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Surveys measuring consumers’ preferences for sustainable food might suffer from socially desirable responding. Social desirability stems in part from social norms about sustainable lifestyles, when respondents need approval from others and when privacy is not guaranteed during survey completion. While various studies showed this phenomenon through laboratory experiments and by comparing different modes of survey administration, no research adopted factorial survey experiments (FSEs) to measure which factors are perceived by consumers as critical for socially desirable answering. The purpose of this paper is to fill this gap, at least for young consumers in a case study with organic fruit.

In total, 143 under-30 respondents were involved in an FSE. Each respondent evaluated six hypothetical scenarios (n=858) describing a consumer surveyed about his/her preferences for organic fruit. Respondents indicated whether they believed participants would have answered honestly or not to the survey described in each scenario. Generalized linear mixed models were used to model how scenario attributes were perceived to influence honest answering.

Respondents believe that people are more prone to bias their answers the more they seek approval from others. Moreover, the presence of acquaintances during survey completion is another critical driver of survey misreporting.

This study, by using a novel robust quasi-experimental approach, confirms that social desirability could lead consumers to misreport their preferences when surveyed about an organic fruit. This confirms that well-designed surveys, adopting proper remedies for social desirability should be adopted even for those food products, like fruit, which are usually deemed to be less subjected to misreporting. It also introduces FSEs as a flexible tool for collecting insights from consumers about potential antecedents of their behavior.

This study explores the effect of language on service satisfaction among Finland-Swedes, a national minority language group in Finland, in the context of early childhood education. Models of public service satisfaction hold standard process and outcome related factors, such as availability and quality, as drivers of the satisfaction. However, although research has shown significant variation in satisfaction between different groups of citizens (race, ethnicity, age etc.), research has largely overlooked group specific factors as explanations for the satisfaction.

A randomized survey experiment with a 2 × 2 × 2 factorial design analyzed the impacts of language, service accessibility, and quality on service satisfaction. The data was analyzed with ANOVA.

The results revealed that language significantly impacts Swedish speakers’ satisfaction, suggesting that for minority groups, language may override typical satisfaction determinants like quality and accessibility. Interestingly, special linguistic needs are relatively more pertinent in low-quality services than in higher-quality ones.

The study shows how group related factors of public service, in our case language, in an important factor explaining satisfaction with the service. The findings have implications for the literature on citizens’ satisfaction with public services with demographic and identity facets, especially in a typical Nordic welfare state.

Periodic economic instabilities and structural changes in the labour market have given rise to a variety of forms of job insecurity. This article compares the scarring effects of different forms of job insecurity on future employment chances, and how they vary across education groups.

Using a sample of real vacancies and data collected in a vignette experiment with employers in Switzerland, a country with a strongly developed vocational education and training (VET) system, this article investigates how employers evaluate a period of unemployment, job hopping and work experience in deskilling jobs when hiring candidates.

The findings reveal that work in deskilling jobs is by far more scarring than unemployment or job hopping. The study also demonstrates that applicants with upper secondary vocational education are impacted the greatest by all three forms of job insecurity.

The study makes use of real vacancies. While experiments have the strength of high internal validity, most experimental studies in recruitment research rely on students as respondents. As this study works with real employers hiring for positions it benefits from high external validity.

In many countries, individuals can receive welfare support whilst simultaneously being employed. The level of earned income that welfare recipients are allowed to keep has long been a subject of debate. Core issues include whether in-work benefit regulations provide incentives for individuals to expand labour market participation and are thus also socially effective and whether the population perceives welfare benefits for individuals who earn own income as fair. This article contributes to the debate about the social legitimacy of in-work benefit regulations by shedding light on the principles guiding judgements about an adequate amount of in-work benefit receipt.

The authors use a factorial survey experiment to investigate which factors guide judgements about an adequate level of in-work benefit receipt. In the authors' factorial survey, the household composition, health status, and monthly earnings of a hypothetical in-work benefit recipient were varied experimentally. The study investigates Germany's basic income support programme, a means-tested social policy programme that targets both unemployed and employed individuals.

The results show that respondents consider higher earnings retention rates for lower-income earners to be fair. This preference mirrors the German legislation, which is based on the principle of need. Furthermore, the presence of children and of physical as well as mental health impairments are associated with support for higher earnings retention rates.

The findings suggest that citizens support the core features of in-work benefit regulations but do not consider in-work benefit recipients as a homogenous group when assessing the adequate level of benefit receipt.

Recently emerged Packaging-as-a-Service (PaaS) systems adopt aspects of access-based services and triadic frameworks, which have typically been treated as conceptually separate. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the implications of blending the two in what we call “access-based triadic systems,” by empirically evaluating intentions to adopt PaaS systems for takeaway food among restaurants and consumers.

We derived relevant attributes of PaaS systems from a qualitative pre-study with restaurants and consumers. Next, we conducted two factorial survey experiments with restaurants (N = 176) and consumers (N = 245) in Germany to quantitatively test the effects of those system attributes on their adoption intentions.

This paper highlights that the role of access-based triadic system providers as both the owners of shared assets and the operators of a triadic system is associated with a novel set of challenges and opportunities: System providers need to attract a critical mass of business and end customers while balancing asset protection and system complexity. At the same time, asset ownership introduces opportunities for improved quality control and differentiation from competition.

Conceptually, this paper extends research on access-based services and triadic frameworks by describing an unexplored hybrid form of non-ownership consumption we call “access-based triadic systems.” Empirically, this paper addresses the need to account for the demands of two distinct target groups in triadic systems and demonstrates how factorial survey experiments can be leveraged in this field.

The purpose of this paper is to test the impact of selected characteristics of jobseekers on employers’ decisions regarding potential hires (direct and probabilistic signals). The main focus of the study is to test the impact of jobseekers’ participation in selected active labour market programmes on employers’ hiring decisions for three positions: unskilled worker, skilled worker and administrative employee. Other characteristics tested include age, gender, presence of children in the household, state of health, experience of short- and long-term unemployment and indebtedness.

This study analyses data from a representative survey of employers with five or more employees in the Czech Republic. The survey was conducted in December 2020 using stratified random sampling, combining online questionnaires and personal interviews. The study includes 1,040 employers and uses the factorial survey experiment (FSE) design.

The results of the FSE suggest that the perceived positive impact of completing one of the activation programmes depends on the position for which the candidate is being recruited. While for the unskilled job category, the completion of any of the tested schemes (training, subsidised jobs or public works) had a positive effect; for the skilled job category, only the training and subsidised jobs schemes had a positive effect; and for the administrative job category, public works programme even had a negative effect.

A somewhat limiting factor in the context of this study seems to be the definitions of the positions tested (unskilled and skilled workers and administrative staff). The decision-making of the respondents was somewhat restricted by such broadly defined categories. Typically, studies with FSE designs have a focus on a specific sector of the economy, which allows for a better definition of the positions or jobs under test. The relationship between position and the impact of individual characteristics is clearly a matter for further research.

The results of the study confirm that completion of the activation programme, as well as other candidate characteristics, constitute differentiating signals for employers that influence their hiring decisions. At the same time, there is evidence that the training programme and the subsidised jobs programme are effective in terms of increasing participants’ chances of employment.

The demand side should be included in the evaluation of activation policies. The design of the FSE provides an appropriate way to test the impact of activation measures on the decision-making of employers.

An increasing amount of attention is being paid to the human side of information security programs, leading to research designs that require the manipulation of study variables. The purpose of this paper is to highlight a traditional assessment of such designs, the manipulation check, and examine how its absence can undermine otherwise solid research efforts.

This paper reviews literature from the fields of research methods, organizational behavior and information systems for extant perspectives and viewpoints on manipulation checks, which are then brought into the realm of information security research.

The possible risks involved with failing to perform manipulation checks are discussed, which include a possibility of making Type II errors. The paper provides further insight on the timing, method and manner in which manipulation checks can be performed.

A disappointing number of research articles in the area of information security fail to report manipulation checks when they should. This paper seeks to remind researchers to perform this vital assessment and to use the results accordingly.

The purpose of this paper is to shed more light on the relative impact of the various workplace resources on employees' effective coping with job stress symptoms, taking into account synergistic and antagonistic effects. The authors used job demands-resources (JD-R) theory as an overarching theoretical framework to test the hypotheses.

The authors used a factorial survey experiment and a within-person design. Data were obtained from a random sample of 97 Greek employees working in public and private organizations. Multilevel modeling regression techniques were used for data analyses. The authors examined the relative effect of various job resources at different levels on employees' ratings of effective coping with job stress symptoms. In parallel, the authors investigated the possible synergistic and antagonistic interactions between the specific job resources.

The authors found that managers' leadership and humor style, their relationship with subordinates and coworkers’ support had positive effects on employees' coping with job stress. In addition, the authors found that the manager's leadership style interacts with manager–subordinate relationship quality and coworkers’ support as well as the latter interacts with the manager's humor style and manager–subordinate relationship quality. The study model explained 50% of the variance in effective coping with stress ratings.

The study highlights the importance of workplace resources as contextual variables, for the effective coping with stress symptoms at work. It highlights that a combination of workplace resources produces a net effect that was better than would have been expected based solely on the individual performance of these job resources. As such, the research answer calls to attend to the effects of synergistic effects of workplace resources on effective coping with stress symptoms at work.

Concerning the decision-making of frontline bureaucrats, research has suggested that caseworkers take into account a broader range of legal, organisational, professional and personal aspects. Their decision-making can offset social rights, when it neglects policy goals, but it can support social rights if the decisions consider clients' perspective.

Based on a factorial survey experiment with 197 Viennese caseworkers of the employment service, the caseworkers were asked how likely they would be to refer nine different typical clients to the introductory session for the programme “Women into Technical and Craft Professions”, whereby different dimensions were altered to grasp regulations and clients' perspective.

In the multilevel analysis, the interest of the clients in a technical-educational programme demonstrates the strongest positive effect, which complies with the programme's political intention. Other pertinent criteria may support clients' interests and the organizational performance goals, but neglect clients' position, when they counteract performance goals. Primarily, caseworkers do what they must and follow mandatory and performance criteria.

On the caseworker's level, further research should aim to reach larger samples. Furthermore, the impact of performance goals on caseworker's decision making has to regard different professional groups beside personnel and labour market experts.

The findings suggest that a focus on the micro-level is needed to evaluate the impact of social policies. The practitioner's position is crucial to juggling legal goals and client's need.

Performance goals ought to better reflect social rights on a broader scale.

This article provides new evidence on the level of discretion caseworkers execute.

Although essential to social welfare, unpaid domestic and care work is an increasingly scarce resource in modern societies. Despite the growing need, many households refrain from outsourcing their domestic chores to the market. Simultaneously, the household service sector is mostly characterised by low-qualification, informal jobs lacking quality and professional standards. Drawing on transaction cost theory, the present study aims to examine how trust problems deriving from the quality and professionalisation of domestic services can be overcome by also exploring the role of state subsidies in this context.

A factorial survey experiment in Germany (N = 4024) causally explores the effect of state-subsidised service vouchers, quality signals and professionalisation on preferences and willingness-to-pay for domestic services. The data were analysed using multilevel modelling techniques.

Hypotheses are mostly confirmed: strong quality signals help overcome trust problems, thus facilitating the demand for household services. Further, service vouchers can generate better pay for domestic workers while simultaneously reducing the costs for households.

The relevance of professionalisation and quality of service as important determinants of domestic service demand is revealed. However, the experimental survey design involves hypothetical scenarios.

The analysis offers insights into how to stimulate demand for household services and increase formal employment in a sector currently largely characterised by informal arrangements. It further shows how social policies can help secure quality and foster professionalisation by shifting paid domestic work from the informal to the formal economy.