Variations in the contractual terms of cooperative advertising contracts: An empirical investigation

Cooperative advertising arrangements between manufacturers and resellers contain two principal components in their payment schedules: a participation rate and an accrual rate. We analyze 2,156 cooperative advertising plans to see how they vary across consumer and industrial products, as well as between convenience and nonconvenience consumer products. We also study how participation and accrual rates vary by the level of manufacturer concentration across product categories. We find that both participation and accrual rates are higher for consumer products than for industrial products and within consumer products are higher for convenience products than for nonconvenience products. We find mixed results for the effect of manufacturer concentration on these rates. We discuss how these results are consistent with existing perspectives on cooperative advertising.     

Marketing and politics: Models, behavior, and policy implications

The American presidential election is one of the largest, most expensive, and most comprehensive marketing efforts. Despite this fact, marketing scholars have largely ignored this campaign, as well as thousands of others for congresspersons, senators, and governors. This article describes the growth of interest in research issues related to political marketing. This emerging research area lies at the crossroads of marketing and political science, but these fields have developed largely independent of one another with little cross-fertilization of ideas. We discuss recent theoretical, empirical, and behavioral work on political campaigns, integrating perspectives from marketing and political science. Our focus is on (1) the extent to which paradigms used in goods and services marketing carry over to the institutional setting of political campaigns, (2) what changes are necessary in models and methodology to understand issues in political marketing and voter behavior, and (3) how the special setting of politics may help us gain a better understanding of certain topics central to marketing such as advertising, branding, and social networks.     

Nuclear energy and risk assessment by Indian courts: analysis of judicial intervention in the Kudankulam Nuclear Power Project

Judicial intervention on nuclear energy safety discourse in India is very recent. The debate on the Civil Nuclear Liability for Damage Act 2010 in the Parliament and the 2011 Fukushima nuclear accident in Japan provoked public apprehension about nuclear safety in India. The Kudankulam Nuclear Power Project (KNPP) in South India became the flash point. The localized agitation against the project consequently gained momentum and was taken up aggressively by civil society groups citing safety compromise on various technical parameters. Though the government constituted expert committees to assuage any misgivings, the matter, however, was challenged before the Madras High Court and as appeal before the Supreme Court of India. The former assured safety and legality of the project and the latter endorsed this view, with supplemental directions, determining the superiority of expert committees who unequivocally concluded that the project was safe. The Courts similarly converged on the issue that the project was of national importance. On the access to project information, though the Central Information Commission ordered to make public the KNPP site and safety evaluation reports, however, Nuclear Power Corporation appealed to the Delhi High Court arguing the information was proprietary and obtained a stay order.