach is novel in its treatment of partial information and in its axiomatization of the uniform distribution in case of ignorance. © 2021 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Purpose – Video games are considered as a leisure activity that makes being unemployed more attractive than before. In this study, the authors use eSports prizes as a proxy for the popularity of video games to analyze its influence on total and youth unemployment. Design/methodology/approach – The authors develop a theoretical model and empirically test it using the total prize money won by representatives of a country in a given season in eSports tournaments, via a panel regression model with the country-year as a unit of observation. The data set includes information about 191 countries between 2000 and 2015. Findings – The authors’ results of regression analysis show a positive influence of the popularity of video games on the unemployment rate. In addition, the authors analyze this effect for countries with different levels of income and labor productivity. The authors found a significant inverse relationship between income level and the effect of the popularity of video games on total and youth unemployment. Originality/value – While previous studies rely mostly on self-reported data, the authors suggest a new approach to measure video game popularity. This paper contributes to existing knowledge with empirical evidence on how leisure activities affect unemployment at the country level.  

Purpose: The research aims to examine the impact of economic policy uncertainty (EPU) on a company's behaviour concerning its human capital. Additionally, the difference in effect for companies with specific human capital is analysed.

Design/methodology/approach: The hypotheses are tested on a multi-industry sample of large public companies from five European countries, using panel data modelling. The index of Baker et al. (2016) is used to measure EPU.

Findings: In the case of increasing EPU on one standard deviation, companies tend to reduce their human capital by approximately 1.7%. Moreover, despite theoretical assumptions, the effect on companies with more specific human capital is twice stronger. The heterogeneity of effect across countries and industries is also present.

Practical implications: Regulators and governments should consciously introduce changes in relation to regulations and decrease the uncertainty of economic policy to stimulate corporate investments in human capital.

Originality/value: This is the first study that considers the mechanism of EPU and its influence on corporate human capital. The results suggest that concerns regarding economic policy cause companies to reduce human capital.

We propose a new solution concept, called Context-Dependent Equilibrium Under Ambi- guity (CD-EUA), for strategic games where players’ beliefs may be influenced by exogenous context-related information. Players’ beliefs about the strategic behavior of their opponents are represented by belief functions. The notion of belief functions allows us to combine ex- ogenous context information in the spirit of Schelling (1960) with endogenous equilibrium beliefs about the opponents’ behavior in analogy to the standard Nash equilibrium. For any finite strategic game, we prove existence of a CD-EUA for any context information and any degree of confidence in it. Moreover, we show continuity of the equilibrium corre- spondence. Finally, we illustrate how CD-EUA can be applied to different types of context information in games by explaining some stylized facts from experimental research on co- ordination.

Business‐like approaches are applied more and more widely in nonprofit organization contexts, and theaters are no exception. Revenue generation, customer segmentation, and personalized marketing are becoming the key managerial concerns. Our study focuses on two relevant aspects of theater attendees' behavior. We examine visitors' willingness‐to‐pay (WTP) for theater seats (to derive revenue drivers), and its difference between two segments – single and couple visitors (to uncover the social motivation effect). These aspects taken together have never been previously studied in the nonprofit marketing context. We model WTP using the actual purchase data from Perm Opera and Ballet Theatre in Russia. Unlike most marketing studies which use stated preference for WTP evaluation, we employ the revealed preference approach. The results verify that single and couple visitors may be treated as separate segments, allowing for personalized promotion and other marketing decisions.