Exploring consumer orientation toward returns: unethical dimensions

As customer return rates increase, retailer bottom lines suffer from customers’ misuse of the policies and to the ethics of such practice. The purpose of this study is to explore customers’ orientation toward return behaviors, and to develop a return orientation assessing these dimensions. This research identified three dimensions relevant to consumer return behavior: the planned/unethical returner; the eager returner; and the reluctant/educated returner. A retest with another sample confirmed these three dimensions. Each dimension was analyzed for its relationship with consumer ethical beliefs as measured by the Muncy–Vitell Consumer Ethics Scale, ethical philosophies and shopping behaviors. These relationships supported the ethical and unethical aspects of returner orientation. Results of this research imply that the core aspect of returner orientation is relevant to ethical behavior and misuse of retail return policies. The three return orientations identified partially support the Rosenbaum & Bitner‐Olson research.     

Development of a food and health strategy for Cardiff

This keynote address will cover the background to, research involved in and presentation of a Food and Health Strategy for Cardiff. The work involved:

• 1 A rapid appraisal of over 20 initiatives, which promote the availability and consumption of safe, healthy and sustainable food within Cardiff.
• 2 Recommendations for membership of a food and health strategy working party.
• 3 The preparation of a framework document as a starting point for the working party.
• 4 The meeting of the working party and key‐stakeholders to produce a final strategy for Cardiff incorporating sustainable development, food quality, safety and hygiene, food availability, education and nutrition.
• 5 Ensuring that the Cardiff strategy reflected the broad aims and objectives of already existing pertinent documents, e.g. National Service Framework for Coronary Heart Disease, National Service Framework for Diabetes, Nutrition Strategy for Wales, Cardiff Strategy for a Healthy City, A Community Strategy for Cardiff, Local Sustainability Strategy for Cardiff.

The presentation will consist of key findings in terms of best practice, evaluation of successful initiatives and intercollaborative working.     

The welfare cost of means‐testing: pensioner participation in income support

We estimate parametric and semi‐parametric binary choice models of benefit take‐up by British pensioners and use a revealed preference argument to infer the cash‐equivalent value of disutility arising from stigma or complexity of the claims process. These implicit costs turn out to be relatively small, averaging about £3–4 per week across Income Support recipients. Using the Foster–Greer–Thorbecke measure of poverty among pensioners, we find that allowing for implicit claim costs incurred by benefit recipients raises the measured degree of poverty by not more than 13%. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Optimal collective dichotomous choice under quota constraints

Summary. This paper presents optimal collective dichotomous choices under quota constraints. We focus on committees that have to decide whether to accept or reject a set of projects under quota constraints. We provide a method for optimal ranking of projects which is suitable for solving this problem. The main result generalizes a number of earlier results in the subject. To outline the applicability of our method, we demonstrate its usage in the area of information filtering. Received: February 14, 2000; revised version: January 19, 2001     

PRACTICES OF TREASURY MANAGEMENT IN A SMALL OPEN TRADING ECONOMY: THE BELGIAN CASE

There is little systematic information available on the current practices in the area of treasury management among companies outside the US. The purpose of this study is to investigate management practices in the areas of treasury management for companies located in a small open trading economy: Belgium. This article analyses and compares corporate responses in three important areas of treasury management, i. e. managing banking relations, domestic cash management, and foreign exchange management. The results presented in this article indicate that corporate practice in these areas could be much more sophisticated.     

Thermodynamic implications for natural resource extraction and technical change in U.S. copper mining

Motivated by the lack of integrated approaches that do justice to both the thermodynamic and economic aspects of natural resource use and the lack of empirical studies combining the two disciplines, this paper provides an integrated framework for the valuation of technologies, substitution and technical change. The paper determines empirically the relationships between thermodynamic states of materials and the use of high-quality energy sources for the case of copper mining in the United States. The empirical analysis provides the basis for a nonlinear dynamic simulation of optimal resource extraction and endogenous technical change in the light of changing resource quality. The study assesses the potential for future improvements in U.S. copper mining.     

Tools, Techniques and Tightropes: The Art of Walking and Talking Private Sector Management in Non–profit Organisations, is it Just a Question of Balance?

The focus of this paper, first presented at a European Institute for Advanced Studies in Management workshop on challenges of managing in the third sector, is the experiences of small to medium non–profit organisations and their relationship with management tools and techniques. It seeks to raise debate around implications for the creative use of private sector management tools and to contribute to understanding of non–profit management practice. While lessons may be learned from business techniques and processes, the paper contends that execution of business enhancing tools needs to be considered in contexts relevant to the sector's interests and primary aims.     

Quantity and price controls by the firm under demand uncertainty and welfare implications

A monopoly facing an uncertain demand can affect its profit distribution through the choice of ex ante controls. This paper compares two modes of behavior - price-setting and quantity-setting - in the context of a mean-variance model. The main results are: (a) With nonlinear cost, the monopoly will not be indifferent between the two modes. In the particular case of quadratic cost, conditions for the dominance of price-setting over quantity-setting behavior are derived. (b) Whereas it is well-known that the risk averse, quantity-setting monopoly will produce less under uncertainty than under certainty (or risk neutrality), the price-setting monopoly increases its expected output when faced by uncertain demand, possibly exceeding even the competitive output under uncertainty. (c) Using expected social surplus as a welfare criterion, price-setting emerges as the welfare-dominant behavior when there is a conflict between the privately and the socially preferred modes. (d) Finally, there exist conditions where price-setting monopolies welfare-dominate a competitive industry facing the same random demand.