Railroad deregulation,carrier behavior,and shipper response: A disaggregated analysis

The Staggers Rail Act of 1980 provided American railroads with almost complete relief from rate regulation. Regulatory reforms resulted in rapid and pronounced changes in firm behavior and an eventual reconfiguration of the industry as a whole. This investigation provides a highly disaggregated study of deregulated rail rates for seventeen commodities. The results indicate that the Staggers Act fundamentally altered the way in which rail carriers price their services. As importantly, the results suggest that shippers have responded to altered railroad behavior by changing the characteristics of their shipments. Together, the changes in railroad behavior and shipper responses to these variations have produced lower railroad rates for a small but measurable number of movements across a wide range of commodities.     

Consumer Preference and Willingness to Pay for a Local Label Attribute in Western Australian Fresh and Processed Food Products

This study investigates Western Australia’s consumer attitudes toward and preferences for locally produced food products signified by a state-funded campaign logo, Buy West Eat Best (BWEB). A choice experiment using both a fresh and a processed food product (skinless chicken breast and fruit yogurt) is conducted to assess willingness to pay for a local production attribute and other label claims. We find that consumer awareness and preference for local foods is high. However, this high preference is not because the product is locally produced but because of the local attributes associated with high-quality products. The study highlights the importance of successfully differentiating products through credible labeling schemes in order to capture market premium.     

Strategies for integrating farmers into modern vegetable supply chains in Vietnam: farmer attitudes and willingness to accept

In Vietnam, the development of so‐called ‘modern’ vegetable supply chains is receiving considerable interest amongst researchers and governments. This interest partly stems from the view that enhancements in food safety can be achieved if farmers are willing to adopt supply chains that are often associated with ‘western’ forms of retailing. Our study investigates farmers’ willingness to change to two ‘modern’ alternatives – a supply model based on cooperatives and another based on investors facilitating the change. Using discrete choice data drawn from 412 farmers, mixed logit models in willingness to pay space are developed that reveal the relative importance of different drivers of change. The paper offers insights that can inform governments about the incentives required to bring about change. In addition, the paper illustrates the novel application of a choice experiment to enumerating the perceived costs of changes in vegetable supply chains.     

Marketers’ use of alternative front-of-package nutrition symbols: An examination of effects on product evaluations

How front-of-package (FOP) nutrition icon systems affect product evaluations for more and less healthful objective nutrition profiles is a critical question facing food marketers, consumers, and the public health community. We propose a conceptually-based hierarchical continuum to guide predictions regarding the effectiveness of several FOP systems currently used in the marketplace. In Studies 1a and 1b, we compare the effects of a broad set of FOP icons on nutrition evaluations linked to health, accuracy of evaluations, and purchase intentions for a single product. Based on these findings, Studies 2 and 3 test the effects of two conceptually-different FOP icon systems in a retail laboratory in which consumers make comparative evaluations of multiple products at the retail shelf. While there are favorable effects of each system beyond control conditions with no FOP icons, results show that icons with an evaluative component that aid consumers’ interpretations generally provide greater benefits (particularly in product comparison contexts). We offer implications for consumer packaged goods marketers, retailers, and the public policy and consumer health communities.     

An experimental assessment of alternative teaching approaches for introducing business ethics to undergraduate business students

This study employs a pretest-posttest experimental design to extend recent research pertaining to the effects of teaching business ethics material. Results on a variety of perceptual and attitudinal measures are compared across three groups of students — one which discussed the ethicality of brief business situations (the business scenario discussion approach), one which was given a more philosophically oriented lecture (the philosophical lecture approach), and a third group which received no specific lecture or discussion pertaining to business ethics. Results showed some significant differences across the three groups and demonstrated that for a single lecture, the method used to teach ethics can differentially impact ethical attitudes and perceptions. Various demographic and background variables did not moderate the relationship between the teaching method and the dependent variables, but the sex of the student was strongly associated with the ethical attitude and perception measures. Scot Burton is Assistant Professor of Marketing at Louisiana State University. His research has appeared in the Journal of Marketing Research, the Journal of Consumer Research, and the Journal of Marketing, among others. Mark. W. Johnston is Assistant Professor of Marketing at Louisianna State University. His research has been published in journals such as the Journal of Marketing Research, the Journal of Applied Psychology, and the Journal of Business Research. Elizabeth J. Wilson is Assistant Professor of Marketing at Louisiana State University. Her research has been published in the Journal of Advertising Research and Industrial Marketing Management.     

Local assimilation of an enterprise system: Situated learning by means of familiarity pockets

Once a new information system is introduced to the workplace, individuals confront it and struggle to make sense of it. Over time, it must be somehow learned and assimilated into everyday work practices. Enterprise systems, because they are complex and integrate work across functions and distance, pose special challenges to learning at the firm's periphery, where local users are distanced from both the centralized system and others elsewhere, and where a community of learning may be thin or lacking. The present study, using direct observations and interviews at a bank in which a new CRM system was introduced across small regional branch offices, explicates the local learning process. Findings suggest that in assimilating the system, bank representatives created familiarity pockets within which they routinely worked with it and outside of which they competently ignored it. Even within familiarity pockets, routine use of the system, while skilled, masked much that was not known by the bank reps. In short, in local assimilation of enterprise systems, knowing in practice may be constituted as much from what can be competently and routinely ignored by users, as from any deep knowledge of the system itself.     

Creative Rebellion and Moral Efficiency as Elements of Managerial Ideology

It is a supreme irony that given the requirement for rebellious creativity, organizations discourage individuality. Accordingly, these cases of creative rebellion contain the seeds of a more informed criticism of the dominant management paradigm. The conventional notion of efficiency is questioned. The concept of moral efficiency is explained. The cases examined describe and analyze: (1) Refusal to concur with the findings of an aircraft accident report that covers up senior officer management weakness. (2) Falsification of data in order to overcome the dysfunctional impact of a management information system. A deconstruction of these stories suggests theoretical as well as practical tension between the dominant normative management paradigm and the manner in which an innovative perspective of individual ethics pushes toward adaptive solutions to problems that cannot be solved by orthodoxy.     

New Paradigms in Stock Market Indexing

Considerable recent interest has been shown in a new set of stock‐market indices that are weighted by fundamental factors such as sales, earnings, dividends or book values, rather than by capitalization. In this paper, we analyze the performance of Fundamental Indexing? (“FI”). First, we show that the source of FI's recent excellent performance is not from its ability to systematically arbitrage mispricing in a noisy market but from increasing the portfolio's exposure to stocks with low price‐to‐book values and with small capitalizations. We find that FI does not produce a positive alpha when its excess returns are explained by the Fama‐French three‐factor model of CAPM beta, the value premium and the size premium. Second, we show that it is possible to construct a portfolio of exchange‐traded funds with similar factor loadings that can replicate, and sometimes, even outperform FI. However, we caution investors not to expect consistent outperformance from portfolios tilted towards value and small‐cap stocks. Historical data shows evidence of mean reversion in the performance of such strategies.