Enjoyment of the Shopping Experience: Impact on Customers' Repatronage Intentions and Gender Influence

In this paper the authors investigate enjoyment of the shopping experience, its influence on consumers' intention to repatronise a regional shopping centre and the effect of gender differences on shopping enjoyment. Four dimensions of shopping enjoyment are proposed and a 16-item measure is developed to assess 536 consumer perceptions of the shopping experience across five counties in the United Kingdom. Findings indicate that shopping experience enjoyment has a significant positive influence upon customers' repatronage intentions. Furthermore, men are found to have a stronger relationship of enjoyment with repatronage than women. The implications of these results are discussed, together with managerial implications, study limitations, and future research directions.     

Enhancing mental models,analogical transfer,and performance in strategic decision making

Recent research suggests that managers often make strategic decisions in novel situations by utilizing past experiences to reason by analogy. However, there is substantial evidence that decision makers often fail to identify and apply knowledge about one situation to a similarly structured situation. Two experimental studies investigated the mechanisms impacting knowledge transfer from one managerial situation (the source) to an analogous situation. The results show that exposure to variation in the source situation improves transfer performance. Variation decreases performance in the short term but improves learning and increases analogical transfer. Higher performance on and systematic search of the source situation also increase transfer performance. These results yield important implications for enhancing analogical transfer in strategic decision making and for future research on reasoning by analogy. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Vertical Integration in the Malting Barley Industry: A "Silver Bullet" for Coors?

The Coors Brewing Company owns a single-site, integrated malting facility and brewery in Golden, Colorado; a second brewery in Memphis, Tennessee; and a mixing facility in Elkton, Virginia. Coors operates a research and development program that breeds barley varieties suitable for malting at the Golden site. Coors contracts with 900 growers in Colorado, Idaho, Montana, and Wyoming for approximately 160,000 acres of malting barley. This case study is designed for senior- and graduate-level courses in agribusiness management. The case relates three theories of vertical coordination to Coors' decision to contract 100% of its malting barley requirements.     

Organization size, budget cycle, and budget related influence in city governments: An empirical study

This paper explores the relationship between budgeting and perceived power in city government organizations. Data are reported from a survey of perceived budget influence in six city governments in Texas. The findings suggest that perceived influence varies by stage of budget cycle, city size, level of hierarchy, department function, and vertical vs horizontal direction of influence. For example, during budget formulation city managers were perceived as having the most vertical power. During budget implemetation, there was a perceived increase in department head vertical power and a decrease in city council power. Perceptions of horizontal power suggested that budget departments generally had greater perceived influence than operating departments for budget formulation, but not for budget implementation. The findings are used to develop a strategic contingencies model of budget-related power, and to suggest some research steps for testing the proposed model.     

Hypothesis testing based on goodness-of-fit in the moving average time series model

Small sample properties of t-tests are compared with those of tests based on relative goodness- of-fit in the context of the first order moving average time series model. Monte Carlo experiments reported in the paper suggest that the actual size of these t-tests greatly exceeds theoretical large sample significance levels, while conformity of goodness-of-fit statistics to the appropriate chi-square or F-distributions is much closer. The evidence presented suggests that practitioners are well advised to employ goodness-of-fit tests as a check on results of t-tests particularly when the latter indicate ‘significance’.