Employee Participation in Cause-Related Marketing Strategies: A Study of Management Perceptions from British Consumer Service Industries

The purpose of cause-related marketing (CRM) is to publicise and capitalise on a firm??s corporate social performance (CSP) by enhancing its legitimacy in the eyes of its stakeholders. This study focuses on the firm??s internal stakeholders ?C i.e. its employees ?C and the extent of their involvement in the selection of social campaigns. Whilst the difficulties of managing a firm that has lost or damaged its legitimacy in the eyes of its employees are well known, little is understood about the extent to which managers and their social partners listen to and involve their employees in the legitimation process. Through telephone interviews with non-profit organisations and senior managers of service sector firms, the extent of employee involvement in CRM campaigns and the perceived benefits of doing so are investigated.?Amongst other things, we find that (i) the extent of employee participation varies significantly across firms; (ii) larger CRM campaigns tend to be managed centrally with relatively less employee participation than smaller ones and (iii) financial services firms are more likely to make CRM decisions centrally, with relatively less employee participation than retail services firms.     

Antitrust Sanctions and a Firm's Ability to Pay

Review of Industrial Organization - Gallo et al. (1994) analyze the sanctions imposed on firms convicted of criminal price-fixing under the antitrust laws. An element not included explicitly in...     

Mapping information technology

The information technology (IT) industries are dynamic in nature. Technological change is rapid and product life-cycles short. Convergence is profoundly changing the structure and dynamics of the IT industries. To successfully track these trends and understand the IT industries it is essential to have a framework for ordering thoughts and data, and for analysing what is going on. This article outlines the development of a new framework for the IT industries, which can encompass a range of industry and market statistics and provide a model capable of generating insights into the relationships between IT products, services, markets and industry subsectors.     

Internet cautions: Experimental games with internet partners

We report the results of experiments conducted over the internet between two different laboratories. Each subject at one site is matched with a subject at another site in a trust game experiment. We investigate whether subjects believe they are really matched with another person, and suggest a methodology for ensuring that subjects’ beliefs are accurate. Results show that skepticism can lead to misleading results. If subjects do not believe they are matched with a real person, they trust too much: i.e., they trust the experimenter rather than their partner. JEL Classification C9     

PRODUCTIVITY, WORKPLACE PERFORMANCE AND ICT: INDUSTRY AND FIRM-LEVEL EVIDENCE FOR EUROPE AND THE US

This paper considers the contribution of information and communications technology (ICT), to international productivity performance. It first uses an international industry data set and a growth accounting framework, to show that ICT has typically had a lower impact on productivity in Europe than in the US, although there is considerable variation within Europe. The paper also analyses the European situation in greater depth by examining micro‐economic data from Germany, Italy and the UK. While direct comparisons between the national findings are difficult, the results suggest that the UK experience with ICT has been closer to the US than other European countries.     

On Returning Inflation to Target

To gauge the breadth of current inflation and prospects for inflation returning to target, we consider disaggregated measures of CPI infl ation to evaluate trends and then consider diff erent scenarios for the realisation for wages and prices.

     

天津居民使用购物袋偏好研究——应用联合选择实验以及潜在分类分析

由于大量使用塑料袋,白色污染问题在中国的大城市中非常普遍。天津,作为中国第五大城市,和其他大城市一样深受随之引起的环境问题的困扰。为了有力地减少塑料袋的消费量,从2008年6月1日起,中国正式开始实施限塑令,要求各大超市及零售商店对塑料购物袋进行收费。随着限塑令的颁布,许多塑料袋生产厂家被迫关闭,但是市场上仍有相当数量的塑料袋出售。本研究的假设为目前对每个中等大小塑料袋收费0.3元的价格过低,以致不能有效地改变消费者的购买行为。研究采用联合选择实验,通过调查及结果分析探究人们对不可降解塑料袋替代品的偏好和支付意愿。结果表明大部分居民不喜欢不可降解塑料袋,并且会使用其他材料制成的价格合理的购物袋。纸袋和其他降解周期短、耐久性好的袋子的销售存在特定的市场,在这些市场中价格不是决定消费者选择的重要因素。