When Shopbots Meet Emails: Implications for Price Competition on the Internet

Quantitative Marketing and Economics - The Internet has dramatically reduced search costs for customers by using such technologies as shopbots. Email based targeting is relatively inexpensive; the...     

The antecedents of tourists’ gaming spend: does the brand prestige matter?

This study endeavors to empirically analyse the influential effect among brand prestige, service quality, casino visitor satisfaction and spend. Data from 304 tourists who had travelled to Macau and had participated in gambling activities were used and structural equation modelling and multi-group analysis were employed in hypotheses testing. The findings demonstrated that both brand prestige and perceived service quality are determinants of satisfaction and gaming spend, and that brand prestige also affects service quality positively. Furthermore, past experience moderates the service quality and visitors’ satisfaction relationship, also service quality and visitors’ gaming spend relationship.     

On the natural selection rule in general linear models

We consider a problem of selecting the best treatment in a general linear model. We look at the properties of the natural selection rule. It is shown that the natural selection rule is minimax under to “0–1” loss function and it is a Bayes rule under a monotone permutation invariant loss function with respect to a permutation invariant prior for every variance balanced design. Some other condition on the design matrix is given so that a Bayes rule with respect to a normal prior will be of simple structure.     

Does Store Brand Patronage Improve Store Patronage?

Review of Industrial Organization - We investigate the relationship between a household's store brandpatronage and store patronage through its impact on store revenuesand profits. The nature of...     

Cross-cultural study of channel relationship factors — Antecedents of satisfaction in a retail setting: A commentary essay

Channel relationships within and across diverse markets have been investigated for quite some time. Yet findings from these studies over the last forty years or so have been far from conclusive. Channel researchers Runyan, Sternquist, and Chung (forthcoming) investigate interrelationships between the behavioral constructs of role performance, dependence, conflict, satisfaction, and influence strategy in the U.S. and Japanese context. Reading this paper leads credence to the adage, “The more things change, the more they stay the same.” Indeed, a review of representative comparative channels research literature from the 1980s and post-2000 brings to surface striking similarities in terms of shaky conceptual frameworks, less than robust construct measures, and insufficient caveats in explaining and applying research findings. For channels research to gain relevance in today's globalized marketplace, greater sophistication is necessary in formulating and implementing comparative studies. An overarching framework is necessary to explain, if not incorporate, similarities and differences in channel interactions around the globe.     

Is the future static or dynamic? The role of culture on escalation of commitment in new product development

Escalation of commitment in new product development has been studied extensively for the last four decades but the impact of culture on the escalation phenomenon remains largely unexplored. This study investigates how culture impacts the decision to escalate or deescalate commitment to new products. Americans are analytic thinkers whereas Chinese tend to be holistic thinkers. When it comes to decision making, analytic thinkers focus on field independent and abstract factors and believe that future is linear and static, whereas holistic thinkers focus more on contextual factors and believe that future is dynamic and nonlinear. Hence, Chinese are more likely to escalate their commitment relative to Americans on receiving a negative performance report in the new product development process. A lab experiment using weekend MBA students and managers was used to test this underlying hypothesis. The findings confirmed that analytical thinkers use fewer factors than holistic thinkers in making new product decisions, and that Chinese managers are more likely to escalate their commitment relative to American managers. The decision to escalate or de-escalate was moderated by perceived product innovativeness.     

Ethical Challenge to Businesses: The Deeper Meaning

Today, ethics has become an important dimension for businesses. Broadly, there are two lines of thought on this issue. The first one suggests that ethical issues have to be resolved through development of appropriate ethical standards at personal or organizational level. The second one emphasizes the process of developing ethical standards rather than the standards themselves. This paper argues that the latter line of thought, when taken forward, implies that ethical dimension is essentially challenging businesses to transform themselves and their people at a very fundamental level in order to evolve continuously to higher levels of perfection. The deeper significance is that in future, businesses will play a dominant role in bringing forth the human spirit, an aspect that is hitherto perceived to be in the purview of other human activity systems like the Church or family. This restructuring at the societal level is probably the most fundamental message of this age of growing interdependence.     

Human Development and Economic Sustainability

This paper attempts to integrate the concern for human development in the present with that in the future. In arguing for sustainable human development, it appeals to the notion of ethical “universalism”—an elementary demand for impartiality of claims—applied within and between generations. Economic sustainability is often seen as a matter of intergenerational equity, but the specification of what is to be sustained is not always straightforward. The addendum explores the relationship between distributional equity, sustainable development, optimal growth, and pure time preference.     

More optimal designs for diallel cross experiments

It is shown that the complement of a universally optimal design derivable from a triangular design is again universally optimal in a class of connected designs. Furthermore, some series of universally optimal designs for diallel cross experiments are provided. These observations strengthen the result on universally optimal designs by Das, Dey and Dean (1998). Received: August 1999