Sex-Typed Service Images: An Empirical Investigation of Self-Service Variables

This article presents a study of sex-typed service images based on gender research in marketing and service encounter theory. The purpose is to address the issues of how and why services as distinct from products acquire a sex-typed image. Two streams of research provide the variables hypothesized to influence sex- image determination: gender research provides individual variables related to the consumer him/herself, and service encounter research provides variables related to the service itself. Consumer variables include an individual's biological and psychological sex image and personal use, while service variables deal with the sex image of the firm's characteristic provider and typical customer. A study conducted to test the hypotheses that both sets of variables influence a service's sex-typed image is presented. Marketing implications for development and promotion of new services and re-positioning of extant ones are discussed.     

Between Flexibility and Regulation: Rights, Equality and Protection at Work

The year 2000 represented the real year of delivery on Labour's proposals for industrial relations and employment rights. This review focuses on the content of the government's legislative programme, taking account of the impact of public policy at European level and its relationship with national legislation. The government's programme included a number of measures designed to target discrimination and promote equality, and the review examines the form and significance of these changes, in the light of continuing discrimination in the labour market. It then turns to examine the most fundamental legal reform of the year, the introduction of the statutory right to recognition.     

Capital indivisibility and tax competition: Are there too many business areas when some of them are empty?

In this paper, we propose a model where local jurisdictions must engage a development cost before competing for hosting a firm with uncertain preferences among possible sites. We first show that even an optimizing central planner managing all the jurisdictions develops more sites than there are plants to host. Doing so, he diversifies his supply and has a higher probability of hosting the firm. Then, we show that, if every jurisdiction is managed by a local government, there are more developed sites than with the central planner, which implies excess supply.     

Forging Strategic Alliances in Canada's Agrifood Sector: Framework for Analysis and Action

In recent years, participants in Canadas agrifood sector have become more concerned about their competitiveness and have identified strategic alliances as being vital to becoming more competitive. This paper is a review of economics, strategic management and other social science literature examining several issues such as:

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  the types of objectives organizations should pursue using strategic alliances
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  the appropriate configuration for a strategic alliance, given its objectives
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  advantages and disadvantages of strategic alliances versus other types of business relationships
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  factors that enhance or inhibit organizations' abilities to forge alliances.

The latter part of the paper concentrates on what managers interested in pursuing strategic alliances can do to enhance their chances of success.     

Role of education and extension in the adoption of technology: a study of upland rice and soybean farmers in Central-West Brazil

This paper explores reduced form determinants of the adoption of certain technologies by upland rice and soybean farmers in the Center-West region of Brazil. We merge community level data on the availability and quality of publicly provided infrastructure, principally extension, to the farm level data containing information on farmer human capital as well as land quantity and quality. By using community level measures of availability and quality of extension, we avoid problems of endogeneity of farm level measures of extension use. We find positive impacts of farmer education on the diffusion process, in accordance with other studies. We also isolate effects of the quality in regional extension investment as measured by the average experience of technical extension staff. These results indicate that investments in human capital of extension workers does have a payoff in terms of farmer adoption of improved cultivation practices.     

Convergence to competitive equilibria and elimination of no-trade (in a strategic market game with limit prices)

The strategic market games literature contains many results that predict Walrasian equilibria in the competitive limit. However, they usually come at the expense of ad hoc assumptions that rule out “pathological” no trade equilibria. This paper studies a strategic market game with limit prices. The set of Nash equilibrium allocations of this game converges to the set containing all competitive equilibria and no-trade, when players are replicated. Moreover, two rounds of iterated deletion of weakly dominated strategies eliminate the no-trade equilibria. Hence, replication paired with two rounds of iterated dominance gives a clean prediction of competitive equilibrium.     

The consumer's relational commitment: main dimensions and antecedents

As in business-to-business relationships, consumers often establish and maintain long-term relationships with firms. This article uses a multidisciplinary approach with the aims of describing the process that a consumer follows until committing to a firm and identifying the main dimensions and antecedents of the consumer's commitment. As antecedents of commitment, the proposed model considers dependence and trust through the reduction in uncertainty and in the perception of opportunism. The empirical study for the consumer–garage relationship suggests that the consumer's trust reduces the fear and perception of the firm's opportunism and engenders affective and temporal commitment.