Brand love: development and validation of a practical scale

Batra et al. (Journal of Marketing 76, 1–16, 2012) created a new conceptualization of brand love but did not develop a pragmatically useful measure for studies where questionnaire length is a constraint. The current research develops a more parsimonious brand love scale, with three nested versions of 26, 13, and 6 items, respectively. This research also validates the scales, and in so doing conducts several important validity tests not considered by Batra et al. The 26-item scale is able to predict consumer loyalty, word of mouth, and resistance to negative information, with an R ² of .90, after correcting for measurement error.     

Psychometric vs. C-OAR-SE measures of brand love: A reply to Rossiter

Rossiter (Marketing Lett 23: 905–916, 2012) provides a critique of the brand love measure from Batra et al. (J Marketing 76: 1–16, 2012) and offers a new measure of brand love to be used in its stead. In this reply, we argue that our measure is more consistent with the best available understanding on love and brand love. We also note several serious problems in the underlying definition of love used by Rossiter and problems in the way his definition is operationalized in his measure.     

Price Limits, Information Acquisition, and Bid–ask Spreads: Theory and Evidence

A number of futures markets use price limits which, in effect, preclude trade from occurring at prices outside certain exogenous bounds. Noting that such markets are characterized by heterogeneously informed traders, whereas previous work on price limits assumes symmetrically informed traders, we examine the effects of price limits in a setting where market participants are asymmetrically informed. We find that imposing price limits generally lowers the quality of information acquired in equilibrium, but lowers bid–ask spreads as well. Thus, depending on the relative weights placed by society on liquidity versus price efficiency, there may exist a set of price limits that are most efficient in achieving a trade-off between liquidity and informational efficiency. We perform empirical tests of some implications of the model using cross-sectional data on price limits. We find that price limits are strongly negatively related to both price volatility and trading volume. Though other explanations for our empirical findings cannot be ruled out, these results are not inconsistent with the model's implication that price limits should be tighter for contracts which offer greater profit potential for informed traders.     

Deregulation and globalization of airlines

Although the airline industry has contributed to the globalization of the world economy, it is itself one of the least globalized sectors. This article identifies the governmental policies that have contributed to that outcome, and the economic and political forces that have gradually eroded regulatory barriers to competition and globalization in the last ten to fifteen years. Based on their airline industry policies in the mid-1990s, countries are classified as efficiency seekers (e.g., the United States), late reformers (e.g., Germany), and shelter providers (e.g., France), with the first embracing deregulation and globalization, the second adopting those policies somewhat slowly and reluctantly, and the third continuing to resist them in every possible way. Using Porter's “diamond” of international competitiveness, the article then explores the interaction of country characteristics and government policies to shape the competitiveness of U.S. and European airlines. The article concludes that, as a group, U.S. airlines are quite competitive, whereas in Europe the situation varies greatly between efficiency-seeking countries, such as the United Kingdom and the Netherlands, whose airlines have become very competitive, and shelter-providing countries, such as France, Italy, and Spain, whose airlines continue to be plagued by high costs and poor service. Because first-mover advantages can be significant as the airline industry globalizes, countries that postpone reforms are likely to find that the passage of time makes it harder to make their airlines internationally competitive, not merely in terms of cost but also in terms of nonprice dimensions, such as quality, service, and reliability.     

Which Regional Inequality? The Evolution of Rural–Urban and Inland–Coastal Inequality in China from 1983 to 1995

This paper develops a unified empirical framework for describing the relative contribution of rural–urban and inland–coastal inequality to overall regional inequality in China during the 1980's and 1990's. The framework assesses rural–urban and inland–coastal inequalities from the same data set, presents results for a sufficiently long time period to transcend short-term fluctuations, allows for differential price changes, and applies a consistent notion of the contribution to inequality using a decomposition analysis. While the contribution of rural–urban inequality is much higher than that of inland–coastal inequality in terms of levels, the trend is very different. The rural–urban contribution has not changed very much over time, but the inland–coastal contribution has increased by several fold. The paper ends by investigating the role of labor migration in this outcome. J. Comp. Econom., December 1999, 27(4), pp. 686–701. Department of Agricultural, Resource, and Managerial Economics, 309 Warren Hall, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York 14853; International Food Policy Research Institute, 2033 K Street, NW, Washington, DC 20006.     

Developing a typology of affective responses to advertising

This article identifies—and then validates—a set of categories for use in the measurement of affective responses to advertising. Unlike previous categories developed for this purpose, these are first extracted by cluster analysis and then also subjected to formal tests for reliability and for convergent, discriminant, concurrent, and predictive validity.     

Traded and Nontraded Goods and Real Wages

The paper explains most, if not all, observations made by the empirical literature regarding the behavior of skilled and unskilled real wages in the United States, especially those since 1980. Generalizing the Stopler–Samuelson theorem, the authors show that the nontraded sector is critical to explaining the effects of changes in the price of traded goods on relative and absolute wages. Factor‐intensities play their role as in the traditional Stolper–Samuelson model, but the output of the nontraded sector matters as well. Specifically, freer trade benefits capital and hurts both the skilled and unskilled labor if the import as well as the nontraded sectors contract. This is a new result to the literature on Stolper–Samuelson issues.     

Community and class antagonism

We investigate how vertical unity within a community interacts with horizontal class divisions of an unequal income distribution. Community is conceptualized in terms of a public good to which all those in the community have equal access, but from which outsiders are excluded. We formulate the idea of redistributive tension, or class antagonism, in terms of the costs that poorer individuals would be willing to impose on the rich, to achieve a given gain in personal income. Our conclusion is that the nominal distribution of income could give a misleading picture of tensions in society, both within and across communities. Ideologies of community solidarity may well trump those of class solidarity because of the implicit sharing of community resources brought about by community-specific public goods. Greater economic mobility of particular types may actually exacerbate class tensions instead of attenuating them. We illustrate our theoretical results with a discussion of a number of historical episodes of shifting class tensions and alliances.     

Symposium onMarket development and inequality in China1

After three decades of market development, the problem in China is no longer how to achieve growth but how to manage its consequences and how to sustain it. One of the most important consequences is the growing inequality – between skilled and unskilled workers, between the genders, between rural and urban areas, and between inland and coastal regions. The papers in this symposium shed light on the important issue of inequality during rapid market development in China. Analysis based on ground level empirical studies can help us to understand better the sources of the rising inequality and to illuminate the nature of the future challenges.