THE MODERATING INFLUENCE OF FIRM MARKET POWER ON THE TRANSACTION COST ECONOMICS MODEL: AN EMPIRICAL TEST IN A FORWARD CHANNEL INTEGRATION CONTEXT

Transaction cost economics (TCE) has guided a variety of research on governance in the strategic management literature. An important question arises, however, as to whether the TCE framework is equally appropriate for all types of firms in all business settings. In this paper, we argue that TCE is not and suggest that firms with high market power may be able to lower transaction costs under high asset specificity and uncertainty in nonintegrated distribution channels, avoiding the need to utilize highly integrated channels as a result. We test our hypotheses with data collected from 40 manufacturers of electronic and telecommunications products in 109 product-markets in the United States. The results support our hypothesis that transaction cost factors are better at explaining forward channel integration for firms with low market power than for firms with high market power. Our results indicate that the basic TCE framework must be supplemented by the market power construct to adequately explain forward channel integration decisions. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Transaction cost economics (TCE) has become one of the leading theoretical perspectives in the study of management and organizations (Davi

The Impact of Simulation Training on Call Center Agent Performance: A Field-Based Investigation

The most prevalent form of training call center agents is via classroom instruction coupled with role-plays. Role-play training has a theoretical base in behavior modeling that entails observation, practice, and feedback. Emerging simulation-based technologies offer enhancements to behavior modeling that are absent in role-play training. This study evaluates the effectiveness of simulation-based training (henceforth, simulation training) as a behavior modeling technique vis-à-vis role-play training in a real-world call center environment across tasks of different levels of complexity. We collaborate with call centers at two Fortune 50 firms and examine on-job performance metrics to evaluate the effectiveness of simulation training. The performance measures of interest are call accuracy and call duration because these are two important factors that influence customer satisfaction and productivity in call center operations. After controlling for factors such as trainee's learning and technology orientation, age, education, and call center experience, results show that simulation training outperforms role-playing-based training in terms of both accuracy and speed of processing customer calls. Further, the relative superiority of simulation training improves at higher levels of task complexity.call centers, simulation training, behavior modeling, field experiments, performance measurement