Exploring consumer attitudes to online collaborative consumption: A typology of collaborative consumer profiles

Online collaborative consumption enhances peer networks, members of which communicate, collaborate, and even deliver services to one another via digital sharing platforms. Despite the tremendous increase in collaborative consumption, due in large part to the development of the Internet, the reality of the economic and social movements that underpin this trend is much less visible. Of course, not all consumers seek collaborative consumption or interact through online platforms. Using a qualitative approach, this paper aims to investigate motivational factors and barriers against collaborative consumption and to establish a typology of collaborative consumer profiles, identifying the most suitable type of online sharing platforms for each profile. The findings reveal the following collaborative consumer profiles: committed, pragmatists, intermittent, and skeptical, each demonstrating different preferences for the different type of online sharing platform.     

Place Matters: (Dis)embeddedness and Child Labourers’ Experiences of Depersonalized Bullying in Indian Bt Cottonseed Global Production Networks

Journal of Business Ethics - Engaging Polanyi’s embeddedness–disembeddedness framework, this study explored the work experiences of Bhil children employed in Indian Bt cottonseed GPNs....     

Leadership marketing: an exploratory study

In an era when collaboration is the key to business prosperity, the ability to develop one truly coherent and agile brand lived by its employees and delivered to external stakeholders has become extremely challenging. Unity between the internal brand and a company’s external image, when change is the only constant, has almost ceased to exist. The marketing function is frequently underemphasised at board level and its role is often devalued in leading organisational change. This paper concerns how marketing can partner with organisational leadership for a mutually beneficial exchange of skills and capabilities to be able to reinvent organisations rapidly enough to cope with shifts in the external business environment and create a sustainable future for the business. This paper explores the concept of “leadership marketing” from an interpretivist perspective which challenges the conventional view of marketing and leadership as two separate fields and offers a holistic approach for business management and brand alignment.     

A STRUCTURAL RISK‐NEUTRAL MODEL FOR PRICING AND HEDGING POWER DERIVATIVES

We develop a structural risk‐neutral model for energy market modifying along several directions the approach introduced in Aïd et al. In particular, a scarcity function is introduced to allow important deviations of the spot price from the marginal fuel price, producing price spikes. We focus on pricing and hedging electricity derivatives. The hedging instruments are forward contracts on fuels and electricity. The presence of production capacities and electricity demand makes such a market incomplete. We follow a local risk minimization approach to price and hedge energy derivatives. Despite the richness of information included in the spot model, we obtain closed‐form formulae for futures prices and semiexplicit formulae for spread options and European options on electricity forward contracts. An analysis of the electricity price risk premium is provided showing the contribution of demand and capacity to the futures prices. We show that when far from delivery, electricity futures behave like a basket of futures on fuels.     

Clarifying the Relationship between Involvement Variables and Advertising Effectiveness among Young People

Previous research has indicated the need for an in-depth investigation of the role of involvement variables in advertising information processing among young people, in view of the unsuitability of existing adult persuasion models for a young population, the inadequate consideration of involvement variables among young people and the unique characteristics of this population. This study examined the effects of advertising involvement and product involvement on advertising effectiveness among young people, using a quantitative study of 252 4–15-year olds. Results show that advertising involvement and product involvement had a positive direct effect on ad effectiveness. In addition, all endogenous variables—subjective product knowledge, peer and parent influence and age—had an indirect effect on ad effectiveness, via advertising involvement and product involvement. Interestingly, subjective product knowledge and peer influence had no direct effect on ad effectiveness, but rather only an indirect effect. This study presents a more accurate depiction of the complexity of the process and shows that advertising involvement and product involvement contribute to a better understanding of the process among young people.     

Modelling user perception of bus transit quality

This article evaluates how bus users perceive the quality of their public transport service. In particular it looks at how perception of quality varies according to the available information. The experiment compares an overall evaluation of service quality before and after making passengers reflect on the importance of certain fundamental system variables which they may not have previously considered.Focus groups were used to individualise the most relevant variables. A quality survey was carried out both on-board buses and at bus stops and the overall service quality was related to the aforementioned variables using ordered probit models. The perception of quality is shown to change with the category of user and that there tends to be more criticism towards variations in overall quality until the users are stimulated into thinking more deeply about other influential variables. The application of this methodology may provide operating companies with valuable information for planning marketing policies aimed at different categories of user, in order to improve the service quality and attract more passengers to using public transport.     

Russia’s salt industry: Problems of development

The paper describes the current situation in the salt industry. It points to the inadmissibly high and expanding market share of imported salt products despite the country’s own colossal resource base and the domestic enterprises’ huge unused capacities. It has been shown that OAO Russian Railroads (OAO RZhD) will economically benefit due to its reasonable policy of selective reduction of the railroad shipment tariffs for salt for domestic producers due to the inevitable growth of the country’s own salt output.     

The Influence of Unethical Peer Behavior on Observers’ Unethical Behavior: A Social Cognitive Perspective

The relationship between unethical peer behavior and observers?? unethical behavior traditionally has been examined from a social learning perspective. We employ two additional theoretical lenses, social identity theory and social comparison theory, each of which offers additional insight into this relationship. Data from 600 undergraduate business students in two universities provide support for all the three perspectives, suggesting that unethical behavior is influenced by social learning, social identity, and social comparison processes. Implications for managers and future research are discussed.     

THE IMPACT OF FOOD PRICE SHOCK ON HETEROGENEOUS CREDIT CONSTRAINED FIRMS

ABSTRACT 1 : The paper analyzes how rising food and energy prices affect heterogeneous firm access to inputs and production under credit market imperfections. We estimate a firm credit constraint equation using a unique firm level panel data and find that, on average, small individual firms (IF) are more credit constrained than large corporate firms (CF). Using the estimated parameters, we simulate the effect of the recent food price shock on the world markets. Our results suggest that in the presence of credit market imperfections, the less credit constrained CF benefit relatively more from food price increase than IF, as they are able to expand their production more flexibly. These findings have important policy implications for countries with significant market imperfections. In the case of the food price shock, not only consumers but also producers, which on average are more credit constrained than producers in developed countries, may lose their market shares and hence their income in the long run.