Marketing Innovation in Rural Small Food Industries in Iran

Marketing innovation is essential for small industries to transform products into profit; therefore, understanding its nature and determinants is of utmost importance. This study aimed at understanding marketing innovation and its determinants in the 60 small food industries in the rural areas of Tehran province, Iran. Using a census sampling method, 111 managers of these firms were interviewed. Results showed that the firms’ performance in marketing innovation is generally weak, and a higher level of radical innovation in marketing is perceived compared to the incremental innovation. Also, a cause-and-effect relationship exists between both product and organizational innovations and marketing innovation. Furthermore, while incremental marketing innovation was negatively influenced by formal R&D unit, product diversification, and the manager’s years of experience, radical marketing innovation was affected by the capacity of production, product diversification, and managers’ age and education. The study concluded that in order to boost marketing innovation, innovation should be made also in products and organization. In addition, in order to facilitate the process of marketing innovation, practical and updated training for managers encouraging incremental innovation in marketing, product diversification, and improving R&D activities in the studied firms should be regarded.     

Using the Analytic Hierarchy Process as a Two-phase Integrated Decision Approach for Large Nominal Groups

When decision makers who comprise a large nominal group face an unstructured decision problem and no simultaneous interactive communications are available, problem identification and consensus building are difficult, if not impossible. Few tools are available to assist decision makers in this situation. The Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) has typically been used to evaluate a set of alternatives after a decision problem has been structured as a hierarchy with various levels of criteria above the alternatives. With a group of decision makers, AHP has been used to evaluate those alternatives either by consensus building or by combining judgments or priorities using the geometric mean to aggregate their preferences. In this paper, we extend the use of AHP to a situation involving a large nominal group of dispersed decision makers where the entire hierarchy is not defined at the outset. In particular, we use the AHP as an integrative approach to identify the priorities of the various criteria and then use those priorities to screen and consolidate a large set of potential alternatives. This results in considering a reduced set of alternatives that will be affected by the more important criteria. The consolidated set of alternatives is evaluated by each individual in the group using AHP, combined using the geometric mean, and the results are synthesized to obtain the overall priorities of the alternatives. The approach is demonstrated and evaluated in a case study to select an alunmi anniversary gift to the U.S. Coast Guard Academy with a large nominal group of decision-makers dispersed throughout the United States.     

Ethical Principles that Make the World and its Economy More Equal

Abstract

No doubt, the global economic (and political) structure is very unequal. The paper begins by demonstrating the various dimensions of this inequality as they relate to economic measures such as per capita GDP, degree of consumption and ownership, health measures, education, and power and influence in various global organizations such as the United Nations (UN), World Trade Organization (WTO), International Monetary Fund (IMF), and others. Next, the paper, supporting a more equal global economic and political structure, investigates the various instruments in welfare economies and ethics theory that can be utilized to justify a sort of distributional change that could lead to more global equality. Finding various economic and ethical instruments associated with utilitarianism, Pareto Optimality and the Hicks–Kaldor compensation test less than satisfactory in dealing with and advocating sufficient global distributional changes, we will investigate ethical principles developed by John Rawls in both his 1971 The Theory of Justice and his 1999 The Law of Peoples, Sen's capability approach, the debate between Rawls and Sen regarding their ethical principles, and whether or not those ethical principles can justify necessary global distributional changes. As we will argue, although the principles developed by Sen and Rawls can be utilized to justify global distributional changes to a degree, they cannot advocate a global difference principle that can justify sufficient global distributional changes. Attempt is made to develop a global difference principle that can justify and advocate more drastic distributional changes.     

Optimal contracting with dynastic altruism: Family size and per capita consumption

We use a Barro–Becker model of endogenous fertility, in which parents are subject to idiosyncratic shocks that are private information (either to labor productivity or taste for leisure), to study the efficient degree of consumption inequality in the long run. The planner uses the trade-off between family size and future consumption and leisure, to provide incentives for workers to reveal their shocks. We show that in this environment, the optimal dynamic contract no longer features immiseration in consumption. We also discuss the implications of the model on the long run properties of family size in the optimal contract and show that the long run trend in dynasty size can be either positive or negative depending on parameters.     

Do environmental attitudes and food technology neophobia affect perceptions of the benefits of nanotechnology?

In recent years, a significant amount of research has focussed on the analysis of consumers' aversion to new technologies in food production and processing. At the same time, research has shown that environmental attitudes may be related to purchasing behaviour of consumers. This paper presents the result of an investigation into Canadian attitudes towards nanotechnology, in general, and in applications in the food industry. The relationship between the food technology neophobia scale, environmental attitudes and nanotechnology is examined. The results suggest that food technology neophobia is significant in explaining attitudes towards nanotechnology, in general, and for food packaging and foods. Environmental attitudes are important in explaining respondents' attitudes towards nanotechnology in general but not in explaining attitudes towards nanotechnology in food packaging or food applications. Survey respondents' views of the role of science and technology in society (makes society worse or better off) are a more important determinant of attitudes towards nanotechnology than whether they had heard of nanotechnology prior to the survey.     

Mediating effect of technological innovation capabilities between dynamic capabilities and competitiveness of research and technology organisations

Technological innovation capabilities (TICs) are important for organisations to obtain core competencies and competitive advantages. This study assesses the relationship between dynamic capabilities (DCs) and TICs, and analyses the effect of TICs on competitiveness in research and technology organisations. The article presents an empirical evidence from a survey of Iranian large public research institute (LPRI). In order to explore the relationship among the constructs of the survey, the model was proposed using structural equation modelling (SEM). The results of confirmatory factor analysis revealed that the measurement scale of the variables is valid. Moreover, SEM confirmed that both TICs and DCs enhance competitiveness. Finally, it was indicated that TICs play a mediating role in the relationship between DCs and competitiveness.     

A data mining approach for segmentation-based importance-performance analysis (SOM–BPNN–IPA): a new framework for developing customer retention strategies

Importance-performance analysis (IPA) is a simple but effective means of assisting practitioners in prioritizing service attributes when attempting to enhance service quality and customer satisfaction. The purpose of this study was to demonstrate how IPA can be used with market segmentation to develop customer retention strategies for different market segments. For this purpose, a new framework have been proposed that uses self-organizing maps for customers’ segmentation and back-propagation neural network (BPNN) for implicity drive the importance of service attributes based on their effect on customers’ loyalty in each segment. Then, individual IPA matrixes are developed for each market segment. Also, an example case is presented to demonstrate the implementation and application of the proposed framework. The results of the proposed framework compared with a conventional BPNN-IPA approach indicated that it can increase reliability and applicability of IPA results.     

Identification of determinant attributes using the analytic hierarchy process

This article develops a new approach, using information available in the intermediate and final phases of the analytic hierarchy process, to explicitly identify which attributes or criteria are determinant in making a choice among several given alternatives. The approach parallels that used in the popular direct dual questioning determinant attribute (DQDA) analysis, which has been widely used in marketing applications. Using the hierarchical structure and pairwise comparisons, the combined relative priorities of the criteria are compared with the relative priorities of the choice alternatives to compute determinance scores. These values are the basis for identifying which of the criteria are both important and different across alternatives (i.e., determinant). This new approach overcomes the potential ambiguities of traditional direct dual questioning methods. Moreover, the approach is easily extended to include decision hierarchies with multiple levels of attributes and subattributes. He earned a D.Sc. degree in operations research from George Washington University. His current research interests include the application of mathematical programming and decision models to operational problems. He has published in such journals asOperations Research, Mathematical Programming, Decision Sciences, Journal of Business Research, European Journal of Operational Research and theJournal of Business Ethics. He is a member of Operations Research Society of America (ORSA), The Institute of Management Sciences (TIMS), Mathematical Programming Society (MPS), Decision Sciences Institute (DSI), Academy of Management (AOM), Omega Rho, and Sigma Xi. He obtained his Ph.D. in systems science—management science from Portland State University. His research interests are in the application of multivariate techniques as well as general systems methodology tools to business/marketing problems. He has recent publications inDecision Sciences, Journal of Business Research, European Journal of Operational Research, Journal of Managerial Issues, Business Horizons, Advances in Consumer Research, Developments in Marketing Science, andProceedings of the American Marketing Association (AMA), Society for General Systems Research (SGSR), and DSI. He is a member of the American Statistical Association (ASA), DSI, TIMS, and the Academy of Marketing Science.     

Evaluating virtuality in teams: a conceptual model

Major parts of teams deployed in contemporary organisations to some extent possess the attributes of virtuality. In this context, at high levels of virtuality, team requirements become quite different from those of face-to-face teams. Thus, evaluating virtuality in teams is a key prerequisite for assessing its requirements and defining the applicable managerial policies. Nonetheless, the concept of virtuality in teams has remained elusive within the extant literature. To address this, this paper deploys a qualitative meta-analysis to synthesise the relevant findings drawing upon an exhaustive review of the literature. The study conceptualises the phenomenon of virtuality through proposing a conceptual framework for evaluating the level of virtuality in teams. This paper contributes to the field by offering further insight into the concept of virtuality and directs future investigations by providing the ground for validating the presented conceptual model.