Overtime pay regulation and weekly hours of work in Canada

The idea that overtime pay regulation can be used to create employment continues to receive attention in a variety of countries. Standard hours, beyond which a statutory overtime premium must be paid, varies across Canadian provinces, as do coverage rules. Exploiting this variation produces a smaller estimated response of weekly hours to standard hours than previous researchers have found in other countries. Combined with evidence of substantially more moonlighting and higher wages in jurisdictions with lower standard hours, these results support a somewhat pessimistic view of the idea that reducing standard hours can be used promote work-sharing in Canada.     

Materialism,fashion consumers and gender: a cross‐cultural study

The purpose of this study was to examine the relationships among materialism, gender and fashion consumer groups from two countries – one representative of an individualistic culture (US) and one representative of a collectivistic culture (Korea). Participants were 397 students from a university in Korea (n = 221) and a university in the US (n = 176) who completed the questionnaire. The materialism construct showed adequate reliability for participants in both cultures. Fashion change agents scored higher on materialism (centrality and success) than fashion followers. Females scored higher on materialism than males which seemed to be based on higher scores on the centrality subscale. Participants from the US and Korea differed on all three subscales of materialism with US participants scoring higher on centrality but lower on success and happiness than Korean participants. The findings of this study provide valuable implications for fashion marketers and retailers in Korea and US. The findings are limited to Korean and US consumers and cannot be generalized to other cultures. This paper fills a gap in the literature by comparing materialistic values between genders and fashion consumer groups in an individualistic culture (US) and a collectivistic culture (Korea).     

Mundane heroines: Conflict,Ethnicity, Gender,and Female Headship in Eastern Sri Lanka

For the last twenty years, eastern Sri Lanka has witnessed a bitter and bloody civil conflict. This paper explores the experience of female-headed households in the region. Only partially the product of war, such households cannot be bundled together as a social problem with a single solution. Our study endorses the feminist suspicion of falsely homogenizing accounts of women's lives and suggests instead an alternative emphasis on the many ways in which gendered relations of dominance and subordination are maintained. With its co-existing Muslim, Tamil, and Sinhala groups, eastern Sri Lanka facilitates the exploration of ethnicity as a source of variation. The households included in this study share a common structure and face the same economic problems, yet ethnic differences divide them. The paper charts the problems, strategies, and partial triumphs of these lone mothers and proposes policies to help them in their mundane but heroic struggle.     

Satisfaction of disabled rural elders and adults with the quality of community‐based long‐term care services

This study estimates the probability of being satisfied with community‐based health care services in a rural area and compares the formation of satisfaction for elders and younger disabled adults. Using data from a state in New England, USA, a multivariate binomial logit model was used to estimate the probability of being satisfied. The formation of satisfaction differs for rural disabled adults and elders. Two out of five need characteristics were found to influence satisfaction with quality of care, and four out of six enabling characteristics were found to influence satisfaction. The impact of these characteristics differs for disabled elders and adults, pointing to the need to differentiate the disabled population when developing systems of home‐based care.     

ExpertLens: A system for eliciting opinions from a large pool of non-collocated experts with diverse knowledge

The complexity of policy decision-making raises the need to elicit opinions from large and heterogeneous groups of stakeholders with broad and diverse sets of expertise. Existing options for elicitation include small face-to-face panels of experts by using the Nominal Group Technique (NGT), large Delphi panels whose members do not interact with each other face-to-face, and crowdsourcing, which involves an open call for input issued to a large community of people. In an attempt to close the gap between the practical needs of policy makers and the methodological challenges associated with eliciting opinions of large, diverse, and distributed groups, we have developed a new online elicitation system and methodology called ExpertLens. By optimizing the direct interactions of NGT with the larger number of Delphi participants and the wisdom of “selected crowds,” our approach is designed to save on the costs associated with traditional expert panels, while increasing accuracy in elicitation by reducing the potential for group process losses that can occur in large, diverse, and non-collocated panels whose members interact via asynchronous online discussion boards. The ExpertLens approach is iterative, does not require participants to develop consensus, and determines what the group “thinks” by statistically analyzing data collected in all rounds of the elicitation. This paper describes the ExpertLens system and methodology, briefly discusses recent ExpertLens trials, provides conceptual arguments for why it is an appropriate model for eliciting expert opinions, illustrates its main components and analytics by using an infrastructure investment example, and discusses a research agenda for testing the underlying tenets of the ExpertLens approach.     

The Retailer's Perspective on the Link Between Logistical Resources and Perceived Customer Loyalty to Manufacturer Brands

The objective of this study was to investigate the relationships between logistics and brand‐related resources, and assess their impact on the retailer's perceptions of customer loyalty to manufacturer brands. On the basis of theoretical underpinnings of the resource‐based view, this study explores the relationships among four main variables: (1) variety of collaborative logistics technologies shared between retailers and manufacturers, (2) manufacturer's logistics operations quality provided to retailers, (3) retailer's brand differentiation orientation, and (4) retailer's perceptions of customers loyalty to manufacturer brands. An online survey was conducted on 313 senior marketing and supply chain managers from retailer firms. The results of the structural equation analysis support a mediated relationship between logistical resources and perceived loyalty to manufacturer brands. The retailers believe that shared logistics technologies enable manufacturers and retailers to offer higher levels of availability and visibility of preferred brands to their end‐user customers. In turn, the end‐users become more confident with their decisions to repurchase the same brand offerings.