Russian workers’ experiences with and perceptions of sexual harassment severity

As the reach of global business operations increases, cultural context will likely influence the nature and amount of sexual harassment workers experience. Surprisingly, little is known about sexual harassment in Russia, an attractive target for expanding companies. To address this gap in the literature, we examine Russian workers’ perceptions of sexual harassment severity through the lens of cultural context. In particular, we examine the sexual harassment severity perceptions from the perspective of both targets and perpetrators. Results indicate that as targets of sexual harassment, Russian women and men held similar sexual harassment severity perceptions. However, as perpetrators, Russian women reported perceiving the harassment they committed as being less severe than the reports of Russian men. Further, among both targets and perpetrators, Russian women held less permissive sexual attitudes than Russian men, with this difference mediating the relationship between participant sex and perceived sexual harassment severity: women perceived greater severity than men because women hold less permissive sexual attitudes. Implications for research, practice, and the role of national culture in shaping the social construction of sexual harassment are discussed.     

How virtual brand community traces may increase fan engagement in brand pages

Brand pages in social media are a great way to foster consumer gathering around a brand, but it can be challenging to keep fans engaged and coming back to see updated content. Brands with millions of fans on Facebook have seen organic reach fall below 2% of their base. In this article, we describe how the creation of virtual brand communities can help brand managers increase fan engagement. We suggest the steps, conditions, advantages, and limitations involved in nurturing a brand page as an online social gathering that assumes some of the characteristics of a virtual brand community. The results of our study show that a brand page can have some of the characteristics of a virtual brand community—topical information exchange, identity communication, and establishment and internalization of cultural norms. We also show the importance of having celebrities among fans in order to foster social interactions and legitimate social practices on brand pages.     

Consumer cooperatives as an alternative form of governance: The case of the broadband industry

With a growing number of consumer cooperatives in non-agrarian industries such as energy and broadband, there is a need to better understand their emergence as a viable form of governance. In this context, the paper uses Mikami’s (2010) model on consumer cooperatives to explain their emergence as a result of their ability to generate additional equity financing through the membership market. It focuses on the motivations of consumers to financially contribute to a cooperative by examining the risks and benefits associated with the investment. Based on a survey of 759 consumers, it links their motivations for joining a cooperative to different forms of risks and benefits associated with the investment. It shows that the risks related to cost sharing and switching costs are important determinants for consumers. Other factors that affected the likelihood of joining a cooperative were expected benefits with respect to user network externalities and infrastructure gains.     

Pure meat – Public perceptions of risk reduction strategies in meat production

Experience has shown that both the assessment and implementation of new technologies in food production are challenged by negative assessments of the technologies by the public. This article seeks to deepen our understanding of the concerns that may underlie negative attitudes to various kinds of risk reduction strategy in meat production, with the aim of distinguishing between forms of risk reduction in terms of their acceptability. The paper reports the result of a focus-group study. Six focus groups with Danish citizens (N: 5–9) were conducted during May 2006. The design of the groups took a bottom-up approach and included elements of meat quality, meat safety and risk reduction strategies. The study shows the dilemma risk reduction presents to members of the public. On the one hand, people want safe meat; on the other, the study showed that with the exception of hygiene practices, people generally have an aversion to risk reduction strategies. Some variation was found, however, in the rejection of the strategies. Thus, more acceptable strategies are characterised by a low degree of technological interference, and by being close to the consumer’s experience in everyday life and/or familiar to the participants’ picture of meat production. It is also important that the strategy does not alter the quality of the end-product (meat) in an unfavourable way. The implications of the results and the inherent dilemma for meat safety policy formation are discussed.     

A neural network based price sensitive recommender model to predict customer choices based on price effect

The impact of price and price changes should not be ignored while designing algorithms for predicting customer choice. Consumer preferences should be modeled with consideration of price effects. Businesses need to consider for efficient prediction of an individual's purchase behaviour. Personalized recommendation systems have been studied with machine learning algorithms. However, the price-aware personalized recommendation has received little attention. In this paper, we attempt to capture insightful economic results considered in the marketing and economics disciplines by employing modern machine learning architecture for predicting customer choice in a large-scale supermarket context. We extract personalized price sensitivities and examine their importance in consumer behaviour. The employed data collected from a supermarket chain in Germany consists of implicit feedback based on customer-product interactions and the price of every interaction. We propose a two-pathway matrix factorization (2way-MF) model that is price-aware and tries to memorize customer-product interaction's implicit feedback. The proposed models achieve better model performance than standard Matrix Factorization models widely used in the industry. The approach was re-validated with data from supermarket chain in Taiwan. Other industries can adopt the proposed framework of modeling customer's preferences based on price sensitivity. We suggest that further research and analyses could help understand the cross-price elasticities.     

Refining e-shoppers’ perceived risks: Development and validation of new measurement scale

Due to the rapid expansion of perceived e-shopping risks, and highly isolated and inconsistent presentation of literature about this concept, understanding e-shopper's behavior has become more difficult. In this regard, this study brings together different views, evidences and facts about perceived e-shopping risks from both scholars and practitioners of South-East Asian and Western countries. It then interprets the information in the form of a new scale which offers more adequacy, assemblage and uniformity than the existing models of perceived risks of e-shoppers. The new scale of construct has 11 dimensions comprising a pool of 38 items, which has been empirically validated through the data collected from 537 Malaysian e-shoppers. The dimensions are: high price risk, deception risk, transaction failure risk, dissimilar product risk, incapable service risk, illegitimate product risk, isolation risk, unease risk, displeasure risk, prior-purchase time delays risk, and post-purchase time delays risk. The theoretical and managerial implications and research limitations have also been discussed.     

Interaction between message framing and consumers’ prior subjective knowledge regarding food safety issues

This study analyzed the interaction between message frames and recipients’ prior knowledge. The hypothesis is that less prior consumer knowledge will result in a larger framing effect. That is, if the subjective knowledge of the public is low, then the controversy created by mass media regarding a specific food-related event will be larger. Empirical results show that message frame has an influence on college students’ purchasing intentions. College students showed distinct responses in purchasing intention based on different headlines and different amounts of information within articles. The results further suggest that the framing effect depends not only on message frames, but also on the prior knowledge of the message recipient. Those who have less knowledge have larger variation in their purchase intention when responding to different message frames. This suggests that people with less knowledge are more likely to panic due to mass media reports regarding a food hazard issue. More informed consumers have less dramatic responses to food safety issues compared to less informed people.     

Meanings of Food among Polish and American Young Women

Food carries different meanings across cultures and times. This study aimed to explore the meanings of food among young women in Poland and the United States using a qualitative approach. The findings show that, in both countries, women associate food with health, pleasure, and socializing, but overall Polish women are less emotional about food. More specifically, in the United States, women associate food with love, their identities, and have more conflictual feelings about food, whereas in Poland women associate food with creativity. The study discusses marketing implications of the results.     

Exploring the elements of consumer nostalgia in retailing: Evidence from a content analysis of retailer collages

This article focuses on consumer nostalgia in the retailing environment to identify the types of nostalgic memories evoked by remembering a retailer and the elements associated with such nostalgic memories. A projective technique involving collage construction enabled informants to reflect their feelings about, memories of, experiences with, or relationships with a retailer that they have selected. The findings uncovered three distinct types of retailer-related consumer nostalgic memories and six elements that comprise retailer-related consumer nostalgic memories. The findings of the study offer a comprehensive understanding of retailer consumer nostalgia. Theoretical and managerial implications are discussed.