Relationship regarding the demand for labor between domestic temporary and foreign workers: Korean case

With the progress of globalization, South Korea, one of the emerging industrial countries, has recently witnessed a sharp increase in the number of enterprises that employ foreigners. However, there are only a limited number of studies on the influence that such an increase has had on the labor market in the Republic of Korea. Thus, using ‘Workplace Panel Survey’ data surveyed by the Korea Labor Institute (KLI), this paper examines the relationship concerning the labor demand of an establishment between domestic temporary and foreign workers. Analysis using a bivariate Tobit model shows that a typical Korean firm attempts to employ domestic temporary and foreign workers simultaneously. Further, the empirical analysis found that any establishment that is relatively newly established and has difficulty in recruiting domestic workers hires foreign workers, but there is no evidence that establishments hire foreign workers rather than domestic temporary workers to save on the production cost.     

State wage-payment laws, the Pension Protection Act of 2006, and 401(k) saving behavior

I show empirically that state wage-payment laws, which forbid deductions from wages and salaries without the written permission of the employee, constituted a binding constraint on firms’ choices to adopt automatic enrollment in 401(k) plans prior to 2006.     

Separating the Hawks from the Doves: Evidence from continuous time laboratory games

Human players in our laboratory experiment received flow payoffs over 120 seconds each period from a standard Hawk–Dove bimatrix game played in continuous time. Play converged closely to the symmetric mixed Nash equilibrium under a one-population matching protocol. When the same players were matched in a two-population protocol with the same bimatrix, they showed clear movement towards an asymmetric (and very inequitable) pure Nash equilibrium of the game. These findings support distinctive predictions of evolutionary game theory.     

Reconceptualizing value creation: Exploring the role of goal congruence in the Co-creation process

As companies gradually shift from the exchange view to the resource integration view, the creation of value also shifts from the customer sphere to the joint sphere. As a result, the customer and service provider are responsible for co-creating value through resource integration. However, it raises the question of whether customers are capable of contributing to the co-creation of value. Our study proposes a framework of how goal congruence plays a pivotal role in the resource integration process between all actors in the joint sphere. When the level of goal congruence between customer and service provider actors is high, it stimulates the exchange of valuable resources from all actors, which leads to the actual experience of co-creation resulting in value-in-use and improves service outcomes, i.e., customer satisfaction and loyalty. Data were collected through a field survey from salon-and-spa customers (n = 530) and PLS-SEM was employed to test the hypotheses and further analysis. The results show that goal congruence impacts customer satisfaction and loyalty through value-in-use. Therefore, suggesting service providers to properly socialize their goals will be a good strategy to increase customer capability to co-create value and ultimately enhance customer satisfaction and loyalty.     

Value co-creation and employee service behaviours: The moderating role of trust in employee - hotel relationship

Value co-creation (VC) is generally considered as having mutually beneficial implications for all actors involved. Nonetheless, emerging evidence on value co-destruction and its consequences on the wellbeing of co-creating actors implies that narrowing down on specific fallouts of this process is needed for managerial interventions. This paper contributes to the value-co-creation literature by exploring the relationship between customer participation in VC on some difficult to detect employee service behaviors: workaholism and fear-based silence. The extent to which employee trust (TRS) in employee – hotel relationship moderates these relations is assessed. While the findings from 422 frontline employee-customer data within luxury hotels in Ghana support a negative effect of VC on fear-based silence and workaholism, TRS buffered these effects. We recommend that VC in service failure and recovery be approached with tact, compassion, and forgiveness.     

How to retain customers in omnichannel retailing: Considering the roles of brand experience and purchase behavior

The opportunities and challenges of omnichannel in retail industry have been widely discussed, yet despite these benefits, the key elements that constitute an effective omnichannel and how customers respond to omnichannel retailing strategies remain unclear. This research conducted online surveys to test the effects of omnichannel elements on various brand experiences and customer retention, considering the moderating role of purchase behavior. The results indicate that omnichannel elements (integration, individualization, and interaction) are generally helpful in retaining customers, through omnichannel elements influence brand experiences differently. In addition, these omnichannel elements have different influences on customer retention due to different purchase behaviors. The findings suggest that retailers can use different omnichannel strategies to attract customers’ purchases and provide insights for practitioners who want to use omnichannel strategies to deliver superior experiences for customers.     

Increase hedonic products purchase intention through livestreaming: The mediating effects of mental imagery quality and customer trust

Although online retailing is applying livestreaming to promote both hedonic and utilitarian products, the differential effectiveness of utilizing this tool across the two types of products is still unclear. With an online experiment, the study found that livestreaming (vs. traditional e-commerce) is more effective in boosting hedonic products while making no difference in increasing purchase intentions of utilitarian products. By running a moderated serial mediation analysis, the research also demonstrated the underlying mechanism that livestreaming could significantly enhance mental imagery quality and customer trust in hedonic rather than utilitarian products. Therefore, our research has discovered an important boundary condition for the livestreaming effect and also the mechanism for the success of utilizing livestreaming to boost hedonic products. Considering the indiscriminate use of livestreaming regardless of product types and the huge amounts of resources required to sustain livestreaming, the study not only provides a theoretical glimpse of where livestreaming is more effective and why, but also practical insights as to how to apply livestreaming to different types of products and how to leverage mental imagery and customer trust to achieve business growth in an online retailing context.     

The roles of multiple channels in predicting website visits and purchases: Engagers versus closers

In today’s online environment, consumers and sellers interact through multiple channels such as email, search engines, banner ads, affiliate websites and comparison-shopping websites. In this paper, we investigate whether knowing the history of channels the consumer has used until a point of time is predictive of their future visit patterns and purchase conversions. We propose a model in which future visits and conversions are stochastically dependent on the channels a consumer used on their path up to a point. Salient features of our model are: (1) visits by consumers are allowed to be clustered, which enables separation of their visits into intra- and inter-session components, (2) interaction effects between channels where prior visits and conversions from channels impact future inter-session visits, intra-session visits and conversions through a latent variable reflecting the cumulative weighted inventory of prior visits, (3) each channel attracts inter-session and intra-session visits differently, (4) each channel has different association with conversion conditional on a customer’s arrival to the website through that channel, (5) each channel engages customers differently (i.e., keeps the customer alive for a next session or for a next visit within a session), (6) the channel from which there was an arrival in the previous session can have an enhanced ability to generate an arrival for the same channel in the current session (channel persistence), and (7) parsimonious specification for high dimensionality in a low-velocity, sparse-data environment. We estimate the model on easy-to-collect first-party data obtained from an online retailer selling a durable good and find that information on the identities of channels and incorporation of inter- and intra-session visits have significant predictive power for future visitation and conversion behavior. We find that some channels act as “closers” and others as “engagers”—consumers arriving through the former are more likely to make a purchase, while consumers arriving through the latter, even if they do not make a purchase, are more likely to visit again in the future or extend the current session. We also find that some channels engage customers more than others, and that there are interaction effects between the channels visited. Our estimates show that the effect of prior inventory of visits is different from the immediate prior visit, and that visit and purchase probabilities can increase or decrease based on the history of channels used. We discuss several managerial implications of the model including using the predictions of the model to aid in selecting customers for marketing actions and using the model to evaluate a policy change regarding the obscuring of channel information.     

乡村旅游主题下休闲农业发展研究——以山西省100个3 A级乡村旅游示范村为例

以山西省首批100个3A级乡村旅游示范村为研究对象,运用最近邻指数、地理集中指数、核密度分析等空间分析方法及建立乡村旅游资源分类体系,对其空间结构和分类特征进行测度。结果表明:样本点空间分布为集聚型,分布高密度区域主要在山西省中东部、东南部和南部,北部和西部分布密度较低。山西省休闲旅游资源丰富,为乡村旅游提供了大量资源,五种乡村发展类型中,特色文化型村庄占比最大,休闲农庄和城郊发展型村庄相对较少。最后根据研究结果提出相关建议。     

On the importance of matching strategic behavior and target market selection to business strategy in high-tech markets

Business strategy is fundamentally concerned with the actions required to create superior customer value in the firm’s target markets with the ultimate goal of achieving superior performance. Marketing theory suggests that two critical marketing activities required to achieve this end are: (1) the adoption of appropriate strategic behaviors (i.e., customer-oriented, competitor-oriented, technology-oriented) and (2) targeting of the appropriate market segments (i.e., innovators, early adopters, early majority, late majority, laggards). This study builds on prior research which demonstrates that the strategic behavior—firm performance relationship is contingent on the firm’s strategy by examining this relationship in high tech markets and by considering the incremental contribution of appropriate target market selection. Responses from 160 senior marketing managers in high-tech firms reveal strong support for our framework. Thus, this study provides useful guidance to executives and managers in high-tech firms regarding the steps that they should take to increase their probability of success.