The influence of religious commitment on consumer perceptions of closed-on-Sunday policies: an exploratory study of Chick-fil-A in the southern United States

Many businesses operate long hours that often include nights and weekends to accommodate consumers. However, a few businesses maintain a closed-on-Sunday policy and do so while still operating successfully although closed-on-Sunday policies mean forgoing potential sales hours. As most Christian faiths consider the Sabbath as a day of rest, an oft-used rationalization for the success of businesses maintaining this policy is that they must be supported by consumers with strong religious beliefs, who appreciate the message sent by the company and as a result perceive the company favorably. The purpose of this paper was to investigate whether consumers' religious commitment influences their ethical judgment of a company's closed-on-Sunday policy and to determine whether this ethical judgment impacts a company's corporate or brand image and consumer loyalty intentions. The results suggest that consumers with higher levels of intra-personal religious commitment are more likely to hold favorable ethical judgments of closed-on-Sunday corporate policies. In addition, favorable ethical judgments of closed-on-Sunday corporate policies are likely to positively influence corporate image. A more positive corporate image ultimately results in higher consumer loyalty intentions.     

ESTIMATING THE VALUE OF DELIVERY OPTIONS IN FUTURES CONTRACTS

We analyze the effect various delivery options embedded in commodity futures contracts have on the futures price. The two embedded options considered are the timing and location options. We show that early delivery is always optimal when only a timing option is present, but not so when joint options are present. The estimates of the combined options are much smaller than the comparable estimates for the timing option alone. The average value of the joint option is about 5% of the average basis on the first day of the maturity month. This suggests that joint options can increase deliverable supplies while potentially having only a small effect on basis behavior.     

Reliable Estimates of Sovereign Rating

International Advances in Economic Research -     

Dinge, die meine Eltern nicht sehen sollten

Every successful communication process requires a certain degree of self-disclosure. However, both in real life and on social network sites like Facebook, self-disclosure does not imply a total sacrifice of privacy. People rather tend to disclose one part of the self while keeping another one protected. In doing so, it is less important where the protective line is drawn, but that a line is drawn at all. This basic principle of conditional self-disclosure can be applied in diverse strategies. An online survey among German Facebook users (n = 684) examined this assumption. Items for a scale of subjective privacy regulation were derived from Burgoon’s four dimensions of privacy. Based on user’s varying emphasis on these privacy dimensions, seven different types of privacy management could be distinguished. Among these, six different strategies of conditional self-disclosure were observed (?chatty“, ?blogging“, ?networking“, ?sorting“, ?passive“, and ?inexperienced“). Only ?careless“ users did not follow our expectations, attaching none of the measured protective conditions to their self-disclosure.     

A Review of the Empirical Ethical Decision-Making Literature: 2004–2011

This review summarizes the research on ethical decision-making from 2004 to 2011. Eighty-four articles were published during this period, resulting in 357 findings. Individual findings are categorized by their application to individual variables, organizational variables, or the concept of moral intensity as developed by Jones (Acad Manag Rev 16(2):366–395, 1991). Rest’s (Moral development: advances in research and theory, Praeger, New York, 1986) four-step model for ethical decision-making is used to summarize findings by dependent variable—awareness, intent, judgment, and behavior. A discussion of findings in each category is provided in order to uncover trends in the ethical decision-making literature. A summary of areas of suggested future research is provided.     

Risk preferences under acute stress

Many important decisions are made under stress and they often involve risky alternatives. There has been ample evidence that stress influences decision making, but still very little is known about whether individual attitudes to risk change with exposure to acute stress. To directly evaluate the causal effect of psychosocial stress on risk attitudes, we adopt an experimental approach in which we randomly expose participants to a stressor in the form of a standard laboratory stress-induction procedure: the Trier Social Stress Test for Groups. Risk preferences are elicited using a multiple price list format that has been previously shown to predict risk-oriented behavior out of the laboratory. Using three different measures (salivary cortisol levels, heart rate and multidimensional mood questionnaire scores), we show that stress was successfully induced on the treatment group. Our main result is that for men, the exposure to a stressor (intention-to-treat effect, ITT) and the exogenously induced psychosocial stress (the average treatment effect on the treated, ATT) significantly increase risk aversion when controlling for their personal characteristics. The estimated treatment difference in certainty equivalents is equivalent to 69 % (ITT) and 89 % (ATT) of the gender-difference in the control group. The effect on women goes in the same direction, but is weaker and insignificant.