Critical consumer issues in St. Lucia: an examination of consumer challenges and related learning among rural adults according to income levels

Consumer education is a relatively new and growing interest in St. Lucia. Neither the government nor the National Consumer Association has established a consumer education programme to address the growing consumer concerns in the country. The purpose of this study was to examine critical consumer issues, related learning challenges and strategies among rural adults in St. Lucia according to income levels. Rural adult consumers are most disadvantaged in terms of levels of education, income and access to resources, which may help to prevent and mediate consumer concerns. The specific research questions examined were: (1) What is the nature of problems experienced by rural St. Lucian adult consumers in the marketplace? (2) How do rural St. Lucian adult consumers solve the challenges they encounter in the marketplace? (3) What is it like for rural St. Lucian adult consumers as they go about trying to learn to solve the consumer issues they face? and (4) What do rural St. Lucian adult consumers perceive to be the requisites for effective decision making in the marketplace? Data were collected using a questionnaire comprising of 29 questions divided into four sections (problems, strategies, solving consumer problems and making effective decisions) and two biographical questions. A total of 500 rural adult consumers were surveyed verbally through door‐to‐door contact. The findings of this study revealed that middle‐income rural adult consumers experience more problems in the marketplace than those with each lower or higher level of income. Middle‐income rural adult St. Lucian consumers in particular seek more information and are comfortable with using more strategies than the lower‐ and higher‐income rural adult consumers. This research gives us a better understanding of the problems faced by rural adult consumers based on their income. Research results will be useful to the government of St. Lucia and the National Consumer Association when they decide to establish an adult consumer education programme for St. Lucia.     

Providing health checks as incentives to retain blood donors — Evidence from two field experiments

The collection of blood given by donors has proven to be a substantial societal and a managerial challenge. Consequently, blood donation services seek for incentive mechanisms to retain donors. However, economic or material rewards might entail negative side effects such as motivational crowding out or even attracting “bad blood”. In an effort to increase the retention of established blood donors, we conducted two randomized field trials (N₁?=?53,257, N₂?=?31,522) in cooperation with the German Red Cross Blood Donation Service and tested the effectiveness of an incentive strategy that is directly related to the blood donation itself: offering a comprehensive blood health check. Contrary to previous related research, we found substantial positive effects of a comprehensive blood health check incentive on donation behavior. In addition, unlike previous studies, we examine effects of repeated exposure to this incentive and do not find any wearout effects. Considering the positive effect of this incentive on donor retention and the relative low cost for providing this service to donors, our findings suggest that offering comprehensive blood health check incentives is a viable and cost-efficient marketing strategy to increase the retention among previous donors even if offered over the longer run.     

Ethics and Law: Guiding the Invisible Hand to Correct Corporate Social Responsibility Externalities

Tokenistic short-term economic success is not good indicia of long-term success. Sustainable business success requires sustained existence in a corporation’s political, economic, social, technological, legal and environmental contexts. Far beyond the traditional economic focus, consumers, governments and public interest groups alike increasingly expect the business sector to take on more social and environmental responsibilities. Corporate social responsibility (CSR) is the model in which economic, social and environmental responsibilities are fulfilled simultaneously. However, there is insufficient empirical evidence that demonstrates genuine widespread adoption of CSR in practice, and its underlying reasons. Though research in CSR has been rapidly growing, its commercial reality and implications need to be further improved if it is to inspire corporations to voluntarily adopt CSR. In the literature, Carroll’s four-dimensional (economic, legal, ethical and discretionary) CSR framework offers a theoretical basis for developing an empirically based model to explain why and how profit-motivated managers take up CSR voluntarily. Our study has developed a structural equation model to identify the key factors and their interactions that influence economically motivated managers to take on voluntary CSR, and validate Carroll’s four-dimensional construct. The results support Carroll’s four-dimensional CSR framework, with the exception of the link pertaining to the relationship between economic and discretionary/voluntary responsibility. This characterises the economic reality that financial market-driven economic responsibility does not automatically translate into social responsibility. Nevertheless, the empirical results demonstrate that corporations can be led to engage in more voluntary CSR activities to achieve social good when appropriate legal and ethical controls are in place.     

A Markov-switching COGARCH approach to cryptocurrency portfolio selection and optimization

Financial Markets and Portfolio Management - Blockchain is a new technology slowly integrating our economy with cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin and many more applications. Bitcoin and other...     

Healthcare resource utilization and costs among psoriasis patients treated with biologics,overall and by disease severity

Aims: To describe healthcare resource utilization (HCRU) and costs among biologic-treated psoriasis patients in the US, overall and by disease severity.

Materials and methods: IQVIA PharMetrics Plus administrative claims data were linked with Modernizing Medicine Data Services Electronic Health Record data and used to select adult psoriasis patients between April 1, 2010 and December 31, 2014. Eligible patients were classified by disease severity (mild, moderate, severe) using a hierarchy of available clinical measures. One-year outcomes included all-cause and psoriasis-related outpatient, emergency department, inpatient, and pharmacy HCRU and costs.

Results: This study identified 2,130 biologic-treated psoriasis patients: 282 (13%) had mild, 116 (5%) moderate, and 49 (2%) severe disease; 1,683 (79%) could not be classified. The mean age was 47.6 years; 45.4% were female. Relative to mild psoriasis patients, patients with moderate or severe disease had more median all-cause outpatient encounters (28.0 [mild] vs 32.0 [moderate], 36.0 [severe]), more median psoriasis-related outpatient encounters (6.0 [mild] vs 7.5 [moderate], 8.0 [severe]), and a higher proportion of overall claims for medications that were psoriasis-related (28% [mild] vs 37% [moderate], 34% [severe]). Relative to mild psoriasis patients, patients with moderate or severe disease had higher median all-cause total costs ($37.7k [mild] vs $42.3k [moderate], $49.3k [severe]), higher median psoriasis-related total costs ($32.7k [mild] vs $34.9k [moderate], $40.5k [severe]), higher median all-cause pharmacy costs ($33.9k [mild] vs $36.5k [moderate], $36.4k [severe]), and higher median psoriasis-related pharmacy costs ($32.2k [mild] vs $33.9k [moderate], $35.6k [severe]).

Limitations: The assessment of psoriasis disease severity may not have necessarily coincided with the timing of biologic use. The definition of disease severity prevented the assessment of temporality, and may have introduced selection bias.

Conclusions: Biologic-treated patients with moderate or severe psoriasis cost the healthcare system more than patients with mild psoriasis, primarily driven by higher pharmacy costs and more outpatient encounters.     

Measuring the productivity changes of Chinese airlines: The impact of the entries of non-state-owned carriers

The competitive environment of the Chinese airline industry has experienced rapid change since non-state-owned airlines entered the market in 2004. We focus on measuring the productivity changes in the Chinese airlines, especially state-owned ones after this change. The results show that non-state-owned airlines are performing better than state-owned airlines. The productivity changes of state-owned airlines are mainly driven by technical changes before or after the entries of non-state-owned airlines. They have little efficiency improvement. However, the productivity changes of private airlines are mainly due to efficiency improvement. The changes associated with international joint venture cargo carrier are due to its significant improvement in both the efficiency and technical changes.     

Messung und Wirkung von Netzeffekten in der ökonomischen Forschung

Network externalities influence marketing strategies for many innovative goods. We show how network externalities have been measured for specific industries in prior research and compare the various theoretical and empirical results in this paper. Our analysis focuses on research explicitly addressing the effects of network externalities on consumer’s behaviour. Based on the overview of empirical findings we develop implications for managers and scientists and discuss shortcomings of the prior research. Our analysis separates the findings in the respective industries to synthesize the various effects of direct and indirect network externalities. We find strong empirical support for the existence of network externalities, but identify substantial research opportunities.