When customers are members: Customer retention in paid membership contexts

This article seeks to gain an understanding of how members’ characteristics relate to lapsing behavior in paid membership contexts. Literatures such as social identity theory are used to propose hypotheses that are tested using a hazard rate model on archival data pertaining to 7,798 members of an art museum. The results indicate that the hazard of lapsing is lowered with increasing duration, participation in special interest groups whose goals are related to those of the focal organization, gift frequency, and increasing interrenewal times. Conversely, members who have downgraded their membership level in the past, those who have participated in special interest groups whose goals are unrelated to those of the focal organization, and those who received their membership as a gift are more likely to lapse. C. B. Bhattacharya is an assistant professor of marketing at the Goizueta Business School of Emory University. His Ph.D. in marketing is from The Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania. His research interests include brand loyalty and brand health, customer retention, and organizational identification and disidentification. He has published in theJournal of Marketing, International Journal of Research in Marketing, Journal of Retailing and Consumer Services, Marketing Letters, and other journals. During the past few years, students in his marketing research course have addressed real problems for over 30 nonprofits. In 1995, he received The Emory Williams Distinguished Teaching Award, which is the highest teaching honor conferred by Emory University.     

The theorems of international trade with joint production

This paper analyzes the implications of joint production for the four basic results of the factor-endowments theory of international trade. The nature of the relationship between commodity prices and factor rewards is first elucidated in detail. It is then shown that, in sharp contrast to prevalent opinion, there is in fact a strong presumption that the basic theorems will continue to hold in essence. The paper then considers applications and extensions of the analysis to higher dimensions.     

A convexity property of the two-by-two model of production

It is shown that the rental of the ith primary factor in terms of the jth product is a convex function of the relative price of the jth commodity if and only if the weighted elasticity of factor substitution is greater in whichever industry employs the ith factor relatively intensively the weights being the shares of the ith factor in the total costs of the two industries.     

SUPPLY RESPONSE TO PRICE UNDER CERTAINTY,WITH REFERENCE TO THE UNITED KINGDOM EGG MARKET, 1954 TO 1966

Hen egg production in the United Kingdom expanded throughout the 1950's and early 1960's in the face of successive reductions in the guaranteed price thus raising questions about the efficacy of the guaranteed price system as a production control mechanism. The objective of this analysis is to estimate the guaranteed price elasticity of supply of hen eggs over the twelve-year period 1954 to 1966. Two models are used, a conventional linear form and a Nerlove type lagged model. The independent variables considered are the guaranteed price, the price of feed, and egg yield as a proxy for technology. The non-lagged equation is the more satisfactory and gives an elasticity value of 1.66, suggesting that flock owners were highly sensitive to changes in the guaranteed price. This sensitivity tended to be obscured by producer eagerness to profit from technological advance, which was the predominant factor affecting the scale of egg production over the period.     

PROJECTION MODELS FOR U.K. FOOD AND AGRICULTURE*

Successful policy planning depends to a large extent on being able to predict the consequences of alternative measures. In the case of agriculture, it is important to know how the future pattern of supply and demand in this sector will be affected by government action on specific issues such as farm price support, and by expected trends in macro-economic variables such as national incomes and population. This paper illustrates the application of a model of U.K. agriculture to the projection of changes in the production and consumption of food and agriculture products between now and 1975. The demand projections show the effect of important levies, and of joining the E.E.C, on future expenditure on food, while the supply projections show how the output of a number of agricultural commodities will be affected by adjusting farm prices towards E.E.C. levels.