Consumers as legitimating agents: How consumer‐citizens challenge marketer legitimacy on social media

Previous research has shown that consumers increasingly challenge the legitimacy of marketers and unsolicited marketing communication in online contexts. Based on a qualitative study, this article examines how and for what reasons consumers challenge marketer legitimacy—the perceived appropriateness of marketers and their activities—in the empirical context of Reddit, a popular social news and community website. The study suggests that consumers challenge or accept marketer legitimacy in online communities based on particular, community and situation specific, legitimacy criteria that reflect and reproduce the values and norms of the community. In doing so, it is argued, consumers play a role as legitimating agents—consumer‐citizens that have the power to confer or deny legitimacy in the context of business‐society relations. Overall, the study advances knowledge in the field of consumer studies in two ways. First, it builds a symbolic interactionist perspective on consumer‐citizens as legitimating agents who enact their active citizenship role in the marketplace by assessing and constructing marketer legitimacy in online communities. Second, it offers an empirically grounded account of how and for what reasons consumer‐citizens challenge or accept the legitimacy of marketers and unsolicited marketing communication in online communities.     

The Potential Market for GM Rice with Health Benefits in a Chinese High-Risk Region

Genetically modified rice with a high folate content, i.e., folate biofortified rice, was recently developed to tackle folate deficiency. A consumer segmentation study is conducted to explore its market potential in the Chinese Shanxi Province, where the burden of folate deficiency is among the world’s highest. Cluster analysis of 451 rice consumers identified three segments: enthusiasts (14.2%), cautious (41.2%), and opponents (44.6%). Enthusiasts obtain the highest score of GM food knowledge and attitudes and have the highest GM rice acceptance rate, followed by cautious and reluctant consumers. Regarding GM food information, enthusiasts use almost entirely audiovisual channels and rely more on the industry, while other segments depend more on informal channels and anti-GM sources. Trust levels in these channels/sources differ between enthusiasts (high), opponents (neutral), and cautious (low). Based on multinomial regression, a targeted communication approach is recommended with a focus on female, cautious consumers and rural, low-educated opponents.     

Boundaryless careers in the gig economy: An oxymoron?

Advocates of the boundaryless career perspective have relied to a great extent on the assumption that actors take responsibility for their own career development and that they consequently take charge of developing their career competencies. In this provocation piece, we debate the obstructions to and potential ways to promote boundaryless careers in the gig economy, which—despite appearing on the surface to offer suitable conditions for boundaryless careers—suffers from numerous conditions that hinder such careers. Thus, boundaryless careers in the gig economy could be an oxymoron. In particular, we conjecture that intraorganisational and interorganisational career boundaries restrict gig workers' development of relevant career competencies and thus limit their mobility. We then put forward the notion that we have to consider moving away from traditional, employer‐centric human resource management and introduce new forms of network‐based and self‐organised human resource management practices (in the form of collaborative communities of practice) in order to diminish these boundaries.     

Expected utility and the siegel paradox: A generalization

It was recently shown by Sinn that, under certain conditions, because of the Siegel paradox, even risk-averse agents can find speculation on forward currency markets attractive. His assumptions are that the spot and forward rates are identically distributed and statistically independent and that the agents' coefficients of relative risk aversion are constant and inferior to unity. We show that both assumptions of statistical independence and constant relative risk aversion can be dramatically relaxed.Thanks are due to H.-W. Sinn, W. T. Epps, and an anonymous referee for useful comments. Thon would like to thank the Department of Economics and The Center for Law and Economics of the University of Miami for research support, and the Prof. W. Keilhau's Memorial Fund for financial support.     

Repertoire of strategies used by French Canadian mothers living in Montreal to pressure their 10‐year‐old children to eat

This study is concerned with mothers’ use of strategies directed toward their 10‐year‐old children to pressure them to eat. The objective is to document the repertoire of strategies and their context of use. This child‐feeding practice is of interest because of its impact on the child's opportunities for the development of self‐control based on responsiveness to hunger and satiety cues. A total of 24 interviews and one focus group were conducted with French Canadian mothers. Data analyses reveal four major themes associated with the contexts in which pressure to eat were used: food purchasing, food preparation, meal service, food consumption. Strategies related to the context of food purchasing stress the importance of children's influence on family decisions. The strategies used at the time of preparation of meals illustrate the burden of tasks a mother takes on to ensure that her child consumes a particular food. With regard to meal service, very few strategies take into account the appetite of the child. Finally, the variety of strategies deployed at the time of consumption of foods supports the importance of informing parents of the undesirable effect of techniques associated with forcing the child to eat. Avenues for future research are presented.     

The Information Content of Short Selling Around Close Supply Chain Relationships

Close supply chain relationships are sometimes detrimental to the partnering firms, and short sellers recognize this before the rest of the market. Suppliers and customers that are in linked, close supply chain relationships have higher short interest on average. Further, higher short interest increases the likelihood of large, linked customers reporting negative earnings surprises, whereas suppliers with high short interest are more likely to report negative earnings surprises, irrespective of the supply chain structure. Short selling is informative to capital markets because these suboptimal relationships eventually lead to dependent suppliers being delisted from a stock exchange for financial distress reasons.     

The dynamic implications of increasing returns: Technological change and path dependent inefficiency

This paper addresses the issue of path-dependent selection and inefficiency, counterfactual methods and the empirical evidence employed in this research trajectory. The general message is basically that the theoretical argument to prove path-dependent inefficiency is relatively straightforward, while empirical demonstrations, as well as the analysis of welfare implications are much more difficult. In the first section, we briefly state the basic argument explaining how localized learning leads to an incomplete exploration of the variety distribution of a technology. We then synthesize the most interesting historical studies, which get potential regret results, and ask whether these results suggest a large welfare loss. To try to answer this question, we start from the critical arguments of Liebowitz and Margolis to discuss the theoretical and empirical difficulties of establishing path-dependent inefficiency.     

The Dynamics of Insurance Prices

We develop a continuous-time general-equilibrium model to rationalise the dynamics of insurance prices in a competitive insurance market with financial frictions. Insurance companies choose underwriting and financing policies to maximise shareholder value. The equilibrium price dynamics are explicit, which allows simple numerical simulations and generates testable implications. In particular, we find that the equilibrium price of insurance is (weakly) predictable and the insurance sector always realises positive expected profits. Moreover, rather than true cycles, insurance prices exhibit asymmetric reversals caused by the reflection of the aggregate capacity process at the dividend and recapitalisation boundaries.