Search results

This paper focuses on the role of manufacturer brands for resellers within retail channels. This topic is important because of the strategic value of manufacturer brands and the increasing influence of resellers within channels of distribution. Much of the branding research emphasizes a customer-brand knowledge perspective; however, emerging perspectives suggest that brands are also relevant to other stakeholders including resellers. In contrast, channels research recognizes the manufacturer sources of market power, but does not consider the impact of manufacturer “push and pull” strategies within channels. Existing theoretical frameworks, therefore, do not address the reseller perspective of the brand. As a result, the research approach is a multi-method design, consisting of two phases. The first phase involves in-depth interviews, allowing the development of a conceptual framework. In the second phase, a survey of supermarket buyers on brands in several product categories tests this framework. Structural equation modeling analyzes the survey responses and tests the hypotheses. The structural model shows very good fit to the data with good construct validity, reliability, and stability. The findings show that manufacturer support, brand equity, and customer demand reflect the manufacturer brand benefits to resellers. A key contribution of this research is the development of a validated scale on manufacturer brand benefits from the point of view of a reseller. This research shows that the resources that relate to the brand, not just the brand name itself, create value for resellers in channel relationships.

With the rise of employer-promulgated mandatory employment arbitration, scholars have become concerned that these policies may reduce the economic viability of lower value employment claims. Of particular worry are claims made under the Fair Labor Standards Act since the FLSA does not include punitive damages. This study empirically tests the relationship between 368 Fortune 1000 companies’ employment arbitration policies and their wage and hour violations discovered during the Department of Labor inspections. Surprisingly, firms that used arbitration were found to have fewer violations and lower back wages for those violation compared to firms that did not use arbitration. This suggests that viewing arbitration merely as a cost-reduction tool may cast the practice too narrowly and instead it may be part of a larger conflict management system that seeks to address conflict at the earliest possible stage.

School inspection or supervision is one of the core institutional mechanisms for ensuring the quality of education. While analyzing the practices of this quality assurance tool at the basic education level in six developing and emerging economies, this paper found that there has been a major shift in exercising supervision system pushed by the policy dynamics of both international actors and state institutions. The school supervision system has been shaped by decentralization, school-based management, monitoring, data gathering, and output-focused governance. These are also known as the elements of New Public Management (NPM). The growing practice of NPM in all these countries has made the external supervision a less prioritized issue, which is evident in its stagnated and sometimes deteriorated state. On the other hand, the pro-NPM management system advocating for greater autonomy, decentralization and results has not evidently yielded any major positive outcomes, especially in lower-income countries. Thus, the absence of an effective supervision system, both support and control, has created a vacuum in the educational quality assurance instruments. By oversimplifying local contexts in situating NPM, this foreign-emerged management system also has shown reluctance toward fundamental crises of weak institutions in lower-income countries, including resource constraints, skills shortage, and service recipients’ lack of trust, among others. In short, developmental level and institutional capacity matter for the successful implementation of NPM.

Across Europe, on average more than 95% of all passenger cars and half of all light commercial vehicles are permanently available to a household. This includes both privately owned vehicles and company cars. The profiles of vehicle use can be specified as average annual distance driven per vehicle and for the fleet as a total, purpose of travel (trip destination), infrastructure use (urban, interurban or motorway road transport) and also fuel consumption together with data on CO₂ emissions. Indicators on vehicle use can be tracked in various ways:

• self-administered panels of households, which permit their vehicles to be followed for several years;

• national or local household travel surveys (with a seven-day trip diary);

• official vehicle inspection and vehicle registration files;

• ‘vehicle surveys’ based on vehicle registry data;

• traffic counts;

• data collected for road-charging purposes.

self-administered panels of households, which permit their vehicles to be followed for several years;

national or local household travel surveys (with a seven-day trip diary);

official vehicle inspection and vehicle registration files;

‘vehicle surveys’ based on vehicle registry data;

traffic counts;

data collected for road-charging purposes.

The paper will present a review of mainly vehicle-based survey methods used in France, Germany, Finland, the United Kingdom, the United States and Canada, describing existing sampling frames to their scope, advantages and limitations, as well as their costs. Issues addressed in this context will be further examined in terms of their methodological challenges as well as their purpose.

The leading questions underlying this paper as well as the corresponding workshop are: why is it necessary to have data on passenger travel or transportation; and, looking at international experience, how good are vehicle-based surveys in delivering the required information? In discussing problems experienced in the different countries with data collection and evaluation methods, emphasis will be put on potential strategies for methodological and technological improvement and problem solving. One example is the potential use, benefits and constraints of new survey technologies presented by vehicle tracking techniques.

In this chapter, we draw on health lifestyle, human capital, and health commodity theories to examine the effects of educational attainment on a wide range of individual dietary behaviors and dietary lifestyles.

Using data from the 2005-2006 iteration of the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (n = 2,135), we employ negative binomial regression and binary logistic regression to model three dietary lifestyle indices and thirteen healthy dietary behaviors.

We find that having a college degree or higher is associated with seven of the thirteen healthy dietary behaviors, including greater attention to nutrition information (general nutrition, serving size, calories, and total fat) and consumption of vegetables, protein, and dairy products. For the most part, education is unrelated to the inspection of cholesterol and sodium information and consumption of fruits/grains/sweets, and daily caloric intake. We observe that having a college degree is associated with healthier dietary lifestyles, the contemporaneous practice of multiple healthy dietary behaviors (label checking and eating behaviors). Remarkably, household income and the poverty-to-income ratio are unrelated to dietary lifestyles and have virtually no impact on the magnitude of the association between education and dietary lifestyles.

Our findings are consistent with predictions derived from health lifestyle and human capital theories. We find no support for health commodity theory, the idea that people who are advantaged in terms of education live healthier lifestyles because they tend to have the financial resources to purchase the elements of a healthy lifestyle.