Pioneer brand advantage and consumer behavior: A conceptual framework and propositional inventory

What are the behavioral origins of pioneer brand advantage? This article provides an integrative conceptual framework and propositional inventory to help more fully understand this multifaceted phenomenon. It is proposed that there are three sources of entry-order information that work through various psychological processes and affect multiple decision process variables. The conceptual framework translates into eight testable propositions. New exploratory evidence is presented. Managerial implications are discussed.     

Coping with sales call anxiety: The role of sale perseverance and task concentration strategies

The authors study how salespeople cope with social anxiety during customer contacts and find that two tactics, sale perseverance and task concentration, ultimately reduce dysfunctional protective actions. Both coping tactics, however, are differentially moderated by strength of felt physiological sensations and strength of negative expectations and thoughts. Salespeople experiencing anxiety cognitions should distract themselves by concentrating on their task to free up their thinking in relation to the task at hand. Engaging in behaviors to modify the situation by persevering on the sale, on the other hand, occupies action space and should be the coping strategy of choice for those salespeople confronting physiological sensations in relation to felt anxiety. Hypotheses are tested on a sample of 171 salespersons. Frank Belschak (f.d.belschak@uva.nl) is an assistant professor of marketing and organizational behavior in the Business School at the University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands. He received his PhD from the University of Cologne in Germany. His current research interests include personal selling, emotions, and emotion regulation in organizations and across cultures. Willem Verbeke (verbeke@few.eur.nl) is a chaired professor of sales and account management at Erasmus University in Rotterdam, the Netherlands. He received his PhD from the University of Pennsylvania. His area of research interests includes personal selling, sales management, emotions and emotion regulation, and knowledge management. Richard P. Bagozzi (bagozzi@umich.edu) is a professor of marketing in the Ross School of Business and a professor of social and administrative sciences in the College of Pharmacy at the University of Michigan. He received his PhD from Northwestern University. He conducts research on human emotions, the theory of action, goal setting and goal striving, and structural equation methods.     

Brands matter: An empirical demonstration of the creation of shareholder value through branding

This research responds to the attendant need for empirical evidence pertaining to how marketing affects firm performance. Using the Fama-French method, common in finance, and a leading marketplace measure of a brand’s financial equity value, the authors provide empirical evidence for the branding-shareholder value creation link. The results extend previous research by showing that strong brands not only deliver greater returns to stockholders than does a relevant benchmark but do so with less risk This finding holds even when market share and firm size are considered. Barclays Global Investors Thomas J. Madden is a professor of marketing and director of the Professional MBA/Executive International MBA programs at the Moore School of Business, University of South Carolina. His research focuses on the measurement of brand meaning, marketing metrics, and value-based marketing strategies. His research has appeared in theJournal of Marketing Research, theJournal of Marketing, and theJournal of Consumer Behavior. Frank Fehle (frank.fehle@barclaysglobal.com) is the head of Europe Equity Research at Barclays Global Investors in London, United Kingdom. Previously, he was an assistant professor of finance at the University of South Carolina. His research focuses on empirical asset pricing, market microstructure, risk management, and derivatives. His work has appeared in theJournal of Financial Economics, theJournal of Futures Markets, theJournal of Economics and Business, theReview of Quantitative Finance and Accounting, among other journals and conference proceedings. Susan Fournier is an associate professor of marketing at Boston University. Her research focuses on branding and brand relationship marketing. Current projects explore person-brands, resonance as a moderator of the brand meaning → brand strength connection, the types of relationships consumers form with brands, and dynamic processes of relationship development and evolution. She served for 9 years on the Harvard Business School faculty and 2 years as a visitor at Dartmouth College. She consults with a range of companies to inform her teaching, case development, and research.     

Southeast Asian capitalism: History,institutions, states,and firms

This paper examines the structures of capitalism in Southeast Asia. Following the lead of Gordon Redding and others, it argues that parallel to varieties of capitalism elsewhere, there are distinctive features to the Southeast Asian business system, but that institutions play a relatively large role compared to firm specific resources or industry structures. Historically, with the exception of Thailand all the countries in the region are former colonies. All including Thailand share a distinctive style of nationalism, and partly as a result of this, all are governed by states that claim to be strong and lay wide claims but whose capacities are low. Typical features of the region, particularly the roles of large business groups and the Chinese minority, also can be interpreted as a result of this history. One of the outcomes of the analysis is an extension of the varieties of capitalism approach along the dimensions of state capacity and state direction, and of the approach to the internationalizing firm along the dimensions of dynamic capacity and control of subsidiaries. A further outcome is a questioning of the traditional picture of indigenous Southeast Asian business people as lacking in entrepreneurial skills, or more broadly of Southeast Asian nations as lacking in entrepreneurial values. Rather, the past history of these countries has resulted in a set of structures that militate against successful entrepreneurial activity.

Regional GDP in the UK, 1861–1911: new estimates

This article compares the Geary–Stark method for distributing known GDP totals across regions with a variation suggested by Crafts. Tests of the Geary–Stark method confirm that it generates accurate estimates of regional GDP. There are practical and conceptual problems with Crafts' extension, and it is not tested nor is it testable. New estimates of regional GDP for the period 1861 to 1911 contradict Crafts's suggestion of rising regional inequality. Purchasing power parity adjustments do not alter this trend. The new estimates confirm Ireland's post‐Famine catch‐up. The great bulk of Irish labour productivity growth can be accounted for by an upward shifting production function, though it can be argued that that portion of growth that represents catch‐up may be attributable to labour force decline.     

Measuring the cost of liquidity in agricultural futures markets: Conventional and Bayesian approaches

Estimating the cost of liquidity in agricultural futures markets is challenging because bid‐ask spreads are usually not observed. Based on an ability to reflect simulated data from Roll's spread model, we assess the effectiveness of conventional and Bayesian bid‐ask spread estimators under different market conditions. Conventional serial covariance and absolute price change spread estimators appear to be biased. Hasbrouck's Bayesian estimator generates small costs of liquidity whose values depend on the correlation and noise in the data. The absolute value Bayesian estimator is precise and works well under conditions of high levels of noise and correlation usually found in agricultural futures markets. Using data from live cattle (LC) and lean hog (LH) contracts, we find similar patterns of performance that produce economically meaningful cost of liquidity differences.     

IMPORTATION AND INNOVATION

Importation of drugs into the US may soon become legal. Since prices of drugs are lower in most other countries than they are in the US, importation would result in a decline in US drug prices. The purpose of this paper is to assess the consequences of importation for new drug development. First, the author presents a simple theoretical model of drug development which suggests that the elasticity of innovation with respect to the expected price of drugs should be at least as great as the elasticity of innovation with respect to expected market size (disease incidence). Then, the cross-sectional relationship between pharmaceutical innovation and market size among a set of diseases (different types of cancer) exhibiting substantial exogenous variation in expected market size is examined. Two different measures of pharmaceutical innovation are analysed: the number of distinct chemotherapy regimens for treating a cancer site and the number of articles published in scientific journals pertaining to drug therapy for that cancer site. Both analyses indicate that the amount of pharmaceutical innovation increases with disease incidence. The elasticity of the number of chemotherapy regimens with respect to the number of cases is 0.53. The elasticity of MEDLINE drug cites with respect to cancer incidence throughout the world is 0.60. In the long run, a 10% decline in drug prices would therefore be likely to cause at least a 5–6% decline in pharmaceutical innovation. Evidence suggests that pharmaceutical industry employment would also decline (by at least 3.5–4%) in response to an exogenous 10% decline in drug prices.     

Stochastic trend,weather and US corn yield variability

Regional corn yield models incorporating stochastic trends, prices and weather variables are estimated. Hypothesis tests suggest yield variability has increased because of an increase in error variance and an increase in weather-related effects. Decomposition of the error variance shows much of its increase is due to an increased correlaion between regional yields.