Business students' ethical perceptions of retail situations: A microcultural comparison

Due in part to a growing realization of the importance of the role that retailing plays in the marketing channel, and to the increasing numbers of college graduates being employed by retailers, growing attention is being placed on business students' ethical perceptions of retailing practices. This study continues this focus by examining the ethical perceptions of collegiate business students attending two different universities which likely represent two different microcultures — conservative evangelical Protestant and secular.The results suggest that ethical perceptions may vary between the students attending two universities which likely represent differing microcultures. The students attending the conservative evangelical Protestant university appear to possess ethical perceptions which are significantly more ethical than those of students attending the public university. Evidence was observed, therefore, which suggests that ethical perceptions may vary across students from differing microcultures.Dr. David J. Burns is Associate Professor of Marketing at Youngstown State University. His research has appeared in a number of journals. His research interests include business ethics, retail location, and the adoption of new products.Mr. Jeffrey K. Fawcett is an Assistant Professor of Marketing at Cedarville College, Cedarville, Ohio where he has taught since 1987. He is currently working toward his DBA. His research interests include business ethics, and the marketing of services and not for profit organizations.Dr. John M. Lanasa is Associate Professor of Marketing at the A. J. Palumbo School of Business Administration, Duquesne University and a member of the Biard Center for Leadership and Ethics. Dr. Lanasa has numerous publications and his research interests include business ethics and sales training.     

Marketing's Interfunctional Interfaces: The MSI Workshop on Management of Corporate Fault Zones

This paper first introduces the purposes and processesof the Marketing Science Institute's Workshop on Interfunctional Interfaces: The Management of Corporate Fault Zones. The motivatingissues of value migration and market orientation are considerednext followed by discussion of marketing's paradigm shift. Thelast half of the paper deals with several management problemsand research issues which were identified during the workshop.Hopefully, these questions and research needs will help to acceleratedevelopment of research into these interface issues.     

Prospects and problems in modeling group decisions

This paper summarizes some of the major issues related to group decision modeling. We briefly review the existing work on group choice models in marketing and consumer research. We draw some generalizations about which models work well when and use those generalizations to provide guidelines for future research.     

The corporation and profits

In this paper I argue that a theory of the firm that takes profit maximizing to be the essential activity and purpose of the firm is seriously inadequate. I argue that firms in the actual economy neither are nor should be maximizers of profit. I argue instead that firms are and must be satisficers, that they must make enough profit to satisfy the various demands which they encounter in their operation. Yet it should be clear that the notion of satisficing, while it escapes the major problems encountered by maximization, itself lacks much of any very clear content. In the end I claim that the notion of satisficing can best be understood if we abandon the traditional characterization of profits and replace it with a notion of extended profits, which I define as that part of corporate revenue which is available for distribution among stockholders, management, and labor, and for reinvestment in the corporation's business operation. David E. Schrader is Associate Professor of Philosophy and Chair of the Department of Religion and Philosophy at Austin College in Sherman, Texas. Professor Schrader's primary areas of research interest include applied ethics, philosophy of economics and philosophy of religion. In addition to being the author of a number of articles in applied ethics and philosophy of religion, he is the editor of Ethics and the Practice of Law(Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1988).I want to express my gratitude to Austin College for granting me the sabbatical leave during which time I pursued the research which led to this paper, and to the Center for the Study of Values at the University of Delaware for providing both a place and additional support for that research. I particularly want to thank Norman E. Bowie, Director of the Center for the Study of Values, for his very helpful comments on an earlier draft of this paper.     

Prohibiting State Aid in an Integrated Market: Cournot and Bertrand Oligopolies with Differentiated Products

The prohibition of state aid in an integrated market such as the European Community is analyzed in a model where firms produce differentiated products and market structure is either Cournot or Bertrand oligopoly. State aid is financed by distortionary taxation so the opportunity cost of government revenue exceeds unity. Under both Cournot and Bertrand oligopoly, if products are sufficiently close substitutes then there exists a range of values for opportunity cost where governments give state aid and where the prohibition of state aid will increase aggregate welfare. With sufficiently differentiated products, the prohibition of state aid will reduce aggregate welfare.     

Experimental analysis of choice

Experimental choice analysis continues to attract academic and applied attention. We review what is known about the design, conduct, analysis, and use of data from choice experiments, and indicate gaps in current knowledge that should be addressed in future research. Design strategies consistent with probabilistic models of choice process and the parallels between choice experiments and real markets are considered. Additionally, we address the issues of reliability and validity. Progress has been made in accounting for differences in reliability, but more research is needed to determine which experiments and response procedures will consistently produce more reliable data for various problems.Sawtooth SoftwareDecision Research     

Using stated response choice data to enrich revealed preference discrete choice models

There is growing interest in exploring the view that both revealed preference (RP) and stated preference (SP) data have useful information and that their integration will enrich the overall explanatory power of RP choice models. These two types of data have been independently used in the estimation of a wide variety of discrete choice applications in marketing. In order to combine the two data sources, each with independent choice outcomes, allowance must be made for their different scaling properties. The approach uses a full information maximum likelihood estimation procedure of the hierarchical logit form to obtain suitable scaling parameters to make one or more data sets comparable. We illustrate the advantages of the dual data strategy by comparing the results with those obtained from models estimated independently with RP and SP data. Data collected as part of a study of high speed rail is used to estimate a set of illustrative mode choice models.