The response of vital rates to harvest fluctuations in pre-industrial Sweden

This study examines whether there was a Malthusian equilibrium mechanism in Sweden in the pre-industrial period. A unique data set on harvests, deaths, marriages and births going back to 1630 is used to calculate cumulative elasticities of vital rates with respect to harvest. While earlier studies have mostly focused on the impact of real wage, this study uses the calorie content of per capita harvests as an indicator of living standards. It finds that there indeed was a response of vital rates to harvest fluctuations, but there were important structural breaks. While positive checks attenuated after 1720, preventive checks were strengthened. After 1870 preventive checks disappeared, and possibly also positive checks. The results are robust to different models and trend specifications, with one crucial difference: while the distributed lag model shows that positive checks were significant up to 1920, the SVAR model shows that positive checks disappeared after 1870.     

Towns (and villages): definitions and implications in a historical setting

The measurement of urbanization rates and other uses of statistical information, for example the use of historical town growth to measure long-term economic growth, are usually based on an ad hoc population threshold to define and practically classify settlements as towns. The method, however, trades off accuracy and precision for convenience and simplicity. This paper proposes a new threshold that uses the town size distribution together with agricultural data to derive an appropriate cutoff value. The relevance of agricultural income is integrated into the classification scheme through the differential effect of local agricultural endowments on settlement size. The threshold is chosen such that the size of towns above the cutoff is statistically not influenced by local agricultural endowments, while the size of villages, which is below the threshold, is indeed shaped by them. This new approach is practically demonstrated with an application to the urban system of the nineteenth century in the German region of Saxony. This setting is used to investigate the relevance of a different classification for the development of urbanization over time and Gibrat’s law. The results demonstrate that the underlying classification scheme matters strongly for the conclusions drawn from historical urban data. They also indicate that the use of a common population threshold for a comparative analysis or temporal comparisons in a historical context increases the misclassifications of settlements.     

Latin American earnings inequality in the long run

This paper traces between-group earnings inequality for six Latin American countries over two centuries based on wage and income series compiled from a large array of primary and secondary sources. We find that inequality varied substantially by country and by period, questioning the notion that colonial legacies largely dominated the evolution of inequality. There is a broader inequality trajectory over the long run in the form of an “m” pattern with peaks around 1880 and the 1990s and a trough around 1920/1930s. Export-led growth does not necessarily imply a rise in inequality, while the import-substitution industrialisation efforts did not translate into a more egalitarian distribution of income. More notably, Latin America’s experience does not exhibit the great inequality levelling as seen in the North Atlantic economies from the 1930s to the 1970s.     

Customer experience management: toward implementing an evolving marketing concept

Although research continues to debate the future of the marketing concept, practitioners have taken the lead, appraising customer experience management (CEM) as one of the most promising marketing approaches in consumer industries. In research, however, the notion of CEM is not well understood, is fragmented across a variety of contexts, and is insufficiently demarcated from other marketing management concepts. By integrating field-based insights of 52 managers engaging in CEM with supplementary literature, this study provides an empirically and theoretically solid conceptualization. Specifically, it introduces CEM as a higher-order resource of cultural mindsets toward customer experiences (CEs), strategic directions for designing CEs, and firm capabilities for continually renewing CEs, with the goals of achieving and sustaining long-term customer loyalty. We disclose a typology of four distinct CEM patterns, with firm size and exchange continuity delineating the pertinent contingency factors of this generalized understanding. Finally, we discuss the findings in relation to recent theoretical research, proposing that CEM can comprehensively systemize and serve the implementation of an evolving marketing concept.     

Seeing relationships through the lens of psychological contracts: the structure of consumer service relationships

Serving as mental models, psychological contracts guide consumers’ service interactions with their service providers. This study incorporates a psychological contract perspective into the relationship marketing literature, exploring service customers’ beliefs about the terms and conditions of the resource exchange process and the types of relationships they form with service providers. It provides new insights that explain why and how some customers respond favorably to a company’s relationship overtures and investments while others do not. A latent class analysis on a sample of 700 consumers across three different service industries reveals that consumers form four distinct types of psychological contracts: relational, standard, transitional, and captive. To further validate the differences between the contract types, open-ended responses from the respondents were sorted by each class. The distinctive themes that emerged provide a richer understanding of the characteristics of each class beyond those inferred from the quantitative results. Each contract type is also profiled against its underlying level of trust, satisfaction, and commitment to understand the relationship between the contract types and these traditional relationship marketing variables. Marketers can differentiate their relationship marketing strategies and allocate their resource investments more effectively by segmenting consumers according to their psychological contract type.     

B2B relationship calculus: quantifying resource effects in service-dominant logic

Increasingly, knowledgeable business-to-business (B2B) customers and evolving customer needs are leading to seismic shifts in vendor–client interactions. Across industries, sellers are changing their business models from a simple goods orientation to a hybrid goods–services model, placing greater emphasis on delivering complete customer solutions. In such an environment, companies must find ways to prioritize investments in resource development. The service-dominant (S-D) logic framework offers significant insights into this challenge; however, these effects have not been tested quantitatively. This study addresses that gap, examining the influence of various seller resources on buyer satisfaction. An empirical analysis of buying organizations that purchased and implemented business intelligence systems finds that “augmented” operant resources that the buyers ascribe to the software’s sellers—resources that go above and beyond expectations—are the most significant predictors of both successful technology assimilation and overall customer relationship quality. In particular, an augmented operant resource reflecting a seller’s ability to see value creation opportunities from the buyer’s perspective (value mindset) has up to three times the effect on relationship satisfaction as “core” operant resources such as product-specific expertise or basic interpersonal service skills. These results can help sellers prioritize resource investments.     

The customer value proposition: evolution,development, and application in marketing

The customer value proposition (CVP) has a critical role in communicating how a company aims to provide value to customers. Managers and scholars increasingly use CVP terminology, yet the concept remains poorly understood and implemented; relatively little research on this topic has been published, considering the vast breadth of investigations of the value concept. In response, this article offers a comprehensive review of fragmented CVP literature, highlighting the lack of a strong theoretical foundation; distinguishes CVPs from related concepts; proposes a conceptual model of the CVP that includes antecedents, consequences, and moderators, together with several research propositions; illustrates the application of the CVP concept to four contrasting companies; and advances a compelling agenda for research.     

Consumer reliance on intangible versus tangible attributes in service evaluation: the role of construal level

The services marketing literature has traditionally characterized intangibility as the most critical distinction between services and goods, but in practice service production and consumption often involve both intangible and tangible elements. While prior research has examined and debated service intangibility from the firm’s perspective, what is missing is an understanding of how consumers weigh the relative importance of intangible versus tangible attributes in their service evaluation. Drawing on construal level theory, the authors propose that consumers with a high (vs. low) construal level rely more on intangible (vs. tangible) attributes in service evaluation. Furthermore, the effect of construal level on service evaluation is mediated by imagery vividness, with service type (e.g., experience vs. credence services) serving as a boundary condition. The authors conduct two field studies and two lab experiments and find that under a high construal level, consumers rely more on intangible attributes in their service evaluation and choice formation; under a low construal level, consumers rely more on tangible attributes in their service evaluation and choice. The findings not only offer new insights to help reconcile the disparate perspectives on service intangibility in the literature but also have practical implications on service firms’ positioning strategies that vary across time (e.g., advance selling vs. on-site selling) and space (e.g., near vs. distant outlet), as well as which attributes to emphasize in their marketing communications.     

Integrating service and design: the influences of organizational and communication factors on relative product and service characteristics

The aim of this study is to identify the organizational and communication antecedents, and evaluate the consequences on relative product and service characteristics, of the use of service-sourced information by product designers during new product development. An empirical study of 121 product design managers demonstrates that a firm’s market orientation is improved by a healthy working relationship between product designers and service employees. Such a relationship motivates designers to use service-sourced information disseminated to them, enhancing both product and service characteristics of the new offering. The authors discuss how communication channels and information content affect the information use of product designers. Product designers value written information most. Information use does not relate to the frequency of receiving verbal or electronic information. Information about product ergonomics positively influences product designers’ perceptions of the information, whereas information on product aesthetics negatively influences their perceptions.

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