Addictive buying in West Germany: An empirical study

Subsequent to a previous article in JCP (Scherhorn, 1990) outlining a theoretical approach to addictive buying, the authors report on the results of their empirical study of addictive buyers in West Germany. The study indicates that addictive buying is clearly one kind of addiction which may be substituted by other addictions, may take the place of another addiction, or even alternate with other forms of addiction. At the same time, there is substantial evidence that there are special key experiences to which the propensity to addictive buying can be traced. Addictive buyers have been subjected to a specific form of distortion of autonomy: They have felt that for parents, relatives, or neighbours, material goods (money, property, consumer goods) seemed to be more relevant and more important than they themselves. Thus, they have acquired a strong predisposition for using consumer goods as a favourite means of compensating for the lack of self-esteem from which they suffer. This predisposition, however, is reinforced by the fact that consumption and buying increasingly take on the role of a socially favoured means of compensation.     

Consumers and deregulation of the electricity market in Germany

Against the backcloth of EU regulation, this note looks at the “politics of necessity” regarding electricity provision in Germany. Electricity as a case is chosen because its provision has been undergoing a profound process of liberalisation and deregulation, and there is a considerable amount of experience with the chances and pitfalls of liberalisation in this sector. Secondly, electricity is a network industry and a natural monopoly subject to systematic market failure, which calls for regulation. The paper starts out with a closer look at the consumer as an actor in the regulation process, proposing a three-role model of the consumer as a market player, as a citizen, and as a micro-producer in households and networks. In these roles, consumers take on different social and political identities; they are affected differently by (de)regulation of essential services and have different options for reacting to quality and price issues. It then describes the legal state and the development of deregulation in the electricity sector in Germany. Selected empirical data are presented, and consumer policy implications are drawn.     

Exit from the high street: an exploratory study of sustainable fashion consumption pioneers

In today's fashion system, dominated by business models predicated on continual consumption and globalized production systems that have major environmental and social impacts, the consumption of ‘sustainable fashion’ takes on an almost paradoxical quality. This paper explores this paradox by focusing on a previously under‐researched group of consumers – ‘sustainable fashion consumption pioneers’ who actively engage and shape their own discourse around the notion of sustainable fashion consumption. These pioneers actively create and communicate strategies for sustainable fashion behaviour that can overcome the nebulous and somewhat paradoxical reality that sustainable development in the fashion industry presents. Specifically, we use passive netnography and semi‐structured interviews to illuminate the role of motivational and contextual factors that help shape these consumers' definitions of sustainable fashion including such key behaviours as purchasing fewer garments of higher quality, exiting the retail market, purchasing only second‐hand fashion goods and sewing or upgrading their own clothing. Central to much of these behaviours is the notion that personal style, rather than fashion, can bridge the potential disconnect between sustainability and fashion while also facilitating a sense of well‐being not found in traditional fashion consumption. As such, our research suggests that for these consumers sustainability is as much about reducing measurable environmental or social impacts as it is about incorporating broader concepts through which to achieve goals beyond the pro‐environmental or ethical.     

Do adhocracy and market cultures facilitate firm-wide integrated marketing communication (IMC)?

The conceptualization of integrated marketing communication (IMC) has evolved from the marketing communications-centered approach (in the early 1990s) to a broader, firm-wide organizational perspective. The latter is adopted in this research to define IMC as a multidimensional concept. This study was conducted to develop a measurement instrument to assess IMC and examine the role of organizational culture in IMC implementation. Data were gathered via an online survey conducted among CEOs and other senior managers. The findings provide evidence of the reliability and validity of the proposed IMC scale and demonstrate that the dominance of an adhocracy (vs. market) culture contributes to building a more IMC-friendly organizational environment.     

US household real net worth through the Great Recession and beyond: Have we recovered?

Household data adjusted for inflation show that net worth is still below its pre-Great Recession levels, unlike aggregate Federal Reserve data. Poorer and younger households both lost and recovered more net worth percentage-wise. Financial assets have recovered more than non-financial assets.     

Value co-creation among hotels and disabled customers: An exploratory study

This study examines how service supplier and buyer value co-creation influences buyers' attitudes toward service providers. Service-dominant logic is a prevalent concept in the services industry, providing an important marketing theory in which intangible resources, co-creation of value, and relationships are the keys to determining marketing exchanges. This research describes a model for analyzing value co-creation management in the hotel industry, focusing on the specific market segment of disabled customers. This framework helps foster value co-creation to increase the benefits for participants during each stage of their relationship. The paper also presents the managerial implications of the research findings.     

The Influence of Improvements in Accounting Standards on Earnings Management: The Case of IFRS

This article examines the effect of improvements in the quality of International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) on the level of earnings management. In order to achieve this aim, we study the accounting quality of German listed companies through discretionary accruals yielded from 1998 to 2006. We assess the effectiveness of efforts by the International Accounting Standards Board to improve IFRS by using two indices that consider the revision process of the standards, and their mandatory application. Our results indicate that the improvement of accounting standards quality significantly reduces the level of reported negative discretionary accruals of the German listed firms during the period of analysis, once incentive variables are controlled. Further, companies gradually assume the quality of the new standards from the moment they can be voluntarily applied.     

Measuring Socio-Economic GENDER Inequality: Toward an Alternative to the UNDP Gender-Related Development Index

This paper assesses the United Nations Development Program’s (UNDP) Gender-Related Development Index (GDI). Although the GDI has increased attention on gender equality in human development, it suffers from several limitations. A major problem is that it conflates relative gender equality with absolute levels of human development and thus gives no information on comparative gender inequality among countries. Using the same indicators as the GDI, the paper constructs a Relative Status of Women (RSW) index, which demonstrates how using a measure of gender equality that abstracts from levels of development results in very different country rankings. However, the RSW is not an ideal measure of gender inequality. The GDI indicators are not the most appropriate ones for measuring gender inequality and hence both the RSW and the GDI have limited validity. The paper concludes by offering a conceptual framework that provides the basis for an alternative measure of gender inequality.     

On measuring speculative and hedging activities in futures markets from volume and open interest data

This article provides a critical assessment of the line of research that measures speculative and hedging activities in futures markets from volume and open interest data. It makes several contributions. First, a detailed theoretical analysis of the measures proposed in the previous literature as proxies for speculative activity clarifies the circumstances in which they fail, as well as the assumptions that have to be made, when they are used as intended. Second, we propose a new way of combining the volume and the open interest figures, which provides additional information regarding the type of trading activity that takes place in the market on a given date. Finally, we analyse empirically the basic statistical properties of all the ratios when they are applied to real data for some of the stock index futures contracts most actively traded in the world. This empirical analysis shows the diverse behaviour of the ratios when they are applied to a common sample of real data, which confirms our previous theoretical findings. Our contributions should be taken into account when any of the measures is used as a proxy for the relative importance of speculative demand in empirical analyses.