Is the Retail Gasoline Market Local or National?

This paper studies the effect of station density on prices in the retail gasoline market in the Czech Republic. We estimate the impact of the number of competing stations in various driving-distance ranges around each station on prices. We find that station density has a negative effect on prices; the effect decreases with distance and is statistically significant up to six kilometers. This suggests that the retail gasoline market is local rather than national.     

Reciprocal value sharing in manufacturer-retailer relationships: the case of new product introductions

Prior literature examined reciprocity in the context of value creation. However, research has yet to examine whether reciprocity exists in value sharing. To address this gap, the authors examine retailer’s reciprocal value sharing with its manufacturer in relation to new product introductions. The authors test, via a survey of retail managers, whether reciprocal value sharing is influenced by an interaction of manufacturer’s prior new product success with innovativeness of a manufacturer’s products and the frequency of new product introduction. The results indicate that a retailer’s reciprocal value sharing is greater when the manufacturer historically launched successful new products, and that this effect is decreased with the innovativeness of a manufacturer’s products but increased with the frequency of new product introduction.     

Gamified interactions: whether,when, and how games facilitate self–brand connections

Firms increasingly use games to interact with their customers. Yet, surprisingly little is known about whether, when, and how such “gamified” interactions engage consumers with a firm’s brand, thereby facilitating self–brand connections. Building on flow theory, we show that gamified interactions that are highly interactive and optimally challenging facilitate self–brand connections, because such games lead to emotional and cognitive brand engagement. A field study and three experiments across various product domains and game designs support our theory. We also identify conditions under which consumers do not become engaged with a brand, namely when firms restrict their decisional control either to voluntarily participate in the game (i.e., compulsory play) or to spend as much time as desired playing the game (i.e., time pressure). Our findings advance existing knowledge about the use of games in marketing and provide important implications for how marketers can harness their potential to build self–brand connections.     

How is Benevolent Leadership Linked to Employee Creativity? The Mediating Role of Leader–Member Exchange and the Moderating Role of Power Distance Orientation

Previous research has shown that virtuous leader behavior in the form of benevolent leadership has considerable impact on employee creativity. However, little is known as to how and under what conditions these constructs are linked. In the current research, we proposed and tested a moderated mediation model positing leader–member exchange (LMX) as a mediator, and employee power-distance orientation as a moderator of this relationship. Two studies were conducted to test our hypothesized model. In Study 1, repeated measured data collected from 284 Chinese employees in an information technology company demonstrated that benevolent leadership had a lagged effect on LMX. In Study 2, analyses of multisource and lagged data from 391 Chinese employees in 42 research and development teams, and their direct supervisors indicated that benevolent leadership was positively related to supervisor-rated employee creativity via LMX. In addition, the relationship between benevolent leadership and LMX was stronger for employees high in power-distance orientation. Theoretical implications of benevolent leadership’s research and practical contributions concerning promoting creativity in organizations where benevolent leaders prevail are also discussed.     

Transmission of information within transnational social networks: a field experiment

Several studies have shown a relationship between the stocks of migrants and country-level investment in the home country; however the mechanism through which this relationship operates is still unexplored. We use a field experiment in which participants who are recent immigrants send information about risky decisions to others in their social network in their home country. The results demonstrate how this information influences decisions in the home country. We find that the advice given by family members and decisions made by friends significantly affects an individual’s risky decision-making.     

Contagion of network products in small-world networks

We formulate a model in which agents embedded in an exogenous social network decide whether to adopt a new network product or not. In the theoretical part of the paper, we characterize the stochastically stable equilibria for complete networks and cycles. For an arbitrary network structure, we develop a novel graph decomposition method to characterize the set of recurrent communication states, which is a superset of stochastically stable equilibria of the adoption game presented in our model. In the simulation part, we study the contagion process of a network product in small-world networks that systematically represent social networks. We simulate a generalization of the Morris (Rev Econ Stud 67(1):57–78, 2000) Contagion model that can explain the chasm between early adopters and early majority. Our numerical analysis shows that the failure of a new network product is less likely in a highly cliquish network. In addition, the contagion process reaches to steady state faster in random networks than in highly cliquish networks. It turns out that marketers should work with mixed marketing strategies, which will result in a full contagion of a network product and faster contagion rates with a higher probability.

     

Financial Instruments and Promotional Banking in the EU are Growing — But is this Justified?

Institutions and the European Investment Bank are at the forefront of EU investment policy. Their role is expanding and it is now a widely-held position that an improvement in the economy will not eliminate the need for their intervention. The proposals for the 2021–2027 MFF launch more financial instruments and present ‘InvestEU’ as a larger more powerful version of the European Fund for Strategic Investments (EFSI). However, promotional banking is often misunderstood and so is the actual size of promotional banking in Europe in which InvestEU will operate.     

Characterization of the Row Geometric Mean Ranking with a Group Consensus Axiom

An axiomatic approach is applied to the problem of extracting a ranking of the alternatives from a pairwise comparison ratio matrix. The ordering induced by row geometric mean method is proved to be uniquely determined by three independent axioms, anonymity (independence of the labelling of alternatives), responsiveness (a kind of monotonicity property) and aggregation invariance, which requires the preservation of group consensus, that is, the pairwise ranking between two alternatives should remain unchanged if unanimous individual preferences are combined by geometric mean.