Improving media campaigns promoting physical activity: the underutilized role of gender

• As the obesity epidemic worsens in the United States and globally, resources are increasingly being allocated to address this public health threat.
• Media campaigns promoting physical activity are receiving funding from government and private sources, and some of these campaigns have achieved modest success. Still, more can be done to increase the effectiveness of these campaigns.
• Drawing on facets of consumer behavior, psychology, and public policy, this work represents a cross‐disciplinary theoretical analysis suggesting that the effectiveness of media‐based campaigns promoting physical activity could be enhanced by making use of gender‐specific advertising.
• Research is reviewed suggesting that gender differences in information processing styles and values lead to gender‐specific responses to media campaigns.
• Recommendations are made to help practitioners improve physical activity campaigns by crafting advertisements that specifically appeal to the unique preferences of each gender.

Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Cost effects of mergers and deregulation in the U.S. Rail industry

We attempt to disentangle the effects of deregulation on rail costs from those directly attributable to mergers and acquisitions, employing a translog variable cost function, based on an unbalanced panel data set of annual observations for major U.S. Class I railroads from 1974 to 1986. We find that both deregulation and mergers contributed significantly to cost savings. However, of the accumulated cost savings achieved by the six major firms involved in mergers postderegulation, we estimate that by 1986 about 91% of the reduction in accumulated costs is due to deregulation, and about 9% is directly due to mergers and acquisitions (which in turn were facilitated by regulatory reforms).     

Desperately Seeking Differences: Is Management Style Gendered?

The increase in the number of women occupying managerial positions has led to a debate about whether women are bringing a distinct style of management to organizations in the 1990s. It has also prompted a reassessment of the traditional negative stereotype of women managers. This paper examines whether there are sex differences in how women and men manage. It also reports on managers' motivation to work and their attitudes towards women managers. The data are drawn from a large study of men and women senior managers in five multinational companies. My argument is that there is no such thing as a 'female' management style and that the similarities between women and men far outweigh the differences between women and men as groups. Powerful organizational imperatives allow for few substantial modifications in management approach.     

Auditors' behaviour in an audit conflict situation: A research note on the role of locus of control and ethical reasoning

This study investigates the interaction effects of locus of control, a personality variable, and ethical reasoning on the behaviour of auditors in an audit conflict situation. Eighty experienced auditors from a sample of Big Six and Non-Big Six CPA firms in Hong Kong were provided with a case study involving an audit conflict situation and were asked to state the extent to which they would accede to the client's request. Subjects were also administered Rotter's Locus of Control Scale and the Denning Issues Test (DIT) to measure ethical reasoning. Analyses of the data using multiple regression found that ethical reasoning moderated the relationship between locus of control and the auditors' responses to accede to client's request in an audit conflict situation. An implication of these results is that the explicit recognition of both locus of control and ethical reasoning provides a better explanation for differences in auditors' ethical decision making.     

Functional compatibility risk and consumer preference for product bundles

The authors report the results of an experiment examining the effect of functional compatibility risk on consumer’ preference for product bundles vis-à-vis separate items. In a laboratory experiment, 90 undergraduate business students were asked to choose bundled or unbundled stereo equipment after reading product information that either did or did not prime fears of functional compatibility risk. The results indicate that heightening the salience of functional compatibility risk may be a practical way for marketers to increase consumer’ choice of bundled products, particularly among consumers who are more uncertain of their product knowledge. Judy Harris (jharris@bus.ucf.edu) is an assistant professor of marketing at the University of Central Florida. She received her doctorate from the University of Houston. Her work has been published in theJournal of Retailing, theJournal of Advertising Research, theJournal of Consumer Research, theJournal of Applied Social Psychology, Psychology & Marketing, and other publications. Edward A. Blair (blair@uh.edu) is a professor and chair in the Department of Marketing and Entrepreneurship at the Bauer College of Business, University of Houston. He is the author of several books, along with numerous research papers that have been published in journals such as theJournal of Marketing, theJournal of Marketing Research, theJournal of Consumer Research, Public Opinion Quarterly, and elsewhere. He has served on the editorial boards of theJournal of Marketing Research, theJournal of the Academy of Marketing Science, and theJournal of Business Research.     

Measuring customer equity and managing the customer asset: an explanatory study in the Australian hotels

Although there are a range of conceptual and theoretical studies about customer equity (CE) measurement and management in the literature, there are few empirical studies where these two concepts are examined together. This paper focuses on the need for a more synthesised approach and addresses calls for more research into this specific area of marketing management. A conceptual framework was developed that synthesises both customer lifetime value and customer relationship management from a customer equity management (CEM) perspective. The framework was used to empirically examine how four CE strategies, together with a firm’s use of the two types of customer data (aggregated and disaggregated), impact on CEM outcomes. Data were collected from 114 hotel managers in Australia and analysed through a decision tree methodology. The results show that hotels are utilising their CE strategies for acquisition purposes more than retention purposes (customer asset management), which overall appears to satisfice more than maximise their hotel’s capacity in achieving effective CE outcomes. The study’s contribution to theory is through empirically testing a framework that combines two discrete theoretical concepts in one study to provide insights to guide future research.     

An Analysis of Hong Kong Auditors' Perceptions of the Importance of Selected Red Flag Factors in Risk Assessment

This study examined auditors' perceptions of the relative level of risk of fraud and material irregularities associated with the presence of six red flag factors and also evaluated the quality of auditors' judgements. The study was conducted in two stages. In the first stage, subjects were asked to rank the importance of 15 factors that proxy the existence of material misstatements. Based on the responses to this questionnaire, 6 of the most important factors were identified and included in the second stage, a lens model experiment. In the lens model experiment, 30 experienced auditors from a cross-section of Big 6 firms were used as subjects in a repeated-measures ANOVA design. Results showed that misstatements in prior audits and indicators of going-concern problems were perceived to be the most significant factors in alerting auditors to the risk of fraud and material irregularities. In making these judgements, auditors demonstrated a relatively high level of consensus and consistency. However, the two most important factors in the lens model experiment are not the same as the results of the first survey suggesting that the first group of respondents, faced with a simple questionnaire, used heuristics in their decision making. The results have implications for audit practice.     

China - The end of the ＂V＂

July data suggests that the recovery continues but is losing some momentum, as expected Official policy stance remains unchanged, though fine-tuning, especially of monetary policy, is expected in the next few months Some weakness in some commodity imports is appearing     

Posterior Inference in Bayesian Quantile Regression with Asymmetric Laplace Likelihood

The paper discusses the asymptotic validity of posterior inference of pseudo‐Bayesian quantile regression methods with complete or censored data when an asymmetric Laplace likelihood is used. The asymmetric Laplace likelihood has a special place in the Bayesian quantile regression framework because the usual quantile regression estimator can be derived as the maximum likelihood estimator under such a model, and this working likelihood enables highly efficient Markov chain Monte Carlo algorithms for posterior sampling. However, it seems to be under‐recognised that the stationary distribution for the resulting posterior does not provide valid posterior inference directly. We demonstrate that a simple adjustment to the covariance matrix of the posterior chain leads to asymptotically valid posterior inference. Our simulation results confirm that the posterior inference, when appropriately adjusted, is an attractive alternative to other asymptotic approximations in quantile regression, especially in the presence of censored data.