Business-to-Consumer Harassment,Unfair Commercial Practices Directive and the UK—A Distorted Picture of Uniform Harmonization?

The Unfair Commercial Practices Directive 2005 (UCPD) attempts to achieve a full harmonization of the rules against unfair business-to-consumer (B2C) practices. However, this paper argues that the UCPD cannot resolve disparities in national laws because of a lack of clarity of concepts and the existence of uncertain substantive and enforcement provisions. This is demonstrated by the Ferguson v British Gas case which extended the loosely formulated UK Protection from Harassment Act 1997 (PHA) to B2C harassment cases covered by the UCPD. Ferguson highlights contradictions in the approaches of the two systems which suggest loopholes in the UCPD’s full harmonization goal. As well as proposing the amendment of the PHA, the paper suggests that complete harmonization requires that issues of clarity of concepts, definitions, liability, ancillary tort claims, and enforcement rights which create room for creative interpretations and lack of uniformity should be addressed. A one-stop legislation approach to transposition can also improve harmonization.     

Deonance and Distrust: Motivated Third Party Information Seeking Following Disclosure of an Agent’s Unethical Behavior

This article explores the hypothesis that third parties are motivated to seek information about agents who have behaved unethically in the past, even if the agent and available information are irrelevant to the third parties’ goals and interests. We explored two possible motives for this information seeking behavior: deonance, or the motive to care about ethics and justice simply for the sake of ethics and justice, and distrust-based threat monitoring. Participants in a consumer decision task were found to seek out information about an agent who had behaved unethically even when the agent was explicitly excluded from the task; there were no intentions to purchase from the agent; performance expectations for the agent’s product were low; the information that could be sought was non-diagnostic, redundant or irrelevant to an ethical judgment; and alternatives in the market offered as good or better value as the unethical agent. Critically, this information seeking took place even when the observer could disengage from and was not vulnerable to the agent. The findings are discussed in terms of third party information seeking and its effects on ethical behavior in the marketplace.     

Public knowledge,private knowledge: the intellectual capital of entrepreneurs

This paper focuses on the innovative actions of entrepreneurs, namely their tendency to reveal the intellectual capital that results from their research efforts either in the form of public knowledge (publications) or private knowledge (patents). Using data collected by the National Research Council within the US National Academies from their survey of firm’s that received National Institutes of Health phase II Small Business Innovation Research awards between 1992 and 2001, we find that entrepreneurs with academic backgrounds are more likely to publish their intellectual capital compared with entrepreneurs with business backgrounds, who are more likely to patent their intellectual capital. We also find that, when universities are research partners, their presence complements the tendencies of academic entrepreneurs but does not offset those of business entrepreneurs.     

Candidate gene studies and the quest for the entrepreneurial gene

Candidate gene studies of human behavior are gaining interest in economics and entrepreneurship research. Performing and interpreting these studies is not straightforward because the selection of candidates influences the interpretation of the results. As an example, Nicolaou et al. (Small Bus Econ 36:151?C155, 2011) report a significant association between a common genetic variant in the DRD3 gene and the tendency to be an entrepreneur. We fail to replicate this finding using a much larger, independent dataset. In addition, we discuss the candidate gene approach and give suggestions to avoid the publication of false positives.     

Industry changes in technology and complementary assets and the creation of high-growth firms

This study uses employment data to examine why some industries host more new high-growth firms than others. Using a unique data base of 201 industries over a 15-year period, we find that increases in the proportion of employment of scientists and engineers in industries are positively associated with counts of fast-growing new firms; however, we do not detect a relationship between fluctuations in the proportion of employment in sales and production occupations and counts of fast-growing new firms. The findings suggest that technological innovation is an important determinant of entrepreneurial opportunity. Further, they suggest that private new firms are an important means of organizing commercial innovation and that new firms may be less constrained by complementary assets than has been previously understood.     

The Emergence of Individual Knowledge in a Group Setting: Mitigating Cognitive Fallacies

Research in psychology has found that subjects regularly exhibit a conjunction fallacy in probability judgments. Additional research has led to the finding of other fallacies in probability judgment, including disjunction and conditional fallacies. Such analyses of judgments are critical because of the substantial amount of probability judgment done in accounting, business and organizational settings. However, most previous research has been conducted in the environment of a single decision maker. Since business and other organizational environments also employ groups, it is important to determine the impact of groups on such cognitive fallacies. This paper finds that groups substantially mitigate the impact of probability judgment fallacies among the sample of subjects investigated. The key finding of this paper is the analysis of the apparent manner in which groups make such decisions. A statistical analysis, based on a binomial distribution, suggests that groups investigated here did not use consensus. Instead, if any one member of the group has correct knowledge about the probability relationships, then the group uses that knowledge and does not exhibit fallacy in probability judgment. Having a computational model of the group decision making process provides a basis for developing computational models that can be used to simulate “mirror worlds” of reality or model decision making in real world settings.     

Deriving joint space positioning maps from consumer preference ratings

Joint space multidimensional scaling maps are often utilized for positioning analyses and are estimated on survey samples of consumer preferences, choices, considerations, or intentions so as to provide a concise spatial depiction of the competitive landscape including relevant dimensions or attributes, competing brands, and consumers in the same joint space representation. Care has to be given concerning the underlying scale properties of such survey data so as not to distort the resulting joint space positioning map. We present a new joint space multidimensional scaling procedure for positioning analyses for displaying the structure in such survey data when such common ordered successive category measurement scales such as Likert, Edwards, semantic differential, etc., are employed. We present the technical details of this stochastic ordered preference multidimensional scaling vector model as well as the maximum likelihood estimation-based algorithm devised for parameter estimation. Favorable comparisons are made with several existent multidimensional scaling methods in representing the internal structure for such data in marketing positioning studies. An actual commercial positioning application concerning large sports utility vehicles consideration to buy judgments is presented with predictive validation comparisons with other multidimensional scaling joint space procedures.     

Sustainability and consumption

We consider the implications of the three pillars of sustainability (environment, economy and social justice) on consumption in a wealthy country. Building a theoretical model that includes consumers, business, government, the environment, and economic and political relations between nations, we explore how sustainability should affect the consumption behavior of consumers, charitable aid to poorer countries, and responsible environmental practices by businesses. Our model enables us to provide normative implications for consumers, society and business. Importantly, we assume that all stakeholders will optimize their self-interest, and that altruism will only partly explain behavior consistent with sustainability. Among the more non-obvious findings are that (1) the poorer the poor countries are, the less the rich countries should consume, (2) the more sensitive the global political climate is to economic inequity between the rich and poor nations, the less the rich countries should consume, and (3) if aid to poor countries is effective enough, then the more materialistic the society is, the more charitable aid it should give. We also confirm a number of more intuitive findings, such as that business should use more green technology as the taxes on pollution and/or efficiency of green technology increase, and the more resource-intensive consumption is, the less consumers should consume. Taken as a whole, the findings imply that societal consumption patterns should be sensitive to aspects of environmental impact and social justice, even if altruistic motivations are absent.     

Market-focused sustainability: market orientation plus!

The concept of sustainability is increasingly being addressed theoretically by scholars and practically by managers and policymakers. With this growing focus on sustainability efforts, marketing is in a unique position to elevate its focus from managing relationships with customers to strategically managing a broader set of marketplace issues. Overall, an organization achieves market-based sustainability to the extent that it strategically aligns itself with the market-oriented product needs and wants of customers and the interests of multiple stakeholders concerned about social responsibility issues involving economic, environmental, and social dimensions. To set the stage for marketing’s inquiry into sustainability efforts, I briefly review the concept of sustainability, compare it with corporate social responsibility, bring in stakeholders, argue for the notion of “market orientation plus,” and consider the possibility that the notion of what sustainability encompasses is converging in the marketing literature.     

Worth waiting for: increasing satisfaction by making consumers wait

A truism in the marketing literature, and among many marketing practitioners, is that requiring consumers to wait negatively impacts quality evaluations, purchase intentions and a range of other important outcomes. However, it is also true that consumer waiting or queuing has historically been considered from an operations perspective. The present research takes a different approach and examines waits in the context of their ability to function as a signal of quality. Four experiments demonstrate a required wait can indeed signal quality to consumers and increase, rather than decrease, both purchase intentions and actual experienced satisfaction. Three moderators of this effect are examined: preexisting knowledge, consumption motivations, and the extent to which quality is difficult to objectively determine. The results suggest in situations where quality is important, unknown or ambiguous, managers may increase consumer satisfaction by making consumers wait.