The algebra of health concerns: implications of consumer perception of health loss,illness and the breakdown of the health system on anxiety

The current and expected future state of the American health care system creates much concern and anxiety at the national and individual level among Americans. This study is in response to the call of the Institute of Medicine to further study the lack of confidence among Americans about their future ability to receive high‐quality health care. This study compares perceived anxiety and its amelioration as a result of three possible health situations: illness with infectious disease, losing one's health and a breakdown of the health care system. This empirical study was conducted within the framework of conjoint analysis. We conducted an experimental design of ideas, identified attributes that increased or reduced anxiety in each of the three health‐related situations and then segmented consumers on the basis of their patterns of reactions to the attributes. We found that the highest anxiety was attributed to the breakdown of the health care system. The segmentation further suggested that the anxiety emerging from the breakdown of society's health care system generated a different extent of anxiety than that which emerged from one's illness or one's loss of own health. The attributes that drove anxiety across the health situations were, surprisingly, charities, one's company, the local hospital and supplemental insurance. Attributes that reduced anxiety differed among segments. The attributes were found to be: close friends, family, distribution of information by authorities and the belief in God. At a practical level, these data and patterns of response allow health care policy makers to enhance the coping ability of patients by understanding the nature of what reduces the anxiety of individual types of patients. The approach in this study provides a person‐centred system for communication and anxiety reduction that can be implemented as part of a public health policy.     

Managing growth: Human resource management challenges facing the Indian software industry

Indian software industry has had a phenomenal growth in the last two decades and is expected to sustain this momentum in the foreseeable future. Based on content analysis of 25 cases, the paper identifies several human resource management challenges: managing human resources in globally distributed team, shortage of software professionals having sufficient knowledge and competencies, low-skilled nature of the work, lack of well-developed HR systems and processes, high employee turnover, lack of work-life balance, and the problems associated with the use of contract employees. The paper develops a model for managing growth linking the various variables emerging from the study.     

Implementing a customer relationship strategy: The asymmetric impact of poor versus excellent execution

The benefits of developing customer relationships are well established. However, a well-intentioned relationship marketing strategy may fail because of poor implementation. In this study, the authors look at the effects of implementing a customer relationship strategy. Specifically, they examine the implementation of a personal-banker strategy as a means to developing customer relationships in the retail banking industry. The authors show that an “excellent” personal banker can increase overall customer satisfaction and loyalty compared to customers who do not have a personal banker. However, a poorly performing personal banker can result in lower overall customer satisfaction and loyalty than if no personal banker had been available. Moreover, the effects seem to be asymmetric, with the negative effects of a poor relationship strategy exceeding the positive benefits ofan “excellent” strategy. Mark R. Colgate is a senior lecturer in services marketing at the School of Business and Economics, University of Auckland, New Zealand. His research focuses on customer inertia, relationship marketing, and the interface between information technology and marketing. His research has been published in theEuropean Journal of Marketing, theInternational Journal of Service Industry Management, andThe Service Industries Journal and other services journals. Peter J. Danaher is a professor in the Department of Marketing Department at the University of Auckland, New Zealand. He has a Ph.D. in statistics from Florida State University and an M.S. in statistics from Purdue. His primary research interests are media exposure distributions, advertising effectiveness, customer satisfaction measurement, forecasting and sample surveys, resulting in many publications in journals such as theJournal of Marketing Research, theJournal of Advertising Research, theJournal of the American Statistical Association, theJournal of Retailing, theJournal of Business and Economic Statistics, and theAmerican Statistician. He has consulted extensively with Telecom, Optus Communications, Unilever, ACNielsen, and other market research companies.     

Earning Curves and Wage Curves

Using British county data for full-time male manual workers we extend earlier work to investigate wage and earning curves. We distinguish between total earnings and hourly wages for standard hours, uncontaminated by overtime premium. Using data from 1980–1995 we find that earnings behaviour is dominated by volatile hours in the short run, while wage growth is highly sensitive to the level of unemployment as in the classical Phillips curve with macro data. Macro evidence for sticky wages is thus confirmed at the local level, and the wage curve of rapid adjustment is rejected for normal hourly wages.     

An Empirical Investigation into the Excessive-Choice Effect

Recent marketing and psychological studies have shown that more choice does not always benefit consumers. This excessive-choice effect (ECE) is examined empirically using food items in four experiments. The first experiment investigates whether people would voluntarily reduce their choice-set size. The second seeks to replicate previous experimental results. The third and fourth experiments employ nonhypothetical Becker-DeGroot-Marschak (BDM) soda auctions and hypothetical ground beef choice experiments to further detect the prevalence of the ECE in alternative settings and explore the role of personality in decision tasks. Results suggest the ECE exists, but is less prevalent than previous studies suggest.