Editorial

Citation

Moutinho, L. and Huarng, K.-H. (2008), "Editorial", Journal of Modelling in Management, Vol. 3 No. 3. https://doi.org/10.1108/jm2.2008.29703caa.001

Editorial

Article Type: Editorial From: Journal of Modelling in Management, Volume 3, Issue 3

… Time really flies. Here, we are completing three years of Scholarly publication! Conforming with the pattern and scope of modelling subjects, contexts and methodologies that have been introduced in JM2 this issue does not contravene that same modus operandi and we include topics as diverse as customer preferences in Bancassurance, strategic performance groups and competitive market structure, regional efficiency differences in healthcare and foodservice operations and modelling of foreign direct investment (DI) flows.

Wu et al. targeted to search for the preferable bancassurance alliance model for customers. They defined criteria and sub-criteria for use in evaluating six forms of bancassurance alliance. They established a framework for the criteria and sub-criteria by using a modified Delphi method. They also included the opinions of industry experts and applied the analytic hierarchy process. Based on the evaluations, the financial holding company was the customers’ preference.

Various scholars have proposed the concept of strategic groups to capture the strategic heterogeneity existing amongst firms within a designated industry. Thus, variability in form strategies does not exist for firms within the same strategic group, but exist for firms occupying different strategic groups within an industry. Given that different strategic groups often do not exhibit performance differences, more recent scholars have proposed the notion of performance groups where significant performance differences do not exist from firms within the same performance group but exist across performance groups. Unfortunately, it has been found that performance groups may not exhibit differences in strategy. The primary objective of the article by de Sarbo et al. is to integrate these ideas and explicitly derive strategic/performance groups which exhibit differences with respect to both strategy and performance, as well as display associations and potential relationships between the two sets of variables. For this purpose, they formulate a clusterwise bilinear spatial model (e.g. a scalar products or vector multidimensional scaling model) for the analysis of two-way strategic and performance data which simultaneously performs multidimensional scaling and cluster analysis. They utilise an efficient alternating least-squares procedure that estimates conditionally globally optimum estimates of the model parameters within each iterate in analytic, closed-form expressions. They also deploy this bilinear multidimensional scaling methodology in the context of strategic/performance group estimation using archival data for public banks in the NY-NJ-PA tri-state area.

Foreign DI tends to flow to areas with growing markets, political and economic stability, availability of natural resources, and relatively high-factor productivity. Analysis of the significance of these factors is usually carried out with the use of country-level data. Okeahalam and Dowdeswell used the data at the municipal level in one of the provinces of South Africa, Gauteng, to attempt to establish which factors influence investment flows. They assessed the relationship between South Africa’s investment and economic fundamentals at the municipal level. A panel of graphs of the various constituents of DI at a national level for the period 1969-2005 was studied. More than 80 per cent of Gauteng’s population resides in the three metropolitan areas of Johannesburg, Ekurhuleni and Tshwane, with Johannesburg registering the largest share of residents, followed by Ekurhuleni and then Tshwane. These variations are understandable given that metropolitan councils are larger and may have some economies of scale in the delivery of public services relative to the district and municipal councils.

Matawie and Assaf intended to model, estimate and compare the technical efficiency and technology gap ratios of health care foodservice operations that operate in different Australian regions. They introduced the meta-frontier model to estimate and analyze the difference in health care food efficiency across the various Australian regions. The interesting feature of this model is that it allows for the estimation of firms’ efficiency of various groups that might differ in technology and other production environments. They used cross sectional input/output data that best reflect on the operational characteristics of health care foodservice operations to test the model. The estimation process was initially supported by a hypothesis test which confirmed the validity of the metafrontier model in comparing the efficiency of the different outlined regions.

Kumar et al. sought to identify and evaluate the relationships among the flexibility enablers and to prepare a hierarchy of these enablers to know their influences over each other in global supply chain. The framework suggests that the priority of enablers in supply chain should be determined on the basis of their driving power and dependency. Various enablers used by researchers and practitioners for flexibility management of global supply chain have been identified. These enablers have been classified as strategic, operational and performance-based enablers. Interpretive structural modeling was used to establish mutual relationships among the flexibility enablers and to prepare a hierarchy based model. It is found that some enablers having high-driving power and low dependency are of strategic importance. These enablers require more attention while other enablers based on operations and performances are dependents of strategic enablers.

We hope you enjoy dissecting the contents of this issue. See you in Volume 4!

All the best.

Luiz Moutinho, Kun-Huang Huarng