The Influence of Retail Management’s Use of Social Power on Corporate Ethical Values,Employee Commitment,and Performance

Recent cases in retailing reflect that ethics have a major impact on brands and performance, in turn, demonstrating that brand owners, employees, and consumers focus on ethical values. In this study, we analyze how various sources of social power affect corporate ethical values, retailer’s commitment to the retail organization, and ultimately sales and service quality. Multi-source data based on a sample of 225 retailers indicated a strong link between power, ethics, and commitment and that these affected output performance.     

Testing Retail Marketing-Mix Effects on Patronage: A Meta-Analysis

Retailers have always worked to establish close relationships with customers through the retail marketing mix. Thus, the literature has a long tradition of testing the effects of various instruments on retail patronage. This meta-study synthesizes prior research into one comprehensive framework. We use 14,895 effect sizes reported by more than 239,000 shoppers from 41 countries extracted from 350 independent samples, to test the impact of 24 marketing-mix instruments on retail patronage. Specifically, we investigate the direct and indirect effects of these instruments on store satisfaction, word of mouth, patronage intention, and behavior. Product and brand management related instruments display the strongest effects on most outcome variables, whereas price, communication, service and incentive management instruments affect only selected outcomes. Distribution management turns out to be of secondary importance. However, the effectiveness of these instruments depends on the specific shopping context (food/non-food, shopping frequency, single store/agglomeration, hedonic/utilitarian), the retail environment (gross domestic product, country innovativeness, retail sales share, retail employment, Internet era), and the employed method (participant type, study design, data source). Specifically, we reveal most differences for hedonic shopping environments and developed countries. Also, the store’s advertising and atmosphere have gained importance in the Internet era, while purchase incentives, in-store orientation, and store location have lost relevance. This study contributes to a synoptic understanding of the comparable effectiveness of retail marketing instruments on retail patronage. It offers insights into the effectiveness of marketing-mix instruments and provides guidance on whether and when to invest in them. It also presents an agenda for future research on marketing-mix instruments.     

Development and perspectives of the Australian Coal Supply Chain and Implications for the Export Market

The Australian coal industry is critical for the nation’s domestic energy supply and economy with an export value of almost A$24 bn in the fiscal year 2007/08. With almost 75% of production destined to the export market, Australia is also the world’s largest hard coal exporter and an essential secure source of energy particularly to meet both thermal and metallurgical coal demand in the fast growing Pacific Rim. This paper examines the Australian mining sector prospects to retain its position as the world’s largest coal exporter in the mid-term, by analysing the potential increases in export capacity along the coal supply chain through expansions in mine, rail and port capacities. Despite current financial challenges and restrictions, the authors conclude that export volumes, depending on demand, could rise by 50% in the period to 2014.     

Allowing disagreement in evaluations of social welfare

There is no consensus on how to measure interpersonally comparable, cardinal utility. Despite of this, people repeatedly make welfare evaluations in their everyday lives. However, people do not always agree on such evaluations, and this is one important reason for political disagreements. Thus, to keep in control of the normative premises, decision makers may prefer information which can be used as input to an arbitrary social welfare function to information which is the output from a social welfare function specified by the analyst. In this paper we try to identify and simplify sufficient welfare indicators; information which enables decision makers to arrive at welfare evaluations of social states or projects, according to their own ethical beliefs. Our conclusion is that providing factual information about different population groups, their social state, size, and characteristics, may be better for this purpose than the more traditional approach of focusing on ordinal utility information.     

Forecasting the demand for an employee Park and Ride service using commuters' stated choices

This paper uses Stated Choice (SC) data to forecast the demand for an employee Park and Ride service. Since it is well known that SC data contain sources of variation not present in Revealed Preference data we pay special attention to the scaling of the SC model. The results show that the modal shift away from parking-on site will be small unless the new service is accompanied by measures aimed at making parking on-site less attractive such as introducing parking charges.     

Education and electoral participation: reported versus actual voting behaviour

Using survey data of voters in Tanzania, this article shows that while education does not affect self-reported voting in general elections, it increases actual voting. The less educated are more likely to claim to have voted without having done so, which may explain why previous studies of voting in developing countries fail to find an effect of education. We demonstrate the importance of this finding by using our survey data to generate predicted voting probabilities for the respondents to the 2012 Afrobarometer survey in Tanzania and show that while mean self-reported voting does not differ much at different levels of education, the differences become significant when taking into account voting misrepresentation.     

Robustifizierung des Chain-Ladder-Verfahrens über ein skalares Zustandsraummodell

Applications of state space models and the Kalman filter are comparatively underrepresented in stochastic claims reserving. This is usually caused by their high complexity due to matrix-based approaches, which complicate their applications. In order to facilitate the implementation of state space models in practice, we present a state space model for cumulative payments in the framework of a scalar-based approach. In addition to a comprehensive presentation of this scalar state space model, some empirical applications and comparisons with popular stochastic claims reserving methods are performed, which show the strengths of the scalar state space model in practical applications. This model is a robustified extension of the well-known Chain Ladder method under the assumption, that the observations in the upper triangle are based on unobservable states. Using Kalman-filter recursions for prediction, filtering and smoothing of cumulative payments, the entire unobservable lower and upper run-off triangles can be determined. Moreover, the model provides an easy way to find and smooth outliers and to interpolate gaps in the data. Thus, the problem of missing values in the upper triangle is also solved in a natural way.     

Utilizing mobile devices to enrich the learning style of students

As digital technologies evolve in education, business faculty have increased access to an extensive range of mobile devices and online applications to help them inspire students' passion for learning. Adopting new digital approaches to teaching can also enhance the learning style of students who are immersed in the use of digital devices. How can the use of these devices and associated applications (apps) help students broaden the opportunities for a more effective learning experience? In this exploratory article, the authors examine the impact of two mobile apps—Flipboard and Stitcher—on students' learning and engagement with class-assigned marketing materials. Students enjoyed Flipboard more than Stitcher in contributing to the requirements of class work.     

A NON-SIGN-PRESERVING RAS VARIANT

We have developed a variant of the RAS generalised iterative scaling method that is able to change the sign between successive iterates, and thus fulfil constraints that are infeasible for existing RAS variants. Like earlier RAS variants, our method can handle constraints on arbitrarily sized and shaped subsets of matrix elements, include reliability of the initial estimate and the external constraints, and deal with negative values.     

Productive capabilities: An empirical analysis of their drivers

Recent contributions to the growth and trade literature have argued that the structure of an economy, as measured by its productive capabilities, is a key determinant for inter-country differences in development. Productive capabilities have been shown to be highly predictive of future economic growth, yet the country-level variables associated with them remain relatively unknown. In this paper, we empirically explore what variables are systematically associated with productive capabilities using a model averaging framework that can handle a very large number of potential explanatory variables without the need for arbitrary model selection. In order to estimate our dynamic panel specification, we propose a novel Bayesian averaging of classical estimates procedure based on the simple and efficient bias-corrected least squares dummy variable estimator. Our baseline and robustness analysis consider a large number of variables, sample periods and model priors. We find that there is persistence (as measured by the lagged dependent variable) and that variables, such as commodity terms of trade, energy availability, government consumption, capital per worker, arable land and capital inflows show a strong and robust association with capabilities.