Who Pays for Credit Cards?

The authors model side payments in a competitive credit‐card market. If competitive retailers absorb the cost of accepting credit cards by charging a higher goods price to everyone, then someone must subsidize convenience users of credit cards to prevent them from defecting to merchants who do not accept cards. The side payment could be financed by card users who roll over balances and pay interest. It is rational for them to do so if their subjective discount rates are high enough. Charging different prices to different customers based on the underlying cost of the payment instrument would be more efficient for retailers. However, banks may offer incentives to attract convenience users because some of them may become interest‐paying users (“revolvers”) in the future.     

Who Handles the Finance for Chinese Enterprises?

The Rise of Home-made Software"China-made financial software, thebest seller, has seen a 90 percent occupation rate in the home market. It is themost profitable sphere in China's software industry," said General Manager,Liang Yu, of the Wenhua Lishun Advisory Company known for undertakingmarket investigation in the informationindustry. "Financial software sets selling from between several thousand toseveral hundred thousand yuan are muchsought after by domestic enterprises,while the devel…     

Who Files for Personal Bankruptcy in the United States?

Who files for bankruptcy in the United States is not well understood. Previous research relied on small samples from surveys or a small number of states from administrative records. Using over ten million administrative bankruptcy records linked to the 2000 Decennial Census and the 2001–2009 American Community Surveys, I document who files for bankruptcy. Compared to the US population, bankruptcy filers are middle income, more likely to be divorced, more likely to be black, more likely to be veterans, less likely to be immigrants, and more likely to have a high school degree or some college. Filers are more likely to be employed. The bankruptcy population is aging faster than the US population as a whole. Lastly, using pseudo‐panels I study what happens in the years around bankruptcy. Individuals are likely to get divorced in the years before bankruptcy and then remarry. Income falls before bankruptcy and rises after bankruptcy.     

Who is the better player? Off-field battle on Facebook and Twitter

Social media networks have become essential to the modern business world, and are especially vital for sports firms and athletes. Social media networks are new channels for firms to connect with their audience and establish a social customer relationship. For sports firms, athletes play a special role, as they are the firms’ ambassadors and the focus of virtual communities of fans. For most athletes, social media is a powerful tool to take advantage of their time in the spotlight. However, social media has much more potential. This work analyzes the social media profile and content created by six well-known sports figures—Cristiano Ronaldo, Lionel Messi, Tom Brady, Aaron Rodgers, LeBron James, and Kevin Durant—to develop a model (STAR) for social media use. The adoption of this model can enhance fan engagement online and therefore increase athletes’ and firms’ brand value and connectivity with consumers.     

Taxpayers' Perceptions of Practitioners: Finding One Who is Effective and Does the Right Thing?

This paper examines Australian taxpayers' perceptions of their idealized tax practitioner as well as their perceptions of their current tax preparer. The analysis was based on survey responses from 2,040 randomly selected Australian taxpayers who completed the "Community Hopes, Fears and Actions Survey" (author, 2000). Three dimensions were identified as underlying taxpayer judgements of their idealized practitioner. A minority of the sample indicated that their ideal was a creative, aggressive tax planning type, a person who was well networked and familiar with tax office intelligence and enforcement priorities. A second type of idealized practitioner engaged in the cautious minimisation of tax. Unlike creative accountants, practitioners of this type avoided conflict, while being sophisticated about identifying opportunities to minimise tax. The most popular idealized type was the low risk, no fuss practitioner who was honest and risk averse. The data revealed that taxpayers are likely to find tax practitioners who have the attributes that they value most highly, but that when taxpayers' perceptions of their tax practitioner are combined with their ideals, only two substantive dimensions emerge, tax avoidance and doing the right thing. Our inability to distinguish tax practitioners who are seen to provide cautious and aggressive advice in practice has important implications for the growth of aggressive tax planning markets in the community.     

Who pays for switching costs?

Earlier work characterized pricing with switching costs as a dilemma between a short-term “harvesting” incentive to increase prices versus a long-term “investing” incentive to decrease prices. This paper shows that small switching costs may reduce firm profits and provide short-term incentives to lower rather than raise prices. We provide a simple expression which characterizes the impact of the introduction of switching costs on prices and profits for a general model. We then explore the impact of switching costs in a variety of specific examples which are special cases of our model. We emphasize the importance of a short term “compensating” effect on switching costs. When consumers switch in equilibrium, firms offset the costs of consumers that are switching into the firm. If switching costs are low, this compensating effect of switching costs causes even myopic firms to decrease prices. The incentive to decrease prices is even stronger for forward looking firms.     

IPR protection vs. innovation subsidy: What is the choice for the emerging South?

In this paper, we use a classical variety-expanding growth model to analyze the policy or institutional-arrangement choice for the Southern government who faces the tradeoff between imitating Northern innovation without cost and encouraging domestic innovation. We assume that the Southern government fully respects the principle of non-discrimination and hence treats both imitations, i.e., imitation of Northern innovation and imitation of domestic innovation, equally. For a given state of the economy, we explicitly and uniquely establish an optimal degree of intellectual property rights (IPR) protection for the South. Then, we find that there is a complementary relationship between optimal IPR protection and the innovation subsidy policy, which implies that they form an effective policy mix, hence offering a useful insight for avoiding ineffective policy conflicts widely occurred in real-world economies.     

Who is the Athlete Endorser? A Cross-Cultural Exploration of Advertising Practitioners’ Views

ABSTRACT

This study, via the use of focus groups, explores the common meanings that advertising practitioners in 10 countries associate with athlete endorsers. The study's macro perspective brings a unique understanding of practitioners’ universal thinking and practices in relation to athlete endorsement. It reveals that practitioners across the world correlate athlete endorsers with a wide range of positive and useful psychological, social, physical, skillfulness, and sport meanings. In particular, authenticity, objective performance, and the athletes’ belonging to the realm of sport—considered by practitioners as a carrier of positive meanings and as a “meeting place” between audiences and endorsers—were identified as greatly contributing to athletes’ positive endorsement value. The article places the various universal dimensions of athletes raised by practitioners in a holistic conceptual profile, in order to help visualize and organize thoughts when selecting athlete endorsers for marketing campaigns.     

Beyond the corporation: Who represents business to the government and public?

A new kind of business leadership has emerged during the past decade, a leadership devoted to the public interest. What are the stages that characterize the development of these leaders?     

Who Can Adjust to the Euro?

This study estimates potential exchange rate variation among 26 European countries during 1992–1998, as a proxy for the potential magnitude of adjustment they face to euro‐block membership, using the instrumental variable (IV) method, applying least squares cross‐section regression analysis based on optimal currency area theory. A currency union among Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, Ireland, Malta, the Netherlands and Slovenia is found to entail a relatively light burden of adjustment for its members. The current membership of other countries in the euro‐block is potentially very demanding on their societies in the long term. This study also compares currency boards and independent central banks as alternative monetary frameworks for disinflation policies. Based on a pooled time‐series, cross‐section dataset of the same countries and years currency boards are found to be more effective in reducing inflation in all countries except Belgium. Balancing EMU's credibility gains against its adjustment costs, Finland, Greece, Italy, Portugal and Spain seem like unstable members of the euro‐block. For all new EU member states except the Czech Republic, Malta, Slovenia and Slovakia the advice is to stay out of the euro‐block until their economies are liberalised and flexible enough to withstand major adjustments, and their societal interest groups supportive enough of these adjustments.     

R&D: Who does the R,who does the D?

This paper examines the determinants of the allocation of national R&D resources between research and development activities. We derive conditions under which a firm being outdistanced by a foreign rival in a two-stage international patent race would drop out, and relate those conditions to home-market size and to the race's cost and risk characteristics. Because of this “discouragement effect”, firms located in smaller markets appear as if they were, on average, less successful in transforming research expertise into commercial product development. We also show that in a two-sector model (R and D), the proportion of R&D resources going into product development as opposed to research increases with country size. Moreover, starting from a symmetric game and increasing the size of one country induces the opposite effect on other countries (a shift of R&D resources from development to research) through strategic interaction among research teams.     

Who bears the cost of a change in the exchange rate? Pass-through accounting for the case of beer

Nominal exchange rates are remarkably volatile. They ordinarily appear disconnected from the fundamentals of the economies whose currencies they price. These facts make up a classic puzzle about the international economy. If prices do not respond fully to changes in the nominal exchange rate, who bears the cost of such large and unpredictable changes: foreign firms, domestic firms, or domestic consumers? This study presents a new analysis of the sources of incomplete pass-through and then uses this analysis to re-examine its implications for social welfare. I develop and estimate a structural model that analyzes the sources of local-currency price stability for a particular industry. The model enables counterfactual simulations that quantify the relative importance of firms' local-cost components and markup adjustments in the incomplete transmission of exchange-rate shocks to prices and the effect of the exchange-rate shock on domestic and foreign firms' profits and on consumer surplus. The model is applied to a panel dataset of one industry with retail and wholesale prices for UPC-level products. I find that markup adjustments by manufacturers and the retailer explain roughly half of the incomplete transmission and local-cost components account for the other half. Foreign manufacturers generally bear a greater cost (or reap a greater benefit) following an exchange-rate-induced marginal-cost shock than do domestic consumers, domestic manufacturers, or the domestic retailer.     

Do you think that the home delivery is good for retailing?

Order placing and delivery always play a significant role in any business industry. Nowadays, most customers want useful products at their doorstep without visiting any retail store. In this current study, an advanced dual-channel supply chain model is constructed for a single product with two players. Customers can order online or offline from the retail store. In contrast, retailers use only offline mode to take the product from the manufacturer, and retailers charge a different amount for delivery. To optimize profit and satisfy the consumers, retailers only provide a free transportation service when customers order a certain quantity. If customers order less than the desired amount, a transportation charge will be applied to the customers. Contrary to the existing research, demand for the products varies with the selling price online and offline and is also affected by the free home delivery service. Manufacturers use a single-setup multi-delivery (SSMD) transportation strategy to enrich the system's profit. To make the study more applicable, all unit costs are considered fuzzy. Signed-distance defuzzification technique is adopted to defuzzify the fuzzy values. Finally, the total profit of the supply chain is optimized along with the optimized value of the decision-making variable through an uncertain optimization technique. Numerical experiments are carried out along with sensitivity analysis to show the applicability and optimality of this study. Though the crisp data set provided a 0.72% better result compared to the fuzzy data set, but fuzzy data set provided a more realistic result. Numerical results prove that the home delivery service provided 14.59% better profit. Finally, it can be stated that the home delivery policy with some charged amount based on ordered quantity is the best retailing strategy for the dual-channel supply chain.     

Who is behind the sustainable purchase? The sustainable consumer profile in grocery shopping in Spain

Studies of sustainable consumer profiles are mainly label‐specific and focus on Organic or Fair Trade labels. As a result, when the sustainable consumer is defined, there is a sense that only one profile exists. If each label has a different positioning strategy and has different requirements, the buyers of these products may also be different. Through the use of consumer panel data, this paper aims to deepen the understanding of the household demographic profiles of consumers of sustainable brands in order to discover if there is a single sustainable consumer profile or whether there is diversity associated with different labels. This study reveals profile differences and these provide better understanding of the complexities of sustainable consumption. It reveals that the profiles of sustainable buyers are not the same across all labels and this should be taken into account by awarding institutions when designing and evaluating their positioning strategies.     

Who are the essential and frontline workers?

Business Economics - Identifying essential and frontline workers and understanding their characteristics is useful for policymakers and researchers in targeting social insurance and safety net...     

What is the Right Supply Chain for Your Shopper? Exploring the Shopper Service Ecosystem

The emergence of shopper marketing represents a major strategic force in consumer goods branding and retailing, and poses significant challenges to pre existing supply chain thought that most scholars have yet to address. In order to address the marketing and supply chain challenges presented by shopper marketing initiatives, scholars from both disciplines can find common ground by focusing on the shopper instead of consumers or products. The issue is no longer one of matching a supply chain to a product. Instead, marketers and supply chain managers need to ask, “What's the right supply chain for our shopper?” The shopper service ecosystem framework developed in this paper brings together the service dominant logic of marketing with the service ecosystem perspective in supply chain management. Future research frontiers suggest research directions that bridge the marketing and supply chain disciplines to create a multidisciplinary foundation for future research in the shopper marketing realm.