The evolution of consumer knowledge and sources of information: Hungary in transition

The authors’ research in Hungary during the period of transition to a market economy provides an opportunity to examine the evolving relationships between consumer product knowledge and its antecedents, including advertising, personal search, interpersonal sources, and brand experience. Their findings, based on survey data collected in Budapest in 1992 and 1998, indicate that the market information variables explain more variance in consumer knowledge later rather than earlier in the transition. Advertising is an important predictor of consumer knowledge later but not earlier in the transition, personal search is important at both times, and interpersonal sources are not important in either time period; brand experience is negatively related to knowledge earlier in the transition and positively related later in the transition. This study allows one to begin to understand the boundary conditions associated with studies conducted in developed economies. Managerial implications for firms investing in transitional economies are presented. Robin A. Coulter (robin.coulter@business.uconn.edu) is Ackerman Scholar and an associate professor of marketing in the School of Business at the University of Connecticut. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Pittsburgh. Her research interests include branding, cross-cultural consumer behavior, advertising, and research methods. Her work has appeared in theJournal of Consumer Research, the Journal of Consumer Psychology, theJournal of Applied Psychology, and theInternational Journal of Research in Marketing. Linda L. Price (llprice@email.arizona.edu) is Soldwedel Professor of Marketing in the Eller School of Management at the University of Arizona. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Texas at Austin. Her research combines qualitative and quantitative methodologies to examine the active, emotional, imaginative aspects of consumers’ decisions and activities, and the social and cultural context of marketplace behaviors. Her work has appeared in theJournal of Consumer Research, Journal of Marketing, and other leading marketing, management, and social science journals. Lawrence Feick (feick@katz.pitt.edu) is a professor of business administration in the Katz Graduate School of Business at the University of Pittsburgh. He received his Ph.D. from Pennsylvania State University. His current research focuses on cross-cultural consumer behavior, consumer word-of-mouth, and referrals. His work has appeared in the Journal of Marketing, theJournal of Marketing Research, the Journal of Consumer Research, Psychological Bulletin, andPublic Opinion Quarterly. Camelia Micu (camelia.micu@business.uconn.edu) is a marketing doctoral candidate at the University of Connecticut. Her research interests include advertising and product trial and cross-cultural consumer behavior.     

突发公共卫生事件的 应急医疗资源配置研究——基于网格化管理和大数据平台

应急医疗资源是应对突发公共卫生事件最重要的物质基础和保障。在对前人研究进行总结的基础上,分析了目前我国在突发公共卫生事件时应急医疗资源调配机制的不足和网格化管理应用到资源配置中的可行性和优越性,以此将大数据平台和网格化管理模式引入到应急医疗资源的配置研究中。在对应急医疗资源的配置过程进行网格化模型设计的基础上,根据我国应急医疗资源配置的需要和特点,确定了网格系统中的基本单元,即网格划分,并选择五层沙漏模型作为突发公共卫生事件时应急医疗资源配置的网格模型架构,以期完善我国的应急资源管理体系,进一步提高我国在突发公共卫生事件时应急医疗资源的调配和管理水平。     

Assessment and selection of management consultants: A comparative cognitive study between small- and large-scale companies

This paper explores alternative ways of evaluating and ultimately hiring a generalist consultancy for short- and medium-term projects, and how this is shaped by the size of the clients’ company. What buying factors do managers of small and large firms have in mind when hiring consultants for their projects?Instead of employing surveys incorporating predefined buying factors based on what the researchers think would be important, a cognitive mapping methodology - the repertory grid technique - is applied to investigate the underlying phenomena. Using the repertory grid technique to draw mental models is a novel research technique within the supply management field. Recent behavioral supply chain management research found the behavior of managers to be critically influenced by mental models: the lenses through which managers perceive, simplify and interpret the world.Results show differences between the buying factors used in small- and large-scale companies: managers of large companies are more ‘reputation and outcome-oriented’ and managers of small businesses are more concerned with ‘how the services are rendered’. However, both constituents stressed the importance of expertise, quality and the relationship between the client and the management consultancy, although the character of such a relationship differed between small- and large-scale firms. Results also point out criteria that managers of small and large companies employ to discriminate between good and poor performing consultancies and to judge service delivery. The practical implications for both companies hiring consultancies and the consultancy companies are discussed. For consultancies, our findings can help tailoring their efforts to a differing clientele when marketing and selling their services. For companies hiring consultancies, fixating too much on particular buying factors may lead to biased decisions.     

Physical Search

Unidirectional search is an evolutionarily stable outcome in an economy where homogenous buyers and sellers can either move or stay. It is more efficient than bidirectional search. In unidirectional search, it is more efficient if the more numerous agents move and the less numerous agents stay, than vice versa.     

Youth labor market expectations and job matching in sub-Saharan Africa: evidence from school-to-work transition surveys

In this paper, we investigate the factors that influence youth labour market expectations and outcomes. We also perform a job matching exercise to understand youth labour market dynamics in Sub-Saharan Africa. Our results show that youth education is an influential factor of youth employment expectations and employment, ceteris paribus. Higher educational attainments have a great impact on expecting and securing better jobs, particularly in the technical and professional fields. Youth with low educational attainments, particularly primary education and lower, have a higher tendency to expect to be employed in occupations with low job complexity. Our results indicate a severe job-skill mismatch in all occupational categories, both before and after the youth’s transition into the labour market. Using education as the only selection criterion, we found that less than 10 per cent of employment expectations match with skills required while 55 per cent and 34 per cent are under or over-educated for the jobs expected, respectively. Over and under education is a notable feature in youth labour markets in Sub-Saharan Africa. About 47 per cent of employed youth in the sample are overqualified for their respective jobs while 28 per cent are under qualified.     

基于网格技术的城市公共汽车到站时刻预测研究

在介绍了网格技术的含义和基础知识后,结合我国目前公共汽车预测研究的现状,设计了基于网格技术的城市公共汽车到站时间的预测系统,并对其进行了详细的设计。     

Overeducation, regional labor markets, and spatial flexibility

For most workers, access to suitable employment is severely restricted by the fact that they look for jobs in the regional labor market rather than the global one. In this paper we analyze how macrolevel opportunities (regional market characteristics) and microlevel restrictions (the extent to which job searchers are restricted to the regional market) can help to explain the phenomenon of overeducation. We use a two-step procedure to control selective access to employment. The results show that the size of the labor market is an important factor in avoiding overeducation.     

Good News and Bad News: Search from Unknown Wage Offer Distributions

The largest market in national economies is the labor market. Labor market contracting is characterized by job search, often from unknown wage offer distributions. This paper reports experimental tests of finite horizon models of job search in which the wage offer distribution is unknown. Theoretically-optimal search from an unknown wage offer distribution can have the seemingly paradoxical property that some offers will be accepted that are lower than other offers that will be rejected in the same period of the search horizon. Thus the reservation wage property (or lowest acceptable wage path) may not exist. This can occur because an offer that is a priori relatively high (good news) can imply that it is highly probable that search is from a favorable distribution, and such an offer can look unattractive when it is an a posteriori relatively low offer from a favorable distribution (bad news). This paper reports results from experimental treatments for search from unknown distributions in which the reservation wage property does exist and treatments in which it does not exist. We find that the consistency of search behavior with search theory reported in earlier papers is robust to the presence or absence of the reservation wage property and to whether the draws come from known or unknown distributions.     

供应链网格体系结构研究

从全球化供应链的角度出发，提出了供应链网格的体系结构模型。提出了供应链网络SCGfid体系结构模型并进行了分析，对SCGfid体系结构的另一个重要问题SCGfid安全体系结构进行了阐述，指出将网格技术引入供应链全过程是未来必然的发展方向。     

网络搜索引擎——功能、使用技巧与检索策略

伴随Internet爆炸性的发展,以及网上信息资源的快速增长,网络搜索引擎便应运而生了。而如今越来越多的研究者依赖于搜索引擎获得信息,人们的工作、学习、生活与网络搜索引擎已密不可分,把搜索比喻成是一种生活方式已毫不为过。所以,认识和研究网络搜索引擎有着非常重要的现实意义。