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When school leaders advance strategic plans focused on improving educational equity through data-driven decision making, how do policies-as-practiced unfold in the daily work of science teachers? The paper aims to discuss this issue.

This ethnographic study examines how data-centric accountability and improvement efforts surface as practices for 36 science teachers in three secondary schools. For two years, researchers were embedded in schools alongside teachers moving through daily classroom practice, meetings with colleagues and leaders, data-centric meetings, and professional development days.

Bundled initiatives created consequences for science educators including missed opportunities to capitalize on student-generated ideas, to foster science sensemaking, and to pursue meaningful and equitable science learning. Problematic policy-practice intersections arose, in part, because of school leaders’ framing of district and school initiatives in ways that undermined equity in science education.

From the perspective of science education, this paper raises an alarming problem for equitable science teaching. Lessons learned from missteps seen in this study have practical implications for others attempting similar work. The paper suggests alternatives for supporting meaningful and equitable science education.

Seeing leaders’ framing of policy initiatives, their bundling of performance goals, equity and accountability efforts, and their instructional coaching activities from the point of view of teachers affords unique insight into how leadership activities mediate policies in schools.

The purpose of this paper is to make contributions toward new knowledge and understanding of how marketers can provide effective online customization experiences for customers. The practicality of online mass customization has received much attention as consumers perceive more value from customized products than from their standardized counterparts. Little research has been done to understand consumers’ behavioral intentions in response to these value additions. This study incorporates product information framing in developing and empirically testing a model of the relationship between online customization and price sensitivity, endowment addition and expected likelihood of product return.

The relationship among the constructs specified in the model was tested using multiple group structural equation modeling analysis.

The findings indicate that consumers perceived knowledge gain via customization process influences the utilitarian value, which directly impacts levels of likelihood of product return and price sensitivity. The process value, on the hedonic side, influences more on the endowment addition. Endowment addition is found to mediate the relationship between the hedonic benefits and the two utilitarian outcome variables: price sensitivity and likelihood of product return.

Understanding the consequences of customization is particularly crucial for marketers. This research is the first to expand and further our knowledge of customization, particularly in relation to its outcomes of customers’ behavioral intentions.

The underlying thesis of this paper is that consumers will infer that the costs of production of a product that is offered free are low, and this will reduce the price they are willing to pay for the product when it is a stand‐alone offering.

Two laboratory experiments examine how consumers respond to products that have been offered as “free gifts with purchase” of another product.

Study 1 shows, that when an economically identical offer is framed as a joint bundle (Buy X and Y for $), compared with when it is framed as a “Buy one, get one free” offer, consumers are willing to pay less for the product offered “free.” Study 2 shows that, when a product is given away “free,” then consumers are willing to pay less for it as a stand‐alone product, especially when the original promotional offer does not include the price of the free gift.

Results imply that the design and communication of consumer promotions affect the price consumers are willing to pay for a product.

Managerial implications for the design and communication of consumer promotions are discussed.

The paper adds to the growing body of research that shows that a price promotion has more than just an economic effect; it also has an informational effect through which it affects consumer responses.

Using a classification of benefits and costs of promotional offers along three routes – economic, informational and affective – this paper aims at evaluating, from the consumer's point of view, the relative perceptual disadvantages of separate‐item bundles compared to pre‐wrapped bundles.

The marketing literature and a qualitative study based on 18 consumers permits the identification of the relative perceived costs and benefits associated with separate‐item bundles and for hypotheses to be derived. An experiment on a sample of 120 adult consumers was then set up to test these hypotheses.

The findings suggest that consumers associate separate‐item bundles with higher economic benefit but also with higher inspection costs. From a more global perspective, there is no loss of interest in separate‐item bundles compared to pre‐wrapped bundles.

Focusing the research on separate‐item bundles clarifies the way consumers evaluate promotions. Its qualitative phase gives support to the relevance of an “informational route”, beyond the traditional utilitarian and hedonic routes. Its quantitative phase confirms the importance of cognitive biases in consumers' perceptions of promotions.

The numerous advantages of separate‐item bundles for manufacturers and retailers and their attraction to consumers should lead to an increasingly intensive use in promotional campaigns. Besides, the quality of in‐store communication is the most important factor of the success of separate‐item bundles, which provides the opportunity to propose meaningful recommendations for practitioners.

If the strengths and weaknesses of separate‐item bundles have already been studied from a managerial point of view, to the authors' knowledge, no research has focused on separate‐item bundle efficiency from the consumer's point of view.

The paper iaims to investigate the evolution of discourses, claims and actor positions during the German and French examination of legislation aimed at introducing state-mandated website blocking measures of sexual child images (often referred to as “child pornography”).

The focus lies on the opportunities and difficulties for opponents of internet blocking measures to form discourse coalitions that challenge the frames articulated and normalised by power elites. While critics of mandatory internet blocking were ignored at the outset of the debate, their frames have eventually been adopted and debated by proponents of internet blocking in Germany.

Activists successfully criticised the effectiveness of introducing internet blocking measures, which led to the final abandonment of the bill. In France, the debate remained largely confined to online media, where critics voiced their opposition but did not succeed in influencing the broader policy agenda, which was primarily concerned with security issues. Both cases offer important insights for the study of internet filtering and blocking from a comparative perspective.

Both cases offer important insights for the study of internet filtering and blocking from a comparative perspective.

“Buy X Get X Free” promotions are popular across retail settings. Retailers promote a variety of products using this promotional frame. However, past research contains mixed findings about the effectiveness of this promotion compared to the straightforward discount on a single unit of a product. The goal of this research is to employ a theoretical lens to examine the effectiveness of “Buy X Get X Free” promotions.

The theoretical framework was tested in two experiments using different products and samples. The data collected from each experiment were analyzed using both descriptive and inferential techniques to assess support for the theoretical arguments.

Findings reveal that at identical levels of per-unit discount, the “Buy X Get X Free” promotion is perceived less favorably by consumers than a straightforward single-unit discount. Consumers perceive lower transaction value and acquisition value and, thereby, a lower purchase intention, from the “Buy X Get X Free” promotion compared to a single-unit discount.

This research was conducted keeping in mind the popularity of the “Buy X Get X Free” promotion in the real world. The findings caution retailers against indiscriminately using this promotional frame.

Using a theoretical lens, this research proposes and validates a framework to systematically examine consumers' perceptions of the two popular discount frames. The proposed theoretical framework provides a richer understanding of the underlying consumer psychology that drives the evaluation of these promotions. Further, primary data from lab experiments validates the framework. The research also helps advance the understanding of consumer evaluation of sales promotions in general.

Mobile appstores have fast sprung up during the last few years. The large number of apps in these appstores results in increased search effort for the customer as well as fierce competition leading to poorer revenues for both appstores as well as developers. Therefore, appstores allow developers to resort to bundling apps so as to increase the revenues and improve customer loyalty. Since an app-bundle is a mix of two or more apps, it may induce both positive and negative emotions simultaneously in the consumer. The purpose of this paper is to examine the effectiveness of app-bundling strategy from consumers’ perspective, and help developers design app-bundles.

Based on ambivalence theories, this research investigate different antecedents and influence of positive attitude and negative attitude on purchase behavior, and derives seven key app-bundles attributes through an exploratory study. The data were collected from 930 consumers of app-bundles in China and analyzed using SEM approach.

The findings indicate that positive attitude and negative attitude are two separate concepts and the identified seven app-bundling attributes have distinct effect on shaping consumers’ positive and negative attitude.

This study makes three key contributions to theory and practice. First, this study identifies the specific attributes of app-bundles using exploratory study. Second, this study addresses the challenges involved in examining bundles using ambivalence theory. In doing so, it characterizes attitude as positive and negative and treats them as separate constructs. Third, as called forth by previous studies, this study establishes the co-existence of positive attitude and negative attitude.

The purpose of this paper is twofold: first, to provide a descriptive analysis of consumers’ ability to comprehend and use common price promotion information when they choose to do so (e.g. to find the least expensive price or to understand the savings amount); second, to identify which consumer groups (in terms of demographic characteristics) find price promotion comprehension particularly challenging.

An online questionnaire with 14 measures (four literacy, ten numeracy) was administered in the study. Data from 607 Australian consumers were analysed using descriptive, cross-tabulation, and multiple regression analysis via IBM SPSS analytics software.

On average, 20 per cent of the consumers surveyed were unable to comprehend the price promotion signage. On average, 13 per cent of the consumers were unable to carry out arithmetic tasks using the information on price promotion signage. Multiple regression models showed that income level was the main driving factor for the consumers’ price promotion literacy and numeracy levels.

The present study is the first exploratory examination of consumers’ levels of comprehension (literacy) and effective use (numeracy) regarding common types of price promotion communication. The use of online samples and data collection method overestimates the results effect.

This is a pilot field study to investigate whether levels of consumers’ price promotion literacy and numeracy are adequate for everyday decision making. The information can be used as evidence and justification for further research.

The predominant view of positioning in both the literature and practice – a remarkably uni- or two-dimensional view – asks these questions: (1) What dimension should the product or service be positioned on, for example, unique styling, design, performance, and quality? (2) What category does the product or service compete in or belong to? So marketers therefore ask: Should the computer brand be positioned as reliable (Dell), or faster (Toshiba)? Research on economic value is well established in the pricing literature, especially in business-to-business pricing. Most of this literature focuses on differentiation value, that is, how to calculate the worth of the differential benefits a customer receives from using the firm's product versus the competitive substitute. But a much less studied area of this research deals with the price of the competitive reference product, or competitive frame of reference. Rarely do marketers extend positioning strategy to the level of economic value, asking: How is the product framed, and how valuable is the frame? The purpose of this chapter is to explore competitive frames of reference in business-to-business positioning. Specifically, what are alternative types of frames of reference? What is the role of the reference price in frames of reference? What are the implications of choosing one type of frame of reference versus another?