The effect of detergents on fabric handle

The effect of detergent products on fabric handle was investigated by means of consumer responses. The use of a semantic differential grid enabled responses to be compared to an ‘Ideal’ handle. Differences were obtained between the products and evidence was obtained which suggests that the judgements on the semantic differential grid provide a valid estimate of the way people make judgements about the overall handle of towels.     

The effect of fiber type on the handle of fabric for sportshirts

Three sportshirt fabrics made from cotton, cotton/nylon blend, and nylon respectively, were evaluated in terms of fabric handle by 40 female consumers. Few differences were found between the first two fabrics but 100% nylon fabric was less acceptable. Knowledge of fiber type present had a marked effect on handle judgments.     

Consumer ethics: An empirical investigation of factors influencing ethical judgments of the final consumer

Business and marketing ethics have come to the forefront in recent years. While consumers have been surveyed regarding their perceptions of ethical business and marketing practices, research has been minimal with regard to their ethical beliefs and ideologies. This research investigates general attitudes of consumers relative to business, government and people in general, and compares these attitudes to their beliefs concerning various questionable consumer practices. The results show that consumers' ethical beliefs are determined, in part, by who is at fault in the unethical behavior (the seller or the buyer). The results also indicate that those with a more positive attitude toward business are less likely to engage in questionable consumer practices, but one's attitudes toward salespeople, the government and people in general arenot related to the consumer's ethical beliefs.Scott J. Vitell is an Associate Professor and the Michael S. Starnes Professor of Marketing and Business Ethics at the University of Mississippi. His publications have appeared in theJournal of Macromarketing, theJournal of Business Ethics, theJournal of the Academy of Marketing Science, theJournal of Business Research, Research in Marketing and numerous other journals and proceedings.James A. Muncy is Assistant Professor of Marketing at Clemson University. His publications have appeared in theJournal of Marketing, Journal of Business Research, Journal of Current Issues and Research in Advertising, Journal of Marketing Education, andAdvances in Consumer Research. He has also published in the National Proceedings of the American Marketing Association and the American Psychological Association and has published five chapters in books. He is active in the Association for Consumer Research, acting as its Publications Director and Newsletter Coeditor.     

The effect of shelf layout on satisfaction and perceived assortment size: An empirical assessment

This research compares the effect of different shelf visual layouts on decision satisfaction and perceptions of the retailer assortment, with a focus on how (e.g. vertically vs. horizontally) to display products rather than on how many products to display. The combined evidence from three experimental studies shows that displaying assortment breadth horizontally and depth vertically led participants to perceive a larger selection and to be more satisfied. Furthermore, linear displays increase decision satisfaction but decrease perceived assortment size and preference strength for the top brand, whereas visual layouts with the preferred brand in the central position increase decision satisfaction, make the assortment appear larger, and enhance preference strength for the top brand. The findings provide guidelines about how to organize products on the shelves and suggest that – even when actual assortment size is constant – consumer responses to the assortment depend from how the retailer displays the products.     

An assessment of ethics instruction in accounting education

Business school faculty have begun to increase ethics instruction, but very little has been done to assess the effectiveness of this instruction. Curricula-wide studies present conflicting results of the effect of ethics integration into the business curricula. Several studies suggest that courses like business ethics and business and society might have an effect on the ethical awareness or ethical reasoning of business students. A belief of many individuals interested in business ethics is that students must be exposed to ethical awareness and ethical reasoning in business ethics and business and society-type courses and this should be supplemented by discussions of these topics in various business courses such as Accounting, Finance, Marketing, and others.This study reports the results of integrating a unit of business ethics into eleven accounting classes at two universities. An approach for measuring the effect of ethics integration into accounting and other business courses is suggested, and an assessment is made of the impact of ethics integration on students in accounting classes. Results indicate that the principles on which students rely when making moral decisions were affected by ethics integration. After ethics integration, students relied more heavily on the disclosure rule, the golden rule, and the professional ethic.Kenneth M. Hiltebeitel, Ph.D., CPA is an Associate Professor of Accountancy at Villanova University. He has included a unit on business ethics in his Auditing and Advanced Accounting classes for the past two years.Scott K. Jones, Ph.D. is an Assistant Professor of Accounting at the University of Delaware. He has included a unit on business ethics in his Cost Accounting classes for the past two years.     

Consumer ethics: An assessment of individual behavior in the market place

A national sample of 362 respondents assessed the ethical predisposition of the American marketplace by calculating a consumer ethics index. The results indicate that the population is quite intolerant of perceived ethical abuses. The situations where consumers are ambivalent tend to be those where the seller suffers little or no economic harm from the consumer's action. Younger, more educated, and higher income consumers appear more accepting of these transgressions. The results provided the basis for developing a four-group taxonomy of consumers which retailers should find insightful in assessing potential consumer actions in a variety of situations. Sam Fullerton is a professor of marketing at Eastern Michigan University. In addition to his academic career, he has worked as a product manager and is the Vice President of the Sports Research Institute, Ltd. Besides coauthoring a text on marketing research, his work has appeared in numerous journals; among them are Current Issues and Research in Advertising, Health Marketing Quarterly, and Strategic Management Journal.Kathleen B. Kerch participated in an international marketing seminar series in Tokyo, Singapore, and Hong Kong. She is currently employed as a marketing representative for Audio-Video Distributors in Wixom, MI. H. Robert Dodge is a professor and head of the Department of Marketing and Law at Eastern Michigan University. He has published books in the areas of personal selling, marketing research, and business-to-business marketing. Additionally, his work has appeared in a number of journals including Strategic Management Journal, The Journal of Small Business, and Current Issues and Research in Advertising. He is actively involved in consulting including his position as President of the Sports Research Institute, Ltd.     

An empirical assessment of the welfare effects of reciprocal dumping

Can two-way trade in similar products lead to lower welfare than if such trade was banned? Theory answers yes. To empirically investigate this proposition we examine Swedish imports of bottled water. Assuming one-shot (Bertrand and Cournot) competition, we can use the estimates from a structural model of demand to uncover marginal costs. We simulate the effect on consumer and producer surplus of banning imports. We do not find convincing evidence that banning imports would increase overall welfare. Given our choice of market this suggests we should not be overly concerned with the welfare effects of two-way trade in consumer goods that are close to homogenous.     

Defining Ownership: An empirical assessment of the ownership measures

Ownership is considered to be one of the crucial governance mechanisms; however, there have been no systematic attempts at validating the construct and measures used to operationalize ownership. We review the current understanding of ownership and the measures used by each perspective, namely blockholder/dispersed shareholder perspective, owner identity perspective, and aggregated ownership perspective. We thereafter critique each of these perspectives, offer hypotheses regarding their validity, and empirically assess each ownership measure vis‐à‐vis firm performance outcomes. We utilize a sample of 3,990 US firms to test our hypotheses and find no consistent results for the blockholder measure, or for the owner identity measure. However, the aggregated ownership measure consistently accounts for significant increases in explanation of variance in firm performance. Copyright © 2018 ASAC. Published by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

An assessment of operational efficiency of retail firms in China

This study aims to assess operational efficiency of retail firms in China. Economic efficiencies of 61 retailers working in China between 2000 and 2003 are examined in this study using three related methodologies: data envelopment analysis (DEA), Malmquist productivity index (MPI), and a bootstrapped Tobit regression model. DEA analysis shows that only seven retail firms are considered as efficient under CRS assumption in 2002, and four firms in 2003. MPI results indicate that about 37.7 percent (23 out of 61) of retail firms have registered progress in terms of MPI during 2000 and 2003. Results of the bootstrapped Tobit analysis show that retail characteristic plays a significant role influencing retail efficiency.     

Affective cues in persuasion: An assessment of causal mediation

This experiment examined the mediating role of affective cues in persuasion. College students were exposed to advertisements that contained or did not contain affective cues in the form of humor, and that contained or did not contain information about the advertised product. As intended the affective cues were found to influence attitudes toward the advertisement (A_ad), while the productrelevant information was found to influence attitudes toward the advertised product (A_b). By manipulating A_ad and A_b independently, it was possible to test for the causal mediation of one attitude on the other. The results showed that A_b had a significant mediating (p<.05) effect on A_ad, but that A_ad did not significantly mediate A_b.     

Redshift: A radical change in the fabric of computing

Some companies are boosting their computing power to massive scales. Should your company? That depends on whether your company's needs are blueshifting or redshifting. Greg Papadopoulos, Jonathan Schwartz and Jason Woods explain why these new business terms could define your company's future.     

On the antecedents of corporate severance agreements: An empirical assessment

This study of major corporations (n=481) provides an empirical assessment of the effects of several corporate governance variables (CEO duality, boards of director composition, officers and directors common stock holdings, institutional common stock holdings, number of majority owners) on the adoption of so-called severance agreements. A discriminant analysis indicates a significant multivariate function. Wilks lambda univariate analyses suggest that the percentage of common stock held by owners and directors and number of majority stock holders are the more robust discriminators. Dan R. Dalton is Professor of Management and Director of Doctoral Programs, Graduate School of Business, Indiana University. Formerly with General Telephone & Electronics (GT&E) for thirteen years, he received his Ph.D. from the University of California. Widely published in business and psychology, his articles have appeared in the Academy of Management Journal, Academy of Management Review, Journal of Applied Psychology, Journal of Business Ethics, Strategic Management Journal, Journal of Business Strategy, Behavioral Science, and Human Relations, as well as many others. He is the co-author of Case Problems in Management, Applied Readings in Personnel and Human Resource Management, and the forthcoming Absenteeism, Transfer, Turnover: An Interdependent Perspective. Professor Dalton is also co-principal investigator working on a five year grant provided by the General Motors Foundation in the general area of personnel policy. Paula L. Rechner is an Assistant Professor in the area of Strategic Management at the University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana. She received her Ph.D. from Indiana University in 1986. Her primary research interest is corporate governance; specifically, her work has focused on corporate boards of directors and board leadership. In addition, she has been actively involved in research projects concerning strategic decision making, corporate control issues, and improving research methodology. Her articles have appeared in Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, Strategic Management Journal, and Academy of Management Executive, as well as others.     

The Fourth Pillar? An assessment of the Situation of the Finnish Biotechnology

The success in constructing a flourishing information and telecommunication cluster has encouraged Finland to seek equal possibilities in other knowledge-intensive industrial branches. Presently, biotechnology is seen as an auspicious business area. Like in other parts of Europe, Finnish biotechnology concentrates mainly on pharmaceutical industries. More than 70 percent of the human resources of Finnish biotechnology industries is settled in this industrial branch.Despite large investments and financing, modern biotechnology industries are still a marginal industrial branch in the Finnish economy. Its turnover in 1999 was only one percent of the total GNP. The wide spectrum of Finnish higher education and the close relations of co-operation between universities and industries can open up promising prospects. Finland's technology-affirmative attitudinal climate works in the same direction. This progress can be delayed by a lack of highly skilled human resources, which is already a problem in the IT sector. The small size and minor experience in global markets have also limited the success of the Finnish firms.     

An assessment of the impact of counterfeiting in international markets: The piracy paradox persists

This paper investigates recent trends in counterfeiting in the international marketplace. The primary objectives of this paper are to provide the international manager with (1) an overview of the legal framework that governs the protection of intellectual property rights, primarily against pirates; (2) a review of different anti-counterfeiting strategies; and (3) a summary of distinct labeling techniques used to distinguish between the “real” versus “fake” good.     

Receiving word-of-mouth from the service customer: An emotion-based effectiveness assessment

This study examines how receiving negative and positive word-of-mouth from satisfied and dissatisfied customers influences the potential customer. By explicitly including responses in terms of emotions—which hitherto have been neglected in research on word-of-mouth—it was found that emotional contagion and affect infusion were involved in the response process. The net effect was that receiving positive word-of-mouth as opposed to receiving negative word-of-mouth produced more positive evaluations of the service firm in the word-of-mouth conversation and higher levels of purchase intent vis-à-vis this firm. The results are thereby consonant with implicit assumptions in existing literature that word-of-mouth from the existing customer may have a significant impact on the potential customer, and this study indicates that emotional variables play an important role in the influence process.     

Tariff concessions in the Kennedy Round and the structure of protection in West Germany: An econometric assessment

Interindustry variation in reductions in nominal tariffs, effective tariffs and total (tariff and nontariff) protection in West Germany consequent on Kennedy Round concessions are analyzed and compared to a similar analysis of United States concessions. Although structural changes in alternative forms of protection appear quite different in the two countries, evidence suggests that both countries, while subscribing to freer trade, have continued to maintain a policy compatible primarily with the short-run interests of labor.     

An assessment of the proximity of clothing to self scale for older persons

Sontag and Lee developed the Proximity of Clothing to Self (PCS) Scale, an objective measure of the psychological closeness of clothing to the self, and validated a 4‐factor, 24‐item scale with adolescents. The research reported here extends their work by validating a 3‐factor, 19‐item PCS Scale for use with older persons, age 65 and over. A mail survey was sent to a national random sample of 1700 older persons in the United States resulting in 250 respondents in the final sample. Three analytical rounds of confirmatory factor analysis to test the construct validity of the PCS Scale were conducted by using a structural equation modelling programme. The validated three PCS dimensions (i.e. factors) are clothing in relation to: (1) self as structure – process; (2) self‐esteem – evaluative and affective processes; and (3) body image and body cathexis. The researchers recommend using this 19‐item PCS Scale for future consumer behaviour research on older persons when investigating the importance of dress, clothing needs or clothing involvement to meet basic human needs, self‐esteem, life satisfaction and successful aging.     

The use of repertory grid techniques in the evaluation of fabric handle

The reproducibility of a repertory grid for the evaluation of fabric handle was investigated by means of consumer responses to a series of fabrics. The consumer panel evaluated the same fabrics on three separate occasions. On the first and third occasion, the fabrics were seen and on the second occasion unseen. Correlations at high levels of significance were generally found between results obtained on each occasion. This was particularly true of the two seen tests.