Toward a new business model of retail industry: The role of brand experience and brand authenticity

While the customer-to-manufacturer (C2M) business model has received increasing attention as a new business model for e-commerce and retail industry, little is still known about it and the effect of its approach. This study aims to understand how brand-related stimuli in C2M environments affect customer responses as the worldwide COVID-19 pandemic. The outcomes reveal that the Sensory, affective, and intellectual aspects of brand experience positively influence brand authenticity. Brand authenticity has a positive effect on behavioral intention, such as reuse intention and word-of-mouth. Additionally, this research finds that social presence moderates the association between the sensory aspect of brand experience. Thus, this study can suggest a C2M business model as a means of sustainable operation of the retail industry to both researchers and practitioners in relation to the retail industry.     

What constitutes a constitutional amendment culture?

Why are some constitutions amended frequently and others hardly at all? An obvious candidate determinant is constitutional rigidity, i.e., the size and number of procedural barriers to amendment. Given some demand for amendment, greater rigidity implies a smaller supply. However, measures of rigidity often do not correlate significantly (or even with the predicted sign) with amendment rates. Ginsburg and Melton (2015) argue that amendment culture – “shared attitudes about the desirability of amendment” – is a more important determinant of amendment rates. We study up to 128 constitutional episodes from 54 countries and estimate relationships between amendment rates and Hofstede cultural indices. Cultures that are more individualistic and less prone to uncertainty avoidance are associated with higher amendment rates. When cultural dimensions are controlled for, the lagged amendment rate (Ginsburg and Melton’s proxy for culture) is not a robust correlate.     

Forecasting the volatility of asset returns: The informational gains from option prices

A new class of forecasting models is proposed that extends the realized GARCH class of models through the inclusion of option prices to forecast the variance of asset returns. The VIX is used to approximate option prices, resulting in a set of cross-equation restrictions on the model’s parameters. The full model is characterized by a nonlinear system of three equations containing asset returns, the realized variance, and the VIX, with estimation of the parameters based on maximum likelihood methods. The forecasting properties of the new class of forecasting models, as well as a number of special cases, are investigated and applied to forecasting the daily S&P500 index realized variance using intra-day and daily data from September 2001 to November 2017. The forecasting results provide strong support for including the realized variance and the VIX to improve variance forecasts, with linear conditional variance models performing well for short-term one-day-ahead forecasts, whereas log-linear conditional variance models tend to perform better for intermediate five-day-ahead forecasts.     

Business-to-business selling in the post-COVID-19 era: Developing an adaptive sales force

The COVID-19 pandemic has changed how salespeople interact with customers and with business-to-business (B2B) organizations. Organizations must confront the shifts in how their salespeople operate. Recent research recommends firms develop an adaptive sales force to address disruptions like a pandemic and be prepared to meet such challenges in the future. Based on interviews with marketing and sales executives, we explore how firms have responded to these interconnected changes during the COVID-19 pandemic and offer insight into best practices deployed across industries.     

Digital marketing communication in global marketplaces: A review of extant research,future directions,and potential approaches

Digital marketing communication, that is, communication through digital or electronic media among businesses and consumers, is growing rapidly, especially during the COVID-19 era. We propose a framework for analyzing digital marketing communication along four major dyads, business-to-consumer (B2C), business-to-business (B2B), consumer-to-consumer (C2C), and consumer-to-business (C2B). We review and summarize, for researchers and practitioners, the literature during 2000–2021 in these dyads along four major components: goals; channels, media, and platforms; content; and responses. We find that extant research in digital marketing communication pertains mostly to a specific, national level rather than a global level, despite the porousness of national boundaries for digital marketing. We derive important insights, identify key research gaps and questions in each of the dyads along these dimensions. We suggest approaches to address these research questions under three major components: substantive issues, data, and methods. These approaches can offer the insights that managers need to better formulate digital marketing strategies in local and global contexts.     

The impact of research collaboration on academic performance: An empirical analysis for some European countries

The aim of this paper is to investigate the impact of internal and external research collaborations on the scientific performance of academic institutions. The data are derived from the international SCOPUS database. We consider both quantity (the number of publications) and quality indicators (the field-weighted citation impact and the share of publications in the 10% most-cited articles) to evaluate universities' performance in some European countries (Germany, France, Italy, the UK and Russia). To this end, we develop a non-overlapping generations model to evidence the theoretical idea of research externalities between academic institutions. Moreover, we implement an empirical model to determine the extent to which the impact of internal and external collaborations on universities' performance is sensitive to the geographical dimension of the data.     

Natural resource rents and internal conflicts: Can decentralization lift the curse?

We study how natural resource rents affect the risk of internal conflict within countries and how the federal structure of countries influences this relationship. Natural resource abundance may induce excessive rent-seeking and thus increase the risk of internal conflict. Fiscal and political decentralization as an institutional arrangement for rent-sharing and political codetermination of regions within a country may limit the destructive effect of natural resource rents on internal stability. Using cross-country and panel data from more than 90 countries covering the period 1984–2004, we find evidence that natural resource rents indeed increase the risk of internal conflict, but this relationship is significantly mitigated by political decentralization.     

Clearinghouse loan certificates as a lender of last resort

Looking across multiple panics of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, this paper treats borrowing of clearinghouse loan certificates as borrowing from a lender of last resort. We evaluate individual bank use of clearinghouse loan certificates in New York City using bank balance sheet data. Bank capital ratios do not predict positive net borrowing. Lower pre-panic reserve ratios increased the probability of positive net borrowing of loan certificates. Bank borrowing behavior from a lender of last resort remained relatively constant across all three crises considered.     

Relationship Quality as Predictor of B2B Customer Loyalty in the Pharmaceutical Sector: Evidence from Jordan

This article aims to investigate the impactful effect of relationship quality dimensions (i.e., trust, satisfaction, and commitment) on aspects of loyalty represented by attitudinal loyalty and behavioral loyalty. A quantitative survey method was employed to achieve the objectives of the study. Furthermore, a convenience sampling technique was adopted to select a representative sample from physicians working in the public healthcare sector in Jordan. A total of 500 questionnaires were distributed, and 408 questionnaires were used in the statistical analyses. The data were analyzed by applying structural equation modeling to test the study model, and hypotheses were constructed and tested quantitatively and discussed qualitatively. The results revealed that both aspects of customer loyalty (i.e., behavioral and attitudinal) were affected positively by the overall dimensions of relationship quality (i.e., trust, satisfaction, and commitment), providing a recommendation for pharmaceutical companies in Jordan to focus on improving the relationship quality between their medical representatives and physicians due to the importance of such a factor in improving customer loyalty, which will reflect positively in managing their customers effectively and enhancing future business opportunities.     

Effects of scale economies and production seasonality on optimal hub locations: the case of regional fresh produce aggregation

Interest in supporting local and regional food systems is rising and food hubs have attracted considerable attention among Federal, State, and local policymakers. This study explores the problem of endogenous hub location in fresh produce value chains in the Northeastern United States. To overcome limitations in the literature, we incorporate the effects of economies of scale and production seasonality into our models. Three experimental models are designed to examine the effects of alternatively applying yearly, quarterly, and monthly data on model solutions. We explicitly assess how interactions of scale economies and seasonality influence the structure and spatial attributes of an optimal regional produce aggregation hub system. The three models generate marketed different solutions and in many respects they lead to different conclusions about developing local/regional supply chains. The monthly model allows for production seasonality and actual hub operation cycle frequency and thus leads to more efficient hub solution with rich policy implications.