Search results

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.

Academic libraries often wish to build endowments as a principal goal of fund raising activities. For example, one library development brochure begins: “Northwestern University Library's most pressing need is for endowed funds for the purchase of library materials.” Because carefully managed endowments can yield sustained purchasing power, they can assure the sustained collecting essential for building the most useful research collections. Some libraries, like Vanderbilt's, have endowments that help support maintenance of a library building. Creating an endowment for building maintenance is a natural concomitant of raising funds to build because it serves much the same purpose: sustaining library operations over the long term.

This study aims to focus on the role of labor regulation and credit market imperfections, in addition to that of factor endowments, in determining capital intensities in Indian manufacturing.

The paper considers an alternative approach to identifying the effects of India ' s labor regulations on industrial performance. In particular, the paper uses a measure of the stringency of labor regulations across countries – one that is completely independent of the India-specific measures used by earlier studies – and examines its relationship with capital intensities across manufacturing industries. Additionally, since labor regulations are unlikely to be the only reason for imperfections in factor markets, the paper also examines whether and to what extent capital market imperfections affect capital intensities across manufacturing industries. The paper then presents a case study that seeks to ascertain whether actual capital intensities prevailing in Indian manufacturing in major industry groups from 1989 to 1996 were larger than predicted capital intensities for these industry groups based on relative factor demand functions estimated for the USA (a country with relatively less restrictive labor laws and a more developed financial system) evaluated at Indian wages. Finally, the paper uses a recently available dataset to compare capital intensities in Indian and Chinese manufacturing to investigate the behavior of these two emerging Asian economies since 1980, when they started out with relatively similar socio-economic conditions.

The paper finds that India uses more capital-intensive techniques of production in manufacturing than countries at similar levels of development (and similar factor endowments), including China. For a majority of manufacturing industries, labor freedom and capital market development are, in addition to factor endowments, important determinants of capital intensity of production techniques used. Results reveal that, controlling for factor prices, India specializes in more capital-intensive varieties within broad industry groups relative to the USA, a more capital-abundant economy.

To the best of the authors ' knowledge, such a study has not been done for any other country. The paper sheds light on the important issue regarding the use of capital-intensive techniques in manufacturing in India, which is a labor-abundant country. The role of labor regulation has been extensively debated and the paper also investigates its role along with the role played by credit market imperfections.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the strategic effects of academic institutional factors including environmental, social, and economic sustainability indices on the compensation of the president of an institution of higher education (IHE). The objective is to build relationships among variables to benchmark compensation measures for IHE presidents across US universities to proliferate sustainability initiatives. Some of the variables of the study were environmental sustainability, social sustainability, cost efficiency as a measure of economic sustainability, tenure, institutional control of the university such as public or private fundraising reputation, endowment and professor’s salary.

In total, 236 universities have been included in the study. The data for various dependent variables were studied to see the relationship between the independent and select dependent variables. The OLS regression approach was used to ascertain the relationships between the president’s salary, and a selected set of independent variables that includes the measures of sustainability.

The key findings of this study is that variables such as environmental sustainability, tenure, classification, endowment, and professor salary were significantly and positively associated with the IHE president’s salary.

The current study is limited to the IHEs within the USA. Thus, the study cannot be generalized or extrapolated to other countries or contexts or cultures.

The results of the study show that the trustees rarely use proliferation of sustainability as a criterion to compensate IHE presidents. The study concludes with the plea to trustees to benchmark sustainability across IHEs in evaluating and compensating IHE presidents.

This paper extends the compensation study of IHE presidents to include environment, social, and economic dimensions of sustainability. These variables are important in this age where IHEs have been challenged to do more to make our planet sustainable.

The Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB) and the Governmental Accounting Standards Board (GASB) have issued significantly different accounting and financial reporting standards for contributions. These standards are particularly significant for reporting by private and public institutions of higher education. This paper summarizes many of these differences including timing of revenue recognition, classification of contributed resources, recording pledges, and recognition of “collections.” A framework is suggested for evaluating accounting and financial reporting standards for contributions. Finally, recommendations are made to both FASB and GASB for changes to make their standards more consistent.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate whether changing the sequence of proposals during negotiations and changing the order of the responding options might minimize the endowment effect, therefore producing a better chance at reaching an agreement.

The study includes four versions of questionnaires comprised of two identical proposals (one gain and one loss) in reversal sequences, and two identical reimbursement options in reverse order. The four versions aim to allow for a combined investigation of the impact of proposals sequence and the reimbursement options sequence on the endowment effect. Each of the study's 814 participants received one of the four questionnaires. Based on both framing and contrast effects, it is hypothesized that the sequence of proposals – when the first one is conceived as a loss and the second as a gain – has a moderating impact on the endowment effect.

The findings show a significant endowment effect as a high demand inducer in negotiations, and a significant impact of the proposals sequence as a factor that reduces the endowment effect. However, no significant impact of the responding options' order on the endowment effect was found.

The study contributes to the understanding of the impact of proposal sequence in negotiations. Negotiators who understand how to utilize the proposals sequence may lead the negotiation to a concessionary atmosphere.

The paper focuses on the application of the framing and contrast effects to the negotiation process, as well as highlighting the negotiation process, whereby negotiators' insight about the proposal sequence may lead to a better outcome.

Preservation activities have existed in libraries since the early days of librarianship, but these efforts were mostly decentralized and buried in the work of many different departments. Not until the 1970s did library organizations begin to add preservation to organizational charts on a departmental or middle management level, along with its new administrative costs. At that time, libraries were struggling with early efforts at automation and the many changes it would bring to their organizations. Preservation department functions, formerly decentralized from an administrative and budgetary standpoint under the headings of commercial binding, book repair, special collections, or circulation, were now identified as a budget line forced to compete for funds with newly formed library systems departments as well as other traditional library functions. This was particularly difficult given that a large portion of the costs of a comprehensive preservation department were new and additive (Fasana and Baker, 1992, p. 132), yet provided few immediately evident benefits. A burgeoning library systems unit could place libraries on the cutting edge of technology; automated card catalogs could improve productivity and efficiency for staff, and also provide for better patron access to collections. Needless to say, systems departments were much better funded than preservation units at this time.

We estimate the parental investment response to the child endowment at birth, by analysing the effect of child birth weight on the hours worked by the mother two years after birth. Mother’s working hours soon after child birth are a measure of investments in their children as a decrease (increase) in hours raises (lowers) her time investment in the child. The child birth endowment is endogenously determined in part by unobserved traits of parents, such as investments during pregnancy. We adopt an instrumental variables estimation. Our instrumental variables are measures of the father’s health endowment at birth, which drive child birth weight through genetic transmission but does not affect directly the mother’s postnatal investments, conditional on maternal and paternal human capital and prenatal investments. We find an inverted U-shape relationship between mothers worked hours and birth weight, suggesting that both low and extremely high child birth weight are associated with child health issues for which mothers compensate by reducing their labour supply. The mother’s compensating response to child birth weight seems slightly attenuated for second and later born children. Our study contributes to the literature on the response of parental investments to child’s health at birth by proposing new and more credible instrumental variables for the child health endowment at birth and allowing for a heterogeneous response of the mother’s investment for first born and later born children.

Following nearly three years of planning and negotiation, an endowment fund‐raising campaign was launched on behalf of the chemistry library at the University of Illinois at Urbana‐Champaign (UIUC). The campaign, tied to the 100th Anniversary of the chemistry library, was directed at UIUC School of Chemical Sciences (SCS) alumni and SCS faculty. Contributions were sought to create a $200,000 “birthday endowment,” a continuing fund to purchase books for the chemistry library, and endow the library monograph budget with at least $10,000 per year.