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This exploratory study aims to examine the influence of immigrant employee effects within a sample of small New Zealand‐based international service providers.

Seven immigrant employees from six firms were interviewed. The interviews examined immigrant effects on four areas: knowledge transfer and application; customer relationships; marketing strategy and market entry mode. Propositions derived from the literature were tentatively tested.

The findings, consistent with other literature on immigrant effects, indicated that immigrant employees play an important role in shaping these areas within small international service firms. Of particular importance was knowledge of local culture and market conditions. Immigrant employees enjoyed considerable discretion in the creation and management of customer relationships.

There appeared to be strong interactions between the value of immigrant knowledge, relationships and the characteristics of service offerings. The results established have provided guidance for researchers when formulating their research frameworks concerning market entry mode, international marketing strategy, knowledge transfer, immigrant employees and so on. Managers should also consider employing the outcomes of this research when designing their international human resource management and marketing strategies. However, these exploratory findings should be confirmed by future research which is formulated with a larger sample size. Only then can the contributions of this study be considered more definite.

Nowadays, uncertainty in market demand poses considerable risk to the retailers that supply the market. On the other hand, the risk-averse behaviors of retailers toward risk may have evolved over time. Considering a supply chain including a manufacturer and a population of retailers, the authors intend to investigate how the population of retailers tends to evolve toward risk-averse behavior. Moreover, this study aims to evaluate the effects of wholesale-retail price of manufacturer on evolutionary stable strategy (ESS) of the retailers.

Due to market uncertainty, a supply chain with a population of risk-averse and risk-neutral retailers was investigated. The wholesale pricing strategy is determined by a manufacturer acting as a leader, while retailers who make order quantity decisions act as followers. An integrated Cournot duopoly equilibrium and evolutionary game theory (EGT) approach has been used to model this situation.

A numerical real-world case study using Iran Khodro Company is analyzed by applying the proposed EGT approach. The study provides managerial insights to the manufacturer as well as retailers in developing their strategies. Results showed that risk behavior of retailers significantly affects optimal wholesale/retail price, profits and ESS. In the long term, the retailers tend to have a risk-neutral behavior to gain more profit. In the short term, if a retailer choses risk-averse strategy, in the long term, it will change its strategy to obtain more profit and remain in the competitive market.

The contributions in this research are fourfold. First, ESS concept to investigate the risk-averse or risk-neutral attitudes of the retailers was used. Second, the uncertain risk behavior of the competing retailers was considered. Third, the effect of varying wholesale pricing was investigated. Fourth, the equilibrium wholesale and retail prices have been obtained by considering uncertainty demand and risk.

The purpose of this paper is to be more than a book review essay on the work by Tadajewski and Jones, The History of Marketing Thought. It reviews the literature on marketing history and thought, and includes suggestions for additional research on that topic.

The research relies heavily on previously published articles and on databank searches.

A more complete time line of the history of marketing thought is presented. It is also shown that more biographical historical research is needed, especially on those pioneer practitioners of marketing whose legacy has influenced marketing thought and practice.

Knowing more about the history of marketing thought will prove useful both to academics and to practitioners. Biographies are also practical because we learn more about both the scholars and the times that have transformed this discipline.

The essay offers a brief but succinct summary of the history of marketing thought over millennia while at the same time reviewing a readings book on the topic.

Marketing, Pricing, Strategic marketing.

The case is developed for an MBA-level program.

In May 2017, the telecom industry in India witnessed an intense price war over 4G (fourth generation) data prices. Gopal Vittal, CEO of Bharti Airtel was exploring various options on how best to respond to the situation. He had to take a final call regarding Bharti Airtel’s marketing team’s counter move to tackle this price war by Jio – should Bharti Airtel ignore it, accommodate it or retaliate with even lower prices? Bharti Airtel strongly believed that Jio pricing structure had violated “fair pricing” norms, and its pricing was anti-competitive. It had filed a case with the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) and the Competition Commission of India (CCI) to restrain Jio from further giving “free” promotional offers and penalize it for it. Could the legal recourse by Bharti Airtel dampen Jio’s consistent subscriber growth rate?

The case provides the students with an insight into how the competition focused on pricing happens in the telecom industry. The pricing war affects the profit margin of all competing companies. It changes the customer reference point for evaluating the competing products and services. The students would also learn practical applications of positive-sum pricing, pricing war, fair pricing and legal aspects of pricing. This case provides the students with an opportunity to understand the pricing war and how to respond to it in a particular situation; understand positive-sum pricing and negative-sum pricing in telecom industry context; understand legal aspects of pricing; and how to leverage data for gaining newer customer insights.

Teaching Notes are available for educators only. Please contact your library to gain login details or email support@emeraldinsight.com to request teaching notes.

CSS 8: Marketing.

External factors such as improper handling, extreme weather and insect attacks affect product quality. It is most obvious in fruit products which have a high deterioration rate. Moreover, decaying fruits will increase the deteriorating of other good ones. The purpose of this study is to derive the optimal pricing and replenishment decisions for agricultural products considering the effect of external factors that induce deterioration.

In this paper, the study investigates ways to reduce the product deterioration rate by separating the near defective items from the other good products and accelerating the quick sales of the near defective items at a discounted price. The objective is to maximize the total profit by optimizing the selling price and the replenishment cycles. Two scenarios are investigated. In the first scenario, the retailer offers a selling price discount for near defective products to stimulate customer demand. In the second scenario, the retailer does not offer such discounts.

An algorithm to solve the model is derived. Further, numerical examples are developed to compare the total profit for the two scenarios. Theoretical derivations and graphical results show the concavity of the profit function. Finally, the sensitivity analysis shows that the total profit of the discount model is higher.

This study contributes to a new pricing and inventory decision model. The research provides insights to retailers on making optimal pricing and replenishment decisions for non-instantaneous deterioration items, as well as reducing the external factors that influence higher deterioration rate through separating good products from the near defective ones which are sold at a discount to induce the sale.

In the age of “big data,” one of the most important capabilities that differentiates the winners from the losers in the intensely competitive grocery market is how successfully a firm can harness its vast amounts of shopper data to become more shopper-centric. Grocery retailers struggle with how to manage the tremendous amount of data available to them and best leverage their frequent shopper data to derive insights. These data also present an opportunity for academic research on decision-making and evaluation of strategic initiatives. This chapter discusses three case studies that illustrate the various capabilities of frequent shopper data in generating shopper insights. Specifically, using frequent shopper data for millions of shoppers, the three case studies demonstrate how frequent shopper data can be used as an important information asset for understanding differences and similarities among different shopper groups (Case Study 1), as a means to assess the effectiveness of store redesigns/environment changes (Case Study 2), and as a key tool for evaluating program success (Case Study 3). The chapter concludes with a discussion of how successful collaboration between practitioners and academics can be a boon to both business success and academic research.

The purpose of this paper is to provide a thorough analysis of meat demand in China and predict future trends in meat consumption.

Expenditure as well as Marshallian and Hicksian demand elasticities of various meats in China are evaluated using the linear almost ideal demand system.

Results from this paper show that pork, the primary meat in Chinese diets, has become a necessity and that poultry, beef, mutton, and fish are considered luxuries within the meat budget allocation of Chinese households. Furthermore, the results predict that for any increase in future meat expenditure, the largest share of that increase will be allocated to pork consumption.

This paper fills a gap currently present in the empirical literature regarding time series meat demand analysis in China. This paper makes use of newly available time series data on Chinese meat consumption and prices to estimate expenditure as well as own‐price and cross‐price elasticities. Implications for both domestic meat producers and grain exporters are discussed.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the market integration and direction of causality of wholesale and retail prices for the chickpea legume in major chickpea markets in India.

In this paper, the authors employ the Johansen co-integration test, Granger causality test, vector autoregression (VAR), and vector error correction model (VECM) to examine the integration of markets. The authors use monthly wholesale and retail price data of the chickpea crop from select markets in India spanning January 2003–December 2020.

The results of this study strongly confirm the co-integration and interdependency of the selected chickpea markets in India. However, the speed of adjustment of prices in the wholesale market is weakest in Bikaner, followed by Daryapur and Narsinghpur; it is relatively moderate in Gulbarga. In contrast, the speed of adjustment is negative for Bhopal and Delhi, weak for Nasik, and moderate for retail market prices in Bangalore. The results of the causality test show that the Narsinghpur, Daryapur, and Gulbarga markets are the most influential, with bidirectional relations in the case of wholesale market prices. Meanwhile, the Bangalore market is the most connected and effective retail market among the selected retail markets. It has bidirectional price transmission with two other markets, i.e. Bhopal and Nasik.

This paper calls for forthcoming studies to investigate the impact of external and internal factors, such as market infrastructure; government policy regarding self-reliant production; product physical characteristics; and rate of utilization indicating market integration. They should also focus on strengthening information technology for the regular flow of market information to help farmers increase their incomes.

Very few studies have explored market efficiency and direction of causality using both linear and nonlinear techniques for wholesale and retail prices of chickpea in India.

This study aims to analyze the competition of two financial chains (FCs) when the government intervenes in the financial market to prohibit the excessively high-interest rate by minimizing the arbitrages caused by speculative transactions. Each FC comprises an investor and one intermediary, attempts to finance the capital-constrained firms in financing needs.

Using a Stackelberg game theoretic framework and formulating two- and three-level optimization problems for six possible scenarios, the authors establish an integrative framework to evaluate the scenarios through the lens of the two main decision-making structures of the FCs (i.e. centralized and decentralized) and three policies of the government (i.e. speculation minimizing, revenue gaining and utility maximizing).

Solving the problem results in optimal values for tariffs, which guarantee a stable competitive market. Consequently, policymaking by the government influences the decision variables, which is shown in a numerical study. The authors find that the government can orchestrate the FCs in the competitive market by imposing tariffs and prohibiting high-interest rates via regulating the speculation impacts, which guarantees a stable market and facilitates the financing of capital-constrained firms.

This paper aids the financial markets and governments to control the interest rate by minimizing the speculation level.

This paper investigates the impact of government intervention policies – as a leading player – on the competition of FCs – as followers – in providing financial services and making profits. The government imposes tariffs on the interest rate to stabilize the market by limiting speculative transactions. The paper presents the mathematical models of the optimization problems through the game-theoretic framework and comparison of the scenarios through a numerical experiment.