The role of customer gratitude in making relationship marketing investments successful

This paper recognises that customer loyalty is important for many competitive organisations, and that retail firms make investments to build and maintain loyal relationships with their existing and potential customers (e.g. loyalty programs). However, there has been little focus on the mechanisms by which these relationship investments operate to achieve customer loyalty. This paper examines one mechanism, namely customer gratitude, which works to make a firm’s relationship marketing investment a success or a failure. Using data from 1600 undergraduate students, this study empirically confirms the mediating role of customer gratitude between the customers’ perceptions a firm’s relationship marketing investments and customers’ perceptions of the value of the relationship with the firm. Further, a significant moderating effect of perceived benevolence on the relationship between customers’ perceptions a firm’s relationship marketing investments and customer gratitude was identified. For theorists, this customer gratitude model offers a better psychological explanation of how relationship marketing investments operate to improve the value that customers place on their relationships with retailers. Our research suggests that managers should invest resources to stimulate customer gratitude in order to build strong customer–seller relationships.     

Internationalization of business angel investments: The role of investor experience

In this study, we examine business angels (BAs)’ appetite for investing abroad and the role played by investment and entrepreneurial experience. To investigate BAs’ propensity to internationalize their investments, we study cross-border deals and culturally distant investments. Using an international sample of US and European BA deals, we find that both individual investment and entrepreneurial experience foster the internationalization of BAs’ investments, consistent with the predictions based upon the local bias theory. When splitting experience into domestic and foreign, we find that the former increases while the latter decreases local bias. When we separate US and European BAs, we find that the experiential background of BAs does not matter in the same way in Europe and in the US: while the general results are confirmed in Europe, both investment and entrepreneurial experience have a reduced impact in the US. We interpret these results in light of the reduced risk aversion of US BAs that lowers transaction costs.     

The role of CSR committee characteristics on R&D investments

We investigate the impact of corporate social responsibility (CSR) committees on research and development (R&D) investments. Using a unique sample of European listed companies, we offer three key results to the current academic and policy debate. First, we document that firms with a CSR committee exhibit lower levels of R&D investments. Second, we find that the CSR committee membership of either the CEO or chairman is associated with an increase in R&D investments. Finally, we provide evidence that firms whose CSR committees are chaired by a female director exhibit higher R&D investments. These results are of importance for academics, investors, and policy makers, since they shed light on the effect of CSR board committees on corporate outcomes, beyond their impact on social performance and/or sustainability disclosure.     

Marketing investments and market investments in industrial networks

A large and increasing share of company resources is devoted to marketing activities. To a large extent those activities are of a long term nature. There are long term, intertemporal dependence relations between marketing activities and their consequences. It is important both for marketing practice and marketing theory to develop tools for analyses of such relations in marketing. In business, intertemporal relations are frequently analysed within an investment process framework and it seems fruitful to apply such a framework to the analysis of marketing activities. The main purpose of this article is to make such an analysis.     

Tariffs,capital export and immiserizing growth

The purpose of this paper is to show how the Brecher-Diaz (1977) and Minabe (1974) propositions on the capital inflow from a tariff apply symmetrically to capital outflow. That is, when the home country continues to import the labor-intensive goods while remaining incompletely specialized, the capital outflow must reduce the home-country's real income. This will be so when the net return to home capital is greater than the home value of its marginal product at internal prices, but less than the home value of its marginal product at world prices.     

The role of exports in India's economic growth

We analyze the role of exports in India's economic growth and examine whether the export-led growth hypothesis (ELGH) applies to India. Our causality analysis provides support for the validity of the ELGH for India in the trade liberalization phase. Error variance decomposition and other analyses are also undertaken; these corroborate the results of the causality analysis and suggest that the rapid growth of exports has played a substantial role in increasing the growth rate in India following the economic reforms of 1991.     

Foreign direct investments,institutional quality,and economic growth

Institutional quality is considered to be an important factor in boosting economic growth of a country. This paper explores the role of institutional quality in economic growth and more specifically the role it plays via the channel of foreign direct investments. This paper uses a larger dataset of 104 countries and applies GMM estimation method to a dynamic panel data to evaluate the direct impact of institutional quality on economic growth and the indirect impact of institutional quality on economic growth through enhancing the FDI-induced economic growth. This paper provides evidence that both FDI inflows and institutional quality cause stronger economic growth. The FDI-led growth, however, was only experienced in the low and middle-income countries. In these countries, better institutional quality was also found to be enhancing the FDI-led economic growth. An important finding of this paper is that in the high-income countries, FDI was found to slow down the economic growth. The results are robust and consistent for individual institutional quality indicators and controlling for endogeneity.     

The choice between joint ventures and acquisitions in foreign direct investments: The role of partial acquisitions and accrued experience

In order to avoid the liability of foreignness, firms invest in foreign countries pooling their own resources with those of local firms. This combination of assets may take place through joint ventures or acquisitions. When facing the need to choose between these two entry modes, managers find that there are two critical factors that have received little attention in previous research: the existence of different types of acquisitions—full acquisitions, pure partial acquisitions, and shared partial acquisitions—and the role of the experience accrued by the investing firm in carrying out investments through a particular entry mode. Both factors, as well as their managerial implications, are analyzed in this article. © 2004 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.     

Entrepreneurship,export orientation,and economic growth

In this paper the relationship between a country’s prevalence of new ventures and its rate of economic growth is investigated, while taking into account new ventures’ export orientation. It is generally acknowledged that new venture creation as well as export activity may both be important strategies for achieving national economic growth. However, to our knowledge no attempt has been made to investigate empirically the role of export-driven new ventures in economic growth. We focus on the national level and use data for a sample of 34 countries over the period 2002–2008. Our results suggest that, on top of a positive relation between entrepreneurial activity in general and subsequent macroeconomic growth, there is an additional positive effect of export-oriented early-stage entrepreneurship in higher-income countries. However, there is no such additional effect in lower-income countries.     

German investments abroad and foreign investments in the Federal Republic

The investments of residents of the Federal Republic of Germany in economic areas abroad and of non-residents in the economic area of the Federal Republic are the subject of the following article. Their development over the last fifteen years is analysed in regard to their geographical location and distribution over the various economic sectors. One of the questions to be examined is whether German investments in foreign countries are an alternative to exports from the Federal Republic or a necessary complement to such exports.     

External environment and the moderating role of export market orientation

This research has two main objectives. The first is to fill the knowledge gap on the role which the external environment plays in the strategic behavior of exporting companies, taking into account the psychological distances between the domestic and foreign markets. The second aim is to clarify the role that market orientation plays in export activity, since the literature review shows conflicting results. The study provides insight into these issues through hypothesis testing of a conceptual model using a sample of 212 Spanish exporting companies. The results lead to two major conclusions: (a) in turbulent environments, exporting firms adapting the marketing mix program to the needs of foreign markets obtain a better export performance in highly competitive and psychologically distant markets; (b) although market orientation has a direct and positive effect on export performance, its main role is to support strategic decision making in exporting companies. In addition, market orientation moderates the relationship between marketing mix adaptation and export performance.     

The stabilisation of export earnings

The Convention of Lomé anticipates several basic elements of a possible new international economic order. This relates particularly to the export earnings stabilisation system “Stabex“ whose merits and deficiencies after the first two years of application are discussed in the following contribution.