Green consumers and their identities: how identities change the motivation for green consumption

This research aims to fill the gap in green consumption literature from the perspective of values as types of intentions and identity‐based motivation. In two studies, we examine how the salience of personal and social identities can change the relationship between types of intentions and green consumption. The results demonstrate that when personal identity is salient, self‐transcendence intentions influence green consumption more than self‐enhancement intentions. This is because personal identity (compared with social identity) increases the positive effect of congruent intentions (self‐transcendence) on green consumption. However, when social identity is salient, self‐transcendence and self‐enhancement intentions have a similar impact on green consumption. This is because social identity (compared with personal identity) reduces the negative effect of self‐enhancement intentions on green consumption. Finally, we discuss theoretical and managerial implications for values as types of intentions, identity‐based motivation and green consumption.     

Environmental Protection in Environmentally Reactive Firms: Lessons from Corporate Argentina

We propose a model of planned corporate environmental behaviour that emphasises the values and attitudes of managers towards the environment, environmental intentions and the context in which these intentions are formed and translated into actual performance. In particular, we focus on the extent to which environmentally reactive (as oppose to pro-active) managers influence the environmental performance of their firms. We identify the factors that mitigate or accentuate the effects of environmental “reactivism”—i.e. a mind-set shared by those who assign to the state the responsibility of protecting the environment. We generate a series of hypotheses and use structural equation modelling to test them in the context of a unique dataset of Argentinean firms. Our system’s approach to corporate environmental behaviour explains approximatively 70 % of the variation in reported environmental performance across firms while highlighting elements of the model that may potentially be influenced by policy. Amongst other things, our empirical results suggest that stakeholder pressures can be an effective tool in the development of pro-environmental attitudes (and environmental intentions in the case of small firms) and in so doing offset some of the negative effects of environmental reactivism on environmental performance. Our paper highlights a number of other important implications for the design and implementation of environmental policies that account for human managerial determinants of corporate behaviour and social factors.     

Dollarization persistence and individual heterogeneity

A salient feature of financial dollarization, arguably the one that causes most concern to policymakers, is its persistence: even after successful macroeconomic stabilizations, dollarization ratios often remain high. In this paper we argue that this persistence is connected to the fact that the participants in the dollar deposit market are fairly heterogenous, and so is the way they form their optimal currency portfolio. We develop a simple model when agents differ in their ability to process information, which turns out to be enough to generate persistence upon aggregation. We provide empirical evidence that is consistent with this claim.     

Customer perceptions of “McService”’: Relationship with return intention

The fast-food restaurant segment has been a dominant player in the restaurant industry since the 1960s. The recent changes in the needs and wants of guests have affected fast-food restaurants' ability to keep up with the trends regarding healthy and high-quality food options served at reasonable prices. The service quality perceptions assessed in this study were divided into the following constructs: overall experience, employees, ordering process, receiving order, and food quality. The results determined that the construct that influenced repeat intention was food quality, specifically the individual items “fresh food” and “food taste.” The study also found that males tended to evaluate employees more positively than females. Moreover, frequent fast-food diners only tended to have favorable perceptions with regard to the overall ordering process. Implications for practitioners and suggestions for future studies are discussed.     

The economic consequences of the Spanish Reconquest: the long-term effects of Medieval conquest and colonization

This paper shows that a historical process that ended more than five centuries ago, the Reconquest, is very important to explain Spanish regional economic development down to the present day. An indicator measuring the rate of Reconquest reveals a heavily negative effect on current income differences across the Spanish provinces. A main intervening factor in the impact the Reconquest has had is the concentration of economic and political power in a few hands, excluding large segments of the population from access to economic opportunities when Spain entered the industrialization phase. The timing of the effect is consistent with this argument. A general implication of our analysis is that large frontier expansions may favor a political equilibrium among the colonizing agents that is biased toward the elite, creating the conditions for an inegalitarian society, with negative consequences for long-term economic development.     

Coalition-proof supply function equilibria in oligopoly

In an industry where firms compete via supply functions, the set of equilibrium outcomes is large. If decreasing supply functions are ruled out, this set is reduced significantly, but remains large. Specifically, the set of prices that can be sustained by supply function equilibria is the interval between the competitive price and the Cournot price. In sharp contrast, when the number of firms is above a threshold we identify (e.g., three if demand is linear), only the Cournot outcome can be sustained by a coalition-proof supply function equilibrium.