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The magnetic anisotropy in antiferromagnetic 500 A thick NiO films, before and after the establishment of an exchange bias field with Co84Fe16 ferromagnetic layers, was measured using magnetic linear dichroism in soft x-ray absorption. Both <111> textured NiO and untextured NiO films show exchange-bias induced in-plane magnetic anisotropy of nearly equal magnitude and with the Ni moment axis being nearly parallel to the exchange bias field direction. These results represent the first observation of the key step in the exchange biasing process, namely, repopulation of the antiferromagnetic domains whose magnetization axis is closest to the exchange bias field direction.

Faced with fragmented markets, saturated and demanding customers, and global competition, firms increasingly must design and offer a line of innovative, quality-differentiated products to target customers with differing willingness to pay (WTP). In this context, designing a special class of products that we term development-intensive products (DIPs)--for which the fixed costs of development far outweigh the unit-variable costs--presents some unique managerial challenges. Examples of such development-intensive offerings abound in a number of industries, including the pharmaceutical, information, and entertainment sectors of the economy. Our contributions in this paper are threefold: (a) to show that managerial insights from the traditional approach to product-line design developed for unit-variable cost-intensive products do not carry over to DIPs, (b) to present new mechanisms and managerial guidelines for designing a family of products for which development costs cannot be ignored, and (c) to illustrate the insights with an extended industry example. We find that the design approach based on degrading (or subtracting value from) a high-end product to obtain a subsumed low-end edition, shown in the literature to be an effective approach for designing unit cost-intensive products, can be inappropriate for DIPs. This limitation of value subtraction has implications for the number of variants and the sequence in which they are developed. As an alternative to a subsumed product-design strategy, we propose and examine the overlapped product-design approach, in which a low-end product is not completely subsumed within its high-end counterpart, but differentiated on additional vertical quality dimensions. Our results both explain the recent challenges of firms with subsumed low-end products and guide them in designing a product line to successfully address emerging low-end market segments.product-family design, development-intensive offerings, multiple quality dimensions

In response to the asking and requiring of stakeholders to be more environmentally responsible, firms must commit to green corporate social responsibility (CSR). Firms being green and responsible always can acquire intangible resources that are important for firm innovation. Given the scarcity of existing research addressing relevant issues in depth, this paper expands our understanding of green CSR by revealing its antecedent effects on firm innovation performance. We also include public visibility and firm transparency as contingency factors to explore the relationship between green CSR and firm innovation performance. Using data collected from publicly listed firms in China, we find that greater innovation performance is associated with an increase in firm green CSR, and the positive relationship between green CSR and innovation performance is moderated by public visibility and firm transparency. Based on the results, theoretical contributions and practical implications are outlined.