Organic Food at the Point of Purchase: Understanding Inconsistency in Consumer Choice Patterns

The organic food category, while still small in terms of world food production, has continued to grow in many markets in the developed world. This article focuses on understanding the barriers and facilitators to purchasing organic food at the final hurdle: the point of purchase (POP). A qualitative study has identified seven factors that influence buyer behavior at the POP, and these are consumer intention to purchase organic food when entering the retail outlet; habit; availability; false assumptions; visibility and access of organic food; visual and olfactory cues; and price. These can often be the final hurdle to consumers choosing (or not) organic food at the POP.     

Innovation speed under uncertainty and competition

Innovation speed is widely considered to be a key factor for a firm's ability to maintain competitive advantage. Primarily, empirical evidence has found contradictory interdependencies regarding the role of innovation speed. The prevailing proposition of “the faster the better” has been challenged by results of empirical studies heavily depending on the methodological setup used. In contrast, we propose a model of the complete innovation process to study innovation speed under uncertainty and competition. We find that higher market uncertainty speeds up innovation and encourages firms to innovate incrementally. Strong competition tends to reduce innovation speed and encourages rather radical innovation.     

When will the longest expansion end?

Business Economics - What might cause the current expansion to come to an end? Without a negative shock, expansions go on and on. The economy is now enjoying even faster growth due to the tax cuts,...     

Social assistance and dignity: South African women's experiences of the child support grant

Many women interact with the South African social security system in relation to the Child Support Grant (CSG), which is social assistance payable for children living with low-income caregivers. This paper explores women's accounts of how the CSG serves to protect and respect dignity, a foundational value in the South African Constitution. Drawing from focus groups and in-depth interviews with female CSG recipients of working age, it is argued that whilst the experience of using the CSG does protect dignity in certain important respects, other aspects including the application process, the small amount of the grant and negative discourses associated with the status of being a CSG recipient were experienced by many as erosive of dignity.     

The interplay of corporate entrepreneurship,environmental orientation,and performance in clean‐tech firms—A double‐edged sword

Clean‐tech innovations are an important driver in solving global issues such as climate change and for the sustainable development of economies around the world. Whereas a large part of the literature focuses on clean‐tech ventures, less is known on corporate entrepreneurship, that is, entrepreneurial behavior in established firms and its relation to sustainability. This paper extends the sustainable entrepreneurship debate to corporate entrepreneurship, which represents a fruitful avenue to further developing clean technologies. We focus particularly on clean‐tech firms' organizational preparedness for corporate entrepreneurship (OPCE), that is, how well a firm's structures and processes are set for entrepreneurial activities. On the basis of contingency theory, this study investigates how the level of OPCE influences the environmental and financial performance of clean‐tech firms and whether their environmental orientation affects these relationships. Building on data from 103 firms, we find support for a positive effect of OPCE on both environmental and financial performance. Both effects are stronger the higher the external environmental orientation. In contrast, the leverage of internal environmental orientation is not equally positive. Our study reveals that the effect of OPCE on financial performance diminishes for firms that are more strongly driven by an internal than an external environmental orientation.     

Marketing firm performance: When does marketing lead to financial gains?

The research investigated whether economic context and prior financial reinforcement/punishment moderate the effectiveness of marketing behavior in generating gains for the firm. An experiment with a longitudinal design was conducted using 1,759 companies from 2000 to 2017. The results demonstrate that marketing is effective in gaining market share when the country's economy is growing. In contrast, it increases return on assets and Tobin's Q when the country's economy is in recession, this increase being maximized when the company was financially reinforced. The study helps explain the circumstances in which marketing activities boost firms' financial gains.     

The decision game: a serious game approach to understanding environmental risk management decisions

Abstract

Here we describe the implementation of an experimental research tool called the Decision Game that we used to collect data on household flood risk management decisions. Participants using this tool play an interactive game that involves making household decisions about place of residence and a variety of household expenditures, including spending on flood insurance and private flood risk mitigation. Participants also answer survey questions before and after playing the game; the pre-game survey collected demographic information, and the post-game survey collected information about participant experiences with flooding and flood mitigation. Online and face-to-face participants showed similar engagement with the experiment, and most participants appeared to have made deliberate and considered decisions about risk mitigation. Online study participants had similar responses to those who participated in person, although face-to-face participants seemed slightly more likely to mitigate against risk. Overall, participants in this research were younger, more educated and more likely to rent a home than the average Canadian. Serious games may be useful for augmenting existing data gathering strategies used in understanding environmental decision making, particularly for rare catastrophic events for which stated preference surveys may be less informative. Serious games allow for sharing a mixture of information with study participants, including maps, video clips, text and even immersive 3D experiences, and can be administered online to increase participation levels. Future research will consider longer duration online experiments and more immersive interaction frameworks.     

Predicting future purchases with the Poisson log-normal model

The negative binomial distribution (NBD) has been widely used in marketing for modeling purchase frequency counts, particularly in packaged goods contexts. A key managerially relevant use of this model is Conditional Trend Analysis (CTA)—a method of benchmarking future sales utilizing the NBD conditional expectation. CTA allows brand managers to identify whether the sales change in a second period is accounted for by previous non-, light, or heavy buyers of the brand. Although a useful tool, the conditional prediction of the NBD suffers from a bias: it under predicts what the period-one non-buyer class will do in period two and over predicts the sales contribution of existing buyers. In addition, the NBD's assumption of a gamma-distributed mean purchase rate lacks theoretical support—it is not possible to explain why a gamma distribution should hold. This paper therefore proposes an alternative model using a log-normal distribution in place of the gamma distribution, hence creating a Poisson log-normal (PLN) distribution. The PLN distribution has a stronger theoretical grounding than the NBD as it has a natural interpretation relying on the central limit theorem. Empirical analysis of brands in multiple categories shows that the PLN distribution gives better predictions than the NBD.     

How Adult Attachment Styles Relate to Perceived Psychological Contract Breach and Affective Organizational Commitment

The current study examines the relationship between adult attachment style and both perceived psychological contract breach and affective organizational commitment in a sample of college students with employment experience. Attachment style is argued to be an individual difference factor that affects how an individual perceives organizational events based on theory and existing empirical research related to adult attachment style. Individuals with insecure attachment styles were predicted to perceive more psychological contract breach and have lower levels of affective organizational commitment. The results reveal that individuals with higher levels of preoccupied and dismissive attachment styles perceived higher levels of psychological contract breach, and preoccupied attachment style significantly and negatively relates to affective organizational commitment. The relationship between attachment style and psychological contract dimensions was stronger for relational than transactional contract dimensions. Evidence is also found that perceived psychological contract breach mediates the relationship between preoccupied attachment style and affective commitment. Future potential research directions are described. The implications of these findings for managerial practice is discussed.