The German Spa and Health Resort Industry in the Light of Health Care System Reforms

The German health care system has been under increasing pressure over the past decades due to escalating health care costs. A number of reforms have been introduced to ensure a fair and sustainable financing of the health care system. These reforms also have had a significant impact on the health and wellness tourism market and pose great challenges and also new opportunities for the industry. Special reference is made to the important senior market for which health and wellness have become key aspects influencing travel behavior. This can be seen as a positive trend, particularly for the traditional spas and health resorts in Germany. However, the situation is far more complex as outlined with the case example of Bad Wörishofen.     

Service quality, trust, specific asset investment, and expertise: Direct and indirect effects in a satisfaction-loyalty framework

This study proposes an integrated framework explaining loyalty responses in high-involvement, high-service luxury product markets. The model is rooted in the traditional (attribute satisfaction)-(overall satisfaction)-(loyalty) chain but explicitly incorporates facility versus interactive service quality, trust, specific asset investment (SAI), and product-market expertise. The authors focus on disentangling the direct versus indirect effects of model constructs on attitudinal versus behavioral loyalty responses. The results support the traditional chain but also show loyalty can be increased by building a trustworthy image and creating exchange-specific assets. The authors found that overall satisfaction is the precursor both to loyalty and to building SAI. Finally, consumers have different costs in reducing adverse selection problems with information, and thus the negative effect of product-market expertise on behavioral loyalty needs to be controlled if the direct versus indirect effects of model constructs on loyalty are to be disentangled. Jyh-Shen Chiou (jschiou@nccu.edu.tw) (PhD in marketing, Michigan State University) is a professor of marketing in the Department of International Business at National Chengchi University, Taipei. His research interests include satisfaction and loyalty, strategic marketing, and international marketing. His work has been published in theJournal of Service Research, Psychology & Marketing, theEuropean Journal of Marketing, theJournal of Interactive Marketing, Information & Management, theJournal of Social Psychology, theJournal of Business Logistics, Advances in Consumer Research, and other scholarly journals. He has taught courses in marketing research, strategic marketing, and global marketing. Cornelia Droge (droge@msu.edu) is a professor of marketing in the Department of Marketing and Supply Chain Management, the Eli Broad Graduate School of Management, at Michigan State University. Her research interests focus on satisfaction/ loyalty and strategic marketing (especially areas related to the interface of marketing with logistics, supply chain, and operations). Her work has appeared inManagement Science, theStrategic Management Journal, theJournal of Marketing Research, theJournal of Business Logistics, theJournal of Operations Management, theJournal of Product Innovation Management, and other scholarly journals. She is also coauthor of three books.     

THE EFFECTS OF LOGISTICS CAPABILITIES ON FIRM PERFORMANCE: CUSTOMER‐FOCUSED VERSUS INFORMATION‐FOCUSED CAPABILITIES

The research presents a model that portrays customer‐focused and information‐focused capabilities as interrelated predictors of firm performance. Results show that customer‐focused capabilities are directly related to performance, but that information‐focused capabilities are not. Rather, the latter relationship is indirect: information‐focused capabilities are linked to performance via the interrelationship with customer‐focused capabilities.     

Withdrawal from Foreign Lending in the Financial Crisis by Parent Banks and Their Branches and Subsidiaries: Supply Versus Demand Effects

This study investigates the different channels through which internationally active banks can provide loans abroad. Using data on German banks from 2002 to 2010, we contrast determinants for cross-border lending by the parent bank with lending by affiliates located abroad. We show that lending by parent banks is based almost entirely on supply-side determinants, in particular on bank-specific factors. The more the loans are intermediated by banks’ affiliates located abroad, the more relevant become foreign countries’ demand and risk characteristics. This applies in particular when banks operate via locally focused affiliates - rather than regionally active hub affiliates - as well as when the affiliates have the status of branches as opposed to legally independent subsidiaries. In general, banks with a greater risk aversion withdraw more from foreign lending during the financial crisis, especially following the collapse of Lehman Brothers. However, at a Tier I capital ratio of around 11 %, a further increase in the ratio did not affect lending anymore.     

Some remarks on the phenomenon of Islamic revivalism

There are several indications that in at least some parts of the Islamic world a process of cultural and political change has begun, with the tendency towards a reassertion of Islamic values. Amongst other things, this involves formulating a concept of modern Islamic economics, the principles of which are derived from the ethical norms of Islam. Is a specifically Islamic economy really likely to develop? What form might this take?     

The company, product and market dimensions of new product decision scenarios

Studies show that managers synthesize information and make strategic decisions in a situation-specific mode. Making effective new product decisions is a critical problem and managers are urged to improve their performance by adjusting their decision approach to fit the type of situation. Identifying situation-specific new product scenarios is, therefore, an important prerequisite. This article identifies five basic new product decision scenarios using a cluster analysis of factor scored company, product and market data. These provide insights about the situations managers typically face when evaluating new products.     

Content analysis in environmental reporting research: Enrichment and rehearsal of the method in a British–German context

A number of previous studies have utilised content analysis as a method for analysing environmental reporting. In this study, a method, devised by the authors and capable of both mechanistic and interpretative narrative interrogation is presented. By adopting a matrix approach to environmental narratives, multiple information characteristics can be taken into account when analysing disclosures. The method developed in this paper (termed CONI or consolidated narrative interrogation) provides a measure of information diversity, information content and volume. The content analysis instrument facilitates data capture inaccessible to less penetrating research instruments.The joint objectives of this paper are to report on the development of CONI and to demonstrate its capacity to extend the capability of content analysis methods. In particular, the paper demonstrates the utility of CONI through the application to a matched sample of 14 pairs of companies from the United Kingdom and Germany over a period of five years. Findings include the observation that information diversity has broadened over time. The study also notes the dominance of narrative over numerical content with little disclosure containing comparative or contextualised numerical information. There were few significant differences in environmental reporting between the two countries. The paper concludes with suggested opportunities for future research using the CONI research instrument.     

Governance decisions for the offshore outsourcing of new product development in technology intensive markets

This study addresses how buyers organize their offshore outsourcing new product development relationships. Building on transaction cost economics and resource dependence theories, we propose a model of the influence of key new product development offshore outsourcing factors on two important buyers’ governance decisions (i.e., supply concentration and degree of supplier involvement). The antecedents, drawn from the marketing, management, and international business literatures, include: three sources of asset specificity (degree of modularity, strategic value of the project, and technology specificity) and two sources of uncertainty (cultural distance and technological discontinuity). The results, derived from an analysis of 200 offshore outsourcing new product development relationships, provide new insights for academics and practitioners.