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This paper aims to examine how consumers make choices when they are faced with a fixed set of available options, consisting of both preferred and less-preferred choices, in the domain of food consumption. Specifically, the paper offers a novel perspective to predict repeated choice decisions in food consumption, which is termed as “pattern-seeking” – a consumption choice pattern that involves a coherent repetitive sequence of sub-groupings or coherently concentrated sub-groupings of options.

Eight experimental studies that contrast the existing theoretical predictions regarding repeated choices (e.g. primacy effect, recency effect, variety vs consistency) against pattern-seeking were conducted using hypothetical and actual food choices.

The results of experimental studies show that an explicit decision pattern (i.e. pattern-seeking) emerges as the most significant predictor of repeated choice in the food consumption domain.

This study offers a novel perspective on how consumers make repeated choices in the domain of food consumption.

The results show that consumers prefer food consumption with a pattern (vs non-pattern). Thus, it would be better to generate marketing activities that allow customers to satisfy their pattern-seeking more easily.

This study advances the literature on repeated food choices by demonstrating that people possess an inherent preference for patterns in food consumption.

The purpose of this paper is to prove that the abolition of state monopoly in the provision of educational services in Continental Europe will result in members of the educational community spending less time towards rent protection and more time towards educational activities, something that should also benefit the consumers of these services. It also aims to prove that once deregulation reform is introduced, those that now fiercely resist to it will, rationally, accept the new status quo and adapt to it.

The paper presents a model in which externalities affect the decision of the community of educational services providers to allocate time among their profession and towards opposing reform and protecting rents that follow from laws that establish state monopolies in the market for education services. The model proposed shows that, in the presence of such externalities, the introduction of reforms that remove the state monopoly will make the educational community adapt to the new status quo by allocating less time to protect monopoly rents and oppose reform, and more time and effort towards educational‐related activities like research and publications, high‐quality teaching and tutorials, etc.

The prediction of the assumed model that no internal forces can lead to a departure from the unfavorable equilibrium that exists before reform, underlines the need of society to press ahead with reforms regardless of the objections raised by the affected interest communities.

The paper provides for the first time in the relevant literature, an analysis of the harms and drawbacks of the higher education state monopoly in Continental Western Europe.

The purpose of this paper is to provide a sociological analysis of emergent sociospatial structures in a hot‐desking office environment, where space is used exchangeably. It considers hot‐desking as part of broader societal shifts in the ownership of space.

This analysis is based on an ethnographically‐oriented investigation, in which data collection methods used were participant‐observation and interviewing. The analysis uses Lefebvre's conceptualisation of the social production of space and draws on the urban sociology literature.

The analysis first indicates that, in hot‐desking environments, there may be an emergent social structure distinguishing employees who settle in one place, and others who have to move constantly. Second, the practice of movement itself generates additional work and a sense of marginalisation for hot‐deskers.

The paper does not provide a generalisable theory, but suggests that loss of everyday ownership of the workspace gives rise to particular practical and social tensions and shifts hot‐deskers' identification with the organisation.

Official requirements for mobility may result in a new social structure distinguishing settlers and hot‐deskers, rather than mobility being spread evenly.

The paper contributes to the literature on organisational spatiality by focusing on the spatial practices entailed in hot‐desking, and by contextualising hot‐desking within the wider spatial configuration of capitalism, in which space is used exchangeability in order to realise greater economic returns. Rather than using the popular “nomadic” metaphor to understand the experience of mobility at work, it uses a metaphor of vagrancy to highlight consequences of the loss of ownership of space.

Measuring behavior requires research methods that can capture observed outcomes and expose underlying processes and mechanisms. In this chapter, we present a toolbox of instruments and techniques we designed experimental tasks to simulate decision environments and capture behavior. We deployed protocol analysis and text analysis to examine the underlying cognitive processes. In combination, these can simultaneously grasp antecedents, outcomes, processes, and mechanisms. We applied them to collect rich behavioral data on two key topics in strategic management: the exploration–exploitation trade-off and strategic risk-taking. This mix of methods is particularly useful in describing actual behavior as it is, not as it should be, replacing assumptions with data and offering a finer-grained perspective of strategic decision-making.

Many countries today, especially in Europe, provide publicly funded public services in quasi-markets. As these markets commercialize, agencies of various types are providing technologies that support citizens’ choice of services. Citizens’ use of technologies for service provision is studied as e-government under labels of channel management, e-service uptake or adoption. In contrast, by using actor–network theory (ANT), the purpose of this paper is to focus on the marketing devices that are used to enroll citizens to choose technologies in a context with large penetration of quasi-market arrangements.

Based on a Swedish case study, this paper uses qualitative data from 11 occurrences of technologies to support citizens’ choice (“market devices”) in education, healthcare and public pension in an analysis of the means taken (“marketing devices”) to increase their use. The study formulates a tentative typology of these devices.

The marketing devices are intended to attract citizens’ attention to the possibility of choice (e.g. catalogs, postcards and commercials), invite interaction (e.g. various social media platforms), improve the technological support in line with user needs (e.g. user participation in development), increase visibility of technological support (e.g. search optimization) or directly connect citizens to technological support (e.g. via links).

The paper contributes to e-government research through a typology of means taken to increase citizens’ technology use based on selected concepts from ANT, and to a discussion of technologies and humans.

Portable computers have been around just about as long as personal computers, and have always involved serious compromises. The compromises continue, but the computers have improved enormously in true portability, power, and price. You always pay a premium for portability, and more of a premium for the ability to actually work on the road. While the premium has come down, it's still there—but now, you can get almost as much power as you need, if you pay the price. In his second look at the last eight years in DOS computing, Crawford shows how conservative choices in portable computing have evolved, and discusses why conservatism makes more sense when buying a portable.

The purpose of this paper is to understand the mechanisms of partner selection from the transaction cost economics’ viewpoint. This paper reveals that a firm’s choice to initiate a new alliance with a new partner or form a repeated alliance with an existing partner depends on contract terms and the relative characteristics of partners.

The authors examine 555 alliances in high-tech industries from 2001 to 2009, which the authors collected from secondary sources, including the Securities Data Company Platinum and Compustat databases. The authors use a logit model to reveal the effect of contract terms and relative partner characteristics on repeated partnership.

The results show that repeated partnership is less likely to be combined with equity sharing. Repeated partnership is also negatively associated with the functional scope of a new alliance. Finally, a firm is more likely to enter a repeated partnership when its partner is from a different country.

This research provides new insights into how the choice of an alliance partner depends on contract terms and the relative characteristics of partners. Identifying factors associated with partner selection helps us understand the fundamental mechanisms of initiating a new alliance. It allows focal firms to foresee the behavior of their peers or competitors in certain circumstances and thus provides important insights for developing corresponding strategies more effectively.