Out-of-stock,sold out,or unavailable? Framing a product outage in online retailing

Terms, such as “out-of-stock,” “sold out,” and “unavailable” are commonly used by retailers to communicate a product or brand outage. Although these terms are technically equivalent, prior research on product outage and product scarcity suggest that they may be interpreted and processed differently by consumers. The present research investigated whether the manner in which a product outage was framed elicited different consumer behavioral intentions, attributions, and perceptions in the context of online retailing. Data were collected by means of an online experiment. The experiment incorporated a hypothetical scenario approach in which research participants were asked to react to a particular combination of treatment and blocking factors. Results demonstrated that ceteris paribus, framing a product or brand outage as “sold out” produces fewer negative product and website reactions than does framing it as “out-of-stock” or “unavailable.”     

Content analysis of fake consumer reviews by survey-based text categorization

As the influence of online consumer reviews grows, deceptive reviews are a worsening problem, betraying consumers' trust in reviews by pretending to be authentic and informative. This research identifies factors that can separate deceptive reviews from genuine ones. First, we create a novel means of detection by contrasting authentic versus fake word patterns specific to a given domain (e.g., hotel services). We use a survey on a crowdsourcing platform to obtain both genuine and deceptive reviews of hotels. We learned the word patterns from each category to discriminate genuine reviews from fake ones for positively and negatively evaluated reviews, respectively. We show that our All Terms procedure outperforms current benchmark methods in computational linguistics and marketing. Our extended analysis reveals the factors that determine fake reviews (e.g., a lack of details, present- and future-time orientation, and emotional exaggeration) and the factors influencing people's willingness to write fake reviews (including social media trust, product quality consciousness, deal proneness, hedonic and utilitarian consumption, prosocial behavior, and individualism). We also use our procedure to analyze more than 250,000 real-world hotel reviews to detect fake reviews and identify the hotel and review characteristics influencing review fakery in the industry (e.g., star rating, franchise hotel, hotel size, room price, review timing, and review rating).     

Impacts of household loan regulation on financial stability: evidence from Korea

The paper examines whether banking regulations and monetary policy contributed to controlling the fragility of household debt in Korea. The results show that housing loan regulations such as debt to income regulation contributed to a lower household debt delinquency ratio. Lowering the target interest rate provided additional stabilisation of the delinquency ratio. It is recommended that the government adopt an appropriate mix of regulation and monetary policy to control household financial fragility. The financial supervisory services need to be involved in managing debt to income regulation and minimising financial instability and financial market distortions. Further, the monetary authority has to adopt a more effective position in controlling the real lending interest rate and the delinquency ratio of household loans. Such a policy mix will improve effectiveness in controlling financial fragility, especially at a time of financial crisis.     

Promoting Tourism,Projecting Power: The Role of Television Commercials

This paper analyzes television commercials (TVCs) launched by Korea Tourism Organization (KTO) from 1999 to 2012. By repeating shots of traditional and Korean popular (k-pop) culture, high-tech machinery, and sportsmanship, it is fair to say that Korean tourism TVCs both reflected and fueled the fad a target audience has for Korea. Hence the commercials not only promoted tourism, they were also projecting national power in general and cultural power in particular. It is surmised that through power projection the TVCs intend to create a country halo effect so that the country’s products and services may enjoy an aspired added value.     

PARTISAN ADVOCATES

This paper studies the problem of an uninformed decision maker who acquires expert advice prior to making a decision. I show that it is less costly to hire partisan agents than impartial agents, especially under advocacy, and that the decision maker prefers partisan advocacy to other forms of institutions. I also extend the literature, originating with Dewatripont and Tirole ( 1999 ), to a setting with contracts that condition on information provided and not just the decision made.     

Counterfactual analysis of bank mergers

We introduce a counterfactual analysis of banks mergers, combining the pre-merger equilibrium setting with post-merger environmental characteristics, while accounting for endogenously propagated changes in market structure. Using this procedure we are able to estimate the effects on loan flows and interest rates that would have been observed if the pre-merger equilibrium was not altered. Results are obtained for firms, households, and banks inside and outside the merging circles separately. We find that mergers increased firms’ access to credit, but had an opposite effect on households and led to a widespread decrease in interest rates.     

Estimating Willingness to Pay for the Development of a Peace Park Using CVM: The Case of the Korean Demilitarized Zone

Conflicts remain an integral part in shaping the world. Tensions on the Korean Peninsula are no exceptions. The Korean DMZ (Demilitarized Zone) World Peace Park has been proposed to help obtain peace by erasing the memories of war and creating new beginnings of trust, cooperation, and unity on the Korean Peninsula. With their ties to geographical space and conflict, peace park research provides an excellent platform for both activism and research in positive peace. Little, however, is known about peoples’ willingness to pay (WTP) for the creation of peace parks, in general, and specifically for the development of the Korean DMZ World Peace Park. Using contingent valuation methods, the weighted average WTP for development of the Peace Park is $49.03 per household per year. It appears South Koreans are willing to pay not only for the conservation of the DMZ, but also for the peace and unification of the Korean Peninsula the Peace Park may bring to the area.     

Consumer Responses to the Food Industry’s Proactive and Passive Environmental CSR,Factoring in Price as CSR Tradeoff

This study explores social enterprises’ strategies for addressing mission drift. Relying on an inductive comparative case study of two Italian social enterprises, we show how stakeholder engagement combined with social accounting can successfully support a social venture to re-balance its positioning between wealth generation and social value creation. Indeed, stakeholder engagement helps the internal actors of a social enterprise to rationalize and embody pro-social values previously abandoned, while social accounting reinforces this embodiment process by showing the reintroduced social commitment of the social enterprise to external audiences. Conversely, strategies focused only on social accounting and without significant engagement of external stakeholders prove to be unsuccessful in counterbalancing mission drift because they fail to activate the necessary process of internal re-introduction and operationalization of pro-social values and objectives.     

The Foundations of International Business: Cross‐Border Investment Activity and the Balance between Market‐Power and Efficiency Effects

The foundational international business (IB) scholarship grappled with whether multinational enterprises (MNEs) are largely efficiency‐enhancing or market‐power inducing institutions. Contemporary scholarship, however, often associates foreign direct investment (FDI) with efficiency‐enhancing properties and thus neglects the market‐power interpretation of the MNE. Such an imbalance is problematic given that the theoretical and empirical justifications behind the field's embrace of the efficiency interpretation are not fully evident. Instead, both efficiency and market‐power effects are seemingly present in cross‐border investment activity. Based on a comprehensive sample of up to 4,361 cross‐border investments materializing between 1986 and 2010, we present theoretically‐grounded hypotheses with regard to when market‐power effects will tend to dominate efficiency effects. We find that cross‐border investments undertaken by emerging‐market MNEs in both developed and emerging markets tend to involve substantial efficiency effects and minimal market‐power effects when compared with the cross‐border investments undertaken by developed‐country MNEs in both developed and emerging markets.     

Perceptions of determinants of job selection in the hospitality and tourism industry: The case of Korean university students

ABSTRACT

This study explores the key factors influencing potential employees in the hospitality and tourism industry and examines whether causal relationships between behavioral attitudes, subjective norms, and perceived behavioral control influence students' job selection. The study suggests that the career decision-making process is related to job selection. A total of 307 responses were analyzed. The results explain individual students' attitudes toward a behavior and perceived behavioral control in the context of their job selection. Attitudes toward a behavior and job selection had significant effects on career decisions. On the other hand, opinions of significant others had no significant effect. Perceived behaviors required to decide on jobs had a significant effect on job selection intentions. Students with internship experience were likely to form positive attitudes toward the hospitality and tourism industry, suggesting internships to be a useful source of a stronger relationship between the industry and job aptitudes of students in hospitality and tourism programs. The results have important implications.