Affiliated firms and financial support: Evidence from Indian business groups

We investigate the functioning of internal capital markets in Indian Business Groups. We document that intragroup loans are an important means of transferring cash across group firms and are typically used to support financially weaker firms. Evidence suggests that an important reason for providing support may be to avoid default by a group firm and consequent negative spillovers to the rest of the group. Consistent with such spillovers, the first bankruptcy in a group is followed by significant drops in external financing, investments and profits of other firms in the group and an increase in their bankruptcy probability.     

Promoting Vegetarianism through Moralization and Knowledge Calibration

This research extends the theories of moralization and knowledge calibration to vegetarianism. In two studies involving interviews with vegetarians, and meat-eaters; we investigated consumer attitudes toward vegetarianism. Our text analysis results revealed that emotionally calibrated consumers are ‘moral vegetarians’ who find meat repulsive, and make ethical food choices. In contrast, cognitively calibrated consumers are ‘health vegetarians’ who scan the nutrition information, avoid meat due to health restrictions, and embrace vegetarianism for healthy life. Finally, we provided insights into how faux meat companies can promote their products and transform consumer behavior toward vegetarianism by advertising ethical and environmentally friendly foods, and healthy and anti-obesity foods to moral and health vegetarians, respectively.     

Family Control of Firms and Industries

We test what explains family control of firms and industries and find that the explanation is largely contingent on the identity of families and individual blockholders. Founders and their families are more likely to retain control when doing so gives the firm a competitive advantage, thereby benefiting all shareholders. In contrast, nonfounding families and individual blockholders are more likely to retain control when they can appropriate private benefits of control. Families are more likely to maintain control when the efficient scale is small, the need to monitor employees is high, investment horizons are long, and the firm has dual-class stock.     

Stability and Largeness of the Core

In general, there are examples of TU games where the core is stable but is not large. In this paper, we show that the extendability condition introduced by Kikuta and Shapley (1986, “Core Stability in n-Person Games,” Mimeo) is sufficient for the core to be stable as well as large, for TU games with five or fewer players. We provide a counter example when the number of players is six. We then introduce a stronger extendability condition and show that it is necessary and sufficient for the core to be large. Our proof makes use of a well-known result from the theory of convex sets. Journal of Economic Literature Classification Number: C71.     

What Do We Know about Trade Promotions? Contributions,Limitations, and Further Research

The trade promotion area remains seriously under-researched compared with its share of the overall marketing mix budget. This review attempts to provide an up-to-date account of what we know about trade promotions. For eight major topics we elaborate on what that topic means in the context of trade promotions, why it has been deemed important, what empirical findings have emerged in that area, and proposeareas for future research.     

A Decision Model for E-commerce-enabled Partial Market Exit

Struggling retail chains often try to recover profitability by closing some of their stores. The challenge in this strategy lies in determining how many stores to close, as store exit has implications for both the customers and the supply chain. After a store closes, its customers are lost forever to the competition, unless there is a surviving open store nearby or an electronic alternative such as an e-store. From the supply chain perspective, after a store closes, its supporting regional distribution center is left with less business, and thus reduced viability. This paper develops a decision support model to study the profitability of alternative retail network structures by varying the proportion of stores that are closed, the average price sensitivity of demand, the price difference between the online store and the traditional retailers, and customer retention rates.     

A reflection on analytical work in marketing: Three points of consensus

This article presents three points of consensus about game-theoretic work in marketing: First, equilibrium analysis is necessary for studying situations that have strategic interactions. In many cases, empirical examination of these strategic scenarios is difficult or impossible, at least without the guidance of an equilibrium model. Second, more general models are not necessarily ??better,?? because institutional details matter. Thus, the appropriate compromise between generality and specificity depends on the scope of the research question. Finally, there should be a two-way road between theory and empirics??theory is necessary to interpret empirical results, while empirical findings should guide theoretical modeling choices.     

Healthcare resource utilization and costs by age and joint location among osteoarthritis patients in a privately insured population

Aims: To compare healthcare resource utilization and costs between patients aged 18–64 years with osteoarthritis (OA) and matched controls without OA in a privately insured population.

Methods: Patients with OA were selected from de-identified US-based employer claims (Q1:1999–Q3:2011). The index date was defined as the first OA diagnosis indicated by ICD-9-CM codes. One year before and after the index date were defined as the baseline and study periods, respectively. A second OA diagnosis during the study period was also required. Patients with OA were matched one-to-one on age, gender, index date, and minimum length of follow-up to controls without OA. Baseline characteristics and study period resource utilization and costs (2016 USD) were compared between cohorts.

Results: This study identified 199,539 patients with OA (knee: 87,271, hip: 19,953, hand: 15,670, spine: 12,496). The average age was 54 years, and 58% were female. OA patients had higher healthcare resource utilization than matched controls in inpatient, emergency room, and outpatient settings (p?p?Limitations: This sample, obtained using claims data, only includes patients who were actively seeking care for OA and were likely symptomatic. Asymptomatic patients would likely not be captured in this analysis.

Conclusions: Patients with OA incur greater healthcare resource utilization and costs than patients without OA, with substantial variation by joint location.     

Shopping Style Segmentation of Consumers

The World Wide Web has rapidly become an alternative means to reach customers and has attracted the attention of many businesses. Unfortunately, however, despite its growth, there is little knowledge of which consumers would be willing to switch to the new format and to what extent. Our paper is aimed at providing some insights into these questions. Specifically, we propose a model to identify segments that differ in their shopping style, i.e., in their preference for which format, or bundle of formats, they like to shop in.Our research question, and model, is similar in spirit to prior research in marketing on how consumers choose assortments. Despite this similarity, our research makes some substantive and methodological contributions to the literature. Substantively, we examine the issue of the choice of channel assortments by consumers across a variety of product categories. We believe this is an important question and one that has not been examined earlier. From a methodological point of view, our model adds to earlier work by specifying the utility of an assortment as a sum of the deterministic and stochastic components of the utilities of its members. This contrasts with previous research where only the deterministic components of the utilities of the component brands of an assortment are added and the relationships between their random components are not accounted for.We calibrate the model on data regarding the format choices of households. In order to control for potentially similar format preferences across purchases of different categories we specify the model to allow for correlation between format preferences over the choice history of each household. Our results suggest that there are four segments of consumers that differ in their preference for different types of formats.