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Research Parveen Gupta and Anne Anderson Get Specific With Corporate Governance Researchers at Lehigh University's College of Business and Economics in Beth- lehem, Pennsylvania, have found that most corporations don't take into account the financial and legal systems of the countries where they operate when it comes to corporate governance. That oversight can have a negative impact on performance. Anne Anderson, an associate and chaired professor in finance, and Parveen Gupta, a professor and department chair in accounting, studied 1,732 firms in 22 countries. They created a two-by-two matrix that juxtaposed legal structures (civil law versus common law) and finan- cial systems (market-based versus bank-based). Next, they reviewed 60 governance-related measures that fell into eight categories: boards, audits, charters, states of incorporations, compensation, qualitative reviews, ownership, and education. They found that as many as 66 percent of the world's corporations invested either too much or too lit- tle in corporate governance, given the national financial and legal 64 BizEd MAY/JUNE 2010 systems in which they operate. That discrepancy had a negative effect on the value of these firms. On the other hand, firms that customized their governance practices according to their countries' systems had a better return on investment. "We wanted to question the tradi- tional thinking that if you implement good governance, then you increase the value of the firm," says Gupta. "We found that this was not the case overall. Rather, only when you match the level of corporate governance with the finan- cial and legal systems at hand did an increase in performance occur." That means that overly aggres- sive or "one-size-fits-all" corporate governance policies don't necessarily lead to better results, the authors say. "When a significant problem arises, most companies begin imposing additional governance mechanisms without thinking," says Anderson. "The problem is, they enact the wrong measures, and that makes for very costly mistakes." Anderson and Gupta won the Vernon Zimmerman Best Paper Award at the 20th Asian-Pacific Conference on International Accounting Issues last year in Dijon, France. "A Cross Country Comparison of Corporate Gover- nance and Firm Performance: Do Financial Structure and the Legal System Matter?" was published in the January 2010 issue of The Jour- nal of Contemporary Accounting and Economics. Don't Always Follow The Popular Crowd When trying to promote a product and brand, it might not always be best for marketers to seek out the "hip" crowd first. Popular people often are the biggest followers of all, accord- ing to a study from the University of Western Ontario's Ivey School of Business in Canada. The study was conducted by doctoral marketing student Seung-Hwan (Mark) Lee, associate marketing professor June Cotte, and doctoral marketing stu- dent Theodore Noseworthy. The researchers focused on two social networks—a students' group and a seniors' club. Those most central to the network were well- positioned to connect individuals in the group and disseminate informa- tion to others. However, these centers, or "brokers," also were vulnerable to influence from others in the group as they worked to maintain their status. The researchers call this phenomenon "the opposing flow of influence." Marketers often make the assump- tion that those central to a social net- work wield the most influence, but they should take other factors into account, says Cotte. "By understand- ing that the group influences the cen- tral actor, too, researchers and mar- keters can better predict behaviors of individuals in the network," she says. "The Role of Network Centrality in the Flow of Consumer Influence" appears in the January 2010 Journal of Consumer Psychology. The Power of Counterfactual Thinking A recent study finds that those who think about "turning points" in their lives, and imagine what their lives