Decline and variability in brand loyalty

In this paper, we examine the over-time behavior of brand loyalty for a large set of brands drawn from 21 consumer packaged goods categories. Using the brand-loyalty operationalization of Colombo and Morrison (1989), the following conclusions are obtained. First, little support is found for the often-heard contention that brand loyalty is gradually declining over time. Second, while the short-run variability around a brand's mean loyalty level is not negligible, no evidence is found that this variability has systematically increased over time, and it can be reduced considerably through a simple smoothing procedure. Finally, the brand-loyalty pattern for market-share leaders is found to be more stable than for other brands. The study findings were robust to variation in the time interval used to construct the switching matrices, and to different treatments of multiple purchases.     

Healthcare costs for Crohn’s disease patients treated with infliximab: a propensity weighted comparison of the effects of treatment adherence

Objective:

The objective for the research was to evaluate the direct healthcare costs for Crohn’s disease (CD) patients categorized by adherence status.

Methods:

Adult patients with ≥1 claim for infliximab and ≥2 claims for CD who were continuously insured for 12 months before and after their first infliximab infusion (index date) were identified in a 2006–2009 US managed care database. Patients were excluded if they had rheumatoid arthritis claims, received infliximab billed as a pharmacy benefit, or received another biologic drug. Patients were categorized as being either adherent or intermittently adherent to infliximab using a pre-defined algorithm. Total and component direct costs, CD-related costs, rates of surgery, and days of hospitalization were estimated for the 360-day post-index period. Propensity weighted generalized linear models were used to adjust the cost estimates for potential confounding variables.

Results:

The total propensity weighted cost for infliximab adherent patients was $40,425 (95% CI?=?[$38,686, $42,242]), compared to $41,082 (95% CI?=?[$38,163, $44,223]) for the intermittently adherent (p?=?0.71). However, adherent patients had lower total direct medical costs, exclusive of infliximab, that were $13,097 (95% CI?=?[$12,141, $14,127]) compared with $20,068 (95% CI?=?[$17,676, $22,784]) for intermittently adherent patients as a result of substantially lower hospital and outpatient costs (p?Conclusions:

Greater drug-related costs for infliximab adherent patients were offset by lower costs from hospitalization and outpatient visits. These findings indicate that adherent patients have improved clinical outcomes, at a similar aggregate cost, than patients who are only intermittently adherent to therapy.     

Value of information analysis in healthcare: a review of principles and applications

Background:

Economic evaluations are increasingly utilized to inform decisions in healthcare; however, decisions remain uncertain when they are not based on adequate evidence. Value of information (VOI) analysis has been proposed as a systematic approach to measure decision uncertainty and assess whether there is sufficient evidence to support new technologies.

Scope:

The objective of this paper is to review the principles and applications of VOI analysis in healthcare. Relevant databases were systematically searched to identify VOI articles. The findings from the selected articles were summarized and narratively presented.

Findings:

Various VOI methods have been developed and applied to inform decision-making, optimally designing research studies and setting research priorities. However, the application of this approach in healthcare remains limited due to technical and policy challenges.

Conclusion:

There is a need to create more awareness about VOI analysis, simplify its current methods, and align them with the needs of decision-making organizations.     

Growth in regions

We use a newly assembled sample of 1,528 regions from 83 countries to compare the speed of per capita income convergence within and across countries. Regional growth is shaped by similar factors as national growth, such as geography and human capital. Regional convergence rate is about 2 % per year, comparable to that between countries. Regional convergence is faster in richer countries, and countries with better capital markets. A calibration of a neoclassical growth model suggests that significant barriers to factor mobility within countries are needed to account for the evidence.     

Qualitative aspects of the Indian growth spurt of the 1980s

The Indian growth spurt of the 1980s has led DeLong (2003), Rodrik & Subramaniam (IMF Staff Papers 52(2):193–228, 2005) and Kohli (Economic and Political Weekly 41(14):1361–1370, 2006) to question the need for market reforms in the 1990s and the supporters of liberalization to argue that it was the result of piecemeal liberalization. Both sides of this debate focus exclusively on the quantitative aspects of the high growth while ignoring its underlying quality. This paper analyzes two aspects of the quality of growth during the 1980s. First, it considers whether the increases in production were concentrated in goods far removed from mass consumption and second, it analyzes certain characteristics of three consumer goods that serve as an indicator of their quality.     

On the power of bootstrap tests for stationarity: a Monte Carlo comparison

This paper studies the behavior of recently proposed bootstrap tests for the null hypothesis of stationarity when the data are generated under the alternative hypothesis of a unit root. Using Monte Carlo experiments and empirical examples, it is shown that the power of these tests critically depends on the type of bootstrap employed. Specifically, while tests based on the stationary bootstrap have power functions that are increasing with respect to sample size, those based on the sieve bootstrap have non-monotonic power functions. We argue that this difference arises from the fact that the latter procedure does not impose the null hypothesis when generating the bootstrap samples while the former ensures that the bootstrap samples are stationary, conditional on the original data. Our results therefore suggest that while both forms of bootstrap are effective at providing improved distributional approximations under the null hypothesis, it is important to pay careful attention to the particular type of bootstrap being employed when attempting to distinguish between the unit root and stationarity hypotheses as the choice of bootstrap can have crucial implications for the power of the resulting tests.     

Exchange rates dynamics revisited: a panel data test of the fractional integration order

We test the possibility that exchange rates from nine developed countries have a unit root against the alternate possibility that they are fractionally integrated. Theoretically, exchange rates are only expected to follow a random walk under restrictive assumptions. However, most traditional unit root tests cannot reject a unit root in exchange rates, and time series tests that allow for fractional integration have given inconclusive results. To increase the power of the test of the integration order we develop two panel data tests of the fractional integration order. Monte Carlo simulations show that these tests are correctly sized and have relatively high power compared to other similar tests. Moreover, our empirical results show that we can reject a unit root in exchange rates with a high probability, but the integration order is close to one. This indicates that exchange rates are mean-reverting, although the reversion is slow, resulting in long swings.     

Global Governance: CSR and the Role of the UN Global Compact

The article discusses the role of the UN Global Compact (UNGC) in the emerging global corporate social responsibility infrastructure. It evaluates the debate around the effectiveness and legitimacy of the UNGC alongside the arguments of its supporters and critics and thereby introduces the Thematic Symposium contributions. The article further identifies three theoretical perspectives that are used by scholars to discuss the performance of the UNGC: economic, socio-historical, and normative. It proposes that these perspectives can serve as generic distinctions with direct relevance for the evaluation of the UNGC. Once the perspective is chosen, it drives towards a certain purpose which implies assumptions and design features with regard to the UNGC. Finally, the article offers a future research agenda, emphasising the research needed on the UNGC in four areas: the identification of processes and influence mechanisms; legitimacy and effectiveness; local networks and regional development; and the interface of the UNGC and responsible leadership.     

Applying complexity theory to deepen service dominant logic: Configural analysis of customer experience-and-outcome assessments of professional services for personal transformations

Recognizing Gigerenzer's (1991) dictum that scientists' tools are not neutral (tools-in-use influence theory formulation as well as data interpretation), this article reports theory and examines data in ways that transcend the dominant logics for variable-based and case-based analyses. The theory and data analysis tests key propositions in complexity theory: (1) no single antecedent condition is a sufficient or necessary indicator of a high score in an outcome condition; (2) a few of many available complex configurations of antecedent conditions are sufficient indicators of high scores in an outcome condition; (3) contrarian cases occur, that is, low scores in a single antecedent condition associates with both high and low scores for an outcome condition for different cases; (4) causal asymmetry occurs, that is, accurate causal models for high scores for an outcome condition are not the mirror opposites of causal models for low scores for the same outcome condition. The study tests and supports these propositions in the context of customer assessments (n = 436) of service facets and service outcome evaluations for assisted temporary-transformations of self via beauty salon and spa treatments. The findings contribute to advancing a nuanced theory of how customers' service evaluations relate to their assessments of overall service quality and intentions to use the service. The findings support the need for service managers to be vigilant in fine-tuning service facets and service enactment to achieve the objective of high customer retention.     

Embrace•perform•model: Complexity theory,contrarian case analysis,and multiple realities

This essay describes tenets of complexity theory including the precept that within the same set of data X relates to Y positively, negatively, and not at all. A consequence to this first precept is that reporting how X relates positively to Y with and without additional terms in multiple regression models ignores important information available in a data set. Performing contrarian case analysis indicates that cases having low X with high Y and high X with low Y occur even when the relationship between X and Y is positive and the effect size of the relationship is large. Findings from contrarian case analysis support the necessity of modeling multiple realities using complex antecedent configurations. Complex antecedent configurations (i.e., 2 to 7 features per recipe) can show that high X is an indicator of high Y when high X combines with certain additional antecedent conditions (e.g., high A, high B, and low C)—and low X is an indicator of high Y as well when low X combines in other recipes (e.g., high A, low R, and high S), where A, B, C, R, and S are additional antecedent conditions. Thus, modeling multiple realities—configural analysis—is necessary, to learn the configurations of multiple indicators for high Y outcomes and the negation of high Y. For a number of X antecedent conditions, a high X may be necessary for high Y to occur but high X alone is almost never sufficient for a high Y outcome.