An Application of Keaveney's Model of Service Switching Behaviour to GP Fundholders

The introduction of competition within the National Health Service (NHS), with the purchasers having a degree of choice among providers, has raised a variety of issues for buyer-supplier relationships. Purchasers, especially GP fundholders, have power in relation to their provider in the sense that they may ultimately take their custom elsewhere and by transferring their business, or part of their business, from one trust provider to another. As GP fundholders increase in number, and in confidence, this practice seems likely to grow. Using evidence from commercial markets, this article explains why fundholders might switch provider and the implications this has for hospital trusts.     

To tell or not to tell? The roles of perceived norms and self‐consciousness in understanding consumers' willingness to recommend online secondhand apparel shopping

Secondhand apparel shopping resides in a domain characterized by used goods traditionally associated with financially marginalized consumers. Acknowledging the elusive psychological barriers associated with preowned apparel, this study explores mechanisms that facilitate consumers' willingness to recommend online secondhand apparel shopping. Results from three experimental studies and a cross‐sectional survey of online secondhand shoppers in the United States reveal that hedonic and ethical benefits influence recommendation behavior via perceived norms, whereas economic benefit directly influences consumers' willingness to recommend. Moderated mediation analyses further demonstrate that self‐consciousness alters the strength of the indirect effects, such that consumers with lower self‐consciousness displayed greater willingness to recommend compared to highly self‐conscious consumers. Findings contribute to a greater theoretical understanding of the roles perceived norms and self‐consciousness play in facilitating or inhibiting recommendation behavior in a context that implicitly involves self‐disclosure of one's secondhand purchase behavior. Managerial implications offer insights on salient benefits that can be leveraged to influence word‐of‐mouth recommendation.     

Detecting Abnormal Bid-Ask Spread: A Comparison of Event Study Methods

This study examines empirical issues associated with the use of bid-ask spreads in event studies. The simulation results indicate that the distribution of average standardized abnormal spread shows little deviation from normality. Simulation results also indicate that the widely used percent spread metric results in test statistics with low power. In contrast, use of a standardized raw spread metric and a simple mean-adjusted expectation model results in well specified and reasonably powerful Patell and Brown-Warner type test statistics. As the abnormal spread series is characterized by high first order serial correlation, it is important to adjust for this serial correlation when using multi-day event windows.     

Differentiated regulation: the case of charities

The increasing number and influence of charities in the economy, evidence of mismanagement and the need for information for policymaking are all reasons for establishing charity regulators. Public interest and public choice theories explain charity regulation which aims to increase public trust and confidence in charities (and thus increase voluntarism and philanthropy) and to limit tax benefits to specific organisations and donors. Nevertheless, regulation is resource intensive, and growing pressure on government budgets requires efficiencies to be found. This study proposes regulation differentiated according to charities' main resource providers, to reduce costs and focus regulatory effort, and provides a feasible segmentation.     

How Large are the Welfare Gains from Technological Innovation Induced by Environmental Policies?

This paper examines whether the welfare gains from technological innovation that reduces future abatement costs are larger or smaller than the Pigouvian welfare gains from optimal pollution control. The relative welfare gains from innovation depend on three key factors—the initially optimal level of abatement, the speed at which innovation reduces future abatement costs, and the discount rate. We calculate the welfare gains from innovation under a variety of different scenarios. Mostly they are less than the Pigouvian welfare gains. To be greater, innovation must reduce abatement costs substantially and quickly and the initially optimal abatement level must be fairly modest.