Is Cross-Cultural Similarity an Indicator of Similar Marketing Ethics?

This study compares Australian marketers with those in the United States along lines that are particular to the study of ethics. The test measured two different moral philosophies, idealism and relativism, and compared perceptions of ethical problems, ethical intentions, and corporate ethical values. According to Hofstede's cultural typologies, there should be little difference between American and Australian marketers, but the study did find significant differences. Australians tended to be more idealistic and more relativistic than Americans and the other results were mixed, making it difficult to generalize about the effects of moral philosophies on the components of ethical decision-making measured here. This is an important finding; as firms become increasingly more globalized, marketers will more often be involved in cross-cultural ethical dilemmas and it seems natural to assume that similar cultures will have similar ethical orientations. That assumption may well prove erroneous.     

Does Television Viewership Play a Role in the Perception of Quality of Life?

Abstract

The authors hypothesized that television viewership influences materialism and dissatisfaction with standard of living, which in turn contributes to feelings of dissatisfaction with life. They collected data from five countries to examine the issue in a variety of cultural and media environments. The countries and types of samples were: United States (consumer panel and college students), Canada (urban households), Australia (urban households), Turkey (urban households), and China (urban households). The results were generally consistent with the hypotheses. However, most of the support came from the U.S. samples. Two possible explanations may account for the findings. One is that the effect of television viewership on life satisfaction is a unique phenomenon that is applicable only to the United States. Given the disparity of viewership levels between the U.S. and other countries, that explanation has some face validity. The other is that the effects were less evident in non-U.S. samples because of methodological limitations of the cross-cultural research. Overall, the results show that television viewership, at least in the U.S., may play a significant role in making people unhappy with their lives. Much of television advertising reinforces material consumption and possession with images of the “good life.” Thus, television advertising contributes to terminal materialism—materialism for the sake of materialism. Socially responsible advertising professionals should make a concerted effort to create messages that reflect instrumental materialism—materialism for the sake of meeting essential and basic needs.     

Interval censored regression with fixed effects

This paper considers identification and estimation of a fixed-effects model with an interval-censored dependent variable. In each time period, the researcher observes the interval (with known endpoints) in which the dependent variable lies but not the value of the dependent variable itself. Two versions of the model are considered: a parametric model with logistic errors and a semiparametric model with errors having an unspecified distribution. In both cases, the error disturbances can be heteroskedastic over cross-sectional units as long as they are stationary within a cross-sectional unit; the semiparametric model also allows for serial correlation of the error disturbances. A conditional-logit-type composite likelihood estimator is proposed for the logistic fixed-effects model, and a composite maximum-score-type estimator is proposed for the semiparametric model. In general, the scale of the coefficient parameters is identified by these estimators, meaning that the causal effects of interest are estimated directly in cases where the latent dependent variable is of primary interest (e.g., pure data-coding situations). Monte Carlo simulations and an empirical application to birthweight outcomes illustrate the performance of the parametric estimator.     

Strategyand Transaction Costs: The Organizationofdistributioninthecarbonatedsoftdrinkindustry

This paper analyzes the ongoing transformation of the soft drink distribution of Coca-Cola and Pepsi-Cola from systems of independent bottlers to captive bottling subsidiaries, A transaction cost-based theory is developed to explain this restructuring. It is postulated that changes in the external environment and the resulting changes in the strategies of Coca-Cola and Pepsi-Cola raised the costs of transacting between them and their independent bottlers. Two types of empirical tests are presented. One exploits the difference in the distribution of Coca-Cola and Pepsi-Cola in the fountain channel. The other consists of statistical analyses of the competitive effects of the move toward captive distribution. Both types of tests support the basic hypothesis.     

Antitrust in the Internet Era: The Legacy of United States v. A&P

Review of Industrial Organization - Critics from both the right and the left claim that modern antitrust doctrine, rooted in consumer welfare, is inadequate to handle the challenges of the...