2005, Vol.32, No.1

Korean Social Science Journal 2023 KCI Impact Factor : 0.06

pISSN : 1225-0368 / eISSN : 2196-4424
https://journal.kci.go.kr/kssj

Layoff is often regarded by the affected employee as a serious violation of his or her psychological contracts, which is an unwritten agreement that individuals form based on their beliefs concerning the terms of an exchange agreement with their employer. The violation may trigger a reevaluation of the obligations that make up the contract, resulting in a change in the focus and scope of those obligations. Based on longitudinal data in Korea, I examined the changes in the psychological contract with their future employers after the layoffs from the layoff victims viewpoint. While previous research showed that layoff survivors showed decreased commitment after layoffs (Brockner, 1988), the results indicate that, in building a new psychological contract with future employer, layoff victims increase their expectations of responsibilities from their subsequent employers in exchange for the higher commitment to them.

We investigate the concept of demand heterogeneity in high-tech products through testing for the existence of functionality thresholds, which demarcate the performance level below which a consumer will reject a product-irrespective of price. Above such thresholds, however, the consumer is expected to have no or little marginal utility. If functionality thresholds do exist, then the issue becomes whether new market entrants can capture significant share by offering products at functionality threshold levels with lower prices than existing products - and even perhaps offering additionally new attributes as a differentiation strategy. This study proposes the theory that the more is better precept only applies up to the functionality threshold of a product. A key strategic implication of this is that firms targeting the mass market need to adopt more of a modular product strategy to accommodate the heterogeneous demands in functionality requirements. We explore this issue from both a normative and a simulation study, and we discuss the managerial implications of a mass-customization strategy, especially for late entrants in technology product industries.

Even though there have been previous studies to explore the relationship between county government form and expenditure, little attention has been paid to the selection problem that might arise when counties choose their government structures to meet their needs. This paper intends to fill this gap in the literature by estimating the effect of county government reform on expenditure with the selection problem corrected. In contrast to the results in previous studies, the reform of county government structure is found to have decreased the size of expenditure in the reformed counties.