What is not beautiful should match: how attractiveness similarity affects consumer responses to advertising

This study introduces the concept of attractiveness similarity, empirically examines its main effect and whether it moderates the effect of endorser attractiveness on consumer responses to advertising. The results show a positive main effect of attractiveness similarity over and above the mere effect of endorser attractiveness. In addition, a consistent moderating effect of attractiveness similarity on the effect of endorser attractiveness emerges: attractiveness similarity buffers against the less positive effects of lower levels of endorser attractiveness (i.e., it compensates for lower levels of endorser attractiveness). Overall, these findings reveal attractiveness similarity as a new variable in endorser advertising, which has important managerial implications. Advertising campaigns employing averagely attractive endorsers should pay special attention to attractiveness similarity.     

Preference for Restorative Situations: Interactive Effects of Attentional State,Activity-in-Environment,and Social Context

This study extends research on psychological restoration by encompassing a broad set of restorative situations available to urban residents. Preferences are assessed for mundane restorative situations comprising leisure activity, setting, and social context, given different levels of attentional fatigue. Attentional fatigue, activity-setting, and social context were experimentally manipulated. The settings for activities were home, park, city center, and transit. Participants (N = 70) read scenarios describing an attentional state and rated their preference for the situations. Results show interactive effects of attentional state with activity-setting and with social context. The park was most preferred given attentional fatigue. Results confirm that while residents may particularly value urban nature for restoration, their urban context also provides other mundane but attractive restorative situations.     

The service triad: modelling dialectic tensions in service encounters

Models of service encounters are often fraught with reductionism, describing business relationships as mathematical combinations of dyadic constellations. Metaphors of ideal social relationships (marriages or friendships) are highlighted to stress normative aspects of equal, balanced and long-term business partnerships. However, these approaches are limited in their analytical sensitivity, as they cannot address the complexity of multipart relationships, where meanings, roles and relationships are continuously constructed and reconstructed. In order to understand the ambivalent quality of business interactions, this article analyses the corporate travel market by applying Simmel's depiction of the triad as a specific social form. Triadic constellations and more complex service networks involve dialectic tensions, simultaneously exhibiting loyalty and disloyalty, trust and distrust, empowerment and disempowerment. It is argued that a qualitative methodology is a more adequate approach to grasp such dynamic and contextual social realities, because (opposed to a quantitative approach) it is not confined to operate with mutually exclusive analytical categories.     

Home economics and development

The development of home economics shows that the satisfaction of people's social and economic needs has always been its broad aim through history. Home economics focuses on the family as ecosystem and the improvement of the individual's interaction with the environment. Effective management of available resources in order to satisfy the food, housing and clothing needs of the family is an important factor in the improvement of quality of life and also of the functioning of families within the community. Home economics extension helps to maintain the balance between economic and social factors in community development. The learning of physical skills or tasks to satisfy short terms needs therefore serves as the starting point for ultimately developing people's abilities, attitudes and values which will lead them to self‐determination.     

Learning organization at higher education institutions in the EU: proposal for implementing philosophy of learning organization—results from research

Quality & Quantity - For an organization to develop, to improve, and to innovate in this information age, it requires a management system that will maximize use of human potential that it has...     

What drives the choice of the type of partner in R&D cooperation? Evidence for Spanish manufactures and services

We analyse the heterogeneity in firms’ decisions to engage in R&D cooperation, taking into account the type of partner (competitors, suppliers or customers, and research institutions) and the sector to which the firm belongs (manufactures or services). We use information from the Technological Innovation Panel (PITEC) for Spanish firms and estimate multivariate probit models corrected for endogeneity which explicitly consider the interrelations between the different R&D cooperation strategies. We find that placing a higher importance to publicly available information (incoming spillovers), receiving public funding and firm size increase the probability of cooperation with all kind of partners but the role is much stronger in the case of cooperative agreements with research institutions and universities. Our results also suggest that R&D intensity and the importance attributed to the lack of qualified personnel as a factor hampering innovation are key factors influencing positively R&D cooperation activities in the service sector but not in manufactures.     

Housing Attribute Preferences in a Northern Mexico Metropolitan Economy

Studies of the valuation of housing attributes have been conducted for numerous metropolitan markets. Empirical analyses of this nature for cities in Latin America and Mexico are less common. This study utilizes data for 175 new houses in Ciudad Juarez, a major metropolitan economy in northern Mexico, to estimate a hedonic pricing model. All units in the sample were completed and sold between November 2006 and April 2007. For each house, a total of 14 characteristics relating to structure and location are employed as explanatory variables. Estimation results indicate that the structural characteristics play bigger roles than the neighborhood amenities. Surprisingly, neighborhood parks are found to lower housing values.      

Sense-making of risk and role-taking emotions: how young Swedes construe road traffic risk

The aim of this study is to improve our understanding of how young people make sense of traffic risk. The study also aims to contribute to current theory by refining the concept of ‘sense-making of risk’. The focus is to explore, empirically as well as theoretically, how role-taking emotions can contribute to this particular area of research. In order to chart both the sense-making of social interaction and the respondents’ subjective sense of traffic risk, the present study used both in-depth interviews and focus group interviews: the in-depth interviews comprised a total of 11 interviews with as many interviewees, while a total of 36 people were included in the eight focus group interviews. All interviewees were Swedish residents aged between 16 and 20. It is found that by adopting the perspective afforded by theory of emotion, it is possible to deepen our knowledge of individual sense-making of risk. Both primary emotions and role-taking emotions seem to be central to how young Swedes form their understanding of traffic risk. A focus on role-taking emotions reveals the value of indirect social interaction for the individual’s sense-making of risk in general, and adds to our knowledge of the individual’s sense-making of traffic risk in particular.