African Journal of
Business Management

  • Abbreviation: Afr. J. Bus. Manage.
  • Language: English
  • ISSN: 1993-8233
  • DOI: 10.5897/AJBM
  • Start Year: 2007
  • Published Articles: 4194

Table of Content: 14 October 2011; 5(24)

October 2011

The usefulness of measurement equivalence in psychological evaluation: A meta-analysis

  "The greatest social benefit will come from applied research if we can find for each individual the treatment to which he can most easily adapt. This calls for the joint application of experimental and correlational methods” (Cronbach as cited by Witcherts, 2007). Recent developments in experimental industrial psychology concerning the effects of individual differences on test performance and...

Author(s): Herbert Kanengoni

October 2011

Applying Analytic Hierarchy Process-Technique for Order Preference by Similarity to Ideal Solution (AHP-TOPSIS) model to evaluate individual investment performance of retirement planning policy

  Owing to aged people become more and more and serious economy depression in the present society in Taiwan, how retirees will keep their past consumption level after their retirement is an important issue. The purpose of this research will appraise the performance of individual investment planning policy for retirement. Because the investment performance, risks, taxation etc must be considered in making...

Author(s): Hsin-Yuan Chang and Shang-Yu Chen

October 2011

The effect of atmosphere on customer perceptions and customer behavior responses in chain store supermarkets

  This study aims at exploring the theme of creating and managing store atmosphere of chain store supermarket from customer’s point of view. The findings from the study indicate: (1) The customer-perceived factors of store atmosphere of supermarket include 6 factors in 3 categories, that is, design factors, ambient factors (including intangible factors and visual stimulus) and social factors (including...

Author(s): Han-Shen Chen, and Tsuifang Hsieh,

October 2011

Host-country experience, location strategy and investment performance: An empirical study of Taiwan IT companies in China

  Previous studies on investment location focused on local environmental factors, but tended to overlook the fact that firms’ host-country experience might have an impact on their location strategies and influence the investment performance. This study categorized location strategy in the breadth and depth of foreign investment and hotspots for investment to compensate for the inadequacy of relevant...

Author(s): Yi-Yin Yen, and Miao-Que Lin

October 2011

Empirical evidence on opportunity recognition behaviours of informal traders

This study provides empirical evidence on the nature of entrepreneurship in the informal sector. By interrogating opportunity recognition behaviour, motives for start-ups and perceptions of community support, better understanding of the entrepreneurial mindset is achieved. Informal traders were surveyed in a wide range of businesses of varying age and size. Results suggest that opportunity recognition behaviours are...

Author(s): Boris Urban, Robert Venter and Gordon Shaw

October 2011

Determinants of financial wellness among Malaysia workers

  The purpose of this study was to examine determinants that influence financial wellness. The results of this study can be used for better understanding on the relationships between and among determinants of financial wellness by highlighting the relationships among demographic characteristics, financial literacy, financial behaviors, financial stress, and financial wellness. Samples were selected using...

Author(s): Narges Delafrooz and Laily Hj Paim

October 2011

Effectiveness of community based organization (CBO) microcredit programme of concern worldwide: A case study of Bangladesh

  This study was conducted to examine the effectiveness of community based organization (CBO) microcredit programmes of ‘Concern Worldwide’ in selected urban areas of Mymensingh district. The study is concerned with CBO microcredit use, assessing repayment performance, identifying the factors affecting repayment performance and assessing the impact of loan on livelihood improvement of the...

Author(s): Muhammad Sayeedul Haque, Rexona Akter and Khaled Laoubi

October 2011

Institutions and functions of national innovation system in Norway and Iran

  In this article, the institutions and functions of the National Innovation System of Norway has been reviewed. Norway owns a successful National Innovation system in Europe and the OECD countries. This study will focus on the present National Innovation System of Iran and in this research, designed questionnaires, and a series of interviews with policymakers, officials, executives and various related national...

Author(s): Seyedreza Haghi Ahmad Sabahi and Ashot Salnazaryan

October 2011

In-game advertising: Consumers’ attitude and the effect of product placements on memory

  This study investigated the effectiveness of product placement in video games by testing participants’ brand and product memory along with three distinctive types of product presentation: associative placement, illustrative placement and demonstrative placement. Memory measures comprise explicit memory and implicit memory. The results indicated that the associative placement had a lower level of...

Author(s): Shu-Hsun Ho, Yu-Ling Lin and Yu-Ting Yang

October 2011

Investment opportunity set and dividend policy in Malaysia

  This paper investigates the relationship between Investment Opportunity Set (IOS) and dividend policy and if ownership structure moderates this relationship in an emerging economy context. The contracting theory based on Jensen’s free cash flow (FCF) theory is empirically examined using a series of firm characteristics including size, return on assets, board size, board composition, duality and debt to...

Author(s): Ravichandran Subramaniam, S. Susela Devi  and Maran Marimuthu

October 2011

The mediating effect of the organizational socialization on leader-member relationship and job stress

  This research aims to verify the mediating effect of organizational socialization on the relationship between leader-member relationship and job stress (physical and psychological health), targeting employees of the top 500 businesses in Taiwan ranked by Business Weekly Magazine in 2010. This research adopted the questionnaire survey method and a total of 303 valid questionnaires were returned. From the...

Author(s): Jennifer Shu-Jen Lin, Shu-Cheng Lin and Yi-Fong Lin

October 2011

Inflation in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia: The bound test analysis

  The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia has been witnessing a rise in prices for the past few years. This paper intends to examine the determinants of inflation, both in the long run as well as in the short run, using cointegration method developed by Pesaran et al. (2001). The result shows that inflation in world economy, depreciation of domestic currency and supply bottlenecks are the major factors influencing...

Author(s): Khalid Al Khathlan

October 2011

The effects of variations in the implementation of a stepwise managerial strategic crisis model and corporate reputation capital on post-crisis share price values: A qualitative and quantitative analysis of specific South African companies

  The paper proposes a structured, stepwise approach to the management of reputational risks in order to assist in defining strategies for crisis management. A series of case studies of selected South African firms’ responses to specific crises in comparison to an ideal type stepwise model were analyzed and the effects on specific share price values explored. The effect of reputation capital on share...

Author(s): D. A. L.  Coldwell and T. Joosub

October 2011

Only customer satisfaction and customer loyalty is not enough: A study of Pakistan’s telecom sector

  Service industry is totally reliable upon customer satisfaction because its first stage is to catch the customers and the final achievement is the loyal customer; but this is not enough because there are many things that lie between customer satisfaction and customer loyalty. So this study focuses on it and the major element involved like trust. This research is an attempt to explore the customer’s...

Author(s):   Shahid Zaman Khokhar, Farooq Hussain, Tahir Masood Qureshi, Ibrahim Anjum, Ali Samran and Rizwan Arshad

October 2011

Identifying and prioritizing critical success factors for thin film transistor liquid crystal display (TFT-LCD) industry in new product development

  Taiwan’s current thin film transistor liquid crystal display (TFT-LCD) industry provides a representative, real-world example of both the collaboration within, and the competition in technologies and capital orientation. To compete successfully in the market, companies in the industry require continuous technology innovations for new products. Further, a large amount of investment and output value...

Author(s): Dong-Jenn Yang and Jun-Zhi Chiu

October 2011

Innovative management practices and their impact on local e-government performance: The Turkish provincial municipalities

  Contrary to popular belief which sees the government as reactive and resistant to change, the increasing emergence of innovative ideas particularly in the field of local services yielded a wide range of interactions. This was due to address new policy challenges, improve productivity, better serve and more fully engage a changing citizenry. Practicing new ideas triggered more innovativeness. The paradigm of...

Author(s): Aykut Arslan

October 2011

Exploring the antecedents of compulsive buying tendency among adolescents in China and Thailand: A consumer socialization perspective

  From a consumer socialization perspective, this study explored the influences of parent, peer and mass media on compulsive buying tendency of adolescents in China and Thailand respectively. The results of this study indicated that an unexpectedly high proportion of adolescents in both countries had shown compulsive buying tendency. Compared with Chinese adolescents, Thai adolescents displayed slightly...

Author(s): Zhaoyang Guo and Yuanfeng Cai

October 2011

Comparisons of non-parametric disturbance simulations and Monte Carlo approach

  This paper utilized the proposed historical simulation, where the effect of GARCH (1,1) model on price path were considered, and the Monte Carlo approach were also used to examine the difference in option payoff values between these simulation approaches and the original path. Furthermore, we showed which simulation model would have smaller root mean squared pricing error by examining the difference of root...

Author(s): Keng- Hsin Lo and Shu-Shian Lin

October 2011

Quantitative analysis of optimal access charge of Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP)

  Due to the expansion of service-based competition in the telecommunications market, the business on VoIP (voice over internet protocol) has emerged in service market. In this paper, the mathematical model to examine the welfare effect of access charge in the telecommunication market through the new VoIP providers entering the market was analyzed. The study also analyzes the simple model in two markets with...

Author(s): Sung-Uk Park and Soon Hu Soh

October 2011

Turkey and the European Union: Approximations of university students on the European Union

  This study was carried out in order to evaluate the political and socio-economical views of students studying in the School of Physical Education and Sport in Gazi University, on Turkey’s membership to the European Union. The population consisted of 1453 students studying in the School of Physical Education and Sport and a questionnaire of 42 questions was applied to 338 students by random sampling...

Author(s): Tekin ÇolakoÄŸlu

October 2011

Threshold effects in purchasing power parity for African Countries

  This study applies non-linear threshold unit-root test to assess the non-stationary properties of the real exchange rate for twenty African countries. We found that non-linear threshold unit-root test has higher power than linear method. As suggested by Caner and Hansen (2001), the true data generating process of exchange rate is a stationary non-linear process. We examine the validity of PPP from the...

Author(s): Yu-Shao, Liu, Meng-Nan, Zhu and Chi-Wei, Su