Identifying Non‐Adopter Consumer Segments: An Empirical Study on Earthquake Insurance Adoption in Turkey

In recent years, steadily climbing natural disaster losses have increased the need to promote new financial risk transfer mechanisms, including insurance, as a mitigation tool to build resilient communities to recover faster after disaster occurrence. However, while the societal need for such policies is high, demand for natural disaster insurance typically is still low. While there is ample research on positive adoption decisions, reasons for non‐adoption has not yet received the attention it deserves. Using the case of earthquake insurance in Turkey, this study investigates how public policy makers and insurance companies can differentiate non‐adopter segments and consequently develop targeted strategies to stimulate the uptake of disaster insurance. Our study develops a non‐adopter typology consisting of four segments—state reliant positivist, dependers, adversaries, and uninformed loners. Differences among segments provide policy makers and insurance companies with meaningful insights to design and consequently introduce affordable natural disaster insurance to the market.     

The market for corporate control: do countries and technological regimes matter?

Using DATASTREAM and LexisNexis databases, we examine the experience from 1995 to 2005 for eight European countries and 21 sectors, and compute the frequency of merger transactions at sectoral level, controlling for the roles of country variables and focusing on distinct technological patterns of innovation. We found that, even in market‐based countries, where transfer of control is a frequent phenomenon, mergers are less frequent in those sectors where innovation follows cumulative processes and where takeovers represent a ‘breach of knowledge.’ This study provides empirical support to the fruitful line of research of varieties of capitalism (Hall and Soskice 2001 Hall, P. A. and Soskice, D., eds. 2001. Varieties of Capitalism, Oxford: Oxford University Press. [Crossref] [Google Scholar]) and shows that sectoral differences in M&A (mergers and acquisitions) may be seen in their complementarities with differences by country and their institutional frameworks. Results confirm that acquisitions may occur even in those economies where block‐holders are present, but where the good quality of institutions leaves no space for defence against takeovers. It also highlights the significant role played by takeover regulation, and suggests that the recent reforms in European harmonization should be implemented, so that the obstacles impeding takeovers can be removed. However, policy‐makers should also try to identify for which economies and sectoral fields of specialization, merger activities produce more beneficial effects and which turn out to be detrimental.     

Consumer acceptance of wireless finance

M-commerce has been heralded repeatedly as the new service frontier of the millennium. Present market reality, however, seems to be less optimistic. Therefore, the current study explores the factors contributing to the adoption of mobile services in a context of wireless finance. The technology acceptance model was used as a point of departure. For this study, perceived cost, system quality and social influence were added to the model, and the latter two displayed significant effects in the empirical research. Moderating effects of the variables age, computer skills, mobile technology readiness and social influence were investigated, all of which proved to be relevant in the context presented.