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Mobile apps represent an emergent self-service technology that has greatly contributed to the rise of mobile shopping. However, the existing services and marketing literature offer little insight on consumer app usage. Further, little is known about how this app usage might affect important outcomes such as consumers’ intentions to use and recommend an app, their channel preferences (in-store vs app), or their purchasing behavior with the app. Thus, the purpose of this research is to examine if, and how, consumers’ actual experiences using retailers’ apps affected these outcomes.

Data were collected from a series of online surveys of adult consumers based on their prior experiences with retailers’ apps. The hypothesized relationships were tested using regression analyses.

Results highlight perceived ease of use as a critical app attribute that fosters consumers’ personal connections to apps. These connections in turn influence their purchase channel preferences (app vs in-store) and actual purchasing behavior with the app, as well as their future intentions to purchase with the app and recommend it to others. App usage frequency is shown to moderate these effects.

The findings provide needed managerial insight into consumer usage of brick-and-click retailers’ apps. Specifically, the results inform service providers’ mobile commerce strategies – particularly with respect to app design, channel management and customer segmentation. Future opportunities exist to explore and compare consumer usage of other types of service providers’ apps, such as “pure play” providers that do not have physical stores.

This research moves beyond initial app adoption to instead focus on consumers’ actual app usage experiences and their implications. Of note, the findings suggest that firms may be paradoxically driving consumers away from their physical stores as they continue to devote considerable resources to creating and providing customers with easy-to-use mobile apps.

Although it is widely acknowledged that health care delivery systems are complex adaptive systems, there are gaps in understanding the application of systems engineering approaches to systems analysis and redesign in the health care domain. Commonly employed methods, such as statistical analysis of risk factors and outcomes, are simply not adequate to robustly characterize all system requirements and facilitate reliable design of complex care delivery systems. This is especially apparent in institutional-level systems, such as patient safety programs that must mitigate the risk of infections and other complications that can occur in virtually any setting providing direct and indirect patient care. The case example presented here illustrates the application of various system engineering methods to identify requirements and intervention candidates for a critical patient safety problem known as failure to rescue. Detailed descriptions of the analysis methods and their application are presented along with specific analysis artifacts related to the failure to rescue case study. Given the prevalence of complex systems in health care, this practical and effective approach provides an important example of how systems engineering methods can effectively address the shortcomings in current health care analysis and design, where complex systems are increasingly prevalent.

A micro level study was undertaken in a local labour market (LLM) comprising one small town and two industrial villages, each within commuting distance of the town. The boundary of the LLM was clearly defined in that it was surrounded by open countryside free of industry. Analysis of collected data shows that commuting to any other neighbouring industrial settlement was rare, and that the LLM was characterised by relatively high female participation. The aim of the research was to identify the relationships of demand for female in‐factory manual workers and to compare these with those of twilight workers and homeworkers who performed identical work for the same employers. The major industry, that of hosiery and knitwear manufacture, was surveyed to provide a large body of information, but this article extracts only those data relevant to recruitment practices. A pre‐pilot study of a hosiery and knitwear manufacturing company in a different LLM, and a pilot study of footwear manufacturing establishments in the same LLM, revealed that the industry was likely to generate sexually segregated labour forces. Consequently, it was necessary to collect some data for men in order to put into perspective the demands for women.

In April 1988, the National Reference Center for Bioethics Literature (NRC) (see sidebar) published “AIDS: Law, Ethics and Public Policy.” As part of the NRC's Scope Note Series, the paper offered a current overview of issues and viewpoints related to AIDS and ethics. Not meant to be a comprehensive review of all AIDS literature, it contained selected citations referring to facts, opinion, and legal precedents, as well as a discussion of different ethical aspects surrounding AIDS. Updating the earlier work, this bibliography provides ethical citations from literature published from 1988 to the present.

Two perspectives provide alternative insights into household composition in contemporary Eastern Europe. The first stresses that individuals have relatively fixed preferences about living arrangements and diverge from them only when they cannot attain their ideal. The second major approach, the adaptive strategies perspective, predicts that individuals have few preferences. Instead, they use household composition to cope with economic hardship, deploy labor, or care for children or the elderly. This article evaluates these approaches in five post‐socialist East‐European countries, Bulgaria, Hungary, Poland, Romania, and Russia, using descriptive statistics and logistic regression. The results suggest that household extension is common in these countries and provide the most evidence for the adaptive strategies perspective. In particular, the results show that variables operationalizing the adaptive strategies perspective, including measures of single motherhood, retirement status, agricultural cultivation, and poverty, increase the odds of household extension.

This study aims to fill a gap in the literature. The notion of giveaways/free has not been well addressed in management history literature and arguably is a valuable contribution in that it has a strategic dimension.

This paper is conceptual. It is a structured survey of ideas/opinions about the notion of “free” in commercial endeavor. The survey is organized largely from a historical perspective.

Several categories of “free” are delineated and placed into a historical and strategic context.

The work has strategic implications and lays out a new research agenda for management historians.