Subscription models have become a popular new way for consumers to
do their shopping. This paper presents a taxonomy of the three main
archetypes of subscription models and develops a classification scheme
with type-specific features relevant to their successful management.
An implementation framework offers managers a guideline to introduce
subscription models of their own.
We take a detailed look at the current InsurTech landscape from the angle of the academic management literature. Our main goals are to establish a common understanding of key concepts, to facilitate the navigation of this rapidly evolving sector, and to provide an intuitive toolkit for an assessment of the entrants’ disruptive potential as well as the selection of adequate response strategies by incumbents. Based on a threedimensional taxonomy, we screen the existing InsurTech startup range. Two aspects stand out in this regard. First, although the vast majority of activities still focuses on the distribution part of the industry ecosystem, full-stack InsurTech risk carriers are starting to become more commonplace.
Second, we hardly observe any real game-changing business model innovations yet, as many existing startups are essentially pepping up classical industry approaches with the patterns “e-commerce” or “digitization”. Consistent with this observation, most entrants are not on a disruptive trajectory. Instead, they can be assigned to the category “enablers”, suggesting “cooperation” as the incumbents’ reaction of choice for the majority of currently prevailing scenarios. These findings are confirmed by a comprehensive survey among startups and incumbents. Several directions for the future evolution of the sector are plausible. We identify a number of powerful business model recombinations that are either already launching or clearly visible on the horizon. The largest threats are likely to arise from out-of-the box approaches. One example are digital insurers that add significant value for the customer through personalized coverage based on a comprehensive individual risk assessment. Similarly, genuine peer-to-peer concepts, which enable risk transfer directly to the capital markets, could call the primordial relevance of insurance companies into question and therefore lead to outright disintermediation. Consequently, the still relatively comfortable situation for incumbents that currently prevails may not last for long.
Integrating relational embeddedness arguments with Penrosean growth theory, we compare the growth of firms run by spousal entrepreneurs with firms run by sibling entrepreneurs. We theorize that trust, identification, and mutual obligations—the three facets of relational embeddedness—are more pronounced in spousal teams than in sibling teams, which provides spousal teams with advantages over sibling teams in generating firm growth. Probing a sample of all private firms in Sweden over a three-year period, we find support for this conjecture. Exploring boundary conditions to this baseline relationship, we also find that firm age weakens the growth advantages of spousal teams over sibling teams and that industry experience heterogeneity within the entrepreneurial team reinforces these growth advantages. These results provide important contributions for research on firm growth, the social embeddedness of firms, entrepreneurship, and family business.
The article gives a micropolitical analysis of the position of German trade unions on voluntary agreements between nongovernmental organisation (NGOs) and corporations, mostly subsumed under the label CSR (corporate social responsibility). In the German system of industrial relations, trade unions have a hybrid character: On the one hand, they are part of the company through their members and especially through unionised works councils and share similar goals with the company. On the other hand, trade unions also merge political positions of society, keep an eye on companies’ actions, and share similar goals with NGOs. The micropolitical analysis of their positions towards voluntary agreements as well as their interaction raises general questions on how cooperation between firms and NGOs can secure decent working conditions and environmental protection.
We examine in this paper the effects of corporate social responsibility (CSR) disclosure and CSR performance on firm value for S&P 500 firms from 2011 to 2014. We find that CSR disclosure is positively associated with firm value and that the effect of CSR disclosure on firm value is larger than the effect of CSR performance. On average, the overall firm value increase for one index point of Bloomberg's environmental, social, and governance (ESG) Disclosure Score is $260 million, whereas the increase for one index point of the Asset4 ESG Performance Score is below $90 million. Moreover, we find that CSR performance scores related to the environment and governance are positively associated with firm value while the social score is negatively associated. Our results suggest that CSR disclosure mediates CSR performance. Based on prior research, we argue that CSR disclosure tends to be positively biased and too complex to be processed properly. We conclude that a relatively high amount of CSR disclosure is misinterpreted as good CSR performance.
Relying on Google Trends search data for the S&P 500 stocks between 2004 and 2015, we find that investing in momentum in a portfolio of stocks with increasing search activity minus a portfolio of stocks facing a decreasing search activity does not exhibit, ceteris paribus, significant positive momentum returns. Furthermore, we show that retail investors’ attention creates volatility. For that reason, investing in stocks with stable retail investors’ attention decreases significantly momentum volatility. The momentum effect has a negative relationship with the market tone and does not significantly impact the long-term reversal effect. For those reasons, while general investors overreact to information as shown by Hillert et al. (2014), we conclude that retail investors underreact to information.
We investigate the impact of the quality of corporate social responsibility (CSR) reports on sell-side analyst forecast accuracy. The sample comprises 506 large companies that were selected according to the CSR-Sustainability Monitor, which was used to measure the quality of CSR reports issued in 2012 by the members listed in Fortune 500 US and the Global Index. Forecast error is calculated for the forecast horizons of the same fiscal year and one fiscal year ahead. A multiple-regression model showed a negative correlation of CSR quality and forecast accuracy in both forecast horizons, which was significant for companies domiciled in the stakeholders’ region of Western Europe. A probit regression model showed that the probability of overestimating earnings and thus making overly optimistic forecasts was higher in companies that issued CSR reports of better quality, which was significant for the one year ahead forecast horizons of both Western European companies and companies domiciled in the shareholder-oriented region of North America.
Moral scheint ein sterbender Begriff zu sein, wenn man die Exzesse beispielsweise der Banken in der Finanzkrise betrachtet. Doch das wäre ein Trugschluss, wie die Reaktionen auf die Wulff-Affäre zeigen.
Ein Beitrag von Arne Gottschalck mit Kommentaren von Florian Wettstein und Thomas Beschorner.
