Search results

This study examines the empirical relationship between four broad antecedents of brand equity (branding strategy, brand structure, brand positioning and target market) and two separate dimensions of revenue premium: price premium and volume premium. Our modeling framework aims to explain how different antecedents of brand equity influence the realized velocity and margin of branded product sales, key drivers of operating cash flow. Our generalizable empirical analyses are based on a representative dataset of over 6,500 brands, across 200 consumer-packaged goods categories, spanning three years. We find that only 20% of brands command revenue premiums, for which volume premiums are the critical determinant. Branding strategies and brand structure primarily impact volume premium. In contrast, brand positioning has little effect. Target market substantially affects both premiums. Overall, these four elements account for 73% and 69% of the explained variations in price and volume premiums, respectively. This study provides generalizable, important, and novel insights for the theory and practice of brand management regarding price positioning and extending brands into new categories.

We empirically examine the institutional dynamics attending the process whereby legitimate organizational symbols become illegitimate. We conducted two studies, one historical and one comparative, of those firms that appended “dot-com” to their names during the period of “Internet euphoria,” 1998–1999. The first study analyzes the legitimacy over time for one case, that of Egghead software, the first organization to affix “dot-com” to its name. The second study compares the legitimacy of firms named “dot-com” in the wake of the “dot-com” crash, using both public perceptions and financial valuations. Results from the two studies indicate that good organization names can go bad rather quickly and illustrate how swift and definitive the process of deinstitutionalization can be.

This chapter traces the development of the pricing research program of Kent Monroe, beginning with his doctoral dissertation and continuing to the present time. Drawing on psychophysics and adaptation-level theory the early research efforts concentrated on validating two important concepts relative to behavioral pricing research: reference price and acceptable price range. Then the behavioral pricing research program expanded to explore how the context of a purchase situation, including the structure of the prices available for judgment, influences buyers' price perceptions and willingness to buy. In the early years his research included pricing models and research on patronage behavior. Subsequently, concentrating primarily on behavioral pricing research, he began to integrate findings from the research program into examining how various sellers pricing strategies and tactics influence buyers' judgments and purchase decisions. These efforts led to the first edition of his book Pricing – Making Profitable Decisions published in 1979. The book was subsequently revised and expanded in 1990 and again in 2003.

The idea that a significant portion of what consumers do, feel, and think is driven by automatic (or “implicit”) cognitive processes has sparked a wave of interest in the development of assessment tools that (attempt to) capture cognitive processes under automaticity conditions (also known as “implicit measures”). However, as more and more implicit measures are developed, it is becoming increasingly difficult for consumer scientists and marketing professionals to select the most appropriate tool for a specific research question. We therefore present a systematic overview of the criteria that can be used to evaluate and compare different implicit measures, including their structural characteristics, the extent to which (and the way in which) they qualify as “implicit,” as well as more practical considerations such as ease of implementation and the user experience of the respondents. As an example, we apply these criteria to four implicit measures that are (or have the potential to become) popular in marketing research (i.e., the implicit association test, the evaluative priming task, the affect misattribution procedure, and the propositional evaluation paradigm).

Literacy demands have changed over the years and for success in society it is necessary to handle a wide range of texts and written information. The school has been criticized for not giving their pupils the necessary abilities to handle the kind of information they are faced with in society. One important dimension of literacy is reading comprehension, but even though much written information has the form of tables, drawings, graphs, etc. such presentations are most often accompanied by written text. This chapter focuses the comprehension of different kinds of written information, and data from different tasks are evaluated in light of the simple view of reading. A total of 132 grade 6 readers were given four reading comprehension tasks concurrently with a decoding task and a listening comprehension task. It was found that the sum of decoding and listening comprehension accounted for a larger part of the variance in all the reading comprehension tasks than the product of decoding and listening comprehension. The pupils' results on a naming task and morphological tasks from preschool accounted for significant parts of the variance in the comprehension of both plain text and text combined with tables and graphs over and above the concurrent decoding and listening comprehension results. Speed of orthographic identification in 2nd grade accounted for an additional, significant part of the variance in the plain text reading tasks. These results show that processing speed and linguistic knowledge, such as morphological knowledge, are important contributors to the comprehension of different kinds of written information. Even if speed of orthographic identification is especially important for comprehending plain texts, a broad linguistic and cognitive perspective seems to be important when preparing pupils to comprehend different kinds of written material.

Inconsistencies and contradictions in the US government's story of hijackers and their masterminds are examined to account for what happened on 9-11. A little-known initial FBI list of 19, scrutinized for four names not on its final list, calls into question the FBI naming process. We discovered 11 of the FBI-named finalists could not have been on those planes, with 10 still alive and another's identity improvised by a double. The Dulles videotape, essentially the government's case that hijackers boarded the 9-11 flights, is found to have serious problems including authentication, as does the so-called bin Laden “confession” video.

Were “hijackers” known to be in the US before intelligence alleges it knew? Evidence is examined which shows that they were closely monitored by agencies which denied this knowledge; in particular, an undercover FBI agent lived with them the prior year.

Noting government refusal to disclose evidence called for by investigators, we find some pieces altered or fabricated and others confiscated or destroyed. Other revelations point to hijackers with national security overrides, protection in their alternate roles as drug traffickers, and deep political connections with government elites. We investigate patterns, reminiscent of historical intelligence involvement, revealing the presence of a covert intelligence operation disguised as an outside enemy attack.

This paper aims to investigate spillover effects of public capital stock in a production function model that accounts for spatial dependencies. In many settings, ignoring spatial dependency yields inefficient, biased and inconsistent estimates in cross country panels. Although there are a number of studies aiming to estimate the output elasticity of public capital stock, many of those fail to reach a consensus on refining the elasticity estimates. We argue that accounting for spillover effects of the public capital stock on the production efficiency and incorporating spatial dependences are crucial. For this purpose, we employ a spatial autoregressive stochastic frontier model based on a number of specifications of the spatial dependency structure. Using the data of 21 OECD countries from 1960 to 2001, we estimate a spatial autoregressive stochastic frontier model and derive the mean indirect marginal effects of public capital stock, which are interpreted as spillover effects. We found that spillover effects can be an important factor explaining variations in technical inefficiency across countries as well as in explaining the discrepancies among various levels of output elasticity of public capital stock in traditional production function approaches.

Although the global economic crisis that began in 2007 has renewed interest in Keynes among the wider educated public, graduate courses in macroeconomics usually teach little about Keynes and the issues he analyzed, and what little they teach is often wrong (e.g., that Keynes assumed an arbitrarily fixed money wage rate or that he ignored expectations). Consequently, as macroeconomists turn their attention to the possibility, causes and consequences of financial crises and global depression, they do not have access to the insights into these questions produced by earlier generations of economists. The time and attention constraints of theory courses do not allow simply directing the students to the extensive scholarly literature on the economics of Keynes, so this paper offers a suggested introduction to the economics of Keynes for a graduate course in macroeconomics.