Relationship intention and relationship quality as predictors of clothing retail customers’ loyalty

Retailers endeavour to establish and maintain strong relationships with customers in order to build customer loyalty. Unfortunately, such endeavours are not always successful as not all retail customers reciprocate retailers’ relationship efforts. Customers’ intentions to engage in relationships with retailers (i.e. relationship intentions) should thus be the starting point in building customer loyalty. Moreover, customers’ perceptions of the strength of their relationship with a retailer (i.e. relationship quality) should also be considered when building customer loyalty. The purpose of this study is to determine whether clothing retail customers’ relationship intentions and relationship quality, individually and in combination, predict their loyalty to clothing retailers. Data were collected from 511 respondents in South Africa’s greater Tshwane metropolitan area. From a hierarchical multiple regression analysis, it was found that clothing retail customers’ relationship intentions and relationship quality are individually, and in combination, predictors of their loyalty to the retailer. Results furthermore indicate that relationship quality mediates the relationship between relationship intention and customer loyalty. The findings highlight the importance of first determining customers’ relationship intentions, and then reinforcing positive perceptions of relationship quality when building customer loyalty.     

European Integration and Australian Manufacturing Industry: The Case of Philips Electronics, 1960s–1970s

The creation of the Common Market in the European Community required electronics multinational Philips to integrate production operations across European countries. This effort had consequences for its Australian subsidiary. Rather than become a regional Philips hub with the support of its parent, as intended in the 1960s, it was absorbed by addressing changes in Australian trade policy and increased Japanese imports. The parent company's establishment of regional supply centres in Europe and Asia left no role for the small Australian production facilities in the company's global structure. Production and employment at Philips Australia were scaled back drastically during the 1970s.     

Scenarios and Actors' Strategies:: The Case of the Agri-Foodstuff Sector

The importance of the agricultural market in France prompted BASF to seek out a new way of strengthening relations with its partners in the agrifood sector. In 1996, against a backdrop of change (EU legislation) and upheaval (Mad Cow Disease), BASF offered operations managers or officers of distribution companies an opportunity to reflect upon the future in a workshop setting. This innovative three-stage exercise, guided by Professor Michel Godet (CNAM) and the Gerpa consulting team, met with enthusiasm, and was expanded beyond the original group and time frame. In fact, the distribution chain was opened up to include various actors, for example, consumer advocacy groups, so that we speak of the agri-food channel and sector. Original questions focused on farmers' expectations and distribution problems with specific horizon lines. Environmental and genetic issues soon came to the forefront. Besides workshops and meetings, the Delphi-Régnier Abacus technique was applied, as explained in this step-by-step review of the BASF project. Overall, futures thinking has become part of the BASF France way of doing business. Indeed, the BASF “Futures Studies Group,” expanded to include mass distribution representatives, intends to continue working on the very timely theme of food safety.     

Infrastructure and Public Utilities Privatization in Developing Countries

Should governments in developing countries promote private ownershipand deregulated prices in noncompetitive sectors? Or shouldthey run publicly owned firms and regulate prices at the expenseof rents to insiders? A theoretical model is used to answerthese normative questions. The analysis focuses on the tradeoffbetween fiscal benefits and consumer surplus during privatizationof noncompetitive sectors. Privatization transfers control rightsto private interests and eliminates public subsidies, yieldingbenefits to taxpayers at the cost of increased prices for consumers.In developing countries, where budget constraints are tight,privatization and price liberalization may be optimal for lowprofitability industries but suboptimal for more profitableindustries. And once a market has room for more than one firm,governments may prefer to regulate the industry. Without a credibleregulatory agency, regulation is achieved through public ownership.     

Reifying Behavior in Decision Support Systems

In order to realize the kind of active, intelligent decision support system advocated by previous authors, we argue that the implementation should be based on reified models of the system behavior, an approach called meta-level reification. In this article, we describe the nature and benefits of meta-level reification for arbitrary computation systems, and relate the benefits to decision support systems. To further illustrate our approach, we present an implementation of a reified architecture based on the MAX architecture (Kuokka, 1990), and show its application to several simple decision support functionalities in an investment domain. Finally, we discuss the advantages, disadvantages and future work of our approach.     

What Can We Learn from Droppers and Non-adopters About the Role of Advice in Agricultural Innovation?

In this article we assess the diversity of sources of advice identified by 678 adopters, 295 non-adopters and 107 droppers (or dis-adopters, who have ceased or reduced the use) of agricultural innovations across 13 European countries. For most innovations, the volume and composition of advisory supports (e.g. public advisory services, farm business organisations, NGOs, research and development sector, other farmers), at the whole farm level were similar between adopters, non-adopters and droppers. However, there were significant differences in relation to specific innovations. Farmers adopting digital technologies, soil-improving cropping systems, and common management of natural resources identified more diverse sources when assessing innovations, suggesting that more diverse advisory support supported successful implementation. For new on-farm activities, non-adopters had more varied sources of advice than adopters. This demonstrates that non-adoption can be a well-informed decision. Droppers typically identified fewer sources of advice on an innovation than adopters, particularly in the later stages of the innovation process, suggesting that lack of advice impeded successful implementation. The findings suggest that public funding for advisory services could usefully target emergent gaps: to support the provision of up-to-date advice on topics to farmers who have difficulty accessing advice, and to prevent unnecessary dropping by supporting the implementation of innovations.     

Microstructure and asset pricing: An insight on African frontier stock markets

This article investigates the impact of microstructure factors on asset pricing in some African stock markets. We use data on stocks listed on the Johannesburg Stock Exchange, the “Bourse Régionale des Valeurs Mobilières,” and the Nigeria Stock Exchange, and we consider international portfolio management from 2000 to 2014. Generalized least square and fixed effect are estimation methods used to highlight the effect of microstructure variables on expected return. At the same time, panel smooth transition regression (PSTR) modeling is considered to identify the thresholds in this effect. The results show that liquidity and to a lesser extent the number of trading days are the most common significant microstructure variables for all the studied markets. However, other variables’ effects on the return are specific to the considered stock markets. Furthermore, the PSTR estimator reveals that the impact of indicated factors on asset pricing is not linear because it produces a double threshold between return and microstructure.     

Age-related taxation of bequests in the presence of a dependency risk

This paper studies the properties of the optimal taxes on bequests when individuals differ in wage and in their risks of mortality and old-age dependance. Survival is positively correlated to income but dependency is negatively correlated with it. The government cannot distinguish between bequests motives, that is whether bequests resulted from precautionary reasons or from pure joy of giving reasons. Instead, it observes the timing of bequests and the health status at death. Under the utilitarian social welfare criterion, we show that bequests taxation results from a combination of equity, insurance, and public revenue motives. If redistribution concerns dominate insurance concerns, it is desirable to tax the most bequests of those individuals living long in good health and to tax the least bequests of those dying early. This is a direct consequence of the socio-demographic structure we assumed where richer agents live longer and in better health than poorer agents. To the opposite, if insurance concerns dominate redistributive concerns, early bequests should be the most taxed and, bequests under dependency the least taxed. Under the Rawlsian criterion, we find that early bequests should be the least taxed and bequests left by the healthy long-lived individuals should be the most taxed.