The impact of individual and managerial factors on salespeople's contribution to marketing intelligence activities

Although salespersons represent a unique and important channel of information, few of them contribute efficiently to marketing intelligence. This research aims to understand how salespeople's motivation and effort to gather and transmit marketing intelligence to management may be influenced by individual (organizational commitment, desire for upward mobility) and managerial (control system, participation in decision making, feedback, recognition) factors. The test of the proposed model shows that desire for upward mobility is the only individual determinant of behavior. Other than participation in decision making, all the managerial factors play influential roles in structuring both motivation and behavioral effort toward marketing intelligence by salespeople. The authors also discuss the limits of the model, some managerial implications, and future research opportunities.     

A theory of search with deadlines and uncertain recall

We ask how the ability to recall past prices affects the dynamics of search and price formation. In the model, buyers have limited time to purchase a good and face uncertainty regarding the availability of past price quotes in the future. Sellers cannot observe a potential buyer’s remaining time until deadline nor her quote history, and hence post prices that weigh the probability of sale versus the profit once sold. We find that, in contrast to conventional wisdom, reducing the consumer’s recall ability may actually improve his expected utility because it lowers the average expected price in the market and reduces the duration of search.     

An Introduction to the Patstat Database with Example Queries

This article provides an introduction to the Patstat patent database. It offers guided examples of 10 popular queries that are relevant for research purposes and that cover the most important data tables. It is targeted at academic researchers and practitioners who are willing to learn the basics of the database.     

How to derive consensus among various marketing journal rankings?

Despite the increasing popularity of journal rankings to evaluate the quality of research contributions, the individual rankings for journals that ranked below the top tier of publications usually feature only modest agreement. Attempts to merge rankings into meta-rankings suffer from some methodological issues, such as mixed measurement scales and incomplete data. This paper addresses the issue of how to construct suitable aggregates of individual journal rankings, using an optimization-based consensus ranking approach. The authors apply the proposed method to a subset of marketing-related journals from a list of collected journal rankings. Next, the paper studies the stability of the derived consensus solution, and the degeneration effects that occur when excluding journals and/or rankings. Finally, the authors investigate the similarities/dissimilarities of the consensus with a naive meta-ranking and with individual rankings. The results show that, even though journals are not uniformly ranked, one may derive a consensus ranking with considerably high agreement with the individual rankings.     

Business Cycle Synchronization of Turkey with the Eurozone and the United States: What Has Changed Since 2001?

Using wavelet methodology, we make a detailed spectral analysis of the business cycle synchronization of the Turkish economy with the eurozone and the United States. We take into account the dramatic change in the main economic indicators in the Turkish economy after the 2001 financial crisis. We find that the correlation of Turkish cycles with the cycles of the eurozone and the United States increased substantially after 2001. Moreover, the correlation of the Turkish cycles with the U.S. cycles is not lower than that with the euro cycles after 2001. Accordingly, analyzing the effect of international developments should not be confined to the trade channel. We submit that capital flows offer a reasonable explanation for the high correlation with the United States.     

Do rating agencies’ decisions impact stock risks? Evidence from European markets

This article analyses the effect of rating agencies’ decisions on stock risks for European issuers concerning five kinds of events. Our approach is an extension of dummy variable regression event study methodology, using a GARCH(1,1) estimation to capture simultaneously the impact on both systematic and specific stock risks. This new methodology allows us to obtain both global results by categories of rating decisions and individual results, event by event. We document, globally, a positive impact of upgrading on systematic risk, a negative impact of rating confirmation on specific risk, and no significant impact in all other cases. Regarding event-by-event results, the proportion of rating actions exhibiting a significant effect on risk is almost always observed between 20% and 30%. The weak evidence of a global effect on systematic risk may be due to the lack of informational content of the rating decisions on the stocks’ risk, or the existence of rebalancing effects between systematic and idiosyncratic risks. Furthermore, it should be noticed that the decline in volatility in case of a rating affirmed is an insight of the certification role played by the agencies.     

Financial liberalization,private investment and portfolio choice: Financialization of real sectors in emerging markets

Using firm level panel data, we analyze the impacts of rates of return gap between financial and fixed investments under uncertainty on real investment performance in three emerging markets, Argentina, Mexico and Turkey. Employing a portfolio choice model to explain the low fixed investment rates in developing countries during the 1990s, we suggest that rather than investing in irreversible long-term fixed investments, firms may choose to invest in reversible short-term financial investments depending on respective rates of returns and the overall uncertainty in the economy. The empirical results show that increasing rates of return gap and uncertainty have an economically and statistically significant fixed investment reducing effect while the opposite is true with respect to financial investments.     

Consumer workers as immaterial labour in the converging media markets: three value‐creation practices

This paper takes a practice‐based approach to consumer studies and focuses on the strategic and productive roles that consumers play as immaterial labour or consumer workers in the converging media markets. Based on a case study of a print media organization and its customers, the aim is to discuss the collaborative practices through which value is created in the market. By means of a textual analysis of online and interview data, three value‐creation practices are abstracted and illustrated: constructing a sense of belonging and collective identity, mutual helping and peer support, and building pride and self‐respect. Overall, the paper suggests that in global media environments, consumer‐customers are playing increasingly significant strategic roles in the practices and processes through which value is co‐created in the market. It is therefore concluded that the idea of consumers, and media audiences in particular, as recipients of communication and targets of marketing activities needs to be problematized and the dynamic strategic roles that consumers currently play in the market need to be acknowledged and actively incorporated into the business praxis of media corporations.