The role of actual,ideal, and ought self‐congruence in the consumption of hedonic versus utilitarian brands

To emotionally attach consumers to a brand and inspire brand loyalty, marketers often target the brand personality towards the consumer's actual or ideal self. The self is not limited to its actual and ideal dimension, however, and motivation to approach a desired self may vary depending on the consumer's personality. Thus, the current research is the first to link self‐congruence to self‐discrepancy theory by incorporating the ought self into the self‐congruence framework and taking into account self‐discrepancies as potential moderators of the self‐congruence effect. Additionally, hedonic brand nature is discussed as important condition for self‐congruence and self‐discrepancies exhibiting their fullest effect. The conducted study focuses on how actual, ideal, and ought self‐congruence influence emotional brand attachment and consequently brand loyalty. For brands of primary hedonic nature, findings confirm actual and ideal self‐congruence as drivers of emotional brand attachment, which in turn increases brand loyalty, while ought self‐congruence influences brand loyalty directly. Moreover, self‐discrepancies moderate the described relations, albeit their effect is contrary to theory‐based expectations. From these findings, the authors derive important implications for business practice and future research.     

Arrow: A flexible architecture for an accounting and charging infrastructure in the Next Generation Internet

Current pricing and charging methods for the Internet are not based on actual usage of this service, which leads to unfairness and more important, it does not deliver the right signals through financial incentives to network providers to upgrade critical links of their networks. The development of new multimedia applications and the convergence to an integrated services network will foster the tremendous growth of the Internet even more. With the Next Generation Internet not only technical services like bandwidth reservation will be introduced, but also new applications will emerge within the Internet. Charging the Internet in a fashion that provides feedback to users and providers has been proposed since the early '90s, however, only a few implementations and real-world examples are known today. This is due to subsidizing the Internet in its early stages and due to a technical development that did not care much about charging. With the recent redesign of the Internet protocol suite and discussions on multiple service classes in the Internet, architectures for charging and accounting have to be revisited, too. Economic models for the Internet cannot be tested fully and validated in non-real-world environments, because of the unknown user behavior. With this uncertainty over what models and pricing schemes to choose, it is evident that a specific charging and accounting platform will never be accepted by the community. In this paper a novel and flexible architecture for charging and accounting is proposed that provides a wide range of mechanisms and lets researchers experiment in an environment as close as possible to the targeted system. As a first step, four different pricing schemes are described, qualitatively assessed on the proposed platform, and a prototypical implementation performed. One of the economic models that have been implemented on Arrow is based on different service classes including reservation and recalculates prices dynamically depending on the traffic situation. This revised version was published online in August 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

Interdisciplinary Contributions to Marketing Thought

In this volume, we explore cross-disciplinary contributions to marketing knowledge. Examples are drawn from four related areas: a) management; b) art & design; c) electronic commerce & retailing; and d) psychology & consumer behavior. Traditionally, retailing and consumer behavior may be treated as sub-areas of marketing, rather than being viewed as disciplines in their own right. Here, the opposite view is adopted. In general, there is a focus on identifying knowledge that originates in other disciplines and then flows to marketing. Future studies may want to examine knowledge flows that occur in the opposite direction.     

Pharmaceutical Economics

Business Economics - The role economists play in shaping the direction and outcome of business research and policy decisions of a very important part of the healthcare industry—the...     

Trade and the (dis)incentive to reform labor markets: The case of reform in the European Union

We study the relation between international trade and the gains to reform labor markets by removing firing restrictions. We find that trade linkages imply substantially smaller benefits to reform than those calculated in the closed economy general equilibrium model of Hopenhayn and Rogerson [Hopenhayn, Hugo, Rogerson, Richard, 1993. Job Turnover and policy evaluations: a general equilibrium analysis. Journal of Political Economy 101 (5), 915–938 October]. When economies trade, labor market policies in one country spill over to other countries through their effect on the terms of trade. A key finding in the open economy is that the share of the welfare gains from domestic labor market reform exported substantially exceeds the share of goods exported. Thus, with international trade, a country retains little to no benefit from unilaterally reforming its labor market. A coordinated elimination of firing taxes yields considerable benefits. We also find that the U.K. benefits from labor market reform by its continental trading partners. These insights provide some explanation for recent efforts toward labor market reform in the European Union.     

Applications of system dynamics in marketing: Editorial

This special issue of the JBR illustrates a range of applications of modeling and simulation from the system dynamics perspective to problems in marketing and related areas. The papers pertain to the diffusion of new products and technologies, advertising effectiveness, management decision-making, forecasting, project dynamics, and innovation and leadership. Papers presented in this special issue were selected from submissions to attend a two-day workshop on applications of system dynamics in marketing, held at the Johnson School of Management, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York, in June 2007.     

Foreign acquisitions by Chinese firms: A strategic intent perspective

This article presents a strategic intent perspective (SIP) to analyze the foreign acquisitions made by Chinese firms. It suggests that Chinese firms strategically use cross-border acquisitions to achieve goals, such as acquiring strategic capabilities to offset their competitive disadvantages and leveraging their unique ownership advantages, while making use of institutional incentives and minimizing institutional constraints. The SIP is supported by the evidence from three firms that we studied, where dozens of interviews were conducted, including the one with the founder of Lenovo. This study contributes to extant international business theories by incorporating the SIP to examine internationalization strategies of firms from developing countries.     

The timing and context of consumer decisions

Researchers have long recognized the importance of studying consumption activities over time, but they have had inadequate theories and methods for studying consumers over the course of their lives. This paper suggests that the life course paradigm that has been widely used in social sciences could be employed to overcome some limitations of previous consumer research. To illustrate its application, two consumption activities are used??one first-time and another repeat choice. Hypotheses are developed based on the most popular life course theoretical perspectives, and data from a national longitudinal study are used to test them. The results show that consumers are influenced by prior life experiences and future expectations, and they suggest the value of studying consumer behavior in time and context using the life course paradigm. Finally, the paper discusses implications for theory development and future research using this innovative approach.     

ASSESSING THE SAMPLES OF PRIOR ORGANIZATIONAL RESEARCH

The sampling designs used in organizational research have been less than consistent across different reported studies. In this analysis we examine the reported relationships among several key organizational variables in ten separate previously published studies to determine the degree to which major differences in sample designs have influenced findings. We isolate that portion of reported associations due to unique characteristics of the samples and report the association these ‘sample design effects’ have with particular sample designs. Results indicate homogeneous samples of organizations inflate reported relationships yet leave significant sources of variation uncontrolled in sample selection. an alternative to sampling of homogeneous organizations is suggested by the fact that larger and probabilitistically selected samples are also associated with larger reported relationships among organizational variables.     

A rationale for planning: Implications from the economic theory of the firm

This paper undertakes the development of a foundation for a theory of why firms plan. The theory of the firm literature provides a useful starting-point and provides insight into the factors which have an effect on the planning function of the firm. Those factors include transactions costs, uncertainty and asset-specificity. The fact that some firms should not plan even in the face of uncertainty and transactions costs emphasizes the importance of the relative magnitudes of various costs and demonstrates the relevance of standard economic analysis for the study and practice of business planning. Examples illustrate the role of planning for human, financial and physical resources.