Communication and marketing of services by religious organizations in India

Marketing communication is a vital strategic tool for religious organizations to achieve competitive differentiation. The study uses media richness theory with competitive response to develop hypotheses about the use of personal and non-personal channels by religious organizations. The study uses unique primary survey data on 568 Hindu, Muslim, Christian, Sikh and Jain organizations spread over 7 states in India, collected between 2006 and 2008, to investigate the marketing communication strategy of religious organizations in response to their competitors' use of non-personal communication channels and provision of non-religious services. The findings suggest that if a competitor uses higher non-personal communication channels, then this evokes a retaliatory reaction with the incumbent, increasing their personal communication channels. Second, an incumbent who is more responsive to a competitor increasing their non-religious service provision will respond by increasing their non-personal communication channels and by decreasing their personal channels. The findings have implications for managers who need to select the richness of the media for their communications' strategy in the context of competitive response.     

Biases and Strategic Behaviour in Performance Evaluation: The Case of the FIFA's best soccer player award

In this paper, we study biases in performance evaluation by analysing votes for the FIFA Ballon d'Or award for best soccer player, the most prestigious award in the sport. Our findings suggest that ‘similarity’ biases are substantial, with jury members disproportionately voting for candidates from their own country, own national team, own continent and own league team. Further, we show that the impact of such biases on the total number of votes a candidate receives is fairly limited and hence is likely to affect the outcome of this competition only on rare occasions where the difference in quality between the leading candidates is small. Finally, analysing the incidence of ‘strategic voting’, we find jury members who vote for one leading candidate are more, rather than less, likely to also give points to his main competitor, as compared with neutral jury members. We discuss the implications of our findings for the design of awards, elections and performance evaluation systems in general and for the FIFA Ballon d'Or award in particular.     

Extrinsic psychosocial stressors and workers’ productivity: impact of employee age and industry experience

ABSTRACT

This paper aims to explore the impact of employee age and industrial experience on extrinsic psychosocial stressors that may influence the productivity of workers. Using an integrated theoretical approach, this study examines four extrinsic psychosocial stressors, i.e. work environment, infrastructure, economy and country environment. The data were collected from Pakistani construction industry through a questionnaire survey approach. The study’s findings show that workers having diverse ages did not agree over several work environments and economy-related psychosocial stressors, whereas workers having diverse industrial experiences were in disagreement over numerous country environment and economy-related psychosocial stressors. The study concludes that firms need to mitigate the work environment related psychosocial stressors in young workers, such as, over congestion and inaccessibility to different tools, high temperature and workspace atmosphere. Moreover, organizational and governmental support are direly needed to overcome the country environment-related psychosocial stressors of less experienced workers who are more susceptible to these stressors due to the complex organizational culture, occurrence of natural disasters and unfavourable economic and political state of the country.     

A Measure of Trade Induced Adjustment in Volume and Quality Space

In this paper we contribute to the literature on the measurement of international trade flows. Specifically, we combine changes in the volume and quality in matched trade changes to present a simple new index together with a geometric framework that can be used to visualise changes in quality and volume simultaneously. We illustrate the usefulness of our simple extension with data for trade between Malaysia and China between 1994 and 2004.     

TRIBUTE: Trip-based urban transportation emissions model for municipalities

This research aims at developing modeling and scenario-comparison tools to explore the impacts of various transportation and land use planning policies on changing travel behavior and eventually greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. A Trip-Based Urban Transportation Emissions (TRIBUTE) model is developed. Data required for TRIBUTE comes from household travel surveys and emissions inventories, which is a major advantage in cases where a detailed transportation network model is unavailable. TRIBUTE is composed of two main parts: a mode choice model and an emissions forecasting model. The mode choice model is responsible for estimating modal shares of alternative modes of travel in response to changes in personal, modal, and land use attributes. The emissions forecasting model translates the modal shares into vehicle kilometers traveled, and subsequently GHG emissions. TRIBUTE is a macroscopic model intended to assist municipalities evaluate alternative transportation and land use policy scenarios and eventually select the one(s) that help them meet their future GHG emission targets. This paper reports on the conceptual framework of the developed model and presents a case study.     

Is Price Transmission in the Indian Pulses Market Asymmetric?

Journal of Quantitative Economics - Pulses form an integral part of the Indian diet. In the recent past, the domestic wholesale-retail price differential has risen rapidly. The retail prices...     

The Role of Middle Class in Economic Development: What Do Cross‐Country Data Show?

This paper investigates the channels through which the middle class may matter for consumption growth. Using several different middle‐class measures and a panel of 105 developing countries spanning the period 1985–2013, we find that a larger middle class influences consumption growth primarily through higher levels of human capital accumulation. There is also a significant direct effect of middle‐class size on consumption growth, which is more pronounced in the latter half of the sample, the 2000–2013 period.