scholarly journals A practice-based approach to collective decision-making in pricing

2019 ◽  
Vol 16 (1) ◽  
pp. 117-143
Author(s):  
Sof Thrane ◽  
Martin Jarmatz ◽  
Michael Fetahi Laursen ◽  
Katrine Kornmaaler
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Collective Decision ◽  
Control Problems ◽  
Collective Decision Making ◽  
Content Type ◽  
Pricing Decisions ◽  
Micro Level ◽  
And Control ◽  
Coordination And Control ◽  
Multiple Actors

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to analyze price decision-making through a practice-based approach. The paper investigates the micro-level practices used to arrive at sales price decisions. Design/methodology/approach In this study, a qualitative study approach is used to develop findings abductively. The data are gathered through an in-depth case study at two firms: semi-structured interviews, meeting observations, shadowing and pricing documents. Findings This paper finds that pricing is a collective decision-making process involving multiple actors across the organization. The case firms work on solving information, coordination and control problems to arrive at sales prices by enacting interlinked practices. Pricing is therefore neither a structure nor a single decision but a process consisting of multiple micro-level practices that enable firms to make pricing decisions. Originality/value This paper develops a practice-based approach to pricing that conceptualize the micro-level practices used to to make pricing decisions in the face of information, coordination and control problems. The paper is interdisciplinary and adds to the accounting literature and the market literature, which have tended to study pricing as a decision made by one decision maker, and not as an organizational process where multiple actors share, evaluate, interpret and coordinate information and decisions.

Collective decision-making for developing emergency management capabilities

2020 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 179-202
Author(s):  
Namkyung Oh
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Emergency Management ◽  
Collective Decision ◽  
Financial Resources ◽  
Collective Decision Making ◽  
Analytic Hierarchy ◽  
Content Type ◽  
The Usa ◽  
State And Local ◽  
Context Specific

PurposeThe purpose of this study is to explore the applicability of analytic hierarchy process (AHP) to collective decision-making of local and state disaster managers for their efficient and effective allocation of limited financial resources.Design/methodology/approachFor the implementation of AHP, this study conducted an AHP survey with state and local disaster managers in post-Katrina Louisiana, the USA.FindingsThe AHP analysis disclosed a preference gap between local and state managers. It also identified frequent interaction with partners, leadership and communication, as the most critical capabilities to develop for effective emergency management.Research limitations/implicationsThis study discussed the value of consistent and careful management of the collaborative relationship. This study is context-specific in disaster type (Hurricane) and locality (Louisiana). Other AHP studies or similar multi-criteria decision-making models should be implemented in different contexts.Originality/valueEven with clear advantages of collective decision-making in the emergency management field, a model for collective decision-making has been rare. This study explored the applicability of AHP to the collective decision-making for the efficient and effective allocation of limited financial resources.

scholarly journals The bridging role of regional headquarters. Multinational companies in the Asia-Pacific region

2020 ◽  
Vol ahead-of-print (ahead-of-print) ◽  
Author(s):  
Bruno Amann ◽  
Jacques Jaussaud ◽  
Johannes Schaaper
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Structural Equation ◽  
Multinational Companies ◽  
Asia Pacific ◽  
Pacific Region ◽  
Asia Pacific Region ◽  
Content Type ◽  
Regional Headquarters ◽  
And Control ◽  
Coordination And Control

Purpose Large multinational companies (MNCs) are strongly formalized, often standardized and complex with multiple hierarchical levels. Over the past few decades, MNCs have strengthened their coordination and control systems by creating regional headquarters (RHQs). This study aims to investigate how MNCs rearticulate control dimensions at RHQs, to coordinate and exert control over subsidiaries in the Asia-Pacific region. Design/methodology/approach Based on a survey of 86 French MNCs in the Asia-Pacific region, this study applies a structural equation model to determine RHQs’ roles in the field of regional decision-making, coordination and control. Findings Large MNCs, with a significant presence in Asia, transfer coordination and control to RHQs, in a way that leads us to propose the use of the expression “regio-centralization.” RHQs become socialization hubs, where most regional decisions are taken and where international managers meet. MNCs mobilize at the same time expatriates, short-term assignees and local managers who intensively interact at RHQs. Thus, informal control at RHQs increases, partly substituting formal control by HQs. Smaller MNCs, without RHQs, on the contrary, base their control and coordination on the formalization of HQs-subsidiary relations, especially through strong reporting, in combination with centralized decision-making at HQs. Research limitations/implications This study is based on MNCs from one specific country, France, and focuses only on the dynamic Asia-Pacific host region. Coordination and control in less dynamic regions may reveal different results. Originality/value This study leads to a better understanding of how large MNCs reorganize dispersed activities in the Asia-Pacific region by creating RHQs, where important control and coordination functions are relocated.

Member preference heterogeneity and system-lifeworld dichotomy in cooperatives

2017 ◽  
Vol 30 (7) ◽  
pp. 1063-1080 ◽  
Author(s):  
Constantine Iliopoulos ◽  
Vladislav Valentinov
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Collective Decision ◽  
Internal Conflict ◽  
Preference Heterogeneity ◽  
Collective Decision Making ◽  
Content Type ◽  
Agricultural Cooperative ◽  
Root Cause ◽  
Double Nature

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to shed new light on the issue of preference heterogeneity in cooperatives. Design/methodology/approach Drawing on the ideas of Habermas and Luhmann, this paper interprets preference heterogeneity of cooperative members in terms of the precarious relationship between the categories of “system” and “lifeworld.” The argument is buttressed with a case study of an agricultural cooperative recently founded in Central Greece. Findings The sensitivity of cooperatives to the lifeworld contexts of their members exacts the price in the form of the member preference heterogeneity problem. If this sensitivity is taken to be the constitutive characteristic of cooperatives, then the proposed argument hammers home their fundamental ambivalence, as they are necessarily fraught with the potential for internal conflict. Research limitations/implications The paper urges for a radical rethinking of Georg Draheim’s thesis of the “double nature” of cooperatives. “Double nature” is shown to aggravate the member preference heterogeneity problem. Practical implications The results of this study inform the cooperative leaders’ quest to strike a balance between the interests of their members and the demands of the external socio-economic environment. Originality/value This research contributes significantly to the literature on collective decision-making costs incurred by cooperatives. The failure of cooperatives to balance the sensitivity to members’ interests and to the external environment is exposed as the root cause of the divergence and heterogeneity of member preferences. This heterogeneity is shown to boost collective decision-making costs.

Islands of Stability: Engaging Emergence from Cellular Automata to the Occupy Movement

2014 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrew Pickering
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Cellular Automata ◽  
Black Box ◽  
Collective Decision ◽  
Collective Decision Making ◽  
Occupy Movement ◽  
History Of ◽  
The 1960S

"Instead of considering »being with« in terms of non-problematic, machine-like places, where reliable entities assemble in stable relationships, STS conjures up a world where the achievement of chancy stabilisations and synchronisations is local.We have to analyse how and where a certain regularity and predictability in the intersection of scientists and their instruments, say, or of human individuals and groups, is produced.The paper reviews models of emergence drawn from the history of cybernetics—the canonical »black box,« homeostats, and cellular automata—to enrich our imagination of the stabilisation process, and discusses the concept of »variety« as a way of clarifying its difficulty, with the antiuniversities of the 1960s and the Occupy movement as examples. Failures of »being with« are expectable. In conclusion, the paper reviews approaches to collective decision-making that reduce variety without imposing a neoliberal hierarchy. "

Corruption and Anticorruption in Democratic Athens

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Claire Taylor
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Participatory Democracy ◽  
Collective Decision ◽  
Civic Culture ◽  
Collective Decision Making ◽  
Alexander The Great ◽  
Political Equality ◽  
Individual Judgment ◽  
Collective Judgment ◽  
Hidden Knowledge

The chapter examines a major corruption scandal that involved the Athenian orator Demosthenes and an official of Alexander the Great. This episode reveals how tensions between individual and collective decision-making practices shaped Athenian understandings of corruption and anticorruption. The various and multiple anticorruption measures of Athens sought to bring ‘hidden’ knowledge into the open and thereby remove information from the realm of individual judgment, placing it instead into the realm of collective judgment. The Athenian experience therefore suggests that participatory democracy, and a civic culture that fosters political equality rather than reliance on individual expertise, provides a key bulwark against corruption.

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