Analysis of the Service Dominant Logic network,authors, and articles

The present study analyses research conducted in Service Dominant Logic (S-D logic), providing an overview of its intellectual structure. For that purpose, a structured approach was adopted through the implementation of bibliometric methods, using co-citation analysis combined with performance analysis and an integrative science mapping approach, which considered a timeline, a graph, and a distance-based perspective. This allowed the identification of the leading authors and of six clusters of articles based on bibliographic coupling, along with the most prominent research themes clustered in five subdomains of research based on co-occurrence of terms. The networks extracted show the associations between the main articles and concepts treated by the S-D logic community, unveiling the salient challenges and prospective expansion facing its future theoretical and practical context.     

From global start-ups to the borderless firm: Why and how to build a worldwide value system

Although the original concept of international new ventures included the geographic configuration of value activities, the subsequent development of the literature has gradually abandoned the concern about the geographic configuration of both input sourcing and output marketing to concentrate almost exclusively on the latter. Therefore, this paper argues that there is a need to re-focus the research so as to figure out how and why some companies are borderless. Borderless firms are defined as the result of the combination, early on, of geographically dispersed resources and capabilities, defying the home-base logic. A borderless firm presents the following characteristics (or a combination of them) from inception (or shortly thereafter): (i) value-added activities dispersed across different countries and regions; (ii) entrepreneurs not bounded by a home base; (iii) multinational founders and/or management teams; and (iv) a multinational workforce. To enquiry into this issue, the study uses five case studies of borderless firms. The results advance the understanding of the motives and processes behind the development, early on, of a borderless configuration of value activities.     

Throwing It All Away: Exploring Affluent Consumers’ Attitudes Toward Wasting Edible Food

The skewed allocation of food across the world population is a major concern, as the result is that some of us live in abundant supply while others spend their life in constant scarcity. While researchers have studied a variety of issues related to the amounts of food being wasted, or the waste of edible food across consumers with different demographic characteristics, less is known about the drivers of attitudes toward food waste. Based on survey data from a sample of affluent Norwegian consumers, we test how subjective food knowledge, environmental concern, age, and income are related to consumer attitudes toward wasting edible food. We find that all variables except income drive consumer attitudes. Implications for theory and public policy are offered.     

Fitting room or selling room? Millennial female consumers’ dressing room experiences

As retail experiences have become more important to the modern consumer, the store environment has taken on greater significance. The store environment is especially of great significance to the millennial consumer. These consumers tend to spend more time in the fashion retail store, while their expenditure on fashion items increases on a yearly basis. The dressing room must be seen as the clothing retailer's selling room – the place where the retail environment plays an immense role with regard to a consumer's cognitions, emotions and purchasing behaviour. The purpose of this study was to explore and describe young millennial clothing consumers' Functional, aesthetic, emotional and symbolic dressing room experiences. A qualitative research strategy was followed. Two unstructured interviews were held with 15 participants. Participants had to take photos of retailers' dressing rooms before the second interview. A photo‐elicitation technique was employed during the second interview. Findings revealed that participants had specific expectations with regard to the functionality and aesthetics of the dressing room, as well as with regard to the symbolic messages and the emotions that they expected to experience. If the dressing room did not meet their expectations they got disappointed, experienced negative emotions and thoughts and the need to leave the dressing room. The behavioural response of avoidance strongly came to the forth. Findings of this research point to the importance of the dressing room as part of the retail experience and have implications for consumer specialists and retailers.     

Sodium content in foods: Brazilian consumers’ opinions,subjective knowledge and purchase intent

This study attempted to gain insights on Brazilian consumers’ subjective knowledge of sodium content in processed and homemade foods and their purchase intent for products with reduced‐sodium content. A questionnaire was distributed to 409 consumers selected by convenience quota sampling. We found that Brazilian consumers were concerned about the amount of salt (sodium chloride) in the products they consumed, regardless of educational levels, income, age, lifestyles, or health conditions. However, they still considered their consumption to be above WHO‐recommended limits and had little subjective knowledge about the term ‘sodium’. While processed products were considered the main contributors of high‐sodium intake, participants were not concerned about addition of salt at the table and salt in homemade food. The majority of respondents rarely read the sodium content on food labels; however, men and older individuals were more likely to read label information on sodium content. Products with reduced sodium were found to have market appeal, which justifies investments in research to develop these products. Therefore, in addition to the efforts to reduce sodium in the processed‐food industry, it is necessary to promote awareness about the importance of food labelling, especially sodium content, and the need to reduce salt in homemade food and additions during meals.     

Disaggregating the Demand for Pesticides: Does it Matter?

This paper analyzes the demand of French farmers for pesticides by disaggregating among the three main categories of pesticides. We estimate the demand elasticities of herbicides, insecticides, and fungicides with respect to pesticide expenditure, and also consider crop differentiation. We retain a Linear Approximated Almost Ideal Demand System specification. A Full‐Information Maximum Likelihood estimation procedure is used to deal with corner solution problems and censored data. The estimation is based on two cross‐sections covering pesticide use of three major crops cultivated in France in 2001 and 2006. Our results show that farmers' response to price variation is very low, especially for 2001. Furthermore, elasticities of pesticide expenditure are significantly different across categories: the highest levels are obtained for fungicides and the lowest ones for insecticides. Finally, we find higher own‐price elasticities for herbicides and fungicides than for insecticides, which are less frequently used.     

Are patent fees effective at weeding out low‐quality patents?

The paper investigates whether patent fees are an effective mechanism to deter the filing of low‐quality patent applications. The study analyzes the effect on patent quality of the Patent Law Amendment Act of 1982, which resulted in a substantial increase in patenting fees at the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. Results from a series of difference‐in‐differences regressions suggest that the increase in fees led to a weeding out of low‐quality patents. About 10% of patents in the lowest quality decile were filtered out, with the effect concentrated in the patents of firms whose overall patent portfolio was medium to large (more than 20 patents). The study has strong policy implications in the current context of concerns about declines in patent quality.     

Consumer Search in Retail Gasoline Markets

This paper develops direct tests for search behavior in retail gasoline markets. We exploit a unique market‐level dataset that allows us to directly measure search intensity with daily web traffic data from a gasoline price reporting website and perfectly measure daily changes in price levels and dispersion. Our simple yet powerful tests provide strong evidence of both cross‐sectional and intertemporal price search.     

Profiling the segments of senior tourists throughout motivation and travel characteristics

Interest in tourism market segmentation of seniors has been increasing in recent years as the tourism industry has begun to be aware of their importance for the sector. This is a very heterogeneous group, with greater purchasing power and lifestyle-oriented entertainment and enjoyment of leisure time by performing travel than previous generations. This study strives to contribute towards the hitherto scarce research on segmentation in senior tourism. Specifically, this work aims to determine the existence of various profiles of senior tourism by means of using socio-demographic variables, motivation and characteristics of travel of seniors. For this, two complementary analysis techniques, the nonlinear canonical correlation (OVERALS) and a two-stage cluster analysis, were used. Five market segments were identified according to the behavioural variables analysed that allow marketers to target this group in the most convenient manner and to exploit new market opportunities.