Applying the Randomized Response Technique in Business Ethics Research: The Misuse of Information Systems Resources in the Workplace

Mitigating response distortion in answers to sensitive questions is an important issue for business ethics researchers. Sensitive questions may be asked in surveys related to business ethics, and respondents may intend to avoid exposing sensitive aspects of their character by answering such questions dishonestly, resulting in response distortion. Previous studies have provided evidence that a surveying procedure called the randomized response technique (RRT) is useful for mitigating such distortion. However, previous studies have mainly applied the RRT to individual dichotomous questions (e.g., yes/no questions) in face-to-face survey settings. In this study, we focus on behavioral research examining the relationships between latent variables, which are unobserved variables measured by multiple items on Likert or bipolar scales. To demonstrate how the RRT can be applied to obtain valid answers from respondents answering a self-administered online questionnaire with Likert and bipolar scales, we build a behavioral model to study the effect of punishment severity on employees’ attitudes toward misuse of information systems resources in the workplace, which in turn influence misuse behavior. The survey findings meet our expectations. The respondents are generally more willing to disclose sensitive data about their attitudes and actual behavior related to misuse when the RRT is implemented. The RRT’s implications for causal modeling and the advantages and challenges of its use in online environments are also discussed.     

Rating versus ranking: What is the best way to reduce response and language bias in cross-national research?

We propose solutions to two recurring problems in cross-national research: response style differences and language bias. In order to do so, we conduct a methodological comparison of two different response formats—rating and ranking. For rating, we assess the effect of changing the commonly used 5-point Likert scales to 7-point Likert scales. For ranking, we evaluate the validity of presenting respondents with short scenarios for which they need to rank their top 3 solutions. Our results – based on two studies of 1965 undergraduate and 1714 MBA students in 16 different countries – confirm our hypotheses that both solutions reduce response and language bias, but show that ranking generally is a superior solution. These findings allow researchers to have greater confidence in the validity of cross-national differences if these response formats are used, instead of the more traditional 5-point Likert scales. In addition, our findings have several practical implications for multinational corporations, relating to issues such as selection interviews, performance appraisals, and cross-cultural training.     

Development of a home food production frequency scale

This paper reports on the development of a home food production frequency scale. The scale is survey based and consists of the summed score of six items answered on a five-point Likert scale. Similar to other assessment scales that measure family characteristics such as family cohesion, adaptability or family stress, home food production frequency can be used as a convenient alternative to time-use measures of home production. The scale's validity and reliability is assessed revealing considerable potential for its use to ascertain relationships between home food production activity and other family variables and to specify more fully empirical models in home economics research.     

Measuring Sponsorship Transparency in the Age of Native Advertising

As advertisers continue to develop new formats of online content that blurs the line between advertising and news or entertainment, the need to understand how consumers process covert advertising grows. While regulators and industry practitioners agree that transparency is paramount to preventing consumer deception, there exists no established way of determining the extent to which a given message transparently conveys to consumers that is a paid advertisement. The current study makes the case for, develops, and validates a scale to measure sponsorship transparency. Following traditional scale development methods, the study generates a pool of items based on consumer and expert input, reduces the number of items based on empirical research, and evaluates scale validity and reliability using a diverse national sample.     

Sustainable growth for the self-employed in the retail industry based on customer equity,customer satisfaction,and loyalty

In Korea, traditional retail districts face a serious situation whereby businesses in downtown areas face collapsing as local population declines: resulting in a decrease in self-employed sales and a declining local economy. Traditional retailers use ambiguous accounting and are reluctant to use credit cards, and thus, the overall reliability of their customer data is low. This paper solves this problem by applying the concept of customer equity (CE). We conducted an empirical analysis through questionnaires to identify differences in CE between traditional and new retail formats. The questionnaire consisted of questions related to CE (value equity, brand equity, relation equity), satisfaction, loyalty, and demographic characteristics. CE and satisfaction were measured on a 5-point Likert scale. A total of 400 surveys were completed, resulting in 391 usable returns for analysis in this study. In the regression analysis between CE and customer satisfaction, both old and new retail firms showed statistically significant effects. In the traditional retail industry, value equity and brand equity were statistically significant, while relation equity were not.     

Enduring Attitudes and Contextual Interest: When and Why Attitude Surveys Still Matter in the Online Consumer Decision Journey

Consumers leave traces of key interest to managers on their journey to purchase. Next to traditional survey-based attitudes, readily available online metrics now show aggregate consumer actions. But how do survey response metrics and online action metrics relate to each other? To what extent do they explain and predict brand sales across consumer categories? This article shows that surveys and online behavior provide complementary information for brand managers. Times series data for 32 brands in 14 categories reveal low correlations but substantial dual causality between survey metrics and online actions. Combining both types of metrics greatly increases the model's power to explain and predict brand sales in low-involvement categories. By contrast, high-involvement categories do not gain much from adding survey-based attitudes to a model including online behavior metrics. The authors synthesize these generalizations in a new framework relating enduring attitudes to the contextual interest expressed by online actions. This new framework helps managers assess both types of metrics to drive brand performance depending on whether their goal is short-term sales or long-term brand health.     

Driving Goal-Directed and Experiential Online Shopping

Goal-directed and experiential online shopping are two general categories of consumer behavior on the Internet. Internet stores promoting online transactions may face challenges regarding how to satisfy distinct online shoppers. This study develops a dual-state of cognitive and affective reactions to online services and flow experiences to predict goal-directed and experiential online consumer behavior. This survey mailed 300 questionnaires to a random sample of volunteers with substantial online shopping experience. Of these, 150 samples were returned for data analysis. Empirical results from the survey indicate that the dual-state of online services is more appropriate for assessing goal-directed purchase intentions than for examining the willingness to purchase experientially. In contrast, the dual-state of flow experiences is better at assessing goal-directed purchase intentions and the willingness to purchase experientially. Finally, this study features implications for academics and practitioners.     

Methodological Issues in the Design of Online Surveys for Measuring Unethical Work Behavior: Recommendations on the Basis of a Split-Ballot Experiment

In recent years, there has been an increasing interest in unethical work behavior. Several types of survey instruments to collect information about unethical work behavior are available. Nevertheless, to date little attention has been paid to design issues of those surveys. There are, however, several important problems that may influence reliability and validity of questionnaire data on the topic, such as social desirability bias. This paper addresses two important issues in the design of online surveys on unethical work behavior: the response scale for questions regarding the frequency of certain types of unethical work behavior and the location of the background questions in an online survey. We present the results of an analysis of a double split-ballot experiment in a large sample (n = 3,386) on governmental integrity. We found that, when comparing response scales that have labels for all categories with response scales that only have anchors at the end, the latter provided answers with higher validity. The study did not provide support for the conventional practice of asking background questions at the end.     

应对供应链突发事件风险的企业协作应急策略

供应链突发事件风险不同于普通运营风险,属于低概率-高后果（LP-HC）型风险。根据供应链风险发生的来源,突发事件风险可以划分为三种类型：供应中断、运营中断和需求突变。文章讨论了企业间纵向协调和横向协作两种应急协作机制,并在三种不同类型的突发事件情况下,分别探讨了企业应急策略问题。通过对独立应急模式和企业间协作应急机制的对比和分析,提出了一种合理的供应链突发事件应急策略选择框架：对于供应或运营中断风险,企业横向协作应急策略更加有效;对于需求突变风险,企业纵向协调应急策略更加有效。     

Measuring user perceived service quality of online auction sites

This study proposes a measure for online auction sites' service quality (OA-SQ). The conceptualisation is based on a literature review of service quality research and an analysis of the unique characteristics of online auctions. A pilot study refined the initial scale. A second survey data set tests the final scale. Results of both exploratory and confirmatory factor analysis show high construct validity of the scale. The scale includes 24 items for seven dimensions: efficiency, system availability, privacy/security, compensation, personalisation, playfulness, and reputation.     

Technology acceptance modeling of augmented reality at the point of sale: Can surveys be replaced by an analysis of online reviews?

Online reviews by users have become an increasingly important source of information. This is true not only for new users of goods or services, but also for their producers. They extend the insight into the acceptance of new goods and services, e.g. at the point of sale, from a mere sales and usage quantity oriented point of view to a cause and effect oriented one. Since online reviews by consumers of many goods and services are nowadays widespread and easily available on the internet, the question arises whether their analysis can replace the more traditional approaches to measure technology acceptance, e.g., using questionnaires with TAM (Technology Acceptance Model) items. This paper tries to answer this question using IKEA׳s mobile catalogue app as an example. For comparisons reasons, data on the acceptance of the current version of this catalogue is collected in four different ways, (1) as answers to batteries of TAM items, (2) as assignments to pre-defined adjective pairs, (3) as textual likes and dislikes of users (simulating online reviews), and (4) as publicly available (real) reviews by users. The source for (1)–(3) is a survey with a sample of respondents, the source for (4) an online forum. The data is analyzed using partial least squares (PLS) for TAM modeling and text mining for pre-processing the textual data. The results are promising: it seems that data collection via surveys can be replaced – with some reservations – by the analysis of publicly available (real) online reviews.     

“Sorry,the product you ordered is out of stock”: Effects of substitution policy in online grocery retailing

Postpurchase out-of-stock (PP-OOS) often happens in an online grocery context, where products appear to be available at the time a consumer places an order, but become OOS when the order is to be dispatched. This paper investigates two substitution policies that can mitigate negative responses: substitutions can match (i) on the dominant attribute and (ii) with a product from the consumers’ past purchase portfolio. According to data collected through two computer-simulated purchase experiments, involving more than 3,000 households and five product categories, matching the substitution on the dominant attribute increases acceptance, but this dominant attribute varies across category differentiation level (flavor for horizontal differentiated categories like cereals or crips vs. brand for vertical differentiated categories like margarine or ketchup). Category differentiation also informs acceptance of national brand or private-label flavor substitutes, such that, same-flavor private label is prefered more in horizontal differentiated categories. Matching on the basis of previous purchases has positive effects for both category differentiation levels, and when combining both policies, the previous purchase matching effect grows stronger for same flavor, rather than same brand, matching. These detailed insights establish several key managerial implications for substitution policies in online grocery contexts.     

Exploring the Impact of Cultural Value Orientations on Market Mavenism and Opinion Leadership

Market mavens and opinion leaders are two key types of consumer influentials. The focus of this research is to extend their predictor characteristics by drawing on the four-way horizontal and vertical individualism-collectivism typology. The theoretical and practical contributions of this study are established by the findings based on the survey data collected from 313 online consumer panelists in the United States. Market mavenism and opinion leadership were independent yet moderately related concepts. Vertical individualism and horizontal collectivism were significant predictors of both market mavenism and opinion leadership while horizontal individualism affected only market mavenism. Vertical collectivism did not predict either type of consumer influentials. Interaction with service employees moderated the relationships between horizontal collectivism and market mavenism and between vertical individualism and opinion leadership.     

Organizational Trust and Interfirm Cooperation: An Examination of Horizontal Versus Vertical Alliances

Over the past decade, trust has emerged as the central means of achieving cooperation in interorganizational relationships. Past empirical inquiries have largely focused on the role of trust within the context of vertical relations between channel members or service providers and their clients. Thus, little is known about the nature or the role of trust in horizontal relations. A number of interorganizational scholars suggest that the nature and the effect of behavioral norms such as trust may be widely different in horizontal versus vertical relationships. This study examines the effect of relationship form on organizational trust using data from a survey of 106 U.S. firms who have recently participated in either horizontal or vertical R&D alliances. The results of this survey indicate that participants in vertical alliances display higher levels of organizational trust than participants in horizontal alliances. In addition, while organizational trust enhances cooperation in vertical alliances, trust is unrelated to cooperation in horizontal alliances.     

A comparative analysis of differential consumer response across supermarket and specialty store in the candy category

Retailing industry has undergone tremendous change in its complexity and sophistication over the past few years. Globally we are witnessing the evolution of retailing industry from traditionally micro-managed small retail formats like mom and pop store to modern corporate-managed large retail formats like supermarkets. Consumers are also shopping across these various store formats even for the products in similar categories. In this research, we posit that consumer purchases in the similar categories may very well be characterized by differential responses to marketing mix across different store formats. The proposed model accounts for the influences that these diverse response parameters and preferences have on one another as well as consumer heterogeneity. Our results show that sensitivities to marketing mix as well as correlations in preferences do indeed vary across formats for consumer purchases in similar categories.     

Consumers’ acceptability and creative use of traditional woven fabric

The study examined the utilization and acceptability of traditional woven fabric ‘aso‐oke’ in patchwork craft design as bedcover and throw pillows. The ‘aso‐oke’ fabric was sewn using a patchwork technique of clothing construction to produce a bedcover and throw pillows. A questionnaire designed on a 5‐point Likert scale was used to collect the data. The result showed a favourable response of Likert mean score 4.17 which indicates a greater acceptability of the fabric and design used in the making of the bedcover and throw pillows.     

Organizational Ethics: Perceptions of Employees by Gender

As more women enter the work force and assume management positions in corporations, increasing attention is being given to employment diversity. In addition, studies suggest that females have more propensity for ethics than males. However, these results may be debatable and limited data are available to substantiate these claims or assess gender differences among employees. Ethics codes can aid in supporting policies and enhancing corporate diversity. To assist one company in the development of an ethics code, a survey of 4005 employees in one U.S. corporation was conducted to ascertain their opinions of the ethical environment of the company. The survey used the Ethics Environment Questionnaire (EEQ), consisting of twenty items on a 5-point Likert-type scale; reliability on Cronbach's alpha was 0.94. Response rate was 50%, with the sample paralleling the population in proportion of males and females. Respondents reported a profile of 3.18 out of the high of 5.0, but with several significant differences between the male and female employees, including differences on education and position. Males were more in agreement than females that the firm had an ethical environment. On some items, however, males and females were in strong agreement. Comparisons to prior studies were drawn, including suggestions for ways corporations could use an ethics survey to tailor in-service training, enhance diversity in the work force, and support the development of an ethics code.     

Going Online for Groceries: Drivers of Category-Level Share of Wallet Expansion

Some grocery product categories may be more successful than others in terms of stimulating consumers to increase their share of wallet (SoW) when they start buying through the online channel of a grocery chain. This study explores the circumstances in which online and multichannel marketing mix instruments determine the extent of category-level SoW expansion. To do so, the authors use U.K. household scanner panel data, covering online and offline purchases by 3,311 households in 59 categories of four multichannel retail chains. The results indicate that the effectiveness of online and multichannel marketing mix instruments for stimulating expansion is moderated by category characteristics, such that a selective approach to making decisions about the online price, online assortment breadth, online/offline assortment integration, and online national brand proliferation, tuned to account for category differences, can increase category-level SoW for the online-visited chain.