The effect of permanent product discounts and order coupons on purchase incidence,purchase quantity,and spending

This paper examines the influence of a permanent discount strategy on customer purchase behavior, i.e., purchase incidence in each week, purchase quantity (in units), and total order spending (in CNY). Permanent discounts are defined as discounts continuously provided by retailers. We identify two types of permanent discounts, namely, product-specific price discounts (PD) and order coupons (OD, which can be redeemed for a total order). We collect transactional data from a Chinese online retailer and empirically examine the effects of the two types of permanent discounts and customers’ expectations of PD and OD. We find nonlinear relationships between permanent discounts and customer purchase behavior. PDs negatively influence spending when they are lower than 19% but show a positive effect beyond this threshold, hence depicting a U-shaped relationship. They also affect purchase quantity positively but at a decreasing rate. Customer expectations of PD influence purchase incidence, spending, and purchase quantity following a U-shaped patter with a positive influence appearing when PD expectations are high than 31%, 27%, and 18% respectively. On the other hand, ODs influence spending and purchase quantity positively at an increasing rate. Customer expectations of OD influence purchase incidence, spending, and purchase quantity following a U-shaped relationship where the positive influence on purchase incidence shows beyond OD expectations of 426 CNY, and the positive effect appearing on spending and purchase quantity when these expectations are higher than 34 CNY. We also find that customer expectations of discounts interact with current discount levels in their influence on spending. Combining these results and considering that order coupons negatively affect the profit margin of the total basket, we suggest that retailers should offer order coupons with relatively low value but product-specific price discounts with high discount depth.     

Social media affordances: Enabling customer engagement

Despite the acknowledged importance of social media for customer engagement, our understanding of this phenomenon is limited and new theories can help shed further light on the unique features of social media in the tourism context. Our work contributes to the literature by adopting an affordance perspective that leads us to identify three distinctive social media affordances for customer engagement in tourism: persistent engagement, customized engagement, and triggered engagement. Our work also extends prior research on customer engagement by examining the process of recognition (proprioception, exteroception and coperception) through which organizations engage customers in social media.     

Recessionary period activities in forest sector firms: Impacts on innovativeness

The Global Financial Crisis (GFC) provides a unique setting to study innovativeness and customer orientation in forest sector firms. Considerable research has focused generally on innovativeness in forest sector firms, but little attention has been given to the actions of firms to the chaotic market environment during the GFC. Our objective is to clarify how a customer orientation and the practice of developing new markets during a market downturn results in enhanced knowledge-based resources, manifested as increased innovativeness. Our longitudinal design includes data representing 2012 and 2015 from 89, US-based forest sector firms. Responding firms are more focused on process than product innovativeness. During the GFC, responding firms concentrated more on foreign market development than on domestic market development. Firms with a stronger customer orientation in response to the GFC realized higher innovativeness post-GFC. Also, firms actively developing new foreign markets in response to the GFC realized higher process innovativeness. Our results support a stronger customer focus for forest sector firms as it translates to increased innovativeness and potentially improved product development. In addition, allocating resources to foreign market development during financial downturns can be a strategy to build innovativeness.     

Using verbal attention to enhance restaurant customer satisfaction and behavior

Managing and developing positive customer relationships is a critical factor in the success of a restaurant. In this study, waitresses either asked customers about their satisfaction with the food or service before proposing tea or coffee, or they directly proposed coffee or tea without asking about satisfaction. It was found that the number of customers who ordered coffee/tea was significantly higher when the waitress asked the customers about their satisfaction. The theoretical and practical interest of studying the effect of verbal communication toward customers is discussed.     

商业信用与合作型客户关系的构建——基于提供给大客户应收账款的经验证据

利用我国上市公司前5名应收账款欠款人信息以及前5名大客户信息的披露数据,本文较为直接地考察了企业是否以及如何利用应收账款的产品质量担保功能与大客户构建合作型客户关系。研究结果表明,客户集中度越高,企业提供给大客户的信用政策越宽松,即应收账款金额越多,信用期限越长;进一步研究发现,在与主要客户地理位置相似度较低的企业、处于竞争性行业的企业以及营商环境较好的地区,上述两者之间的正相关关系有所增强。最后,本文发现,在与大客户构建合作型客户关系时,企业向这些大客户提供的应收账款越多,企业的业绩越好。     

Performance assessment of ensemble learning systems in financial data classification

Financial data classification plays an important role in investment and banking industry with the purpose to control default risk, improve cash and select the best customers. Ensemble learning and classification systems are becoming gradually more applied to classify financial data where outputs from different classification systems are combined. The objective of this research is to assess the relative performance of existing state‐of‐the‐art ensemble learning and classification systems with applications to corporate bankruptcy prediction and credit scoring. The considered ensemble systems include AdaBoost, LogitBoost, RUSBoost, subspace, and bagging ensemble system. The experimental results from three datasets: one is composed of quantitative attributes, one encompasses qualitative data, and another one combines both quantitative and qualitative attributes. By using ten‐fold cross‐validation method, the experimental results show that AdaBoost is effective in terms of low classification error, limited complexity, and short time processing of the data. In addition, the experimental results show that ensemble classification systems outperform existing models that were recently validated on the same databases. Therefore, ensemble classification system can be employed to increase the reliability and consistency of financial data classification task.     

湖北省乡村旅游资源分类与评价研究

乡村旅游是我国当前旅游发展的热点之一,乡村旅游资源分类与评价是合理开发、科学规划乡村旅游的基础。根据资源的价值和功能,构建了湖北省乡村旅游资源分类体系,包括8个主类,18个亚类,41个基本类型。湖北省乡村旅游资源特色突出,四季赏花资源丰富,千湖之省水乡风光典型,乡村文化深远且地域差异明显。在此基础上,提出了乡村旅游资源定量评价方法与标准,并对湖北省乡村旅游资源结构、等级、地域分布进行了评价,最后提出了湖北省乡村旅游发展的相关策略。     

A game theoretic approach for analyzing the competition between national and store brands by considering store loyalty

1. Download : Download high-res image (189KB)
2. Download : Download full-size image

     

The future of Russian gas exports to East Asia: Feasibility and market implications

For a long time, the Russian government has aimed to diversify gas exports to East Asian countries. This gearing of Russia towards Asia will have great consequences on world energy, the global economy, and geopolitics in the coming years. This paper analyzes the growth potential of Russia's diversification strategy and the impact this policy would have on sales to Europe. As the most likely scenario is for total gas exports to grow at a moderate rate from 2010 to 2030, any increase in sales to Asia could make difficult the raising of exports to Europe. Our thesis is that this trade-off will depend primarily on domestic consumption trends, geographic targeting of investments, and commercial and financial alliances with foreign partners. However, imports from Central Asia, declining exports to Ukraine and Belarus, and Gazprom investments in other gas-producing countries could also affect gas exports and gas distribution among different markets.     

DEMAND,CUSTOMER BASE‐LINE AND DEMAND RESPONSE IN THE ELECTRICITY MARKET: A SURVEY

The increasing use of demand‐side management, as a tool to reliably meet electricity demands at peak time, has stimulated interest among researchers, consumers and producer organiza‐tions, managers, regulators and policymakers. This research reviews the growing literature on models which are used to study demand, customer base‐line (CBL) and demand response in the electricity market. After characterizing the general demand models, the CBL, based on which the demand response models are studied, is reviewed. Given the experience gained from the review and existing conditions, the study combines an appropriate model for each case for a possible application to the electricity market; moreover, it discusses the implications of the results. In the literature, these aspects are studied independently. The main contribution of this survey is attributed to the treatment of the three issues as sequentially interdependent. The review is expected to enhance the understanding of the demand, CBL and demand response in the electricity market and their relationships. The objective is conducted through a combination of demand and supply side managements in order to reduce demand through different demand response programs during peak times. This enables electricity suppliers to save costly electricity generation and at the same time reduce energy vulnerability.