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Briefly reviews previous research on the value of investment advisors’ recommendations and presents a study comparing portfolio returns from analysts’ recommendations in the Wall Street Journal’s “Dartboard” contest 1990‐1996, four randomly selected shares and the Dow Jones Industrial Average. Finds the analysts’ portfolio has the highest average returns and standard deviation; and that although some individual analysts have excellent scores in the contest, this is inversely related to the number of times they participate. Suggests that they do not significantly outperform other portfolios, but that contest winners’ tips have significant effects on the market, especially for non‐listed shares. Assesses the implications of the results for the efficient market hypothesis and the share prices of firms with higher asymmetric information.

This paper aims to develop a novel and generalizable machine-learning based method of measuring established marketing constructs through passive analysis of consumer-generated textual data. The authors term this method scale-directed text analysis.

The method first develops a dictionary of words related to specific dimensions of a construct that is used to assess textual data from any source for a specific meaning. The method explicitly recognizes both specific words and the strength of their underlying sentiment.

Results calculated using this new approach are statistically equivalent to responses to traditional marketing scale items. These results demonstrate the validity of the authors’ methodology and show its potential to complement traditional survey approaches to assessing marketing constructs.

The method we outline relies on machine learning and thus requires either large volumes of text or a large number of cases. Results are reliable only at the aggregate level.

The method detail provides a means of less intrusive data collection such as through scraped social media postings. Alternatively, it also provides a means of analyzing data collected through more naturalistic methods such as open-response forms or even spoken language, both likely to increase response rates.

Scale-directed text analysis goes beyond traditional methods of conducting simple sentiment analysis and word frequency or percentage counts. It combines the richness of traditional textual and sentiment analysis with the theoretical structure and analytical rigor provided by traditional marketing scales, all in an automatic process.

Experts respond to the same incentives as people in other areas of human action, and in the same ways. This insight is a truism: Experts are ordinary people, not otherworld creatures. The disciplined pursuit of this common sense observation helps us to reach conclusions about experts that might be surprising or counterintuitive.

Mothers play important roles in their families' lives. When they are high performance athletes, they need specific supports that will enable them to excel in their roles as mother athletes. The feminist qualitative research in this chapter is based on data from two studies drawn from semi-structured interviews with elite female distance runners: 14 in 2013–2014 and 11 in 2021. We address two questions: (1) what are the considerations that elite female distance runners make around planning their pregnancy(ies) and family lives? and (2) how have experiences shifted between athlete interviews in 2013–2014 and a new cohort of athletes in 2021? In order to address these questions, we drew on three complementary theoretical approaches: liberal feminism, radical feminism, and strategic essentialism. Further, we then used thematic analysis and generated three broader themes about elite female distance runners that aligned with both cohorts of athletes. First, athletes are forced to plan/strategize their pregnancies around finances, competitions, contracts, and spousal supports due to the lack of support from athletic governing bodies or corporate sponsors. Second, female athletes who choose to have children experience stress and uncertainty in their athletic careers that their male counterparts do not. Third, elite female athletes are demanding that further change occur to address these inequalities, and participants offered a number of potential solutions to improve supports for these athletes. Although solid progress has been noted in the timeframes of our two cohorts, further commitment from athletic governing bodies and corporate sponsors is needed to work toward gender equity in athletics.

Presents a review on implementing finite element methods on supercomputers, workstations and PCs and gives main trends in hardware and software developments. An appendix included at the end of the paper presents a bibliography on the subjects retrospectively to 1985 and approximately 1,100 references are listed.

The essence of community policing is a police‐community partnership for identifying, prioritizing and resolving citizen problems. The nature of community policing demands that attention be paid to public expectations of police, and implies listening to citizens and taking their problems seriously. A critical precursor to community policing is identifying citizens’ perceptions of police and their local neighborhoods. This paper presents findings from the Harrisburg Citizen Survey – 1999, in which citizens were asked a series of questions regarding their attitudes toward their local police, their fear of crime, and their perceptions of physical and social incivilities in their neighborhoods. The overall research question for the paper is “Can attitudes toward police be predicted by citizens’ perceptions of physical and social incivilities, their fear of crime, and contact with police, controlling for age, gender, race/ethnicity, household income, and level of education?”

The purpose of this paper is to study how individuals assess responsibility during an uncontrollable event requiring collective action, using crises affecting service workers as contexts. Specifically, the authors examine what parties consumers hold responsible for ensuring service worker welfare following an uncontrollable event and determine what factors make customers more open to accepting responsibility for ensuring worker welfare themselves.

The authors surveyed a nationally representative sample of US consumers regarding their attitudes toward protecting service workers during COVID-19 and used regression analysis to identify factors that predict attributions of responsibility to customers. The authors also conducted an experiment (using a new crisis context) to determine whether certain key factors impact customer perceptions of their own responsibility for helping employees during an uncontrollable event.

The survey results show US consumers hold firms most responsible for worker welfare, followed by customers and, finally, government. When examining factors that drive attributions of responsibility for customers, perceptions of how sincere firms are in their efforts to help employees predict higher responsibility attributions, and experimental results confirm that higher perceived firm sincerity increases consumers’ own sense of responsibility toward workers.

This research identifies factors that affect consumer support for efforts to help service employees and collective action problems more generally.

This research highlights an under-studied crisis context – uncontrollable events that require collective action – and shows how consumers make assessments about their own responsibility (in addition to the responsibility of the service firm) in these contexts.

This paper aims to test whether an antecedent/consequence brand equity model developed with Americans holds up with Chinese, and to examine whether brand equity's functional (utilitarian) and experiential (emotive) facets have (dis)similar significance in a cross‐cultural setting.

The survey was administered to US and Chinese samples, with data analyzed using structural equation modeling to test hypotheses developed from literatures.

The study found evidence that the model does hold up in a cross‐cultural setting, and that some of brand equity's functional and experiential antecedents and components have dissimilar significance with the two sample groups.

Only one brand was employed; the survey was completed with volunteer US and Chinese university students vs a broader range of age groups; and the dissimilar nuances of the English and Chinese languages may lead to divergent understandings of the measures.

The study provides a foundation for future cross‐cultural brand equity research and sheds empirical insight that, contrary to social sciences literatures' suggestions, the similar significance of brand equity and its antecedents are such that firms may benefit from employing standardized marketing strategies in cross‐cultural settings.

The study is a benchmark comparative cross‐cultural brand equity study with the vastly disparate US and Chinese consumers.