Love or Money? The Effects of Owner Motivation in the California Wine Industry

Models that assume only consumer tastes determine the characteristics of supply are restrictive; producers can gain utility from aspects of production and pay for deviating from demand by accepting lower financial returns. We model and measure motivations of California winery owners, and analyze their effects on quality and price. We find utility–maximizers are more likely to produce high quality and set higher quality–adjusted prices. Profit–oriented owners are less likely to produce high quality wines. These results suggest that the presence of hobbyists who enjoy producing high quality may lower financial returns in the segment and discourage profit–maximizers from locating there.     

Management and the Professions: How Cracked is That Glass Ceiling?

All prestigious or highly-paid occupations in Britain are dominated by men: this is as true of the public sector as it is of industry. This article examines the evidence for discrimination in the public sector. It deals with both the situation at work and the one at home. It looks at various explanations as to why this is the case, as well as the evidence on how men and women deal with the inequality. The author concludes that there are good reasons why men and women do not see or confront the issues discussed in her article. Unless men and women wake up to the fact that we live in an unequal society and wish to see the glass ceiling well and truly broken, little is likely to change.     

Web advertising: The role of e-mail marketing

This study examines a comprehensive range of executional elements in a sample of permission-based e-mail marketing campaigns. The sample comprised almost 1000 promotional e-mails sent over an 18-month period by twenty leading U.K. e-retailers. Content analyses of the e-mail campaigns reveal that different tactics of format, address, subject lines, hyperlinks and interactivity are applied to initially attract customers' attention and then encourage further interest. Interviews with nine of the twenty marketing executives who designed the campaigns pointed to managers' reasons for use of the tactical alternatives.     

The Intra‐ and Inter‐Personal Dynamics Associated with Consuming Sensitive Products: Understanding the Consumption of Erectile Function Aids Using Dimensional Qualitative Research

It is estimated that well over 300 million men will be diagnosed with erectile dysfunction by 2025. Men seeking treatment face a burgeoning array of options, some quite invasive. This study utilizes a dimensional qualitative research (DQR) approach to examine what men think, feel, and experience as they consider integrating erectile function (EF) aids into their sexual relationships. The findings suggest that the process of accepting changes in sexual functioning and consuming EF aids frequently moves beyond intrapersonal issues to encompass spouse/partner relationships. The insights gleaned from this study have implications not only for the marketing of EF aids but also for healthcare professionals assisting men in the treatment of their symptoms. Finally, the study findings expand current marketing applications of the DQR framework by demonstrating the value of second‐order modality analysis.     

Accounting for Negative,Zero and Positive Willingness to Pay for Landscape Change in a National Park

In contingent valuation, despite the fact that many externalities manifest themselves as costs to some and benefits to others, most studies restrict willingness to pay to being non‐negative. In this paper, we investigate the impact of allowing for negative, zero and positive preferences for prospective changes in woodland cover in two UK national parks, the Lake District and the Trossachs. An extended spike model is used to accomplish this. The policy implications of not allowing for negative values in terms of aggregate benefits are also investigated, by comparing the extended spike model with a simple spike making use of only zero and positive bids, and a model which considers positive bids only. We find that ignoring negative values over‐states the aggregate benefits of a woodland planting project by up to 44%.     

A Critical Investigation of the Bargaining Behavior of Tourists: The Case of Hong Kong Open-Air Markets

Shopping has long been recognized as an indispensable tourist activity. Hong Kong's open-air markets, where a multitude of bargaining activities can be observed, ranked as the second most popular of the island territory's diverse range of attractions in 2008 in terms of tourist arrivals. To develop cutting-edge marketing strategies that promote tourists' enjoyment of their bargaining adventure and ultimately enhance the overall shopping experience, the study reported in this article was aimed at identifying the dimensions underlying tourists' perceptions of the importance of 18 bargaining motivators and 12 bargaining attitudes and types of bargaining behavior, respectively, and subsequently evaluating the predictability of these underlying dimensions on tourists' shopping contentment indicators (overall bargaining satisfaction, the likelihood of a subsequent visit, and the likelihood of recommending open-air markets to others). A non-probability quota sampling technique was used to survey 203 Asian and non-Asian tourists in Hong Kong. A multivariate approach encompassing factor analysis and multiple regression was employed: Factor analysis delineated four underlying dimensions of factors affecting bargaining intentions. “Value for money” was shown to be the factor rated most important to tourists' bargaining intention; similarly, two underlying dimensions of bargaining attitudes and behavior—“bargain for psychological well-being” and “bargaining intensity”—were identified. Multiple regression results indicated the statistical significance of “bargaining for psychological well-being” and “bargaining intensity” to the existence of positive relations between shopping contentment indicators.     

Participation in Community Leisure Programs: Experiences and Perspectives of Children with Developmental Difficulties and Their Parents

Children with developmental disabilities participate in more solitary, sedentary, and home-based leisure activities than active physical pursuits or community-based activities. Clinical experience suggests that children with less well-recognized developmental difficulties also have compromised leisure experiences; however, this has not been fully investigated. This study engaged 20 school-age children with developmental difficulties in a community-based circus program, designed in collaboration with occupational therapists. The program included activities such as trampolining, trapeze, and acrobatics. Semi-structured interviews with children and parents explored children's leisure experiences both at circus and more broadly. Qualitative content analysis revealed that friendships, having fun, and being physically active were highly valued aspects of leisure. The coaching style and “just right” level of challenge within programs were identified as central to children's engagement and sense of competence. Participating in a supported leisure program such as circus appeared to promote children's engagement in community leisure, at least in the short term.     

Deterrence and knowledge of the law: The case of drunk driving

While it is necessary that researchers make choices in order to estimate inequality, the reasons for the measurement choices and their impact on inequality estimates have not been widely assessed. This paper uses Canadian data from the 1980s to analyse whether inequality estimates are sensitive to common measurement choices. Seemingly minor technical choices about the treatment of outlying observations, such as the use of top-income coded data, exclusion of very high and low observations, and differences among data sets in the capture of very high observations affect estimates of inequality. Further, the impact of the treatment of outlying observations on inequality estimates are at least as large as the impact of measurement choices of a conceptual nature, such as the income definition and population selection. The sensitivity of inequality estimates to measurement choices, which often remain invisible, affect inferences about the relative degree of inequality at a given point in time among countries and changes over time.     

Salt or Sludge? Exploring Preferences for Potable Water Sources

Decision makers often use information about public preferences to guide public policy. Several disciplines gather information on preferences through surveys by asking respondents to make hypothetical choices over potential policies. However the context of the choice question differs between approaches, with some failing to make the full consequences of the respondent’s choice explicit in the question. In this study we investigate whether question context matters, by exploring whether economic and psychology approaches yield a similar understanding of community preferences towards a large-scale recycled wastewater scheme. We find that stated preferences differ depending on whether the preference question is contextualised using economic incentives. The findings provide insight into the implications of inappropriately contextualised preference questions, methodological considerations in attitude identification and estimation, and the diversity of values and public attitudes towards recycled wastewater.