The two largest online shoe retailers are Shoebuy and Zappos.com. While Shoebuy offers a standard online retailing experience, Zappos has sought out a market niche of exemplary customer service.
a. Shoebuy sales associates' performance are evaluated on a number of metrics such as tardiness at work and missed days, dollar volume handled, volume of returns, volume of customers requiring supervisor intervention. Discuss how prone this system might be to employees "gaming" the system.
b. Zappos sales associates are expected to go to extraordinary lengths to address the individual needs of specific customers. Discuss how well these expectations might be met if Zappos sales associates were evaluated the same way Shoebuy employees were.
c. What sort of evaluation system do you think Zappos would use?
d. Do you think that a source of new employees for either is to entice the other's company's current employees away?
Your pharmaceutical firm is interested to know how much information the stock market reveals about its intellectual property. You have merged stock market return data with patent citation data into the file "patents" available on Blackboard.
a. Is there is a positive return to a firm having their patent portfolio cited? (regress stock market returns "rtn" against patent citations when they occur "bcites") 2
b. The return also includes general stock market movements. If you use the return net of S&P 500 movements "bxrtn", is there still a return?
c. Sometimes information is not updated until a day later or it leaks out a day early. If you include lag and lead values of bcites, is the total return higher?
d. Is this result robust to fixed effects for the Permno and the year?
e. A measure of the value of a patent is the number of citations it will eventually generate, "fcites." Repeat the above steps for fcites instead of bcites. Is there a positive return to having a more highly cited patent granted?
f. Is there a return to having a more highly cited patent granted after controlling for citations when they occur?
g. The market value of a firm is the number of shares outstanding times the price. What is average market value over the sample and what is the dollar value of a citation when it occurs and when the patent is granted?
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