Gambling Taxation: A Comment

This comment demonstrates that the application of the GST to gambling represents a shift from a commodity tax to an ad valorem tax. Theory and evidence suggest the move is likely to be welfare enhancing.     

Pleasantly Plump: Offsetting Negative Obesity Stereotypes for Frontline Service Employees

Obesity is described as the fastest growing public health challenge facing developed nations (Prentice, 2006). This research introduces the topic of obesity to the retailing literature by examining the interplay between obesity in frontline employees and customer evaluations of service transactions. Baseline effects are established that show customers evaluate employees and firms more negatively if the frontline worker is obese compared to average weight. Two follow-up studies identify means by which firms may offset the negative obesity effects. Specifically, signaling theory is drawn upon in Study 1 to justify the introduction of observable quality cues as a means to offset negative stereotypes. Results indicate that the presence of unambiguous quality cues attenuate unfavorable judgments of the obese employee and the affiliated retail store. In Study 2, a countervailing, jovial stereotype is primed as a means to offset the more prominent negative ones. Retail managers can use this research as a means to understand an important caveat to frontline service evaluations and as the basis for managing a prominent negative stereotype.     

A voice from the silent masses: An exploratory and comparative analysis of noncomplainers

This study used a critical incident survey with both qualitative and quantitative sections to investigate noncomplainers. Noncomplainers are customers who experience service failures but do not voice complaints. The qualitative study (n=149) explored reasons why customers do not complain after experiencing service failures. In the quantitative study (n=530), two kinds of noncomplainers who either (a) received organization-initiated recoveries or(b) exited the encounters without recoveries were compared with three kinds of complaining customers who received (a) satisfactory recoveries, (b) dissatisfactory recoveries, or (c) no recoveries. The five customer groups were compared across repurchase intentions, negative affect, perceived regret, and intentions to engage in negative word of mouth. The results of the comparative analyses challenge existing views of noncomplainers’ repurchase intentions and negative outcome levels. Clay M. Voorhees (voorhees@bus.msu.edu) is an assistant professor of marketing at Michigan State University. His research interests are in the areas of service decision making, consumer complaining behavior, customer equity, and the development and application of innovative research methods to service decision making models. Clay’s research has been published inJournal of the Academy of Marketing Science, Journal of Service Research, andJournal of Services Marketing. Michael (“Mike”) K. Brady (mbrady@cob.fsu.edu) is an associate professor of marketing and director of the doctoral program at Florida State University. His research interests are in the areas of managing the service decision-making process, managing service failure, and the strategic ramifications of branding for service firms. Mike’s research has been published in theJournal of Marketing, Journal of Service Research, Journal of Retailing, Psychology & Marketing, Journal of Business Research, Journal of Services Marketing, International Journal of Service Industry Management, and other outlets. Mike has won both the M. Wayne Delozier Award for Best Conference Paper at the Academy of Marketing Science Conference and the Steven J. Shaw Award for Best Conference Paper at the Society for Marketing Advances Conference. Mike serves on the editorial review boards of theJournal of the Academy of Marketing Science, Journal of Service Research, andJournal of Retailing and was named an Outstanding Reviewer by theJournal of Retailing in 2004. David M. Horowitz (dmh03@fsu.edu) is a marketing doctoral candidate at Florida State University whose interests include services marketing, cognitive anthropology research methods, and marketing and public policy issues. He completed his MBA at San Diego State University and holds a BS in industrial engineering from Stanford University. David’s research has been published in theJournal of the Academy of Marketing Science and the proceedings of national and regional conferences.     

Impacts of FFW on nutrition in rural Kenya

Assessing the impacts of Food-for-Work (FFW) on human capital formation depends on understanding the specific nutritional contributions of FFW to the overall diet of FFW participant households. However, empirical studies in this area are very scant. This paper is an attempt to fill such gap. The primary objectives are to measure the magnitude of the FFW contribution to participants' nutritional status. Primary data collected from a random sample of 300 farm-households in the Rift Valley Province of Kenya are used. A linear programming model is used to estimate the shadow prices of nutrients. These prices are then entered into an econometric model of consumer demand for nutrients in order to estimate own and cross-price elasticities for each nutrient component. The results indicate that FFW significantly improves the nutritional status of FFW participant households. More specifically, participants experienced an implicit income gain, which resulted in a significant nutritional improvement. The poorest FFW participant households exhibited even higher nutritional gains (32.46%) than those participants from relatively higher income groups. FFW participant households showed a 90% higher propensity to spend on nutrients than the non-FFW participants. The findings of this study are expected to assist in the design of future ‘targeted’ food aid projects.     

How to give and receive: An exploratory study of charitable hybrids

Most charitable organizations can only rely on appeals to purely philanthropic motivations in attempting to solicit donor contributions. The decision processes exhibited by the targets of charitable solicitations are very different from those the same individuals use in making daily purchase decisions. Although both charitable giving and purchase contexts have been studied extensively, there are numerous organizations that require targeted customers to use a decision process that merges elements of both domains. Charitable hybrids, such as museums and universities, are such organizations, supplementing traditional revenue streams by soliciting charitable contributions, thus evoking a complex consumer decision process. For these firms, giving good service may yield an added benefit of maximizing charitable contributions received. Drawing on both the services and charitable giving literatures, a model of the consumer decision process is developed in this hybrid situation. In an exploratory test of the model, initial evidence is found that both classes of effects have significant influence on donors' intentions to give. However, in charitable giving contexts, organizational identification appears to fill a central role in influencing decision outcomes, which diminishes the role of satisfaction. The findings provide provocative evidence that further research in this setting is warranted. © 2002 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.     

On the methodology of the holistic experiment: An approach to the conceptualization of large-scale social experiments

Presupposing Churchman's and Ackoff's definitions of a system, the notion of a holistic experiment is defined. A holistic experiment is an experiment on a nonseparable system for the purpose of determining the properties (measures of effectiveness) of the systems components. The basic problem of a holistic methodology is that of conceptualization: (1) the conceptualization of the systems “components,” (2) the conceptualization of the “teleological” standard that defines the systems components; and (3) the assessment of the degree of systems “separability.” Various guidelines for conceptualization are offered. These guidelines derive from such disparate disciplines of knowledge as the sociology of knowledge, the psychology of science, the philosophy of science, law, epistemology, ethics, and systems science. It is argued that the problem of defining an adequate methodology for holistic systems constitutes an “ill-structured” problem. The methodology for dealing with ill-structured problems is not the same as the methodology for dealing with well-structured problems. To date, the methodology of the management sciences has been overwhelmingly preoccupied with well-structured problems. Large-scale social experiments require a fundamentally different approach.     

Reading between the lines: An empirical examination of qualitative attributes of financial analysts’ reports

This paper examines whether two qualitative attributes of financial analysts’ reports, detail and tone, are significant in explaining how the market responds to analysts’ reports, after controlling for the information contained in the reports’ quantitative summary measures. Report detail is hypothesized to reflect the level of effort expended by the analyst in preparing the report, and therefore the usefulness of their intrinsic firm value estimates. Report tone is predicted to signal the analyst’s underlying sentiment regarding the firm and may be used to assess the extent to which analysts’ conflicts of interest interfere with the mapping of firm value estimates into stock recommendations. Consistent with these hypotheses, we find that the tone of financial analyst reports contain significant information content incremental to the reports’ earnings forecasts and recommendations, and report complexity (one component of report detail) helps explain cross-sectional variation in the market’s response to the reports’ recommendations.     

Measuring the diffusion of housing prices across space and over time

How fast and how long (and to what magnitude) does a change in housing prices in one region affect its neighbors? In this paper, I apply a time series technique for measuring impulse response functions from local projections to a spatial autoregressive model of housing prices. For a dynamic panel of California counties, the data reveal that the diffusion of regional housing prices across space lasts up to two and half years. This result, and the econometric techniques employed, should be of interest not only to housing and regional economists, but to a variety of applied econometricians as well. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.