Engineering Hedonic Attributes to Generate Perceptions of Luxury: Consumer Perception of an Everyday Sound

For the last twenty years, the perception of hedonic attributes has been a problematic matter in consumer research. We argue that the perception of a hedonic product attribute should not be considered as an irreducible holistic experience, but rather as a complex set of sensory experiences, the components of which are identifiable and quantifiable. We provide evidence for this position by proposing a reliable method linking the features of product-related sound stimuli to consumer perception of hedonic attributes. To our knowledge, this study is the first of its kind offering a detailed investigation of consumer perception of everyday sounds (as opposed to music). We discuss managerial and consumer-level implications of the findings and provide an agenda for future research.     

Do You Prefer Having More or More than Others in the Workplace? A Quasi‐experimental Survey in Algeria

We examine the relevance of relative standings in Algeria (North Africa). We focus on the workplace, by considering domains generally important in this specific context: income, extra wage, office size, free days, worked hours, days being ill, offered company car, traffic jam when going to work, and being praised and berated by supervisor. Respondents prefer equality situations (i.e., where everyone has the same endowment) rather than positional and absolute ones (i.e., where they have the highest relative and absolute levels, respectively). An exception is found regarding praise by supervisor where the proportions of individuals choosing positional states are the highest. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

On the Economics of Postassessments in Insurance Guaranty Funds: A Stakeholders’ Perspective

This article proposes a model that suggests there are contagion effects among members of an insurance guaranty fund when postassessments are charged to all other insurers upon the failure of a member company. Indeed, these extraordinary payments are shown to increase the default rate of other firms in the industry, ultimately lowering the value of corporate claims as well as government tax claims. The model is also used to examine the efficiency of different recoupment mechanisms (both existing and new) used by regulators and insurers to potentially reduce these contagion effects. Analysis allows us to stipulate the conditions under which a “tax carryforward” provision could be more efficient than the usual recoupment mechanisms known as “premium rate surcharge” and “premium tax credit.”     

EMAC Distinguished Marketing Scholar 2012: Respect the data!

Consumer research suffers from a lack of respect for data. Researchers routinely fail to report full experiments that do not produce expected results and often eliminate alleged “outliers” on the basis of inappropriate rules, leading to biased test reports. Scholars appear to be relying less on non-experimental data, even as the serious limitations of experimental data may create structural discrepancies with the other, non-experimental cases of a phenomenon or process, such that it becomes impossible to study some major consumer phenomena. The lessons from empirical data get accepted only when they can be described as confirming preexisting conceptual frameworks. This article presents an extensive analysis of multiple forms of a lack of respect for the data and proposes some remedies. Overall, data should never play a subordinate part.     

Semi-core equivalence

Summary. The main requirements for equivalence of the core of an economy and the Walrasian equilibrium allocations are largeness and the freedom to form almost arbitrary coalitions in the Edgeworthian barter processes. We investigate whether constraints on coalition formation and coalitional barter alter these insights. Our notion of the semi-core imposes a restriction on the collection of formable coalitions that does not affect the fundamental equivalence property. Using our concept of the contract-core we show that additional constraints on coalitional barter can only be alleviated within an environment with sufficiently many formable coalitions: besides a contract-core equivalence theorem we show certain non-equivalence results.Received: December 11, 1995; revised version: September 17, 1996This revised version was published online in February 2005 with corrections to the cover date.     

Is international entrepreneurship a field? A bibliometric analysis of the literature (1989–2015)

The abundant academic literature on international entrepreneurship has attracted the attention of many researchers in various fields (international business, entrepreneurship, management, marketing, to mention a few). A debate has been opened on whether international entrepreneurship is indeed a field. In this article, we seek to contribute to this debate. We applied a bibliometric analysis to 567 articles on international entrepreneurship published during the 1989–February 2015 period. The main indices that this is an emerging field are as follows: a concentration of publications on central contributors and universities, key dates of social events, the creation of a journal dedicated to the topic and a strong identity of keywords. A co-citation analysis shows that the international entrepreneurship field is structured on a stable body of references, organised into five key clusters, distinct from its mother disciplines: international business and entrepreneurship. Our work helps to identify the paradigmatic approaches that structure international entrepreneurship.     

The trade-growth nexus in the developing countries: a quantile regression approach

This paper applies quantile regression techniques to investigate how the impact of trade openness on the growth rate of per capita income varies with the conditional distribution of growth. Using formal robustness analyses, we first identify robust variables affecting economic growth (investment, government balance, terms of trade, inflation, and population growth) which we then use as controls in the quantile regression estimations. Our findings suggest a heterogeneous trade-growth nexus: for both the short and the long run, the effect of openness on growth is higher in countries with low growth rates compared to those with high growth rates.     

Evaluating the Impact of a Working Time Regulation on Capital Operating Time: The French 35‐hour Work Week Experience

In this article, we evaluate the impact of diminishing weekly working hours on capital operating time using the French 35‐hour working week experience. We merge the French survey on Capital Operating Time (COT, Banque de France, Central Bank of France; 1989–2004) and administrative Working Time Reduction agreements files (WTR, DARES, French Ministry of Labour; May 2003). We construct shift‐work‐based capital operating time indicators. Using differences‐in‐differences econometric models, we show that the implementation of the 35‐hour work week did not induce any reduction in COT. Hence, firms increased shift‐work to compensate for the decrease in working hours.     

Consumer Segments Based on Attitudes Toward Luxury: Empirical Evidence from Twenty Countries

This article proposes an international segmentation of consumers based on their attitudes toward luxury. We perform a two-stage empirical study with a data set that combines samples from 20 countries. We provide a substantive interpretation of the results to show that three attitude segments dominate in a Western cultural context. We discuss several directions for future research based on the findings.