Customer reactions to variety: Too much of a good thing?

Summary Studying product variety is an interesting and relevant area for research. Work in this area should build on careful understanding of both customers’ reactions to it and managers’ decision making with respect to it. This requires an interdisciplinary focus, drawing on work in information processing, channels, operations management, game theory, and managerial decision making. In fact, the major advances may come more from combining knowledge from the different areas rather than boring more deeply into a single one. Donald R. Lehmann is George E. Warren Professor of Business at the Columbia University Graduate School of Business. He has a B.S. degree in mathematics from Union College, Schenectady, New York, and an M.S.I.A. and Ph.D. from the Krannert School of Purdue University. His research interests include modeling individual choice and decision making, understanding group and interdependent decisions, meta-analysis, and the introduction and adoption of innovations. He has taught courses in marketing, management, and statistics. He has published in and served on the editorial boards ofJournal of Consumer Research, Journal of Marketing, Journal of Marketing Research, Management Science, andMarketing Science, and is founding editor ofMarketing Letters. In addition to numerous journal articles, he has published four books:Market Research and Analysis, Analysis for Marketing Planning, Product Management, andMeta Analysis in Marketing. Professor Lehmann served as executive director of the Marketing Science Institute from 1993 to 1995 and as president of the Association for Consumer Research in 1995.     

The professor-consultant: An important marketing resource

There has been little published on the topic of marketing consultants. The literature void is even more pronounced when a major source of outside expertise, the professor-consultant, is examined. The authors have surveyed marketing academicians to determine their attitudes toward consulting and the scope and nature of their consulting activities along with the kinds of clients for whom they work. The findings show that professors hold generally favorable attitudes toward consulting and work in a wide range of topical areas while serving many diverse clients.     

Examining product managers’ job satisfaction and performance using selected organizational behavior variables

The product management form of organization has been around for quite a while; yet little empirical research has been done on product managers. This article reports a study of product managers and some organizational behavior factors which contribute to their job satisfaction and job performance. These factors include centralization of decision making, job structure, job scope, role ambiguity, and role conflict. Finally, several suggestions are made for creating an environment more conductive to having product managers who are satisfied with their jobs.     

Entrepreneurial Hustle: Navigating Uncertainty and Enrolling Venture Stakeholders through Urgent and Unorthodox Action

Entrepreneurs need to act under conditions of uncertainty and resource constraints to bring new, often-unrecognizable products to market and convince an unknown set of stakeholders to support their endeavours. The type of action entrepreneurs take to navigate uncertain entrepreneurial contexts is underspecified. We analysed 48 interviews with entrepreneurs to inductively identify an action-oriented construct we labelled as entrepreneurial hustle – an entrepreneur’s urgent, unorthodox actions that are intended to be useful in addressing immediate challenges and opportunities under conditions of uncertainty. In a follow-up study, we use an experimental vignette approach to assess the impact of an entrepreneur’s hustle on venture stakeholders. Findings suggest that entrepreneurial hustle positively influences stakeholder perceptions of the entrepreneur’s leadership effectiveness and a venture’s legitimacy, mediated by perceptions of the entrepreneur’s ability-based trustworthiness. We conclude that entrepreneurial hustle is a fundamental behaviour that enables entrepreneurs to enrol new venture stakeholders and lead their entrepreneurial efforts.     

Clarence E. Ayres and the Legacy of German Idealism

Abstract . Based on the Clarence E. Ayres (1891-1972) papers at the University of Texas, this study traces the continuity among thinkers such as Kant, Hegel, Veblen, Dewey, and Ayres; the latter was a leading institutional economist following Veblen's death. Publicly acknowledging his intellectual debt to Veblen and Dewey, Ayres drew from these men some idealistic assumptions as well as the historicism that is implicit in his technological determinism or instrumental theory of knowledge. Thorstein Veblen and John Dewey owed a great deal to the philosophical tradition of idealism, regardless of the devotion to naturalism in their systems. The origins of Ayres's technological theory of value are found in Veblen and Dewey writings and back of them the legacy of German idealism. The vital link was a mutual acceptance that freedom was expressed in a cultural and historical form, realized in human activity. It was a process.     

Some predictors of SMJ article impact

Article impact is becoming an increasingly popular metric for assessing a scholar's influence, yet little is known about its properties or the factors that affect it. This study tests whether author, article, and methodological attributes influence the impact of SMJ articles, defined as summed counts of article citations. Findings reveal that authors having fewer, more‐often cited articles tended to have SMJ articles that received the most citations. In addition, whether an article appears in a regular or a special issue is not a stable predictor of its impact. Moreover, empirical articles that test primary data, control for more threats to internal validity, and have higher statistical power tend to receive more citations. Further, an article's long‐term impact oftentimes becomes apparent shortly after its publication. Overall, the findings provide new insights into the determinants of impact and its temporal qualities and help explain some of the differences between high and average impact articles. The findings also underscore the need for transparency between author publication strategies (article volume, impact) and the requirements of his/her institution. Implications for authors, reviewers, editors, and administrative evaluation are offered. Copyright © 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Essentiality,Efficiency, and the Efficient Component-Pricing Rule

The determination of interconnection charges to essential facilities is an important problem in regulated telecommunications markets in the wake of the Telecommunications Act of 1996. This paper defines mathematical conditions for the essentiality of upstream productive inputs and examines their implications for efficient interconnection pricing. The paper shows conditions under which the efficient component-pricing rule (ECPR) can be derived as a special case of a Ramsey pricing rule. The paper also shows how efficient pricing differs from the ECPR for a number of interesting cases.     

AIDS is your business

If your company operates in a developing country, AIDS is your business. While Africa has received the most attention, AIDS is also spreading swiftly in other parts of the world. Russia and Ukraine had the fastest-growing epidemics last year, and many experts believe China and India will suffer the next tidal wave of infection. Why should executives be concerned about AIDS? Because it is destroying the twin rationales of globalization strategy-cheap labor and fast-growing markets--in countries where people are heavily affected by the epidemic. Fortunately, investments in programs that prevent infection and provide treatment for employees who have HIV/AIDS are profitable for many businesses--that is, they lead to savings that outweigh the programs' costs. Due to the long latency period between HIV infection and the onset of AIDS symptoms, a company is not likely to see any of the costs of HIV/AIDS until five to ten years after an employee is infected. But executives can calculate the present value of epidemic-related costs by using the discount rate to weigh each cost according to its expected timing. That allows companies to think about expenses on HIV/AIDS prevention and treatment programs as investments rather than merely as costs. The authors found that the annual cost of AIDS to six corporations in South Africa and Botswana ranged from 0.4% to 5.9% of the wage bill. All six companies would have earned positive returns on their investments if they had provided employees with free treatment for HIV/AIDS in the form of highly active antiretroviral therapy (HAART), according to the mathematical model the authors used. The annual reduction in the AIDS "tax" would have been as much as 40.4%. The authors' conclusion? Fighting AIDS not only helps those infected; it also makes good business sense.