Why sad people like shoes better: The influence of mood on the evaluative conditioning of consumer attitudes

An experimental study investigated the influence of mood on the acquisition of affective consumer attitudes. Within an evaluative conditioning paradigm, participants in happy or sad mood were presented with evaluatively neutral products paired with affectively liked or disliked faces. Subsequent likability ratings revealed that the mere co‐occurrence of a product with the valenced face influenced the evaluation of the previously neutral targets. However, this effect of affective learning was significantly stronger in the sad‐mood condition. A subsequent awareness test indicated that contingency awareness plays a role in the acquisition of consumer attitudes. The implications for consumer research and attitude formation processes are discussed. © 2004 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.     

Organizational resources enabling service responsiveness: Evidence from Greece

This article examines the implementation of relationship marketing strategy based on a sample of business-to-business firms operating in Greece. Organizational resources, including a focus on learning and flexibility/adaptation in strategic planning, are demonstrated to be antecedents of effective relationship marketing strategies. The possession of these resources lead to superior customer performance (as measured by customer satisfaction and loyalty) and, ultimately, superior financial performance (as measured by profit levels, profit margin, and ROI). Our results provide support for the development of organizational resources that foster and enable relationship marketing in business-to-business environments since such resources are linked with improved firm performance.     

Direct Democracy and Local Public Finances under Cooperative Federalism

In this paper, we exploit the introduction of the right of local initiatives in the German state of Bavaria in 1995 in order to study the fiscal effects of direct democracy. Our identification strategy combines difference‐in‐differences and regression discontinuity methods: we compare municipal expenditure and revenue between pre‐ and post‐reform periods at population thresholds where the signatures needed to launch initiatives and minimum quorum requirements decrease discontinuously (difference‐in‐discontinuities design). The results suggest that stronger direct democratic institutions lead to an expansion of local government size.     

Exploring Diversity in Accounting through Faculty Journal Perceptions*

The accounting research community has frequently been described as being both diverse and focused on local issues. At the same time, increasing pressure is being placed on researchers to publish in internationally highly regarded journals. Since faculty evaluations depend on journal rankings, such rankings need to take into account the diversity of the research community. Therefore, this study examines how contextual factors such as a researcher's location and research orientation may influence journal quality perceptions and readership patterns based on an international sample of 1,230 accounting academics. The perceived quality of journals is measured across a number of dimensions, including journal familiarity, average rank position, percent of respondents who classify a journal as top tier, and readership. The results support that a significant variation in journal quality perceptions exists based on a researcher's geographic origin, research orientation, and affiliation with a journal.     

Origins of reform resistance and the Southern European regime

With a particular interest for Southern Europe, this contribution develops a classification of obstacles to economic policy reforms. This classification covers approaches ranging from classical economics and political-economic explanations to more innovative explanations linked to behavioral economics. The subsequent part analyzes qualitatively and quantitatively to which extent the “Southern European regime” may imply a particular relevance of some of the potential reform obstacles classified before. We derive “reform ability profiles” which quantify several of the reform obstacles (or reform drivers) to compare EU countries in their likely reform predisposition. These profiles confirm particular Southern European weaknesses which tend to reduce the political-economic feasibility of long-term reforms: a low effectiveness in poverty protection, high intertemporal discounting and uncertainty avoidance, a poor information level of the population and deeply shattered trust in national institutions. In a microeconometric analysis based on Eurobarometer survey data, the analysis leaves the highly aggregated level and looks into the individual heterogeneity in reform acceptance. It is shown that several of the reform obstacles identified in theory are also empirically correlated with the individual inclination to accept reforms.     

Quantifying preferential trading in the e-MID interbank market

Interbank markets allow credit institutions to exchange capital for purposes of liquidity management. These markets are among the most liquid markets in the financial system. However, liquidity of interbank markets dropped during the 2007–2008 financial crisis, and such a lack of liquidity influenced the entire economic system. In this paper, we analyse transaction data from the e-MID market which is the only electronic interbank market in the Euro Area and US, over a period of 11 years (1999–2009). We adapt a method developed to detect statistically validated links in a network, in order to reveal preferential trading in a directed network. Preferential trading between banks is detected by comparing empirically observed trading relationships with a null hypothesis that assumes random trading among banks doing a heterogeneous number of transactions. Preferential trading patterns are revealed at time windows of 3-maintenance periods. We show that preferential trading is observed throughout the whole period of analysis and that the number of preferential trading links does not show any significant trend in time, in spite of a decreasing trend in the number of pairs of banks making transactions. We observe that preferential trading connections typically involve large trading volumes. During the crisis, we also observe that transactions occurring between banks with a preferential connection occur at larger interest rates than the complement set—an effect that is not observed before the crisis.     

Factors determining municipal broadband strategies across Europe

Recognizing that high-speed broadband connectivity emerges as a key element for growth, city authorities engage in fiber access deployments to empower their local communities in the digital economy. Currently, a growing number of municipal fiber projects are underway or planned while the international community and the telecommunications industry are yet undecided about the role and type of municipal intervention. This paper takes a holistic view of municipal broadband in Europe, aiming to understand the factors that determine municipal strategies in fixed Next-Generation Access (NGA) networks and the implications of municipal broadband to regulation and markets. The data suggests that the determining factors are (a) the engagement of public utilities; (b) the involvement of the private sector in joint infrastructure projects; (c) the local demand for retail and wholesale services; and (d) the institutional and regulatory framework at the European and national scale. The findings of the study indicate that (a) municipal initiatives are highly dependent on national factors, thus the resulting interventions fare strong resemblance within a single country, while they can be substantially different across national contexts; (b) current EU provisions for public involvement in broadband development stimulate municipal plans for large scale arrangements; and (c) national regulatory frameworks, that primarily address vertical integrated incumbents and nationwide markets, may need adjustments to handle emerging access monopolies of regional and city broadband infrastructures.     

Going Down the Slippery Slope of Legitimacy Lies in Early-Stage Ventures: The Role of Moral Disengagement

Journal of Business Ethics - Aristotle’s philosophical insights into ethics, wisdom and practice have drawn the attention of scholars. In the current professional context where ethics are...