Brand Attachment and Consumer Emotional Response to Unethical Firm Behavior

Attaching consumers to a brand is a cornerstone of relationship marketing as attachment increases loyalty. This research investigates another possible benefit of attachment, its potential and limits for shielding brands from firms’ ethical missteps. Merging motivated reasoning and attachment theories, two studies focus on how brand attachment influences consumer judgments of firm ethics and the emotional and behavioral consequences developing from those. A field study indicates that attachment attenuates judgments of unethical behavior, contributes to emotional ambivalence, and affects purchase intentions. A subsequent experiment corroborates these findings and shows that the buffering role of attachment is limited to conditions when the information about firm ethics is moderately rather than extremely negative. Implications focus on advancing research on ethics and emotional ambivalence in consumer brand relationships and on managerial implications.     

Import-Price Uncertainty, Production Decisions, and Relative Factor Shares

The effects of import-price uncertainty on factor income in Switzerland are estimated. The production-theory approach is used to derive the import demand function from an expected utility maximization problem, treating imports as an input to the technology. The model is also used to test for risk aversion and to assess the impact of uncertainty on the volume of imports and gross output. Evidence is found that, for most years, labor has been relatively more vulnerable to uncertainty than has capital.