Too Popular to Ignore: The Influence of Online Reviews on Purchase Intentions of Search and Experience Products

Consumers assess the credibility of online product reviews to guide their purchase decisions. However, little is known about how consumers determine the credibility of online product reviews. This article examines the effect of the level of detail in a product review and the level of reviewer agreement with it on the credibility of a review and consumers' purchase intentions for search and experience products. Overall, the results indicate that more credible reviews lead to higher purchase intentions. Interestingly, the findings also demonstrate that consumers determine the credibility of a review differently for search and experience products. For search products, consumers deem online reviews to be more credible when the reviews contain detailed information about the product. However, for experience products, consumers determine the credibility of a review by assessing the level of reviewer agreement with a review. The lack of diagnosticity of detailed information in online reviews of experience products is attributed to the idiosyncratic nature of experiences. Implications for research and practice are discussed.     

What is professional attire today? A conjoint analysis of personal presentation attributes

Personal presentation attributes have long been understood to affect perceptions of competence and capabilities. To that end, this study investigates seven attributes associated with favorable interview presentation, including overall physical attractiveness, neatness and grooming, clothing color, conservative versus trendy attire, professional versus casual attire, and body modification (including tattoos and piercings). Participants (n = 108), including students, faculty, and hospitality industry professionals, sorted an orthogonal array of 16 full-color, laminated cards that contained photos so that respondents could see levels of clothing color, clothing conservativeness, and degree of professional attire. The remaining attributes and their corresponding levels were shown on respective analog indicators. The conjoint analysis results indicate that grooming and professional attire are the most important attributes in shaping favorable perceptions. Furthermore, faculty perceived conservative clothing to be better while students and industry professionals indicated that trendy clothing creates a more favorable presentation on the part of a job candidate.     

An optimization approach to strategic sourcing: A case study of the United States Air Force

The DoD annually procures billions of dollars worth of systems, supplies, and services in support of the national military strategy. Faced with budget cuts and other resource constraints, the DoD must transform its procurement process to ensure cost-effective sourcing of critical supplies and services. One aspect of current transformation in the DoD is the use of a strategic sourcing approach for the procurement of services at military installations. Using the Air Force's strategic sourcing process as our context, we developed an optimization model for selecting a set of proposals from among multiple offerors for services to be performed at multiple installations. The selection achieves the most favorable objective by balancing the confidence level in an offeror's past performance with the cost of services to the Air Force. The research findings, which are based on a realistic scenario, demonstrate improvements over the current sourcing process in both overall performance and cost.     

Controlling the Urban Fabric: The Complex Game of Distance and Proximity in European Upper‐Middle‐Class Residential Strategies

This article presents an open discussion of the processes of urban secession and gentrification in contemporary European cities, arguing that intergroup social dynamics in urban spaces are generally more complex than either extreme mutual avoidance or the colonization of neighbourhoods by the wealthiest groups. We analyse the residential strategies of urban upper‐middle class managers in various European metropolitan areas through in‐depth semi‐structured interviews to argue that these groups develop complex strategies of proximity and distance in relation to other social groups. The development of these ‘partial exit’ strategies takes place through specific combinations of practices that allow groups to select the dimensions they are willing to share with other social groups, and those in which they prefer a more segregated social environment for themselves and their families. The responses of our interviewees were consistently more nuanced and complex than suggested by a simplistic theory about their drive to withdraw from society, forcing us to develop more sophisticated conceptual frameworks to account for the growing prevalence of multi‐layered identities and spheres of reference and solidarity, specific combinations of elective segregation and local involvement, and more active patterns of mobility combined with local embeddedness.     

Correlations in emerging market bonds: The role of local and global factors

This paper empirically assesses co-movements in emerging market bond returns and disentangles the roles of external and domestic factors during episodes of heightened market volatility. The conceptual framework, set in the context of asset allocation, allows us to describe the channels through which shocks originating in a particular emerging or mature market are transmitted across countries and markets. We show that a simple measure of cross-country correlations, when presented together with the more commonly used average correlation coefficient, can be more informative during episodes of heightened market volatility. Data for the period 1997–2008 are analysed for evidence of true contagion and common external shocks.     

The cost of equity of internet stocks: a downside risk approach

Beta as a measure of risk has been under fire for many years. Although practitioners still widely use the CAPM to estimate the cost of equity of companies, they are aware of its problems and are looking for alternatives. A possible alternative is to estimate the cost of equity based on the semideviation, a well-known and intuitively plausible measure of downside risk. Complementing evidence reported elsewhere about the ability of the semideviation to explain the cross-section of returns in emerging markets and that of industries in emerging markets, this article reports results showing that the semideviation also explains the cross-section of Internet stock returns.     

Market timing: A global endeavor

This paper employs daily fund and index data, the classical Treynor and Mazuy timing model, and two multi-factor extensions to measure the market timing ability of global asset allocation funds. These funds differ from traditional global or international funds in that they face fewer investment constraints and are known to actively shift funds across a wide variety of asset classes. When using the classical Treynor and Mazuy timing models, I find evidence of poor market timing ability. However, this evidence disappears when timing ability is examined using two multi-factor models. The results from Treynor and Mazuy are spurious since both multi-factor extensions do a much better job in explaining the variation in average fund returns.     

Governance, Democracy and Poverty Reduction: Lessons Drawn from Household Surveys in Sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America

Public statistics face quite a challenge when it comes to measuring new dimensions of development (institutions, governance, and social and political participation). To take up this challenge, modules on Governance, Democracy and Multiple Dimensions of Poverty have been appended to household surveys by National Statistics Institutes in twelve African and Latin American developing countries. This paper presents the issues addressed and the methodological lessons learnt along with a selection of findings to illustrate this innovative approach and demonstrate its analytic potential. We investigate, for instance, the population's support for democratic principles, the respect for civil and political rights and the trust in the political class; the ‘need for the State’, particularly of the poorest; the extent of petty corruption; the reliability of expert surveys on governance; the perception of decentralization policies at local level; the level and vitality of social and political participation, etc. The conclusive appraisal made opens up prospects for the national statistical information systems in the developing countries. The measurement and tracking of this new set of objective and subjective public policy monitoring indicators would benefit from being made systematic.