Impact of Giving on Self and Impact of Self on Giving

Recent research suggests that consumers are spending billions of dollars in interpersonal and self‐gifting and yet, there is limited research regarding the giver's role of self and how this influences the choice of gift. Because self is so intertwined in both types of giving, the research reported here explores if different dimensions of the malleable self will be activated in various gift‐giving contexts, depending upon the receiver and the occasion of the gift. Testing a conceptual model that for the first time combines both types of giving, this research uses three studies to explore how the gift‐giving context can act as a situational cue and make accessible a particular view of the self, namely the giver's gender identity and self‐construal to motivate choice of gift. Results suggest a new paradigm for considering consumer gift behavior and have theoretical and practical implications for advertising, selling, and other marketing contexts.     

Economics Goes to Hollywood: Using Classic Films and Documentaries to Create an Undergraduate Economics Course

The authors describe an interdisciplinary approach to teaching economics that uses a powerful contemporary medium, the motion picture, to establish the context for teaching elementary economics concepts. The plots and subplots in many films can be used to illustrate problems and issues that are amenable to economic analysis. They suggest how these films can be sequenced to create a general studies course for nonmajors.     

Developing a Typology of Chinese Shopping Tourists: An Application of the Schwartz Model of Universal Human Values

This study aims to develop a typology of Chinese shopping tourists based on the Schwartz values. As a medium for investigating rich segmented markets, values emerge as an alternative variable for personality, lifestyle, and other demographic and socioeconomic segmentation variables. Convenience sampling is adopted in this study, and 511 usable responses in China are obtained. Results of the factor analysis reveal the following five dimensions of personal values among Chinese shopping tourists: self-enhancement, universalism, assurance, self-direction, and benevolence. The cluster analysis, which used the aforementioned five dimensions, identify the following clusters: uncertainty (Cluster 1), passion (Cluster 2), balance (Cluster 3), and conservation (Cluster 4). This study provides insights into the nature of personal value of Chinese shopping tourists by applying the Schwartz values, and identifies the shopping travel characteristics of Chinese shopping tourists. The results of this study are expected to assist destination marketing organizations in creating strategies to provide better shopping environments and services for tourists, and to achieve higher levels of tourist satisfaction.     

The influence of leader regulatory focus on employee creativity

Brockner and Higgins (Brockner, J., Higgins, E. T. 2001. Regulatory focus theory: Implications for the study of emotions at work. Organizational Behavior & Human Decision Processes, 86(1), 35–66.) suggest that a leader's behavior may be perceived as an organizational endorsement of promotion-focused or prevention-focused concerns and that this perception will influence employee behavior by eliciting a congruent state of regulatory focus. We tested this hypothesis using matched pairs of leaders and employees from a Chinese firm and found that employee creativity is positively associated with the promotion focus of the supervisor's behavior. Consequently, through their actions, promotion-focused leaders may increase the likelihood of entrepreneurial action in their firms by eliciting a promotion-focused state of eagerness from their employees.     

Work–family conflict in the sales force redux: A compendium of influencers

Abstract

Selling is a primary function of channels of distribution with sales managers and salespeople markedly influencing channel success. Recently, salesperson work–family conflict has become a major concern, owing to its potential for adversely affecting sales force performance and thus impairing associated channel success. It has been extensively investigated in industrial-organizational (I/O) psychology, but sales scholars’ interest in it remains in the incipient stage. Whether findings from non-sales contexts are portable to a selling milieu remains an empirical question. This article presents an array of organizational- and managerial-related, individual job-related, individual person-related, technology-related, and contemporary selling environment-related factors that have been found to be or are logically associated with salesperson work–family conflict. The article thus seeks to facilitate sales researchers’ and practitioners’ efforts in undertaking empirical work and assisting salespeople to manage such conflict. To date, no previously published work has engaged in this charge.     

带着翅膀去旅行

喜欢春天,是因为青岛. 这座美丽脱俗的城市,在温柔中藏着独有的惊艳,等着人们去发现.漫步青岛的心情,不曾张牙舞爪,却时刻想要一对会飞的翅膀,它能带你去欣赏最美的风景,体会最纯粹的浪漫,感受最质朴的热情.     

The impact of word-of-mouth communication on attribute evaluation

Wright and Lynch (1995) propose that the medium that best communicates the type of attributes is the one most congruent with that type of information. This paper extends on this media congruence hypothesis by examining the impact of word-of-mouth (WOM) communication on the WOM recipient's ratings of search and credence attributes in two different service contexts. Results from two experiments suggest that negative WOM (but not positive WOM) is more effective in changing the evaluation of credence attributes than that of search attributes for unfamiliar brands. This finding implies that marketers of such unfamiliar brands need to have different approaches to deal with the impact of negative WOM on different attribute types.     

The Decentralization of Decision Making and Employee Involvement within the Workplace: Evidence from Four Establishment Datasets

Participatory work practices, like teams, quality circles and joint consultative committees (JCCs) can, but do not necessarily, decentralize decision making and increase worker autonomy. We use broad, cross‐sectional establishment data from the European Union and three Commonwealth countries to measure the extent of decision making by workers across these countries, and to analyse how this measure varies with the use of participatory practices. Within Europe, workers in Sweden, Germany, France, the Netherlands and Ireland are most likely to be given the authority to make decisions. In Spain, Portugal and Italy, decentralized decision making is more unusual. While decision making is generally higher in establishments with teams, JCCs and quality circles, this result does not hold across all countries. Even where the relationships are significant, use of participatory practices explains a surprisingly small amount of the overall variation in decision making.     

制止暴君

那些没有在身边建立起强大的团队．因而无法借用他人的支持和天赋的经理人，将会发现自己处在一个孤立无援．充满压力的位置。然而，强权威压策略并非是解决这个问题的答案[编者按]     

A synthetic factor approach to the estimation of value-at-risk of a portfolio of interest rate swaps

In this paper we decompose the interest rate swap yield curves of 10 major currencies into their common factors and find that the first two factors, interpreted as parallel shift and rotation, explain between 97.1% and 98.6% of the variation in the interest rate swap rates across all 10 currencies. The main contribution of the paper however is that we then model these two factors as simplified synthetic factors so that they may be used to develop an innovative approach to the computation of Value-at-Risk (VaR) for a portfolio of interest rate swaps.