中国轻度通货膨胀有利于边疆经济发展

中国实行市场经济后取得的各项成绩使世界震惊.随着社会的发展,各种不同方式的通货膨胀也在所难免,特别是边疆地区由于受到区域性的经济、产业、思想认识和政策的滞后影响,发展速度相对缓慢.边疆地区和发达地区相比较,适当的通货膨胀有助于该地区经济发展.     

Teddy bears

This is a story of an iconic toy, the Teddy Bear. What makes Teddy Bears so special? The paper ponders this question by way of reflecting the author's lifelong relation to her own Teddy. The result of this reflection is that it is Teddies’ cuteness, bearness and softness as well as their unique role as intimate bedmates that makes them so special. Altogether, it seems that the secret behind Teddy Bears’ success is that they manifest and embody human vulnerability.     

Despite unethical retail store practices,consumers at the bottom of the pyramid continue to be loyal

Research in the area of retail store loyalty agrees that consumers reward retailers when they are satisfied with its products, services, and its image. Moreover, one would agree that if the retailer engages in unethical practices, the customer would quickly defect and even engage in word of mouth to influence others to defect. But this might not be the case universally. One consumer group that continues to be loyal to a retailer despite widespread unethical practices is the poor. A growing stream of research under the label of bottom of pyramid (BoP) and subsistence consumers has increasingly pointed out the market attractiveness of this segment to multinational companies. These poor consumers are individuals who earn approximately $2 per day. In this paper, we explain the nature of widespread unethical retail practices prevalent amongst the neighborhood retail stores (or kirana as they are referred to in India) that serve the BoP consumer, types of patronage behaviors, and the reasons ‘why’ these consumers continue to support the kirana store. The data for this paper comes from a qualitative study conducted with 58 urban poor consumers in India. This study carries significant implications for both domestic and multinational companies that market fast-moving consumer goods in the BoP market.     

Nostalgic collections

Nostalgia has been transformed by the consumer market. With the emergence of ephemeral novelty goods – popular music, TV serials, kitsch, automobiles, and especially playthings – nostalgia has become less about identification with past communities, ideologies, or regimes than associated with fast-changing consumer goods, especially those encountered in childhood and youth. Reappropriating those goods later in life in nostalgic collecting has become a big business, producing narrow cohorts of consumers sharing common consumer memories. I explore this phenomenon through the history of collecting toys, dolls, and Disney collectibles in the USA.     

Curry

Marketplace icons are often markers of transnational transactions engendered by commercialization and dominance of the West. Curry as a marketplace icon helps to identify these constituents of iconicity. This article briefly examines the historical roots of curry or spicy Indian food and its implication in the project of colonialism. Curry as a signifier of Indian food was invented in British colonial narratives and shaped by commercial interests and racial prejudices. Because of the way forces of colonization and commercialization create international circulation of goods and ideas through globalization, curry as a marketplace icon signifies hegemony and global hierarchies that shape ideas of consumption and markets.     

The roles of alternative data and machine learning in fintech lending: Evidence from the LendingClub consumer platform

There have been concerns about the use of alternative data sources by fintech lenders. We compare loans made by LendingClub and similar loans that were originated by banks. The correlations between the rating grades (assigned by LendingClub) and the borrowers’ FICO scores declined from about 80% (for loans originated in 2007) to about 35% for recent vintages (originated in 2014–2015), indicating that nontraditional data (not already accounted for in the FICO scores) have been increasingly used by fintech lenders. The rating grades perform well in predicting loan default. The use of alternative data has allowed some borrowers who would have been classified as subprime by traditional criteria to be slotted into “better” loan grades, allowing them to obtain lower priced credit.     

Whiskey: marketplace icon

Brands are potent and efficient vehicles to diffuse and reproduce ideologies. This article revisits over a decade of research on Jack Daniel’s as an iconic brand, and provides a behind the scenes look at the process of researching cultural brands. It describes whiskey as a marketplace icon that reflects particular cultural ideologies, and updates the Jack Daniel’s story in the context of the craft liquor movement. Iconic brands, cultural icons, and marketplace icons are discussed. Further distinctions between iconicity at the category, segment and brand level are made. The article is transcribed and edited from an interview with Consumption Markets & Culture editor Jonathan Schroeder in June 2015.     

Rock and roll

As a means of demonstrating rock and roll’s enduring iconicity, the author offers a personal narrative of a relationship he had with a well-known rock group. This narrative is then used as data to locate four sites of rock and roll iconicity: the private, the public, the communal, and the kinetic. A fifth site of iconicity, the nostalgic, is identified as an inevitable outcome of the first four. The author concludes that rock and roll achieves its iconicity in the marketplace by offering a text against which consumers can monitor changes in their own preferences and behaviors.     

High heels

Regarded by some as women's power tool and by others as instruments of torture, high heels constitute one of the most polarizing marketplace icons today. Why did the noblemen's footwear of choice become one of the most celebrated icons of femininity, and how? This article attempts to shed light on these questions by focusing on the actors and practices that have influenced the development of cultural meanings we come to associate with high heels.     

American Glamour 2.0: architecture,spectacle, and social media

In this article, I argue that the layered notion of glamour, a term familiar from mid-twentieth-century film, architecture and popular culture, has increasing relevance in today’s hyperpublic world of social media, internet image-construction, and market segmentation. The creation and consumption of Hollywood images and slick advertising copy has long involved processes of narrative construction, projection, performance, and self-assessment that hold significant parallels for our culture of customized Instagram feeds, “Facebook envy” and other forms of digital communication, reception, and surveillance. Increasingly, contemporary public space is being shaped as a platform for the production and consumption of such data; a concomitant increase both in the development of techniques for surveillance and in the creation of defensible private spaces – both domestic and spiritual – creates new challenges for designers of both physical and online environments.