What price loyalty? A fresh look at loyalty programs in the credit card industry

There is controversy about the effects of loyalty programs in the customer relationship management literature. Although some managers and researchers believe that customer loyalty created through loyalty programs leads to higher firm profits, others have found evidence that loyalty programs do not have a positive effect on firm's profits. In this article, we present our findings regarding the effect of reward cards and affinity cards on customer profitability in the context of credit card industry. We find surprising evidence that customers who own either a reward card or an affinity card generate significantly less profit than those customers who do not have these cards. Equally puzzling is the fact that these customers also have lower average lifetime with the firm. This leads us to a puzzle as to why these practices are widely prevalent in the industry. We find that loyalty cards provide value to the issuers in terms of risk management. They serve as a mechanism to reduce the risk associated with more profitable customers by attracting less risky customers. Thus, through loyalty cards the financial institution is able to balance out the total risk of the portfolio of customers by acquiring customers, who although less profitable, are less risky.     

Semiotic knowledge toward heritage product in tourism industry： A case of Terengganu

In order to provide an appropriate context for the current state of the heritage product in tourism industry, semiotic knowledge become an important role to know deeply the identity, philosophy, and also the meaning of behind the actual product. Scott （2000） stresses the requirement of aesthetic and semiotic content in a creative product, instead of creativity. But, how many of retailers and salespersons in heritage product believe the semiotic as knowledge to present the product and opportunities in their selling？ According to Kotler （2000） a good personal selling will provide a detailed explanation or demonstration of the product. The message can be varied by the salesperson to fit the motivations and interests or each prospective customer. So, the purpose of this paper is to closely examine the level of awareness among retailers and salesperson toward the important of semiotic knowledge as part of strategic persuasion in a selling process. This survey study will develop a sample among retailers and salesperson in Kuala Terengganu as a respondent who give the feedback to fulfill the research questions.     

New Moralities for New Media? Assessing the Role of Social Media in Acts of Terror and Providing Points of Deliberation for Business Ethics

Social media offers a platform for diffused stakeholders to interact with firms—alternatively praising, questioning, and chastising businesses for their CSR performance and seeking to engage in two-way dialogue. In 2014, 163,402 public messages were sent to Fortune 200 firms’ CSR-focused Twitter accounts, each of which was either shared, replied to, “liked,” or ignored by the targeted firm. This paper examines firm reactions to these messages, building a model of firm response to stakeholders that combines the notions of CSR communication and stakeholder salience. Our findings show that firm response to a stakeholder on social media is positively and most significantly associated with what we refer to as the stakeholder’s connective power but negatively associated with the firm’s own connective power. To a lesser extent, firm response is positively associated with the stakeholder’s normative power but negatively associated with the firm’s own normative power. Firm response is also shown to be positively associated with stakeholder urgency in terms of both the originality of a stakeholder message and the expression of positive sentiment.

     

基于信息通讯技术的开放远程教育——联合国教科文组织的视角

1.构建知识型社会的背景 1.1联合国教科文组织的工作 紧随信息社会世界首脑会议,联合国教科文组织通过了一个为期六年的中期战略计划,总体目标之一是构建具有包容性的知识社会。这一计划无疑是基于联合国教科文组织在信息社会世界首脑会上的倡导提出的。世界信息社会世界首脑会议分为两阶段,第一阶段于2003年在瑞士日内瓦召开,第二阶段于2005年在突尼斯召开。     

Estimation and evaluation of core inflation measures

This article estimates and evaluates different measures of core inflation for India by employing statistical and econometric approaches. We estimate Wholesale Price Index (WPI) ex-food, WPI ex-food and energy, 20% asymmetric trimmed mean, 63rd percentile and Structural Vector Autoregression (SVAR) measures of core inflation. The trimmed mean, 63rd percentile and SVAR measures are unbiased, less volatile and highly correlated to headline inflation. The predictive accuracy of the different core inflation measures used in this article is assessed. The overall result suggests that a 20% asymmetric trimmed mean and SVAR measures of core inflation can be useful for the policy purposes.