heuristics and biases in timing the replacement of durable products the process by which individuals make recurrent decisions about when to replace durable goods is examined two experiments are reported in which subjects play the role of purchasing agents who must repeatedly decide whether to keep a currently owned manufacturing device or replace it with a superior new one given uncertainty about the future performance of new and currently owned machines replacement patterns are compared with those that would be predicted if subjects made decisions as rational economic agents following the principles of optimal replacement theory this comparison reveals a number of systematic departures from optimality that do not vanish with experience among these are a tendency to replace at a slower rate than would be predicted by normative theory and a tendency to weigh opportunity costs arising from obsolescence greater than those arising from product deterioration in addition subjects display a bias against making replacement purchases given short lapses of time since the previous replacement the findings are interpreted in terms of known biases in decision making under uncertainty in dynamic and static settings

how do consumers make choices a survey of evidence in this paper we review the evidence about the purchase behaviour of consumers we concentrate on the characteristics of the choice process choice of the external information source and nature of the information obtained from these sources the impact of important systematic differences among consumers and products on choice behaviour is also discussed

a probit latent variable model of nutrition information and dietary fiber intake nutrition information and intake data for a sample of u s household meal planners are used to estimate the effects of fiber specific information on dietary fiber intake the information variables are measured using survey questions on fiber content of foods attitude toward consuming fiber rich foods and awareness of fiber health links the evidence confirms the influence of nutrition information on fiber intake household income meal planner age smoking status vegetarian status race and ethnicity are major determinants of both information and intake education exerts a sizable intake effect by enhancing the information level direct and indirect effects of exogenous variables are reported

some models for estimating technical and scale inefficiencies in data envelopment analysis in management contexts mathematical programming is usually used to evaluate a collection of possible alternative courses of action en route to selecting one which is best in this capacity mathematical programming serves as a planning aid to management data envelopment analysis reverses this role and employs mathematical programming to obtain ex post facto evaluations of the relative efficiency of management accomplishments however they may have been planned or executed mathematical programming is thereby extended for use as a tool for control and evaluation of past accomplishments as well as a tool to aid in planning future activities the ccr ratio form introduced by charnes cooper and rhodes as part of their data envelopment analysis approach comprehends both technical and scale inefficiencies via the optimal value of the ratio form as obtained directly from the data without requiring a priori specification of weights and or explicit delineation of assumed functional forms of relations between inputs and outputs a separation into technical and scale efficiencies is accomplished by the methods developed in this paper without altering the latter conditions for use of dea directly on observational data technical inefficiencies are identified with failures to achieve best possible output levels and or usage of excessive amounts of inputs methods for identifying and correcting the magnitudes of these inefficiencies as supplied in prior work are illustrated in the present paper a new separate variable is introduced which makes it possible to determine whether operations were conducted in regions of increasing constant or decreasing returns to scale in multiple input and multiple output situations the results are discussed and related not only to classical single output economics but also to more modern versions of economics which are identified with contestable market theories

consumer information search revisited theory and empirical analysis a comprehensive theoretical framework for understanding consumers information search behavior is presented unlike previous research our model identifies not only what factors affect consumers search behavior but also how these factors interact with each other in particular the model emphasizes the effect of prior brand perceptions on the search process we argue that when consumers have brand specific prior distributions of utility the existence of relative uncertainty among brands is necessary for search to be useful thus we explain why product class involvement or low search costs may not be sufficient to induce large amounts of search activity and why there may be an inverted u shaped relationship between search activity and experience we test our theory on consumers search behavior for new automobiles using data collected contemporaneously with consumers actual decision process our data support our theory

additive efficiency decomposition in two stage dea kao and hwang 2008 kao c hwang s n 2008 efficiency decomposition in two stage data envelopment analysis an application to non life insurance companies in taiwan european journal of operational research 185 1 418 429 develop a data envelopment analysis dea approach for measuring efficiency of decision processes which can be divided into two stages the first stage uses inputs to generate outputs which become the inputs to the second stage the first stage outputs are referred to as intermediate measures the second stage then uses these intermediate measures to produce outputs kao and huang represent the efficiency of the overall process as the product of the efficiencies of the two stages a major limitation of this model is its applicability to only constant returns to scale crs situations the current paper develops an additive efficiency decomposition approach wherein the overall efficiency is expressed as a weighted sum of the efficiencies of the individual stages this approach can be applied under both crs and variable returns to scale vrs assumptions the case of taiwanese non life insurance companies is revisited using this newly developed approach

information health risk beliefs and the demand for fats and oils mean and variance measures of health information about cholesterol and saturated fat are included in a demand system for fats and oils a bayesian model of health risk belief and consumer awareness surveys are the basis for computing these measures the empirical demand model shows that health information has resulted in significant increases in consumption for corn cottonseed and soybean oils and decreased consumption for butter and lard the predicted demand effects based on the bayesian information model are more reasonable than predictions from using either a time trend or a simple cumulative cholesterol information index copyright 1995 by mit press

health behavior health knowledge and schooling the positive correlation between schooling and good health is well documented one explanation is that schooling helps people choose healthier life styles by improving their knowledge of the relationship between health behaviors and health outcomes that is schooling improves the household s allocative efficiency in producing health this empirical study uses direct measures of health knowledge to test this explanation part of the relationship between schooling and the consumption of cigarettes alcohol and exercise is explained by differences in health knowledge however most of schooling s effects on health behavior remain after differences in knowledge are controlled for

benchmarking superannuation funds based on relative performance in this article we assess fund performance using data envelopment analysis dea for each inefficient fund dea provides a set of role model funds whose best practices may be emulated for performance improvement we find that the role models of most inefficient funds consist entirely of funds different from their own type to overcome this situation we suggest a multi step dea procedure the procedure starts by categorizing funds on a hierarchical basis we establish the hierarchy based on the frequency of efficient funds that belong to each fund type thereafter a set of role model funds for each inefficient fund is found by pooling the funds in its own category and the funds that belongs to the categories at the lower levels in the hierarchy and applying dea this procedure is repeated by augmenting the pool with funds at the next higher level and so on until all the sampled funds are included at each step a set of role models is identified an inefficient fund can thus reach the efficient frontie

the adequacy of investment choices offered by 401k plans abstract the choices made by 401 k participants are the product of two different decisions what is offered and what is chosen while there have been a number of studies of the decisions made by participants in 401 k plans there have been no studies of the adequacy of the full set of choices offered to 401 k participants this paper analyzes the adequacy and characteristics of the choices offered to 401 k plan participants for over 400 plans we find that only 53 of the plans offer an adequate set of options and that over a 20 year period offering inadequate options makes a difference in terminal wealth of over 53 we find that funds included in the plans are riskier but have a slightly higher return than the general population of funds in the same categories however we find that the return difference is roughly equal to the difference in expenses between funds selected by plans and randomly selected funds we study the characteristics of plans that are associated with adequate investment choices including an analysis of the use of company stock plan size and the use of sophisticated strategies

why do managers explain their earnings forecasts managers often explain their earnings forecasts by linking forecasted performance to their internal actions and the actions of parties external to the firm these attributions potentially aid investors in the interpretation of management forecasts by confirming known relationships between attributions and profitability or by identifying additional causes that investors should consider when forecasting earnings we investigate why managers choose to provide attributions with their forecasts and whether the attributions are related to security price reactions to management earnings forecasts using a sample of 951 management earnings forecasts issued from 1993 to 1996 we find that attributions are more likely for larger firms less likely for firms in regulated industries less likely for forecasts issued over longer horizons more likely for bad news forecasts and more likely for forecasts that are maximum type furthermore attributions are associated with greater absolute price reactions to management forecasts more negative price reactions to management forecasts forecast news held constant and a greater price reaction per dollar of unexpected earnings our findings hold after control for the aforementioned determinants of attributions and after control for other firm and forecast specific variables that are often associated with security prices

reservation price as a range an incentive compatible measurement approach abstract drawing from the literature on buyers uncertainty in preference and product knowledge the authors suggest and empirically test the proposition that a consumer s reservation price for a product is more meaningfully and accurately represented as a range than as a single point given this conceptualization they propose an approach for incentive compatible elicitation of a consumer s reservation price range icerange that builds on becker degroot and marschak s 1964 point of purchase method two empirical applications of the approach provide an assessment of its practicality and its predictive performance relative to current methodologies for reservation price elicitation the results demonstrate that the proposed method significantly outperforms the benchmark approaches in terms of predictive validity and yields valuable incremental information about uncertainty in product valuation

efficiency of mutual funds and portfolio performance measurement a non parametric approach abstract in finance portfolio performance assessment is an important area of research the two popular indices of performance are the jensen s alpha and the sharpe index however there are a number of shortcomings of the above measures that have been highlighted in the literature we propose a new measure of performance that seeks to address the limitations of the earlier indices the new index is calculated by employing a well known method in operations research called data envelopment analysis we show the benefits of the proposed approach and assess the performance of mutual funds we compare the results with traditional indices of performance an interesting result we obtain is that the mutual funds are all approximately mean variance efficient

consumer evaluations of multiple versus single price change this article examines how consumer evaluations of multiple price changes differ from the evaluation of a single price change of an equal amount consistent with r thaler s theory about segregation versus integration of gains and losses we find that multiple price decreases are evaluated more favorably than a single price decrease and multiple price increases are evaluated more unfavorably than a single price increase however these effects are moderated by consumer price uncertainty and relative magnitude of the prices being evaluated because price uncertain consumers consider higher ranges of prices acceptable they are less unfavorable to multiple price increases and more favorable to multiple price decreases than certain consumers moreover when the magnitude of one price is very small relative to other prices consumers preference for multiple price decreases relative to a single price decrease is reduced however this effect is not found when there are price increases

the persistence of risk adjusted mutual fund performance the authors examine predictability for stock mutual funds using risk adjusted returns they find that past performance is predictive of future risk adjusted performance applying modern portfolio theory techniques to past data improves selection and allows the authors to construct a portfolio of funds that significantly outperforms a rule based on past rank alone in addition they can form a combination of actively managed portfolios with the same risk as a portfolio of index funds but with higher mean return the portfolios selected have small but statistically significant positive risk adjusted returns during a period where mutual funds in general had negative risk adjusted returns copyright 1996 by university of chicago press

single option aversion this article documents single option aversion an increase in consumers desire to search when faced with a single option this effect can lead to a product being chosen more often when competing alternatives are included in the choice set contrary to various rational models of search as well as to recent research on choice conflict showing that additional options can lead to higher deferral rates a series of lab studies document this effect differentiate it from other context effects and test some of its boundary conditions the results suggest that single option aversion is not driven by the information provided by the additional options that the desire to search is critical for this effect to occur and that the effects of single option aversion are not limited to the immediate choice set these results have both practical and theoretical implications for the understanding of consumer search and choice deferral

consumer health information and the demand for medical care this paper is an empirical investigation of consumer health information using a new direct measure of information the econometric approach treats both information and physician visits as endogenous variables when estimating the demand for medical care the results show that information increases the probability that a consumer uses medical care but that conditional on use the quantity of care consumed is not related to information the results contradict specific implications of models where physicians can create or induce demand for their own services several results suggest that poorly informed consumers tend to underestimate the productivity of medical care in treating illness copyright 1990 by mit press

socioeconomic characteristics and obesity in underdeveloped economies does income really matter available evidence suggests that overweight and obesity prevalence is increasing worldwide at an alarming rate in both developed and developing countries this study focuses on the determinants of overweight in mothers and children using a unique dataset collected in urban accra in ghana the findings show that mothers education employment status and ethnicity significantly exert influence on the generation of body weight in particular those who attained secondary and tertiary education had lower body mass indices and were much less likely to be overweight or obese lending support to the notion that more educated women normally have better health knowledge and are more likely to consume healthy foods and also engage in physical exercises that help to control weight gain mother s education was also found to exert a negative and significant impact on the weight status of children furthermore household expenditure was found to exert a positive and significant impact on the probability of a mother b

best performing us mutual fund families from 1993 to 2008 evidence from a novel two stage dea model for efficiency decomposition when analyzing relative performance especially at the institutional level the traditional data envelopment analysis dea models do not recognize vastly different and important activities as separate functions and therefore cannot identify which function may be the main source of inefficiency we propose a novel two stage dea model that decomposes the overall efficiency of a decision making unit into two components and demonstrate its applicability by assessing the relative performance of 66 large mutual fund families in the us over the period 1993 2008 by decomposing the overall efficiency into operational management efficiency and portfolio management efficiency components we reveal the best performers the families that deteriorated in performance and those that improved in their performance over the sample period we also make frontier projections for poorly performing mutual fund families and highlight how the portfolio managers have managed their funds relative to the others during financial crisis periods

how disaggregation enhances the credibility of management earnings forecasts an important problem facing managers is how to enhance the credibility or believability of their earnings forecasts in this paper we experimentally test whether a characteristic of a management earnings forecast namely whether it is disaggregated can affect its credibility we also test whether disaggregation moderates the relation between managerial incentives and forecast credibility disaggregated forecasts include an earnings forecast as well as forecasts of other key line items comprising that earnings forecast our results indicate that disaggregated forecasts are judged to be more credible than aggregated ones and that disaggregation works to counteract the effect of high incentives we also develop and test an original model that explains how disaggregation positively impacts three factors that in turn influence forecast credibility perceived precision of management s beliefs perceived clarity of the forecast and perceived financial reporting quality we show that forecast disaggregation works to remedy incentive problems only via its effect on perceived financial

multi period efficiency and malmquist productivity index in two stage production systems abstract conventional two stage data envelopment analysis dea models measure the overall performance of a production system composed of two stages processes in a specified period of time where variations in different periods are ignored this paper takes the operations of individual periods into account to develop a multi period two stage dea model which is able to measure the overall and period efficiencies at the same time with the former expressed as a weighted average of the latter since the efficiency of a two stage system in a period is the product of the two process efficiencies the overall efficiency of a decision making unit dmu in the specified period of time can be decomposed into the process efficiency of each period based on this decomposition the sources of inefficiency in a dmu can be identified the efficiencies measured from the model can also be used to calculate a common weight global malmquist productivity index mpi between two periods in that the overall mpi is the product of the two process mpis the non life insurance industry in taiwan is used to verify the proposed model and to explain why some companies performed unsatisfactorily in the specified period of time

estimating search benefits from path tracking data measurement and determinants we study consumer search behavior in a brick and mortar store environment using a unique data set obtained from radio frequency identification tags which are attached to supermarket shopping carts this technology allows us to record consumers purchases as well as the time they spent in front of the shelf when contemplating which product to buy giving us a direct measure of search effort we estimate a linear regression of price paid on search duration in which search duration is instrumented with a search cost shifter we show that this regression allows us to recover the marginal return from search in terms of price at the optimal stopping point for the average consumer our identification strategy and coefficient interpretation are valid for a broad class of search models and we are hence able to remain agnostic about the details of the search process such as search order and search protocol we estimate an average return from search of 2 10 per minute and explore heterogeneity across consumer

all things considered the role of choice set formation in diversification abstract the diversification effect a tendency toward greater variety as multiple choices are made simultaneously in advance of consumption is a robust and important phenomenon researchers have typically explained the diversification effect in terms of differences in the process by which people select items from among those available this precludes the possibility that the locus of the effect lies in people s choice sets themselves that is how people decide which options to consider when making choices the authors examine the effects of set formation using an experimental choice sequence task and conjoined stochastic model of set formation and conditional choice the findings demonstrate that set formation plays a critical role in diversification previously chosen options are indeed discounted but only for simultaneous choices and only in the set formation portion of the model furthermore the expected number of choice set items is substantially greater in multiple versus single item choice s

resolving the deposit dilemma a new dea bank efficiency model abstract one of the weaknesses of current bank efficiency models is a disagreement as to the role of deposits in the bank production process some models view deposits as an input while others view them as an output such disparity of approaches results in inconsistent efficiency estimates in this study we propose an alternative data envelopment analysis dea bank efficiency model that treats deposits as an intermediate product thus emphasizing the dual role of deposits in the bank production process consequently the effect of the amount of deposits on bank efficiency depends on the efficiency at both stages of the bank production process the main advantage of our model is that it does not require a researcher to make a judgment call as to whether having more production approach or less intermediation approach deposits is better for bank efficiency our unified framework has the potential to produce more consistent efficiency estimates

buyer uncertainty and information search preliminary measures of pre purchase uncertainty were developed through focus group interviews and were administered to a nationwide sample of recent appliance purchasers responses indicated the presence of two general types of uncertainty knowledge uncertainty uncertainty regarding information about alternatives and choice uncertainty uncertainty about which alternative to choose in exploring how each of these uncertainty dimensions was related to search behavior we found that choice uncertainty appeared to increase search but knowledge uncertainty had a weaker negative effect on search implications of the findings for previous research on the relationship between uncertainty and search are discussed along with research directions

the economic causes of obesity a survey abstract obesity rates have increased dramatically over the last 30 years rising obesity has developed into a considerable worldwide public health problem with significant economic and social consequences accordingly obesity has become a subject of economic research this paper provides a broad survey of the recent and growing economic literature on the causes of obesity the literature both theoretical and empirical overall aims to explain the rising obesity trend and to identify the factors that contribute to obesity also surveyed are non economic causes and consequences of obesity and the interconnection with economic influences an understanding of the causes of obesity allows policies to be considered that might stem the global increase in obesity

performance evaluation of participating nations at the 2012 london summer olympics by a two stage data envelopment analysis this study measures the performance of participating nations at the olympics considering the quest for medals as a two stage olympic process the first stage is characterized as athlete preparation ap and the second stage as athlete competition ac we extend the relational model from the constant returns to scale framework to the variable returns to scale version the efficiency of each participating nation in the entire two stage olympic process is calculated as a product of the efficiencies of both stages and a heuristic search is applied to the extended relational model the efficiency of each stage can be obtained and directions for improving the performance of participating nations in the two stage olympic process can be identified an empirical study of the 2012 london summer olympic games reveals that the efficiency of the ap stage is higher than that of the ac stage for the majority of participants in addition a plot of the relationship between these three efficiencies shows that the efficiency of the entire two stage olympic process is more significantly related to that of the ac stage than that of the ap stage

the relationship between smoking quitting smoking and obesity in australia a seemingly unrelated probit approach smoking and obesity are two leading causes of preventable death further understanding of the relationship between these two risk factors can assist in reducing avoidable morbidity and mortality this study investigates the empirical association between obesity and the propensity to smoke and to quit smoking using a seemingly unrelated sur probit approach that takes into consideration the potential for reverse causality and unobserved heterogeneity using australian health survey data this article demonstrates the usefulness of the sur probit approach in generating information on the relationship between unobserved factors influencing both smoking behaviour and obesity and in providing estimates of the conditional probabilities of each risk factor results suggest the two risk factors are not independent the presence size and direction of correlation between the unobserved factors are found to vary by smoking behaviour and by gender estimates of conditional probabilities demonstrate smokers have a

optimal search for product information consumers often need to search for product information before making purchase decisions we consider a tractable continuous time model of gradual learning in which consumers incur search costs to learn further product information and update their expected utility of the product at each search occasion we characterize the optimal stopping rules for either purchase or no purchase as a function of search costs and of the importance informativeness of each attribute this paper also characterizes how the likelihood of purchase changes with the ex ante expected utility search costs and the importance informativeness of each attribute we discuss optimal pricing the impact of consumer search on profits and social welfare and how the seller chooses its price to strategically affect the extent of the consumers search behavior we show that lower search costs can hurt the consumer because the seller may then choose to charge higher prices discounting creates asymmetry in the purchase and no purchase search thresholds and may lead to lower prices if search occurs in equilibrium or higher prices if there is no search in equilibrium this paper also considers searching for signals of the value of the product heterogeneous importance of attributes endogenous intensity of search and social learning this paper was accepted by pradeep chintagunta marketing

changes in compulsory schooling and the causal effect of education on health evidence from germany in this paper we investigate the causal effect of years of schooling on health and health related behavior in west germany we apply an instrumental variables approach using as natural experiments several changes in compulsory schooling laws between 1949 and 1969 these law changes generate exogenous variation in years of schooling both across states and over time we find evidence for a strong and significant causal effect of years of schooling on long term illness for men but not for women moreover we provide somewhat weaker evidence of a causal effect of education on the likelihood of having weight problems for both sexes on the other hand we find little evidence for a causal effect of education on smoking behavior overall our estimates suggest significant non monetary returns to education with respect to health outcomes and not necessarily with respect to health related behavior

low income and poor health choices the example of smoking people with low incomes tend to make less healthy consumption choices than do high income people in the case of food agricultural economists have investigated whether this is due to the cost of a healthy diet studies of various aspects of the nutrition income nexus have generally been inconclusive we investigate a different possibility motivated by the fact that low income individuals are most likely to be smokers which cannot be due to limited budgets drawing on a body of related literature we develop a model in which income serves not only as a budget constraint but also as a source of future utility we test the model by estimating logistic models of beginning and quitting smoking we find support for the idea that low income consumers make less healthy choices because they face lower costs in terms of foregone future utility

modelling superannuation fund management function as a two stage process for overall and stage level performance appraisal we assess superannuation fund performance in a multi dimensional framework by conceptualizing its management function as a serially linked two sub process operational management om and portfolio

productivity and intermediate products a frontier approach abstract in recent years it has become popular to measure productivity using non parametric approaches however this has been done while ignoring intermediate products here we develop a non parametric productivity measure that explicitly incorporates such products

market information and firm performance the value of new information depends on how accurate the information is but it may also depend on the characteristics of the firm and the nature of the industry it operates in we develop a game theoretic model to understand how firm and industry characteristics moderate the effect of market information on firm profits our results suggest that information is more valuable when product substitutability is higher suggesting that information is of greater value in more competitive industries our results also suggest that although industry size does not affect the value of information information is more valuable for larger firms we find that except under some conditions more precise market information has a greater impact on profits in a stackelberg mode of conduct than in a bertrand nash mode

social learning in networks of friends versus strangers networks and the embedded relationships are critical determinants of how people communicate and form beliefs the explosion of social media has significantly increased the scope and impact of social learning among consumers this paper studies observational learning in networks of friends versus strangers a consumer decides whether to adopt a product after receiving a private signal about product quality and observing the actions of others the preference for the product has greater heterogeneity in the stranger network than in the friend network we show that when the network is small observing friends actions helps the consumer make more accurate inferences about quality as the network grows however the stranger network becomes more effective underlying these results are two competing effects of network heterogeneity on social learning these are the individual preference effect which allows one to make a better quality judgment when the preference element of past actions is more certain and the social conforming effect wherein private signals are underused in quality judgment as people follow others actions we find cascading is more likely to occur in the friend network than in the stranger network for a high quality firm the stranger network generates greater sales than the friend network when the network size is sufficiently large or the private signal is sufficiently accurate we also examine the existence of experts and firms using advertising to influence consumers finally we show how networks that are highly homogeneous or heterogeneous could impede observational learning

the economics of consumer knowledge while approaches to measuring the state of a consumer s knowledge are well developed much less is known about the relationship between knowledge and consumer choice and information search the purpose of this article is to explore these relationships by treating consumer knowledge as human capital which affects the full price of consumption and search activities using this framework models are presented to explain life cycle consumption patterns lifestyles brand loyalty choice of features and search behavior this economic perspective is compared and contrasted to other consumer research on these topics including recent qualitative research that examines consumption behavior

deriving the dea frontier for two stage processes data envelopment analysis dea is a method for measuring the efficiency of peer decision making units dmus recently dea has been extended to examine the efficiency of two stage processes where all the outputs from the first stage are intermediate measures that make up the inputs to the second stage the resulting two stage dea model provides not only an overall efficiency score for the entire process but as well yields an efficiency score for each of the individual stages due to the existence of intermediate measures the usual procedure of adjusting the inputs or outputs by the efficiency scores as in the standard dea approach does not necessarily yield a frontier projection the current paper develops an approach for determining the frontier points for inefficient dmus within the framework of two stage dea

the performance of us equity mutual funds the paper examines the performance of us no load equity mutual funds fund performance is derived using stochastic frontier analysis for a flexible functional form this analysis allows us to derive parametric estimates of efficiency scores for each fund in our sample for the first time in the literature our results indicate that us no load equity funds display varying levels of efficiency over time but also depending on size and on investment style robustness analysis reaffirm the efficiency scores remain consistent across different selections of inputs and outputs as well as the underlying distribution of the return having estimated each fund s efficiency in the sample we unveil their underlying dynamics also with respect to risk and operational characteristics such as flows assets and morningstar star ratings panel var estimations reveal that the response of funds efficiency to a shock in risk is positive and substantial some evidence of reverse causality is also observed finally we extend our analysis to investigate the relationship between funds performance and key covariates across subgroups defined by size

the behavioural homogeneity evaluation framework multi level evaluations of consumer involvement in international segmentation this paper presents a generic strategic framework of alternative international marketing strategies and market segmentation based on intra and inter cultural behavioural homogeneity consumer involvement ci is proposed as a pivotal construct to capture behavioural homogeneity for the identification of market segments results from a five country study demonstrate how the strategic framework can be valuable in managerial decision making first there is evidence for the cultural invariance of the measurement of ci allowing a true comparison of inter and intra cultural behavioural homogeneity second ci influences purchase behaviour and its evaluation provides a rich source of information for responsive market segmentation finally a decomposition of behavioural variance suggests that national cultural environment and nationally transcendent variables explain differences in behaviour the behavioural homogeneity evaluation framework therefore suggests appropriate international marketing strategies providing practical guidance for implementing involvement contingent strategies 2007 academy of international business all rights reserved

hot hands in mutual funds short run persistence of relative performance 1974 1988 the relative performance of no load growth oriented mutual funds persists in the near term with the strongest evidence for a one year evaluation horizon portfolios of recent poor performers do significantly worse than standard benchmarks those of recent top performers do better though not significantly so the difference in risk adjusted performance between the top and bottom octile portfolios is six to eight percent per year these results are not attributable to known anomalies or survivorship bias investigations with a different previously used data set and with some post 1988 data confirm the finding of persistence

the impact of product line extensions and consumer goals on the formation of price image abstract how do vertical product line extensions influence a retailer s price image conventional wisdom suggests that adding an upscale or downscale item to a product line has a directionally consistent impact on price image such that upscale extensions increase price image and downscale extensions decrease price image in contrast this research argues that vertical extensions can have the opposite effect such that upscale extensions can decrease rather than increase price image and vice versa for downscale extensions the authors further propose that the impact of vertical extensions on price image is a function of consumer goals and in particular whether consumers have the intent of browsing or buying the authors test these predictions in a series of five empirical studies that offer converging evidence in support of the proposed theory

estimating a household production function heterogeneity the demand for health inputs and their effects on birth weight the household production literature emphasizes that technical or biological processes condition input selection by households in their production activities along with prices and income exogenous variations in health to the extent that they are perceived by individuals heterogeneity lead to correlations between inputs and health outcomes that cannot be used to derive causal conclusions therefore estimates of health technology must be obtained from a behavioral model in which health inputs are themselves choices consistent estimates are reported of the effect of endogenous inputs such as medical care smoking and fertility on birth weight and fetal growth in the presence of health heterogeneity

an empirical two stage choice model with varying decision rules applied to internet clickstream data abstract in this article the author proposes and applies an empirical two stage choice model to internet clickstream data that captures observed choices for two choice stages products viewed and products purchased the model allows for interdependences between choices within a stage as well as the use of varying decision rules in each stage the author accommodates heterogeneity in preferences and in decision rules the proposed model uses observed choices to infer both attribute preference ratings and criterion attributes the results show empirically in a field setting that the product attributes evaluated in stage 1 differ from those evaluated in stage 2 consistent with existing theory consumers tend to use simpler decision rules based on a subset of attribute information in earlier stages the author also finds some preliminary evidence that attributes such as price and size tend to be considered in only one of the two stages whereas ingredient attributes tend to be considered in both stages f

dea frontier improvement and portfolio rebalancing an application of china mutual funds on considering sustainability information disclosure abstract data envelopment analysis dea has been a widely used methodology for evaluating the relative performance of portfolios extensive work has appeared for realizing the role of dea in the aspect of assessing portfolio performance and deriving the relative rankings however the role of providing realizable benchmarks is not fully explored in the existing literatures most importantly the dea based portfolio performance evaluation methods developed in the existing literatures can hardly provide support for fund managers in pursuing sustainability performance in this paper we first propose a dea frontier improvement approach under the mean variance framework this approach provides investor with a rebalancing strategy as well as an improved dea frontier which approximates the portfolio efficient frontier better than the traditional dea model does then this approach is extended to a general return risk framework our in sample simulation results verify the effectiveness of the proposed approach for a wide range of applications in addition the out of sample tests show that the rebalancing investment strategies can achieve higher sharpe ratios and sortino ratios than those of the original ones finally we apply the proposed approach to evaluate mutual fund performance in china with the consideration of sustainability information disclosure we construct a disclosure index to indicate the extent of sustainable information disclosure of each mutual fund the results show that the proposed approach provides not only investment recommendations but also references for constructing sustainable green funds

accounting for rationality double entry bookkeeping and the rhetoric of economic rationality this article addresses claims made by weber schumpeter and sombart concerning the importance of double entry bookkeeping they argue that accounting played a key technical role in enhancing rationality and furthering the development of capitalism methods of production the history of accounting methods and practices from the middle ages to the 19th century is surveyed in order to evaluate these arguments two important dimensions of accounting are discussed the rhetorical and the technical the argument is that as rethoric accounting must be understood as an attempt to convince some audience of the legitimacy of business ventures goody s analysis of writing and literacy is applied to the development of accounting as a technique as a practical method double entry bookkeeping appears to have increased rationality but the rhetorical side of double entry is also critical the conclusion is that the significance of double entry bookkeeping can be appreciated only if its rhetorical and technical aspe

event studies in management research theoretical and empirical issues we examined the use of event studies in management research and found that there was inadequate attention paid to theoretical and research design issues this lack of attention may lead to false in

willingness to pay estimation with choice based conjoint analysis addressing extreme response behavior with individually adapted designs the increasing consideration of behavioral aspects in operations management models has prompted greater use of choice based conjoint cbc studies in operations research such studies can elicit consumers willingness to pay wtp a core input for many optimization models however optimization models can yield valid results only if consumers wtp is estimated accurately a simulation study and two field studies show that extreme response behavior in cbc studies such that consumers always or never choose the no purchase option harms the validity of wtp estimates reporting the share of consumers who always and never select the no purchase option allows for detecting extreme response behavior this study suggests an individually adapted design that avoids extreme response behavior and thus significantly improves wtp estimation accuracy

schooling health knowledge and obesity the connection between schooling and health is well documented an important empirical issue that needs to be examined however is whether schooling s effects are due to individual health knowledge differences this empirical study examines this issue with an increasingly important health indicator obesity since provision of health knowledge is a major tool of public agencies promoting health this empirical study uses a new direct measure of health knowledge to test this hypothesis the results show that knowledge is inversely related to the probability that an individual is obese schooling s effects on relative weight and the probability of being obese are explained by differences in knowledge this result may imply that schooling s effect on the allocative efficiency of the household production of health is the main reason schooling is linked to health behaviour the result also may imply that the most effective method of health education is to highlight the disease element of poor dietary habits a

a consumer perspective on price matching refund policies effect on price perceptions and search behavior although price matching refund policies are common in many retail environments the impact of such policies on consumers has largely been ignored this article reports the results of three studies that examine price matching policies from a consumer perspective study 1 shows that consumers perceive price matching policies as signals of low store prices and that the presence of a refund increases the likelihood of discontinuing price search contrary to the predictions based on signaling theory in information economics studies 2 and 3 show that when search costs are low the number of stores searched increases in the presence versus absence of a price matching policy when search costs are high consumers appear to accept the price matching signal at face value and search less in the presence of a refund the article concludes by discussing the theoretical implications of the findings and suggesting directions for future research

calories obesity and health in oecd countries theoretical models suggest that decisions about diet weight and health status are endogenous within a utility maximization framework in this article we model these behavioural relationships in a fixed effect panel setting using a simultaneous equation system with a view to determining whether economic variables can explain the trends in calorie consumption obesity and health in organization for economic cooperation and development oecd countries and the large differences among the countries the empirical model shows that progress in medical treatment and health expenditure mitigates mortality from diet related diseases despite rising obesity rates while the model accounts for endogeneity and serial correlation results are affected by data limitations