Customer Evaluation of Supply Systems: The Case of Ethiopian Seed Supply Systems

This study explores the performance of Ethiopian seed systems from a customer’s perspective. The study builds on the view that seed supply systems perform marketing functions such as developing new varieties of seed, multiplying the right quantity and quality, and distributing to the right places, at the right time, for an acceptable price. Hence, supply systems create value and satisfy customers. This study’s contribution is twofold. First, customer satisfaction theory is applied to complex chains (i.e. seed supply systems) in emerging markets, with their specific contextual challenges. Second, it identifies the criteria that farmers use to evaluate seed supply systems and evaluates Ethiopian seed supply systems from a farmer customer’s perspective, which can be used as a basis to increase customer satisfaction.     

Marketing survey research best practices: evidence and recommendations from a review of <Emphasis Type="Italic">JAMS</Emphasis> articles

Survey research methodology is widely used in marketing, and it is important for both the field and individual researchers to follow stringent guidelines to ensure that meaningful insights are attained. To assess the extent to which marketing researchers are utilizing best practices in designing, administering, and analyzing surveys, we review the prevalence of published empirical survey work during the 2006–2015 period in three top marketing journals—Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science (JAMS), Journal of Marketing (JM), and Journal of Marketing Research (JMR)—and then conduct an in-depth analysis of 202 survey-based studies published in JAMS. We focus on key issues in two broad areas of survey research (issues related to the choice of the object of measurement and selection of raters, and issues related to the measurement of the constructs of interest), and we describe conceptual considerations related to each specific issue, review how marketing researchers have attended to these issues in their published work, and identify appropriate best practices.     

Urbanization and start-up rates in different geographies: Belgium,the Netherlands,and Sweden

This study addresses the mediating role of settlement patterns in the relationship between urbanization and start-up activity. Places do not operate in a vacuum and to understand the effect of “own” density on start-up patterns, we need to account for the urban spillovers or borrowed size that they may experience from other places nearby. The results can explain the empirical ambiguity in the relationship between urbanization and start-up patterns: the relationship between urbanization and start-up rates becomes more similar between countries when controlling for country-specific settlement patterns by including a spatially lagged urbanization variable and variables measuring the distance to urban centers. Accounting for the relative location of places and relevant sorting effects, we find that “own” density has a consistently negative effect on start-up activity. Yet, access to other places has a generally positive effect. This implies that nearby regions profit from the advantages offered by urban environments without having to deal with the costs involved.     

PRODUCT FUNCTIONALITY,COMPETITION, AND MULTIPURCHASING

The more functionalities a good offers, the greater is its perceived quality. Equilibrium prices in standard spatial competition models depend solely on quality differences. We assume that new functionalities are more appreciated the closer a product is to a consumer's ideal variety. Prices are then increasing in functionality levels. Furthermore, we endogenize whether consumers buy only one of two varieties (single‐purchase) or both (multipurchase). Under multipurchase, there might be a hump‐shaped relationship between equilibrium prices and functionality levels. Therefore, it could be optimal for each supplier to sacrifice sales and set prices so high that multipurchase is eliminated.     

A new approach to estimation of the R&D–innovation–productivity relationship

ABSTRACT

We apply a generalized structural equation model approach to the estimation of the relationship between R&D, innovation and productivity that focuses on the potentially crucial heterogeneity across sectors. The model accounts for selectivity and handles the endogeneity of this relationship in a recursive framework which allows for feedback effects from productivity to future R&D investment. Our approach enables the estimation of the different equations as one system, allowing the coefficients to differ across sectors, and also permits us to take cross-equation correlation of the errors into account. Employing a panel of Swedish manufacturing and service firms observed in three consecutive Community Innovation Surveys in the period 2008–2012, our full-information maximum likelihood estimates show that many key channels of influence among the model's components vary meaningfully in their statistical significance and magnitude across six different sectors based on the OECD classification on technological and knowledge intensity. These results cast doubt on earlier research which does not allow for sectoral heterogeneity.     

Sektorale und gesamtwirtschaftliche Beurteilung des „Carbon-Leakage”-Problems für die Bundesrepublik Deutschland

In order to mitigate the global warming issue, the European Commission decided To reduce carbon dioxide emissions in Europe by 2020 by 20% (compared to 1990). This translates into an overall reduction of 1.1 billion tons. The most important Reduction tool in its policy arsenal is the Emission-Trading System (ETS). All ETS industries together are supposed to reduce their CO₂ emissions by 421 million tons or 21 % (compared to 2005). With a planned reduction of 421 million tons of CO₂, Germany’s ETS industries bear almost a quarter of the Overall reduction burden. The associated carbon leakage problem is only to some extent attributed to the climate protection targets. The planned adjustment of the major allocation mechanism in the third trading phase weights considerably more. In the third trading phase the free provision of benchmark-related emission permits will be replaced with a market-price auction system. A current study of the EEFA-Research Institute examines the effects of auctioning on compatibility, production and employment in Germany.