Permission Marketing and Privacy Concerns — Why Do Customers (Not) Grant Permissions?

Little is known about the influence of motivators that drive consumers to grant permission to be contacted via personalized communication. In this study, a framework is developed to investigate the effect of select drivers of consumers granting permission to receive personalized messages. The authors distinguish between drivers related to benefit and cost to the consumers. They identify the influence of perceived personal relevance, entertainment, and consumer information control as well as monetary incentives and lottery participation as benefit-related factors. Cost-related factors entail the registration process, privacy concerns, and perceived intrusiveness. The authors find that, except for monetary incentives and lottery participation, the identified drivers significantly influence consumers' decision to grant permission. The strong negative influence of privacy concerns on the probability of granting permission can be lessened by two benefit-related factors, namely message content with entertainment value or personal relevance for the consumer. The study helps to improve firm measures aimed at getting more permissions — granted by customers for interactive campaigns.     

Why Do Firms in Customer–Supplier Relationships Hold More Cash?

A firm is in customer–supplier relationships when its business depends on a small number of major customers/suppliers. In this paper, we provide evidence that relationship‐specific investments undertaken by firms in customer–supplier relationships are associated with high cash holdings in these firms. The evidence is consistent with the prediction of Titman's stakeholder theory that a firm relying on relationship‐specific investments maintains a high cash reserve as a cushion to sustain its relationship‐specific investments when negative shocks occur. Our findings suggest that relationship‐specific investments are important determinants of the precautionary motive to hold cash.     

After Industrial Society: Service Society as Clean Society? Environmental Consequences of Increasing Service Interaction

Whereas industrial society is known to be to a great extent responsible for the degradation of the environment, service society is assumed to be rather ‘clean’. There has, in fact, been a substantial reduction in material metabolism in industrial production in the developed countries. The increasing interaction intensity, however; which is characteristic for a service society, results in massive transport volumes and thus in other negative environmental impacts which to a large degree offset the advances in industrial production.     

Why Do Governments Privatize Abroad?

Privatization through global equity market placement has largely contributed to financial market development and integration. Despite the relevance of the fact, the reasons underlying governments' choice to sell shares of privatized companies abroad are still poorly understood. This paper presents new evidence for a sample of 233 share issue privatizations in 20 OECD countries, showing that redistribution concerns and the objective of domestic financial market development make domestic privatization more likely. However, if budget constraints are binding, governments tend to sell abroad a larger quantity of shares, particularly when corporate governance at home is weak.     

Do Inner City Chain Stores Charge More?

Chain store executives state that their prices are centrally determined and are therefore uniform within a metropolitan area. Consumer groups charge that prices in inner city chain stores are relatively higher. This study examines evidence relevant to this debate.     

Why Do We Buy Traditional Foods?

Consumer behavior toward traditional specialties varies according to the cultural context of consumption. It thus becomes crucial to develop marketing strategies that target segments with different levels of familiarity with food. Our article purposes to analyze the purchase drivers of traditional foods known to consumers because of their reiterated consumption. The importance of the product’s attributes, the purchasing motivations, and the information channels are studied by applying the CUB model, which utilizes a probabilistic structure that simulates the individual’s psychological mechanism in adopting a choice of preference. The case study is that of extra-virgin olive oil in Italy, where this product is a fundamental element of the culinary tradition. The results show that in the ambit of traditional specialties, in contexts of elevated familiarity, the traditional information channels of marketing are less effective and call for strategies based on a more direct connection between consumer and producer.     

Why the Real Economy Is More “Hollowing-out” ?

In recent years,in face of a slowdown in the domestic and global economy and a remaining high cost of labor,raw material and financing,more and more Chinese entrepreneurs decide to remove or reduce the once profityielding real industries while shifting their focus     

Why Do Some Consumers Make Unhealthy Food Choices?

This research examines the impact of gender, age, and education on food choices and addresses issues of causality in these observed relationships; a logit model was used to test the mediation effects and hypotheses. The results from a self-administered online survey indicate that gender and education are two key predictors of consumers’ food choices for their children. These findings are further explained by attitudes toward obesity. Specifically, female consumers and parents with lower levels of formal education tend to select food products that are nutritionally inferior because they are not necessarily concerned about their child’s weight and do not usually restrict their child’s food and diet. This research advances a causal mechanism that explains unexpected consumers’ food choices; it essentially proposes and tests two mediators—restrictions of a child’s weight and concerns about a child’s weight—of the relationship between key demographic variables and consumers’ food choices.     

Service Recovery,Justice Perception,and Forgiveness: The “Other Customers” Perspectives

ABSTRACT

While extant research has examined the effects of service recovery on customer attitude and behavior, little is known about whether customers react differently to the same recovery depending on whether they are victims or observers of a service failure. Adopting the “other customers” perspectives, this study used a quasiexperimental design using scenarios in a professional services context with 267 U.S. respondents recruited from Qualtrics national online panel. We found that when compensation is offered, victims will perceive a higher level of distributive justice than observers. However, the effects of service recovery on forgiveness intention is stronger among observers than victims.     

Differences in Customers’ Online Service Satisfaction Across Cultures: The Role of Thinking Style

ABSTRACT

Online retailers constantly strive to improve customer satisfaction. However, satisfaction levels can vary significantly across cultures when customers experience mixed quality services, that is, services with a mixture of high and low quality service attributes. Based on two studies, we find that Westerners (e.g., European Americans) react more negatively than East Asians (e.g., Chinese) toward mixed quality online services. Our findings show that due to differences in thinking style, Westerners (analytic thinkers) are more likely to focus on negative service attributes than East Asians (holistic thinkers), who tend to consider the amalgam of high and low quality service attributes as an integrated whole when forming their overall perceptions and levels of satisfaction. Moreover, the results suggest that for online retailers marketing across cultures, providing superior quality on each individual service attribute may be more important to achieving satisfaction for customers from Western rather than Eastern cultures.     

The Hare and the Tortoise: Do Earlier Adopters of Online Channels Purchase More?

Earlier adopters of a product or service tend to be more valuable than later adopters. Does this empirical generalization equally apply to earlier adopters of a multichannel retailer's new online channel too? This study segments customers on the basis of their responses to a new online channel and investigates the effects of their online channel adoption on purchase volumes across segments. The data cover 12.5 years of purchase history and individual transactions at a large multichannel French retailer of natural health products. Contrary to conventional wisdom, it is not innovators or early adopters, but rather the late majority segment that purchases more than the other segments, both before and after online adoption. Adoption of the firm's new online channel does not influence purchase volumes of heavy shopper segments (late majority and innovators), whereas light shopper segments tend to increase their purchases after adopting this new channel.     

A Study of Why Anomic Employees Harm Co-workers: Do Uncompassionate Feelings Matter?

Although anomic feelings have been found to lead employees to unethical performance, little is known about why this relationship is possible. The aim of this study is to test a compassion-based explanation of why anomic employees harm co-workers by displaying interpersonal deviance. The prediction is made that once sociological anomie (from the Greek, an-: absence, and -nomos: law) enters organizations in the form of employees’ private feelings of anomie—i.e., “anomia”—, this anomia will individually move staff to be uncompassionate in the workplace. Three uncompassionate feelings toward co-workers are then hypothesized to mediate the relationship between anomia and interpersonal deviance: (i) negative judgments about others, (ii) over-identification, and (iii) isolation. Data were collected from 280 employees at ten hotels in the Canary Islands (Spain). The results indicated that (a) anomia was significantly and positively linked to uncompassionate feelings and interpersonal deviance, (b) but only negative judgments about others mediated the anomia effects on interpersonal deviance. Findings suggest to managers that by spreading ethical standards that discourage negative judgments about others in the workplace, they can neutralize the mechanisms leading anomia to interpersonal deviance.     

Do Entrepreneurial SMEs Perform Better Because They are More Responsible?

Many scholars have investigated the direct impact of entrepreneurial orientation (EO) on performance, but this direct association seems both spurious and ambiguous because many parameters may have an indirect influence on this relationship. The present study thus considers sustainable practices—environmental practices, social practices in the workplace (SPW), and social practices in the community (SPC)—as three probable mediators in the relationship between EO and performance, which is considered in terms of its financial and non-financial dimensions. We seek to show to what extent small- and medium-sized enterprises’ (SMEs) sustainable practices are useful assets, which are supported by EO, to improve performance. Using a structural equation modeling approach, data collected from 406 French SMEs were tested against the model. Our findings reveal that EO has a positive impact on the implementation of sustainable practices and that SPW partially mediate the link between EO and performance. Taken together, these findings suggest that EO plays a role in indirectly promoting performance by enhancing certain human resource management practices.     

Where Do Firms Export,How Much and Why?

The empirical finding that exporting firms are more productive on average than non‐exporters has provoked a large theoretical literature based on models such as Melitz ( 2003 ), where more productive firms are more likely to overcome costs associated with trade. This paper investigates how closely the productivity heterogeneity framework fits the data from a firm‐level survey that includes information on export destinations and firm characteristics such as productivity. We find a high degree of unpredictable idiosyncratic participation in export markets by firms and a relatively weak positive correlation between the extent of a firm's export market participation and its export sales. We find that a small number of standard gravity variables provide a close fit to the country‐level determinants of trade but that greater variation results in more difficulty in explaining firm‐specific factors driving exporting behaviour. We also illustrate some elements of the dynamics over time in firm exporting patterns by destination. We show that lagged exporting activity has a significant effect on a firm's current exporting profile.     

Why Do Microfinance Institutions Go Green? An Exploratory Study

In recent years, in addition to financial and social objectives, the microfinance industry has started to look at its environmental bottom line. The objective of this paper is to identify why microfinance institutions (MFIs) decide to go green. Data was collected through a quantitative survey of 160 MFIs and qualitative semi-structured interviews of 23 MFIs’ top managers. Basing our analysis on the model of ecological responsiveness developed by Bansal and Roth (Acad Manag J 43(4):717–736, 2000), we discover that MFIs for which legitimation (stakeholder pressure) is the dominant driver tend to adopt a defensive approach and set up more superficial negative strategies to appear green. In contrast, MFIs for which social responsibility is the dominant driver tend to be more proactive and innovative and develop adapted financial and non-financial services to promote environmentally friendly practices.     

Do Eco‐friendly VMD and Store Reputation Increase Satisfaction of Retail Customers?

This study builds on previous research to investigate the effect of the benefits of eco‐friendly VMD (visual merchandising) on satisfaction as well as the effect of satisfaction on store attitude. This also testifies the moderating effects how the benefits of eco‐friendly VMD affect customer satisfaction by store reputation. A total of 363 responses were used to examine the process through which core benefits and relational benefits of retailers with eco‐friendly VMD affect psychological satisfaction and social satisfaction. This is a unique study offering empirical evidence that psychological and social satisfactions are the mechanisms through which benefits of eco‐friendly VMD lead to store attitude. Results indicate that information benefit and psychological benefit result in positive psychological satisfaction and social satisfaction, which in turn leads to positive store attitude in retail customers.     

Why Are Agricultural Goods Not Traded More Intensively: High Trade Costs or Low Productivity Variation?

This paper empirically studies the sizes of agricultural trade costs and productivity variation in the agriculture sector. In a general Ricardian trade model, I identify these two factors as possible causes of the observed low trade intensity of agricultural goods. Using data on bilateral trade flows, prices of agricultural goods and sectoral production from a sample of 46 countries, I estimate the variation of agricultural productivity as well as trade costs on agricultural and manufactured goods. I find that trade costs are substantial, with agricultural trade costs roughly twice as large as manufacturing trade costs. Moreover, consistent with the existing literature, I find that distance is the dominant part in the estimated trade costs. Lastly, relative to existing estimates of the heterogeneity of manufacturing productivity, the heterogeneity of agricultural productivity is large. These findings suggest that high trade costs are the main impediments to agricultural trade.