Raj V. Mahto

Satisfaction with Firm Performance in Family Businesses

Business goals in family businesses are often subsumed by family goals. As a result, reference performance for each family business is different. This makes the popular financial performance measure of publicly traded companies, profit maximization, insufficient for family businesses. We believe that for evaluating family businesses, the family members‘ satisfaction with firm performance is a better measure of performance. In the study, we identify three predictors of family members‘ satisfaction with firm performance and test the proposed linkages on two samples of family businesses.

How to Increase Job Satisfaction and Reduce Turnover Intentions in the Family Firm: The Family–Business Embeddedness Perspective

The authors define family–business embeddedness as confluence of values and objectives stemming from the overlapping institutional contexts—family, business, and symbolic—in the family firm. Hence, the family–business embeddedness perspective investigates the effect of integrating divergent institutional values and objectives, economic and noneconomic, on family firm’s performance. The authors contend that family–business embeddedness and work centrality will magnify family employees’ job satisfaction, whereas superior job alternatives will produce an opposite effect. In turn, job satisfaction will be negatively related to family employees’ turnover intentions. A survey of 111 family employees from 70 family firms in the United States supported the hypotheses.

Do Venture Capitalists Have a Continuation Bias

Venture capitalists (VCs) follow elaborate procedures to identify the top candidates, out of countless aspiring start-ups, for financing and other types of investor support. Purportedly, VCs also carefully evaluate, based on venture performance, whether or not it deserves to receive follow-on funding. But could decision making biases interfere withthe evaluation process? In this article, we introduce the notion of a continuation bias defined as the proclivity to provide follow-on funding contingent on investor’s earlier investment. We argue that a continuation bias differs from sunk costs, status quo bias and escalation of commitment as it stems from the dual fallacy—information and narcissistic—exaggerating the benefits of greater data availability at later stages of investment and investor’s own contribution to the venture. We also argue that a continuation bias is influenced by contingency factors such that it is more likely to be observed when VCs apply competition-related rather than venture-related investment criteria. A survey of 51 VCs from the US provided support for the hypotheses.

BRIC national export performance: a portfolio approach

The BRIC countries (Brazil, Russia, India, and China) have expanded their export sector considerably in the last two decades. Their export portfolios range from commodities to knowledge-intensive products. In this paper, we use two portfolio approaches (Markowitz and single index models) to assess export diversification strategies. The results indicate that China’s export portfolio dominates the portfolios of Brazil, India, and Russia. China has a highly diversified export profile and also expresses the highest efficiency amongst the BRIC countries. Thus, we make several conclusions about the impact of BRIC countries on the global political economy: (1) export portfolios can be used as a measure of geo-political influence, (2) BRIC countries’ export performance approximates the economic behavior of a global ‘middle class,’ and (3) China’s dominance among the BRIC countries, particularly its diverse profile, largely represents the global economy. China’s portfolio beta for export is closest to the global portfolio beta.