The Effect of Availability,Point of Purchase Advertising,and Sampling on Children's First Independent Food Purchases

The dramatic rise in childhood obesity has triggered great concern among parents, health providers and researchers, public policy makers and politicians. In a controlled experiment with 166 primary school children in Australia, this study investigates the effects of availability, point-of-purchase advertising and sampling on children's food preferences and their first independent food purchases. The results indicate that availability and point of purchase advertising has a significant effect on changing children's preferences. The effects of sampling, in the presence of other forms of promotion, are less clear. The implications of these findings for marketers and public-policy makers are discussed.     

European Views of Advertising

Abstract

The effects of brand beliefs and attitude-toward-the-ad (A_ad) on immediate and delayed measures of attitude-toward-the-brand (A_b)were investigated for individuals who were more- and less-involved with the message of a print advertisement. Results suggest A_ad's and brand beliefs' influence on immediate and delayed measures of A_b depend on individuals' involvement with the message. As expected, for individuals who are more-involved with an advertising message, both beliefs and A_ad influenced A_b. This relationship held even after a one-week delay. For those less-involved with the advertising message, however, beliefs had no significant influence on brand attitudes, measured immediately following advertising exposure or after a one-week delay. A_ad was shown to have a significant influence on brand attitudes in both time conditions. Implications for theory and practice, as well as directions for future research, are discussed.     

A nearly perfect market?

Internet shopbots allow consumers to almost instantly compare prices and other characteristics from dozens of sellers via a single website. We estimate the magnitude of consumer search costs and benefits using data from a major shopbot for books. For the median consumer, the estimated benefit from simply scrolling down to search lower screens is $6.55. This amounts to about 60% of the observed price dispersion and suggests that consumers face significant search costs, even in this “nearly-perfect” market. Price elasticities are relatively high compared to offline markets (−7 to −10 in our base model). Furthermore, contrary to the common assumption, search intensity is not correlated with greater price sensitivity. Instead, consumers who search multiple screens put relatively more weight on non-price factors like brand.     

Two Lighthouses to Navigate: Effects of Ideal and Counter-Ideal Values on Follower Identification and Satisfaction with Their Leaders

Ideals (or ideal values) help people to navigate in social life. They indicate at a very fundamental level what people are concerned about, what they strive for, and what they want to be affiliated with. Transferring this to a leader–follower analysis, our first study (n = 306) confirms that followers’ identification and satisfaction with their leaders are stronger, the more leaders match followers’ ideal leader values. Study 2 (n = 244) extends the perspective by introducing the novel concept of counter-ideals (i.e., how an ideal leader should not be) as a second, non-redundant point of reference. Results confirm that a leader’s match on ideal and on counter-ideal values have independent effects in that both explain unique variance in followers’ identification and satisfaction with their leader. Study 3 (n = 136) replicates the previous results in an experimental scenario study and provides evidence for the proposed causal direction of the underlying process. We conclude that counter-ideal values might be an additional point of reference that people use to triangulate targets above and beyond ideal values and discuss the implications of our findings for value research and management.     

Adult Mortality,AIDS, and Fertility in Rural Malawi

The future course of fertility is a major determinant of economic development in many sub‐Saharan countries, so understanding how HIV/AIDS affects childbearing is of great interest. We show that fertility responds negatively to female mortality and positively to male mortality and that the overall fertility response is small. The negative effect of female mortality is in line with earlier studies that only focus on women and their infection and mortality risks, while the finding of a positive effect of adult‐male mortality is novel. One interpretation of this finding is that women who perceive a high risk of their husbands' or grown‐up sons' deaths are likely to want to have more children to ensure future support.     

Testing for ARCH in the presence of additive outliers

In this paper we investigate the properties of the Lagrange Multiplier [LM] test for autoregressive conditional heteroscedasticity (ARCH) and generalized ARCH (GARCH) in the presence of additive outliers (AOs). We show analytically that both the asymptotic size and power are adversely affected if AOs are neglected: the test rejects the null hypothesis of homoscedasticity too often when it is in fact true, while the test has difficulty detecting genuine GARCH effects. Several Monte Carlo experiments show that these phenomena occur in small samples as well. We design and implement a robust test, which has better size and power properties than the conventional test in the presence of AOs. We apply the tests to a number of US macroeconomic time series, which illustrates the dangers involved when nonrobust tests for ARCH are routinely applied as diagnostic tests for misspecification. Copyright © 1999 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The Conditional Probability of Mortgage Default

This research examines the implications of contingent-claims models for empirical research on default. We focus on the probability of default over a short horizon given the current state of the world, i.e. , the conditional probability of default, which more closely resembles the estimates of empirical models. We highlight the differences between the conditional and unconditional approaches and provide guidance for empirical research by illuminating situations where the expected sign reverses over the shorter horizon or where the functional form is highly nonlinear.