Price Discrimination with Private and Imperfect Information

In this paper, I investigate the competitive and welfare effects of the improvements in information accuracy in markets where firms can price discriminate after observing a private and noisy signal about a consumer's brand preference. I show that when firms believe that consumers have a brand preference for them, then they charge more to these consumers, and this price has an inverse U‐shaped relationship with the signal's accuracy. In contrast, the price charged after a disloyal signal has been observed falls as the signal's accuracy rises. While industry profit and overall welfare fall monotonically when price discrimination is based on increasingly more accurate information, the reverse happens to consumer surplus.     

Productivity Gains and Spillovers from Offshoring

Offshoring is generally believed to be productivity enhancing and this belief is underpinned by economic theory. This paper estimates the impact of materials and business services offshoring on productivity in Belgium over the period 1995–2004. It contributes to the literature: (i) by examining this issue separately for manufacturing and market services industries and (ii) by investigating the possibility of forward and backward spillovers from offshoring, i.e. that productivity gains from offshoring feed through to upstream and downstream industries. Results show that materials offshoring has no effect on productivity, while business services offshoring leads to productivity gains in manufacturing. Furthermore, there is no evidence of either forward or backward spillovers from offshoring.     

Women,Muslim Immigrants,and Economic Integration in France

Muslim immigrants to Europe display distinctive attitudes toward women in a wide range of survey data. This study investigates whether this translates into distinctive behavior. Relying on a dictator game in France and an identification strategy that isolates the effect of religion from typical confounds such as race, we compare the donations of matched Christian and Muslim immigrants and rooted French to in‐group and out‐group men vs. women. Our results indicate that Muslim immigrant participants deviate from Christian immigrant and rooted French participants in their behavior toward women: while the latter favor women over men, Muslim immigrants favor men over women.     

Chief Financial Officers as Inside Directors

Considerable prior research investigates whether the extent of insider presence on corporate boards is detrimental. However, the majority of past research treats all inside directors as a homogenous group. This study considers that issue in the context of chief financial officers (CFO) serving on their own company's board. Our research is important because individuals in different executive roles bring different skills and knowledge to board interactions, highlighting the potential for differential contributions. As prior research does not specifically distinguish CFOs from other board insiders, the potential benefits of knowledge sharing due to increased communication with other board members may have been masked. Specifically, the CFO is directly responsible for the quality of the financial reporting process and can therefore be associated with specific outcome measures. Our results show that the percentage of CFOs serving on their own boards is not large, likely due to the perspective (consistent with agency theory and reflected in independence guidelines) that company insiders on boards could promote their own best interest at the expense of shareholders. Contrary to this perception, we find that companies whose CFO has a seat on the board are associated with higher financial reporting quality (i.e., a lower likelihood of reporting a material weaknesses in internal controls or having a financial restatement, and better accruals quality). Yet, we also find potential drawbacks in that CFOs with a board seat tend to have higher excess compensation and lower likelihood of termination following poor performance, signaling greater entrenchment. While our results provide information to companies considering appointing the CFO to the board, both costs and benefits are demonstrated, and thus we conclude that each board should consider this decision based on its own circumstances and composition.     

Market and technology shifts in the 1990s: Market fragmentation and mass customization

This paper highlights demographic and psychographic population shifts, which, together with a rapid increase in the flexibility and cost‐efficiency of production processes, will force marketers into more complex market segmentation and niche marketing strategies. The accelerating trends in market fragmentation and “mass‐customization” of production will challenge traditional marketing thinking and strategies during the 1990s.     

Who we are and what we do: A profile of marketing academics in UK universities

This paper explores the professional identity of marketing academics in UK universities by focusing on two aspects, i.e. (1) their background characteristics and (2) the activities typically pursued by them. Specifically, the characteristics of marketing academics are explored in terms of demographic profiles, educational background and career structures, while activity patterns provide insights into the composition and length of the working week, research record and the relative importance of outside sources of income.     

Who Uses Intermediaries in International Trade? Evidence from Firm‐level Survey Data

The present paper uses data from the World Bank Enterprise Survey conducted in Turkey in 2005 to shed light on the firms that use intermediaries in international trade. It lends robust empirical support to recent theories which suggest that indirect exporters are mostly small firms that are not profitable enough to cover the high fixed costs of building an own distribution network abroad. Manufacturers who develop new products are more likely to use trade intermediaries, as are firms that produce low‐quality goods. In contrast, neither foreign ownership nor credit constraints are correlated with the choice of export mode. Moreover, firms that rely on trade intermediaries to sell their goods abroad also do so to source their foreign inputs, implying that the role of intermediaries in facilitating trade may be larger than previous studies suggest.     

The Impact of the Interaction of Utilitarian and Informational Reinforcement and Behavior Setting Scope on Consumer Response

The influence of the environment on the emotional responses and behaviors of consumers has been well established in the consumer behavior literature. The Behavioral Perspective Model (BPM) assumes that utilitarian reinforcement, informational reinforcement, and consumer behavior setting scope are independent dimensions of environmental influence, which can combine in particular consumption situations to produce consumer behavior. This paper empirically examines the possibility of interactions among these dimensions by means of the pleasure, arousal, and dominance (PAD) emotional variables. The PAD variables have been shown to mediate consumer behaviors such as the desire to stay or escape from the setting, to affiliate with others, and the willingness to spend money and consume. The results, showing an interaction between pleasure and arousal in high‐pleasure environments, which then leads to increased approach behavior, seem to confirm the synergistic effects of utilitarian reinforcement and informational reinforcement on behavior. This study appears to be the first to find and investigate a three‐way interaction between pleasure, arousal, and dominance in the context of purchase and consumption. This interaction suggests that the three structural dimensions of the BPM combine to produce consumer behavior. It also highlights the important role of consumer behavior setting scope in consumer situations maintained by intermediate patterns of reinforcement. The implications of these findings for theory and marketing management are discussed.     

A Prototype of Multicomponent Brand Personality Structure: A Consumption Synmbolism Approach

Brand personality (BP) in the postmodern marketplace encompasses a variety of anthropomorphized attributes associated with a brand, reflecting on a wide spectrum of social, cultural, and psychological associations capturing various aspects in everyday life stories of consumers. Most prior research onBP, however, has employed a psychology‐based approach, and has not yet fully demonstrated the concept's market‐driven scope in the contemporary brand schema. To bridge the gap between the practitioner and scholar, this study employed a consumption symbolism approach to develop a multicomponent structure ofBP. A qualitative study was conducted with 36 brands of six product/service categories (fashion/luxury, beverage, automotive, personal computer, cosmetics, and retailer) within a specific context (South Korea). The results yielded a prototype of multicomponent BP structure consisting of one psychological component (traits) and three sociocultural components (narratives of socioeconomic/life scene/physical variability). The findings of the study broaden the current understanding of BP by suggesting a multidisciplinary perspective embracing its sociocultural aspects, and by empirically demonstrating the prototype reflecting on a wide spectrum of consumer narratives.