Heavy tails and currency crises

In affine models of foreign exchange rate returns, the nature of cross sectional interdependence in crisis periods hinges on the tail properties of the fundamentals' distribution. If the fundamentals exhibit thin tails like the normal distribution, the dependence vanishes asymptotically; while the dependence remains in the case of heavy tailed fundamentals as in case of the Student-t distribution. The linearity of the monetary model and heavy tail distributed fundamentals are sufficient conditions for fundamentals-based repeated joint currency crises. An estimator for the extreme exchange rate interdependencies is obtained and applied to Western, Asian and Latin American currency block data.     

Male eco‐fashion: a market reality

With the fashion industry striving for competitive advantage, eco‐fashions provide an opportunity to distinguish environmentally friendly products from other fashion products. However, the viability of these eco‐fashion brands is questionable. An exploratory study is conducted to explain men's differences, particularly, as clothing styles vary for men and women. The research examines if men's purchase intent would make a difference to the eco‐fashion industry. A random sample is collected to examine men's purchase intentions for eco‐clothing by product attributes, environmental concerns and sustainable behaviour. Partial least squares is used to empirically test the sample. A conceptual model is developed. It was found that there are four significant exogenous variables, environmental concern, sustainable pricing, sustainable behaviour and sustainable branding with a moderately strong, negatively signed coefficient path. Perceived consumer effectiveness and faith in others are not found to be significant moderators. This defined male segment makes several theoretical contributions as well as generating useful recommendations for marketing practitioners.     

Academic liner notes: a re-inquiry of Chris Hackley’s (2012) CCT Blues

ABSTRACT

While in certain sub-areas of marketing and consumer research, alternative modes of investigation and representation have been mushrooming for a while - i.e. publications of poetry, poetry sessions at conferences, videography, and fiction - we suggest music and complementary academic liner notes as another form of alternative investigation and expression. This paper offers accompanying notes to our original contribution in musical format as an alternative mode of representation and critical dramatization in marketing and consumer research. The song is called CCT Blues and is perfomed by Postmödern talking sans frontiers avéc fromage [the song can be found on Applemusic, iTunes, and Spotify searching for CCT Blues and the artist name.] These liner notes guide the academic listener through our reflexive critical dramatization of the current intellectual condition of the CCT research area in form of a cover song of Chris Hackley’s CCT Blues [2012a. CCT Blues Electric Version.wmv, June 2. Accessed November 25, 2016. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n1pgyaiw610]. Consequently, this paper offers a backstage pass into the world of producing and packaging our critique in audio format.     

Business models as service strategy

It is widely recognized that business models can serve as important strategic tools in innovation and market formation processes. Consequently, business models should have a prominent position in the marketing literature. However, marketing scholars have, so far, paid little attention to the business model concept, perhaps because it lacks an established definition and clear theoretical foundation. This article offers a definition for the business model concept that, using a fractal approach, connects business models to technological and market innovation. Furthermore, the article questions several cornerstone strategic concepts by reconceptualizing business model development from a firm-centric activity that promotes owning key resources and altering sets of decision variables to one that highlights the facilitation of broad institutional change processes. As such, it takes the potentially controversial position of advocating a service-strategy-based understanding of business models for all of marketing strategy.     

The electric guitar – marketplace icon

The electric guitar is an ubiquitous part of contemporary consumer culture. In this Marketplace Icons contribution, we illuminate the iconicity of the electric guitar and what lies behind its thick layers of distorted riffs, mad soloing escapades and eccentric onstage performances, specifically within the rock genre. The genesis of electric guitar playing involves a series of technological alterations of the guitar that freed it from a mere background instrument allowing for new musical roles. It quickly became apparent that all the technical solutions designed to get rid of what was defined as unwanted noise could be turned “against” the clean tone and instead be used to create a unique sound. The control of these noise elements, such as feedback and distortion, became a core element of mastering the modern electric guitar. Rather than just being a marketplace icon, we argue that the electric guitar is fetishized because both its audio quality – the loudness and the potential roughness of the sound – and its visual looks and onstage performances symbolizes youthful rebellion, the essence of rock and roll.     

Declaraciones institucionales y percepciones individuales sobre la sustentabilidad en escuelas de negocios mexicanas

The objective of this paper is to analyze how business schools of Mexican universities deal with the concept of sustainability as part of their educational task. In order to achieve a comprehensive vision, this study considers the environmental, the social, and the economic components of sustainability. After discussing the conceptual dimensions of education for sustainability, the empirical part of the paper consists of two sections: a content analysis of how official university documents handle the concept of sustainability and a survey of professors’ and students’ perceptions of sustainability. The analysis shows that both professors and students in the Management and Accounting disciplines need to extend their understanding about the economic and environmental aspects of sustainability. The results of this study provide information that can guide the efforts made by institutions of higher learning for training their professors and offering a comprehensive education for their students in all three components of sustainability.     

Mystery Shopping in der Gesetzlichen Krankenversicherung – Einsatz von Testkäufern zur Qualitätssicherung

Because of raising costs, modified legal regulations and a changed self-perception of many insurants, compulsory health insurance funds have to cope with an intensified competition on their market. Management instruments like Mystery Shopping, as a method for a hidden inspection of ex ante defined quality standards, enter the health care system. This study's aim is to assess the utilisability of this instrument for compulsory health insurance funds.Basing on a literature analysis and the conducted Mystery Shopping-study in cooperation with a German company health insurance fund, it is assessed, that there are already existing successful approaches of using Mystery Shopping in health insurances and further health care sector. Like in the present study, previous existing applications occur primarily in the evaluation of advisory services (primary in those by telephone). Via Mystery Shopping it is possible to identify relevant factors influencing customer's contentment as well as fund's strengths and weaknesses in an objective and detailed manner. Together with conventional customer satisfaction analyses, potential need for action can be revealed. Besides the evaluation of solely service aspects, prospective applications in the further health care system are introduced.     

Intertemporal effects of consumption and their implications for demand elasticity estimates

Consumption of a good typically diminishes the marginal utility of consuming more, but for how long? This paper adapts a model of consumption capital to allow consumption to have a lasting effect that diminishes the marginal utility of future consumption. Estimates of the model find that it takes the 25th, median and 75th percentile of consumers 19, 32 and 43 days for their marginal utilities to return to pre-consumption levels, and they are forward-looking with respect to these effects. This generates intertemporal substitution of consumption that leads to an overestimate of the own-price elasticity of demand of ten percent when it is estimated using temporary price changes. In addition to these implications consumption effects share with those of durable and storable goods, consumption effects also raise concerns for capacity constrained industries because the timing of consumption affects capacity utilization. In the empirical application in this paper, price variation in one time period generates substantial changes in capacity utilization in that period, but minimal changes in other periods because the intertemporal substitution is spread over many time periods.