Loyalty as a matter of principle: the influence of standards of judgment on customer loyalty

Ethicists refer to people who make judgments based on normative principles as deontologists. Their ethical standards are such that loyalty is an important characteristic to them—which could make them appealing consumers for marketers to target. In a series of three studies, we illustrate the following: whether deontological standards of judgment positively impact their consumer loyalty, if normative advertising campaigns are more effective for deontologists than for utilitarians, and whether the loyalty proneness of deontologists is a function of selective processing. While standards of judgment have been addressed in the literature to measure practices of marketers, our research is the first that speaks to the impact that standards of judgment can have on consumer decision-making.     

Choice Modeling and Tests of Benefit Transfer

Benefit transfer is increasingly being used by decision makers as a way of estimating environmental values suitable for use in benefit cost analysis. However, recent studies examining the validity of benefit transfer of passive use values estimated using contingent valuation have rejected the hypothesis of convergent validity. In this article, we demonstrate the usage of a form of conjoint analysis known as choice modeling for benefit transfer. Choice modeling has been touted as being particularly suitable for benefit transfer because it is possible to allow for differences in environmental quality and socioeconomic characteristics when transferring benefit estimates. We demonstrate that choice modeling is suitable for benefit transfer, particularly when the transfers involve implicit prices. Second, we examine the circumstances in which benefit transfer of choice modeling derived value estimates is likely to be most valid. Two split sample tests were undertaken to achieve this objective. The evidence from these tests indicates that transfers across different case study sites are likely to be subject to less error than those across different populations.     

Cost efficiency of insurance firms in Ghana

The huge infrastructural deficit in Africa requires the establishment of an efficient insurance industry in the pursuance of economic development. Unfortunately, global statistics reveal low patronage of insurance in developing countries, thus making its impact limited in the region. To position the industry for economic development, this study utilizes the stochastic frontier technique to undertake a thorough analysis on the cost efficiency of insurers from the perspective of developing economies using Ghana as a case study. The results on the 30 insurers studied from 2005 to 2014 indicate that insurers in Ghana operate with about 53.8% average cost inefficiency. This stands to confirm the long existed low performance perception of Ghanaians about the industry. Factors identified to explain the cost inefficiencies were firm size, market share, capitalization, reinsurance, regulation, and business type. Several policy recommendations that can help boost the cost efficiency of insurers were derived from the results.     

Positioning UK research and technology organizations as outward-facing technology-bases

UK research and technology organizations (RTOs) compete globally by offering engineering, technology and innovation services. Although associated historically with specific industries, UK RTOs have expanded into nontraditional markets and sectors. This article profiles 15 UK RTOs and we suggest that UK RTOs have unique technology and innovation capabilities, which cut across industrial boundaries.     

The impact of a U.S.–U.K. free trade agreement on workers: a CGE model with worker displacement

Business Economics - On May 5, 2020, the U.S. Trade Representative announced plans to negotiate a free trade agreement with the United Kingdom (USUKFTA). We use GTAP to model the economic...     

Session Ii: Capitalism and Social Insurance

In what Jeff Gordon describes as “the great risk shift,” large U.S. companies have responded during the last 50 years to the forces of globalization and increased pressure from investors by transferring the risks associated with product and worker obsolescence from their shareholders to their employees. Layoffs have generally meant very large, if not complete, losses of “firm‐specific investments” by displaced employees. And the problem is especially troubling in the U.S., where the employees of large companies lose not only their jobs and income streams, but also often their connection to their social network, to the entire system of social welfare and insurance that tends to be provided by large companies and the workplace. While applauding corporate retraining programs, Gordon suggests that individual company efforts are likely to be overwhelmed by the demand for such services. The solution accordingly lies in the form of government‐provided social insurance—in programs that, whether orchestrated and funded at the state or federal level, provide the most cost‐effective government “match” designed to ensure the preservation of human potential and lifetime earnings power of employees.     

Building consumer self-control: The effect of self-control exercises on impulse buying urges

In this research, the effects of self-control exercises on impulse buying urges are examined. Drawing on the strength model of self-control (Baumeister and Heatherton 1996, Psychological Inquiry 7:1?C15), the present paper aims to shed light on impulsive buying by exploring the impact of enhancement of self-control as a result of repeated physical and cognitive self-control exercises over time. The findings showed that these self-control exercises reduced impulse buying urges. Directions for future research are discussed.     

Modelling Heterogeneity in Response Behaviour Towards a Sequence of Discrete Choice Questions: A Probabilistic Decision Process Model

There is a growing body of evidence in the non-market valuation literature suggesting that responses to a sequence of discrete choice questions tend to violate the assumptions typically made by analysts regarding independence of responses and stability of preferences. Decision processes (or heuristics) such as value learning and strategic misrepresentation have been offered as explanations for these results. While a few studies have tested these heuristics as competing hypotheses, none has investigated the possibility that each explains the response behaviour of a subgroup of the population. In this paper, we make a contribution towards addressing this research gap by presenting a probabilistic decision process model designed to estimate the proportion of respondents employing defined heuristics. We demonstrate the model on binary and multinomial choice data sources and find three distinct types of response behaviour. The results suggest that accounting for heterogeneity in response behaviour may be a better way forward than attempting to identify a single heuristic to explain the behaviour of all respondents.     

The efficient use of enterprise information for strategic advantage: A data envelopment analysis

A majority of manufacturers make use of some form of enterprise systems (ES), yet on average, the financial impact of ES adoption is essentially neutral. We propose that in an ES environment of easy information access, competitive success depends, in part, on the policies regulating enterprise information use. To explore this proposition, we examine the efficient use of different types of enterprise information in the realization of strategic performance. Efficient firms will devote fewer resources to information use to achieve the same strategic performance as less efficient firms.