Market-focused sustainability: market orientation plus!

The concept of sustainability is increasingly being addressed theoretically by scholars and practically by managers and policymakers. With this growing focus on sustainability efforts, marketing is in a unique position to elevate its focus from managing relationships with customers to strategically managing a broader set of marketplace issues. Overall, an organization achieves market-based sustainability to the extent that it strategically aligns itself with the market-oriented product needs and wants of customers and the interests of multiple stakeholders concerned about social responsibility issues involving economic, environmental, and social dimensions. To set the stage for marketing’s inquiry into sustainability efforts, I briefly review the concept of sustainability, compare it with corporate social responsibility, bring in stakeholders, argue for the notion of “market orientation plus,” and consider the possibility that the notion of what sustainability encompasses is converging in the marketing literature.     

Worth waiting for: increasing satisfaction by making consumers wait

A truism in the marketing literature, and among many marketing practitioners, is that requiring consumers to wait negatively impacts quality evaluations, purchase intentions and a range of other important outcomes. However, it is also true that consumer waiting or queuing has historically been considered from an operations perspective. The present research takes a different approach and examines waits in the context of their ability to function as a signal of quality. Four experiments demonstrate a required wait can indeed signal quality to consumers and increase, rather than decrease, both purchase intentions and actual experienced satisfaction. Three moderators of this effect are examined: preexisting knowledge, consumption motivations, and the extent to which quality is difficult to objectively determine. The results suggest in situations where quality is important, unknown or ambiguous, managers may increase consumer satisfaction by making consumers wait.     

Markets as networks: implications for strategy-making

Based on empirical studies of firm exchange activities in business markets, this paper outlines a business network view of the firm-market relationship, which differs fundamentally from the view assumed by neo-classical economic theory. We define business networks as sets of connected business relationships. Thus business relationships and connections between relationships are the critical elements in the business network view. It is assumed, as suggested by the Uppsala internationalization process model, that an interplay between knowledge and commitment development is the mechanism that drives the relationship and network development process. Against this background the paper discusses how strategic change is analyzed in literature on alliances and networks. In conclusion the paper presents a set of propositions about strategy-making in business network settings.     

Benefits and challenges of conducting multiple methods research in marketing

Using multiple methods to study a phenomenon is proposed to produce results that are more robust and compelling than single method studies. This research note investigates the implementation of multiple methods research in marketing. In the main study, we conducted a content analysis of articles published in five leading marketing journals from 1990 to 2008: Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, Journal of Consumer Research, Journal of Marketing, Journal of Marketing Research, and Marketing Science. To aid in interpretation of findings from the content analysis, we gathered verbal data from authors of recent multiple methods studies to gain further insight into the benefits and challenges of conducting and publishing multiple methods research.     

Prune or cut down: salience and Sugden’s <Emphasis Type="Italic">The Economics of Rights</Emphasis>, <Emphasis Type="Italic">Co</Emphasis>-<Emphasis Type="Italic">operation and Welfare</Emphasis>

In The Economics of Rights, Co-operation and Welfare (1986), Robert Sugden follows the tradition from Thomas Schelling and David Lewis in ascribing a central role to the notion of salience within his theory of convention. However, against this, Bruno Verbeek (Instrumental rationality and moral philosophy, Kluwer, Dordrecht, 2002) has argued that an empirically adequate notion of salience may not be incorporated into a generic account of convention without circularity obtains. This paper examines Verbeek’s argument against a background of experimental as well as theoretical work on coordination problems. It finds that the argument fails to consider at least two candidate theories of salience that may be incorporated into the theory of convention without circularity: cognitive hierarchy theory that iterates Sugden’s notion of psychological salience and Schelling salience. Thus, in the end Verbeek’s criticism of the role ascribed to salience in theories of convention may be dismissed, though its discussion draws a fruitful perspective.     

A note on χ-values

In this note, we generalize the χ^Sh-value for all efficient TU-values     

Wage inequality in developing countries: South–South trade matters

The relationship between trade liberalization and inequality has received considerable attention in recent years. The major purpose of this study is to present new results on the sources of wage inequalities in manufacturing taking into account South–South (S–S) trade. Globalization has not only lead to increasing North–South (N–S) trade, but it has also changed the direction and composition of trade as more trade is carried out among developing countries. In this study, we find that increasing wage inequality is associated more with the South–South trade liberalization than with the classical trade liberalization with northern countries. A part of this increasing wage inequality due to S–S trade comes from the development of N–S trade relationship in S–S trade that increases wage inequality in middle-income developing countries. This study also seeks to shed some light on the link between the direction of trade and technological change. We explore the fact that S–S trade leads to a technological change biased toward skill-intensive sectors more than N–S trade. This indirect effect increases wage inequality for all developing countries, but it is more important in low-income countries.     

The political determinants of liberalization: do ideological cleavages still matter?

We investigate the political determinants of liberalization in OECD network industries, performing a panel estimation over 30 years, through the largest and most updated sample available. Our results contrast with the traditional wisdom according to which right-wing governments do promote market-oriented policies more intensively than left-wing ones. Our findings reveal a neglected role of the so-called neoliberalism in promoting left-wing market-oriented policy. As a result, we claim that ideological cleavages ceased to act as determinants of the liberalization wave observed in network industries. This result is confirmed when controlling for the existing regulatory conditions that executives find when elected. Furthermore, we find that the country’s exposure to other countries’ policy initiatives acts as a positive stimulus for liberalization policies.     

Strictness of leniency programs and asymmetric punishment effect

We analyze the impact of leniency programs on the behavior of firms participating in illegal cartel agreements in a two-stage repeated game model. Our approach takes into account asymmetric punishment effect and allows to discuss the design of leniency programs in the setting with asymmetries. The main contribution of the paper is that we consider heterogeneous firms. This heterogeneity results in additional costs in case of disclosure of the cartel, which are caused by asymmetric punishments. Next, following current antitrust rules, we analyze effects of the strictness of leniency programs, which reflects the likelihood of getting a complete exemption from fine even in case many firms self-report simultaneously. Our main conclusion is that leniency programs work better for small companies, since a lower rate of law enforcement is needed in order to induce self-reporting by smaller firms, while big firms are less likely to start a cartel in the first place given the possibility of self-reporting in future. Finally, we analyze optimal enforcement strategies of the antitrust authority and conclude that the authority with limited resources should implement more generous leniency rules the more cartelized the economy is.