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This paper reviews the current literature on theoretical and methodological issues in discrete choice experiments, which have been widely used in non-market value analysis, such as elicitation of residents' attitudes toward recreation or biodiversity conservation of forests.

We review the literature, and attribute the possible biases in choice experiments to theoretical and empirical aspects. Particularly, we introduce regret minimization as an alternative to random utility theory and sheds light on incentive compatibility, status quo, attributes non-attendance, cognitive load, experimental design, survey methods, estimation strategies and other issues.

The practitioners should pay attention to many issues when carrying out choice experiments in order to avoid possible biases. Many alternatives in theoretical foundations, experimental designs, estimation strategies and even explanations should be taken into account in practice in order to obtain robust results.

The paper summarizes the recent developments in methodological and empirical issues of choice experiments and points out the pitfalls and future directions both theoretically and empirically.

This study aims to increase knowledge of the ability of nutrition labels to guide consumer choices in real-life environments.

Food consumption and plate waste data were collected from two self-service restaurants (SSR) with different customer groups over six observation days: three control and three intervention (with nutrition labelling) periods. Study Group 1 consisted of vocational school students, mostly late adolescents (N = 1,710), and Group 2 consisted of spa hotel customers, mostly elderly (N = 1,807). In the experimental restaurants, the same food was served to the buffets during the control and intervention periods.

The nutrition label in the lunch buffet guides customers to eat fewer main foods and salads and to select healthier choices. Increased consumption of taste enhancers (salt and ketchup) was observed in the study restaurants after nutritional labelling. Nutrition labelling was associated with a reduction in plate waste among the elderly, whereas the opposite was observed among adolescents.

The results provide public policymakers and marketers with a better understanding of the effects of nutrition labelling on consumer behaviour. Future studies should further evaluate the effects of nutrition labelling on the overall quality of customer diets and the complex environmental, social, and psychological factors affecting food choices and plate waste accumulation in various study groups.

The purpose of this paper is to illustrate how game theoretic solution concepts inform what classes of problems will be amenable to artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML), and how to evolve the interaction between human and artificial intelligence.

The approach addresses the development of operational gaming to support planning and decision making. It then provides a succinct summary of game theory for those designing and using games, with an emphasis on information conditions and solution concepts. It addresses how experimentation demonstrates where human decisions differ from game theoretic solution concepts and how games have been used to develop AI/ML. It concludes by suggesting what classes of problems will be amenable to AI/ML, and which will not. It goes on to propose a method for evolving human/artificial intelligence.

Game theoretic solution concepts inform classes of problems where AI/ML 'solutions' will be suspect. The complexity of the subject requires a campaign of learning.

Though games have been essential to the development of AI/ML, practitioners have yet to employ game theory to understand its limitations.

Using an institution-based view, this study aims to conceptualize how sub-national institutional characteristics are likely to explain location choice of multinationals’ research and development (R&D) subsidiaries.

In a conceptual paper, this study explores specific institutional facets of the regional environments within a country that are capable of explaining, at least in part, the location choices of multinational corporations’ R&D subsidiaries.

This study thus explores the more nuanced influences of the institutional environments at a subnational level and develops propositions to explain location choices based on the differences of the institutional environments.

This study contributes to international business theory by incorporating a location-specific analysis that contrasts to the usual country-level observation on the determinants of firms’ location decisions.

This study aims to provide a response to the commentary by Yuan on the paper “Marketing or Methodology” in this issue of EJM.

Conceptual argument and statistical discussion.

The authors find that some of Yuan’s arguments are incorrect, or unclear. Further, rather than contradicting the authors’ conclusions, the material provided by Yuan in his commentary actually provides additional reasons to avoid partial least squares (PLS) in marketing research. As such, Yuan’s commentary is best understood as additional evidence speaking against the use of PLS in real-world research.

This rejoinder, coupled with Yuan’s comment, continues to support the strong implication that researchers should avoid using PLS in marketing and related research.

Marketing researchers should avoid using PLS in their work.

This rejoinder supports the earlier conclusions of “Marketing or Methodology,” with additional argumentation and evidence.

The aim of this study is to explore the contextual influences of packaging design and its cues on respondents' preferences.

To explore the contextuality of packaging cues, a multi-attribute valuation technique, conjoint analysis was used for two types of pharmaceutical products (painkiller and sore throat medicine) across seven countries. Data were collected among respondents (N = 461) from Finland, Ghana, Mongolia, Nigeria, Portuguese, South Africa and the USA.

Similarities and dissimilarities were observed between the product types and countries analysed in terms of the impact of packaging cues. The findings demonstrate the global and local nature of brand cues expressed in retail packaging.

The study implies that some cues may serve global markets, while some cues may need to be localised in order to meet the needs of local markets. Understanding these cues and their influences on consumers' brand preferences and choices at the point-of-purchases may enable companies to enter new markets, help them create sustainable and credible global brands.

The study contributes to the existing retail packaging literature and pharmaceutical branding literature by providing empirical evidence of the multidimensional aspects of sensory packaging cues. Second, it contributes by showing the contextual nature of retail packaging and its associated cues for OTC pharmaceuticals.

Research in the context of an individual’s choice of an entrepreneurial career has looked at effect of perceived self-efficacy (PSE), personality characteristics (PC) and subjective norms on entrepreneurial intentions (EIs). In contrast, the purpose of this paper is to compare these constructs across a vocational student (VC) group and an academic group (AC), in a supportive entrepreneurial ecosystem. It also includes PC of the individuals as a variable.

The analysis is based on a quantitative method followed by a qualitative approach to gain more insights in the study domain. It includes administration of a survey questionnaire and a round of unstructured interviews with select students.

Theorizing that there would be significant differences in PSE, PC and EIs between the two groups, the study demonstrates that for all the three variables, individuals opting for a vocational course exhibit significant difference as compared to an academic group. The results are significant when controlled for family business background and gender.

This paper has contributed to the academic literature in the entrepreneurship domain by differentiating the choice of an academic course prior to taking up a career in entrepreneurship and how it impacts entrepreneurial orientations. These interrelationships can further be extended into the domain of social media and networks, to draw interesting insights pertaining to how students get influenced by the social media in their choice of entrepreneurial career.

Outsourcing is recognized as one of the critical factors for efficient execution of pharmaceutical supply chain management (PSCM), and many pharmaceutical companies engage in international outsourcing of services (IOS) to survive in global highly competitive business. Since the key success factors for both domestic & international alliances are partnership characteristics and strategic fit management, but there is no empirical research on this issue in Thai pharmaceutical partnership offshore outsourcing. Therefore, this survey of Thai and foreign companies, both contract providers (CPs) and contract manufacturers (CMs), seeks to indicate significant relationships among both outsourcing strategic fit and partnership types, including outsourcing performance outcome. This research is two-fold. First, the partnership types (Type I, II, & III), the strategic fit types (low fit, moderate fit, and good fit), and their correlations are analyzed. And second, their outsourcing performance (company revenues and growth rates) are presented. The results showed that the most of the Thai pharmaceutical outsourcing manufacturing are classified as the partnership Type II, as well as the moderate strategic fit, and strongly support the relationship between the two models. Both of the companies’ revenue and growth rate could predict the companies’ performances outcome for each of partnership and strategic fit types. However, it is not necessary that the most integrative type of partnership, Type III, will be always the best, because it depends also on the strategic fit between each pair of partners as well.

In the COVID-19 pandemic, consumers increasingly opt for, or are forced to, use home delivery services. The authors study retailers' decisions regarding “delivery mode”, which is about outsourcing (vs. insourcing) the delivery service to a traditional delivery company or an unbranded carrier and its effects on consumers' perceived overall quality, perceived hygienic quality, and subsequently, willingness to stay with the firm beyond the pandemic.

A pre-test, an experiment and a post-test were conducted with participants from the UK (Total N = 380).

The results of this study show that (1) in a pandemic, perceived hygienic quality overshadows perceived service quality as a key determinant of consumers' choices, and (2) while consumers have a relatively negative view of the hygienic level of unbranded carriers, they do not differentiate between traditional delivery carriers and retailer-branded carriers. Thus, they are equally interested in using the services of the latter ones.

This study shows that during a health crisis, consumers change their hierarchy of motivations to reflect the new protection motivations. The authors usher perceived hygienic quality as a variable that should be seriously considered as both a tactical and a strategic variable affecting the attractiveness of alternative home delivery methods and consumers' intentions to continue using them after the pandemic.

While there exist many surveys on the use stochastic frontier analysis (SFA), many important issues and techniques in SFA were not well elaborated in the previous surveys, namely, regular models, copula modeling, nonparametric estimation by Grenander’s method of sieves, empirical likelihood and causality issues in SFA using regression discontinuity design (RDD) (sharp and fuzzy RDD). The purpose of this paper is to encourage more research in these directions.

A literature survey.

While there are many useful applications of SFA to econometrics, there are also many important open problems.

This is the first survey of SFA in econometrics that emphasizes important issues and techniques such as copulas.