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The case recounts the development of the French national soccer team between 2004 - when Raymond Domenech became head coach for the French national team - and the devastating performances on and off the field by Team France during the World Cup in South Africa in 2010. After a brief overview of French soccer history, the case introduces Raymond Domenech and provides information about his career up to 2004. It presents his unique character and the soccer philosophy that made him such a promising new head coach for the French soccer team. The case continues by describing the developments over the coming years. Its main focus is Domenech but the case also looks at the soccer players - specifically their roles and behaviors vis-à-vis Domenech - the French Football Federation (FFF) as the organization that gave Domenech the job of head coach, as well as developments in the public's perception of Domenech and his work. The narrative culminates in a description of the events on June 20, 2010, when - as an act of solidarity with a player who was dismissed from the team and the tournament - the French soccer team, in front of the television cameras, refused to follow Domenech and boycotted the public training that was announced for that day. The case ends by describing the reactions of fans, media, politicians, and French officials to the events, the measures that the FFF took following the scandal, and the interpretations different observers formulated in the weeks that followed.

On September 15 and 16, 2008, the British artist Damien Hirst broke all rules of the art market. He bypassed conventional distribution channels - dealers and gallery owners - by directly partnering with Sotheby's auction house - and with their help successfully sold more than 200 pieces of his works. Sotheby's auctioned art works which were less than two years old, which was another break from tradition. Hirst earned more than £110 million from the auction - in the midst of a global economic crisis and on the same day that the Lehman Brothers Investment house collapsed. The case study provides an overview of Hirst's career as an artist and the circumstances that supported his success. The case study enables students to develop a good understanding of the elements of a strategic innovation, and how an individual (or organization) can shake up an established industry merely by framing and answering the fundamental strategic questions "Who is the customer," "What do I offer this customer," and "How do I create value for the customer - and ultimately myself" differently. The case provides detailed information on the structure and size of the global art industry, a market that was estimated by The Economist to account from some $50 billion in sales in 2008, down from $65 billion at its peak in 2007.

This paper analyzes the welfare implications of buyer mergers, which are mergers between downstream firms from different markets. We focus on the interaction between the merger's effects on downstream efficiency and on buyer power in a setup where one manufacturer with a non-linear cost function sells to two locally competitive retail markets. We show that size discounts for the merged entity has no impact on consumer prices or on smaller retailers, unless the merger affects the downstream efficiency of the merging parties. When the upstream cost function is convex, we find that there are "waterbed effects," that is, each small retailer pays a higher average tariff if a buyer merger improves downstream efficiency. We obtain the opposite results, "anti-waterbed effects," if the merger is inefficient. When the cost function is concave, there are only anti-waterbed effects. In each retail market, the merger decreases the final price if and only if it improves the efficiency of the merging parties, regardless of its impact on the average tariff of small retailers.

The paper integrates and builds on extant thinking in corporate marketing and CSR to provide an identity-based conceptualization of CSR. Based on this, it positions CSR as an optimal managerial tool for promoting alignment between multiple corporate identities (e.g., internal, external), which ultimately leads to key benefits for the company.

With permission of Emerald

In this paper we focus on modeling and predicting the loss distribution for credit risky assets such as bonds and loans. We model the probability of default and the recovery rate given default based on shared covariates. We develop a new class of default models that explicitly account for sector specific and regime dependent unobservable heterogeneity in firm characteristics. Based on the analysis of a large default and recovery data set over the horizon 1980-2008, we document that the specification of the default model has a major impact on the predicted loss distribution, while the specification of the recovery model is less important. In particular, we find evidence that industry factors and regime dynamics affect the performance of default models, implying that the appropriate choice of default models for loss prediction will depend on the credit cycle and on portfolio characteristics. Finally, we show that default probabilities and recovery rates predicted out-of-sample are negatively correlated, and that the magnitude of the correlation varies with seniority class, industry, and credit cycle.

© 2011 INFORMS