Determinants of Consumer’s Willingness to Purchase Gray-Market Smartphones

The study analyzes the influential factors of consumers’ willingness to purchase gray-market smartphones by considering the model of novelty seeking, status consumption, integrity, and perceived risk. Attitude toward counterfeit is used as mediation in the model. The causalities in the model of problematic willingness of consumer to purchase gray-market smartphones are hypothesized. A total sample of 350 respondents with 238 effective samples is collected by interviewing with questionnaires at the service counters of telecommunications operators. Structure equation modeling (SEM) is adopted in the analysis. Consumers’ attitude toward counterfeit goods is found to be positively related to the willingness of consumers to purchase gray-market smartphones, but perceived risk is negatively related to consumers’ willingness to purchase. As for personality constructs, integrity and status consumption are found to be negatively related to consumers’ attitude toward counterfeit goods, but novelty seeking is positively related to the attitude. Further, managerial implications for branded smartphone manufacturers and telecommunications regulators are provided by the research.     

Amending China’s Notion of a “Consumer”: Lessons from Comparative Analysis of the PRC Consumer Protection Law

Who does the law treat as a “consumer” and why does it matter? How should China’s notion of a “consumer” best be articulated within the law and applied in practice? This article will attempt to answer these intriguing questions by first focusing on the approach taken to define a “consumer” in China’s Law on the Protection of Consumer Rights and Interests before examining the legal notion of a “consumer” in comparative perspective, in order to further understand the competing rationales behind the consumer protection law. This article will explore this Chinese definition of a “consumer” to propose how China’s vague and unworkable statutory definition of a ‘consumer’ should be amended in future.

     

The Ethnographer’s Apprentice: Trying Consumer Culture from the Outside In

Anthropologists have long wrestled with their impact upon the people they study. Historically, the discipline has served and subverted colonial agendas, but views itself traditionally as an advocate for the disempowered and as an instrument of public policy. Marketing is now among the pre-eminent institutions of cultural stability and change at work on the planet. Currently, ethnography is assuming a growing importance in the marketer’s effort to influence the accommodation and resistance of consumers to the neocolonial forces of globalization. The ethical consequences of market-oriented ethnography are explored in this essay. John F. Sherry, Jr., Herrick Professor and Chairman of the Department of Marketing at the University of Notre Dame, is an anthropologist who studies the sociocultural and symbolic dimensions of consumption, and the cultural ecology of marketing. His work appears in numerous journals, book chapters, professional manuals and proceedings. Sherry has edited Contemporary Marketing and Consumer Behavior: An Anthropological Sourcebook, as well as Servicescapes: The Concept of Place in Contemporary Markets; he is co-editor of Advances in Consumer Research (Vol. 19), Time, Space and the Market: Retroscapes Rising, and Consumer Culture Theory.     

Country of Origin Principle in the EU Market for Audiovisual Media Services: Consumer’s Friend or Foe?

The country of origin principle, the cornerstone of the EU Television Without Frontiers Directive – to become the Audiovisual Media Services Directive – is often criticised as being insensitive to the legitimate national public interest to protect viewers – and consumers – of audiovisual media content. This paper seeks to demystify this pessimistic perception of the country of origin rule from the perspective of the consumer interest. It demonstrates that the possible negative repercussions of the country of origin logic for consumer welfare are mitigated in three ways: by specific derogations possibilities foreseen in the Directive in case of violations of the fundamental rules on protection of minors and of human dignity; through the margin of broadcasting control left to the Member States in the areas beyond those coordinated by the Directive, and by means of a new two-step anti-circumvention procedure introduced by the new Directive.

Television’s Glocal Advertising in Veridical Product Narrative: A SE Asian Reception Study of Consumer Alignment/Alienation

Drawing on post‐Marxist screen reception studies in Malaysia, our article establishes a theoretical framework enabling analysis of consumer identification with/cultural distancing from television advertising and its aesthetics. We develop a hermeneutic model of audience response to audio‐visual text as ludic or play‐like in cognitively pursuing a meaning for veridical (mediated yet transparently accessible) marketing narrative sketches of everyday life transcended. Illustrating and illuminating this thesis, we report on a small SE Asian university research project whose participants articulate written reactions to two televised advertisements displaying transcultural product morphing (or glocal goods). Customer identification with consumers shown in television marketing is argued to be fundamentally hermeneutic. Brought into focus through analysis, that is, customer/consumer alignment is conceptual, conscious, and cultural where both project (expect and establish) a screen narrative shared epistemologically (as interpretative knowledge) and ontologically (as involving their activity). The reader’s propositional identification with a text’s perceived normative statement is enabled. On the other hand, discourses of consumer alienation emerge in response to advertisements inappropriately addressing audience horizons of expectation.     

Consumer Responses to Femvertising: A Data-Mining Case of Dove’s “Campaign for Real Beauty” on YouTube

Adopting a combination of qualitative textual analysis, human-based content analysis, and machine learning–based data mining, we propose a procedure to analyze user-generated content (UGC) on social media using Dove’s “Campaign for Real Beauty” as a case for demonstration. We provide a guideline to explicate all six steps of the analysis procedure: topic identification through qualitative textual analysis, generation of labeled data through human coding, data preprocessing, evaluation of machine learning–based classifiers, topic classification of unlabeled data, and conducting research. The study has important methodological implications for advertising scholars and practitioners.     

Does a Consumer’s Religion Really Matter in the Buyer–Seller Dyad? An Empirical Study Examining the Relationship Between Consumer Religious Commitment,Christian Conservatism and the Ethical Judgment of a Seller’s Controversial Business Decision

Religion is an important cultural and individual difference variable. Yet, despite its obvious importance in consumers’ lives, religion in the United States has been under-researched. This study addresses that gap in the literature and investigates the influence of consumer religion in the buyer–seller dyad. Specifically, this study examines the influence of consumer religious commitment and a Christian consumer’s conservative beliefs in the United States on store loyalty when retailers make business decisions which are potentially reli- gious objectionable. This study uses structural equation modeling and applies Anderson and Gerbing’s (Psychol Bull 103(3):411–423, 1988) two-step approach to exam- ine data obtained from a national sample of 531 consumers. The results from this study suggest that consumers evaluate seller’s actions and form ethical judgments. These judgments are a major explanatory variable in consumer store loyalty intentions.     

Strategic Evaluation of Kenya’s Tourism

1. Introduction Currently, tourism plays a major role in the world economy and has become more important in some countries endowed a variety of tourism attractions. Kenya, which is an East African country, continu- ously outpaces its neighbour countries on tourism industry. In Kenya, tourism industry, as the largest single export earner, is one of vital     

Assessment of Yeats’s Drama Career

Yeats’s poetry, in spite of all its Irish imagery, myths, legends and symbolism, is as much a part of English poetry as of Irish. But his plays belong almost wholly to Ireland. This is mainly due to the fact that Yeats’s work as a dramatist has centered round the Abbey Theatre, a theatre mainly of his own creation. It is when one thinks of his connection with the Irish Dramatic Movement that one feels, as George Moore has said that all the Irish movement rose out of Yeats and returns t…     

The Economics of Japan’s Stagnation

The Japanese economy has been mired in subdued growth and deflation for more than two decades. This paper describes the key economic facts and features of Japan’s decades of stagnation. It discusses why long-term Japanese government bonds’ nominal yields have stayed very low in spite of elevated government debt ratios and chronic fiscal deficits. It also provides a brief overview of Abenomics and recent economic developments in Japan.     

Midea’s Re-adoption of M-form Structure

With a focus on the alignment between business strategies and organization design, this illustrative case study describes and analyzes the evolution and reform of Midea’s organizational structure when confronting both internal and external changes. As one of China’s biggest and fastest-growing household appliance enterprises, Midea adopted, discarded and readopted an M-form1 organizational structure within a five-year period from 1997. This case study first investigates the reasons behind Midea’s reform toward decentralization and the formation of governing rules to balance centralization and decentralization. Different decentralized structures are then contrasted basing on product segments, business streams or even key subsidiaries acting as second-tier group companies. After its trial transformation into an H-form company that holds majority shares in several incorporated subsidiaries, Midea chose to switch to a group company incorporated structure soon after its leadership transition in 2012. Preceding the shortening of the group’s ownership chain was the construction, refinement, and evolution of its 9+2+4 divisional structure. This case study is prepared to provoke discussion and thoughts on the (re)design of a properly decentralized structure suitable for large-sized companies with multiple businesses and the links with external and internal factors.     

Enormous Growth Potential for China＇s Consumer Lending

China＇s consumer lending has been expanding rapidly and shows strong growth potential due to economic growth and government policy, according to a recent report by Boston Consulting Group （BCG）.     

The Performative Nature of Consumer Research: Consumers’ Environmental Awareness as an Example

This article considers the way “green consumers” are constructed – or performed – in studies on consumer environmentalism aiming to inform policy makers. The focus is on concrete data gathering operations, which are exemplified by four brief examples from the author’s own research experience. The conclusion is that consumer research is a creative process, in which consumers are made to interact with different contexts, thus eliciting different outcomes. These conclusions give rise to two suggestions. More attention should be paid to context in research, which is already occurring. More fundamentally, researchers should recognize their active, performative role when interacting with consumers as research subjects, on the one hand, and with policy-makers and other social actors as research utilizers, on the other.     

The Winner’s Curse of Human Capital

We extend a model developed by Evans and Jovanovic (1989) to explain when start-ups are credit constrained. We show that the magnitude of the credit constraint is conditioned by the relative productivity of human capital in both wage work and self-employment. The effect of predicted household income on start-up capital is used to indicate the existence of financial constraint. Empirical analysis reveals that entrepreneurs with high human capital have both greater financial wealth and greater levels of start-up capital pointing to the endogenous nature of credit constraints. High human capital relaxes financial constraints, apparently due to greater productivity of human capital in wage work than in self-employment. Those who are the least likely to be credit constrained in self-employment are those that are least likely to switch into self-employment,and vice versa.     

Province-Level Impacts of Canada’s Trade Agreements

Given Canada’s extended geography and regional economic diversity, individual provinces have differing exposures to particular international trade agreements. We demonstrate this by estimating the impacts of the Canada-Korea free trade agreement on the province of Ontario, using a dynamic general equilibrium model to generate Canada-level impacts, which are then decomposed on the basis of partial equilibrium model simulations on a trade dataset in which Ontario is represented as a separate international trading entity. We show that geography and sectoral specialization matter and that general equilibrium effects must be taken into account in partial equilibrium assessments of sectoral impacts of major trade agreements.     

Enormous Potential of the Chinese Consumer Market

With a population of 1.2 billion, the enormous potential of the consumer market in China is common knowledge for people around the world. From an analysis by the Ministry of Internal Trade, the potential of the Chinese consumer market is shown mainly in two aspects. Firstly, the capacity of the market is growing fast. From 1979 to 1994, the yearly average increase rate of the gross value of national productivity was over nine percent. The sustained increase     

The role of a municipality’s financial health in a firm’s siting decision

When deciding where to locate a new facility, a firm needs to consider the financial health of the municipality where its activities will take place. Unless it sites its facility in a financially viable community, a firm is putting a substantial investment at risk. Despite the importance of this issue, many firms pay insufficient attention to a municipality’s financial condition. Instead, they focus on matters such as the tax rate, the quality of the school system, or the absence of regulatory constraints. All of these features are important, but unless a municipality is financially healthy, they can evaporate before a company has attained its expected return on investment. There are 5 financial statements and 10 financial ratios that can be used to create a financial health template, which can help a firm to assess a municipality’s financial strength, or its counterpart financial weakness. The template goes beyond the debt-repayment focus of credit rating agencies to matters such as financial autonomy, cash flows, and borrowing capacity. We use data from three cities—Barcelona, Dublin, and Detroit (pre- and post-bankruptcy)—to demonstrate the template’s ability to facilitate comparisons among cities that are in different countries and that use different accounting systems.     

Consumer＇s confidence rises again in the third quarter

According to the Orga-nizing Committee of World Economic Development Declaration, China will pub-lish its first declaration on world economic develop-ment next month in Zhuhai. It acts an sponsor as well as an organizer and designer in this activity. Seven Nobel Economics Prize winners