Strategic groups and performance in the Spanish hotel sector

This study uses the strategic group theory to identify business strategies and competitive advantages implemented by Spanish hotels, which are grouped together according to three variables (size, chain affiliation, and category) and the degree of development of the different business strategies. An analysis carried out with the aim of checking the potential existence of significant differences in performance among the strategic groups revealed that the highest performance levels are achieved by larger-sized, chain-affiliated, and higher-category hotels as well as by establishments which base their competitive advantage on category and capacity or size and internal management.     

Operations in banking: the service quality and effects on satisfaction and loyalty

This paper studies the service quality provided by the banks. The objectives are (i) to identify which aspects of the transactions carried out by the banks are important for the service quality perceived by the customers, taking into account some aspects that are sometimes ignored (online channels) and (ii) to observe how service quality influences customer satisfaction and how customer satisfaction affects the loyalty towards the bank. Using a factor analysis, the research identifies the operative, physical, new technologies and human factors. Next, using structural equations models with AMOS, the results show an influence of the operative aspects and the new technologies on service quality, as well as the confirmation of quality as a precedent to customer satisfaction, and how such satisfaction influences on customer's loyalty towards the bank.     

Job quality in the customer contact centre: conceptual foundation and scale development

To develop a comprehensive framework of dimensions of job quality in a customer contact centre (CCC), this study adopts the employee's perspective and proposes 12 dimensions. Previous studies suggest conceptualizations of the dimensions of job quality, but have failed to address the specific dimensions that need to be taken into account in a CCC setting. With its multiple dimensions, the proposed job quality scale achieves high internal validity, reliability and generalizability in the CCC setting. Yet the increasing role of such centres for service delivery makes them and their employees critical to customers' quality perceptions, and the findings of this study offer managers clear guidelines adjusted to the CCC environment.     

Category management and consumer choice

This paper shows the results of an exploratory analysis of the structure of a complex product category: Wine. In complex categories, a usual strategy of consumers is the partitioning of alternatives into homogeneous subsets and the sequential eliminations of subsets until a product/brand is chosen from among few homogeneous alternatives in the last subset. To identify if there is such a kind of strategy and the product attributes involved is of great interest for the retailer. After a discussion of the different modelling alternatives of the choice process, the authors provide an application of the additive trees (ADDTREE) model to explore the hierarchical structure. The ADDTREE results provide a first overview of the competitive market structure of the wine category: competition becomes more intense as the wine category is partitioned by, first, the type of wine criteria and, second, the designation of origin (DO) criteria.     

Attitude and Willingness to Pay for National and Store Brands of Milk in the South of Chile

ABSTRACT

In Chile the milk consumption has maintained between 124 and 134 Ls per capita since 1996. To determine the attitude and willingness to pay for national and store brands of fluid milk in the south of Chile, a survey of 400 people was conducted. A conjoint analysis determined that the consumers experienced a positive reaction toward two national brands (traditional and those emergent in the market) and expressed negative reaction to a store brand. The consumers were determined to pay lower prices in relation to the market value for the store brand and higher prices for national brands.     

Convergence Rates to Output Growth in a Global World: The Roles of Openness and Government Size

In this article, we examine the effects of three openness measures on 54 industrial and emerging economies' output growth over the “globalization years” of 1986–2004. Controlling for standard determinants of the Solow growth model in panel data, we find positive effects of openness on real output growth. While we find support for higher convergence rates under the open economy, the convergence rates in this article for both samples are remarkably close to the 2% level documented in Mankiw et al. (1992) Mankiw, G., Romer, D. and Weil, D. 1992. A Contribution to the Empirics of Economic Growth. Quarterly Journal of Economics, 107(2): 407–437. [Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]. The inclusion of G/Y, however, reduces the speed of convergence more substantially in industrial economies.     

A STRUCTURAL RISK‐NEUTRAL MODEL FOR PRICING AND HEDGING POWER DERIVATIVES

We develop a structural risk‐neutral model for energy market modifying along several directions the approach introduced in Aïd et al. In particular, a scarcity function is introduced to allow important deviations of the spot price from the marginal fuel price, producing price spikes. We focus on pricing and hedging electricity derivatives. The hedging instruments are forward contracts on fuels and electricity. The presence of production capacities and electricity demand makes such a market incomplete. We follow a local risk minimization approach to price and hedge energy derivatives. Despite the richness of information included in the spot model, we obtain closed‐form formulae for futures prices and semiexplicit formulae for spread options and European options on electricity forward contracts. An analysis of the electricity price risk premium is provided showing the contribution of demand and capacity to the futures prices. We show that when far from delivery, electricity futures behave like a basket of futures on fuels.     

Advertising Creativity: The Role of Divergence Versus Meaningfulness

Creativity is seen as an essential component of advertising and is continuing to attract research interest. While there is widespread agreement on the value of creativity, there are two different perspectives on the key components of creativity. One perspective sees creativity as primarily divergence, containing elements of novelty, aesthetic representation, newness, and difference. The second includes, in addition to divergence, the concept of meaningfulness (or appropriateness or connectedness) to the consumer. This view argues that if an advertisement is not meaningful then it simply is not creative. We attempt to find some empirical resolution to this issue. Our findings indicate that divergence is indeed an important element of creativity. Meaningfulness, however, while certainly very important to ad effectiveness, appears to be a distinct and separate construct from creativity.     

The role of retentions in how marketing managers change their strategic orientation

This study looks at how a marketing organization changed its strategic orientation in response to environmental factors, and at the influence of retentions on the change effort. Retentions are defined , here as the concepts and mental models used by marketing managers when trying to respond to environmental changes. The influence of retentions on strategic orientation and factors affecting how retentions change are studied in the context of how a bank trust department responded to the deregulation of the financial services industry between 1982 and 1984. The dominant retentions held by managers both before and after deregulation are presented, and the events that contributed to the change of the retentions are examined. The results suggest that retentions prior to deregulation focused on external sources of influence and were associated with a defender strategic orientation. Retentions after deregulation, once the organization's strategic orientation stabilized, focused on critical resources and competitors and were associated with an analyser orientation. The adoption of the new retentions lagged deregulation by several years, and the transition did not match the steps prescribed by the marketing and strategic management literature. Instead, the transition took place through an iterative sequence of behaviours and evaluations more characteristic of the organizing model (Weick 1979). Managers changed their retentions incrementally by enacting small changes, evaluating the outcomes of their behaviour, and letting the outcomes redefine their retentions.