Daily existence is more interconnected to consumer behaviors than ever before, encompassing many issues of well-being. Problems include unhealthy eating; credit card mismanagement; alcohol, tobacco, pornography, and gambling abuse; marketplace discrimination; and ecological deterioration; as well as at-risk groups who are impoverished, impaired, or elderly. Opportunities for well-being via consumer behaviors include empowerment via the Internet, product sharing, leisure pursuits, family consumption, and pro-environmental activities, among others. In 2005 the Association for Consumer Research launched Transformative Consumer Research (TCR). Its mission is to foster research on quality of life that is both rigorous and applied for better assisting consumers, their caregivers, policy administrators, and executives. This edited volume includes 33 chapters on a wide range of topics by expert international authors. All royalties from sales of this book are donated to the Association to support TCR grants.

This book discusses theories and frameworks addressing the adaptability and sustainable competitive advantages of firms, including dynamic capabilities. This work develops and examines a concept that makes dynamic capabilities more tangible and provides guidance to managers and researchers on how to develop and maintain sustainable competitiveness. The focus thereby lies on sensing, i.e., the capability of firms to recognize opportunities and threats in their environment, and its effect on a firm's financial success. The insights from this work will shift managers' attention from the more static resource-based view to the dynamic capabilities perspective on firms.

This book examines the complex relationship between corruption and entrepreneurship in countries of varying levels of economic development. The authors explore the ways in which social welfare policies have changed in current economic and political environments as well as key challenges faced by the welfare policies. In addition, this book addresses three key questions with regard to the impact of corruption on institutions and social welfare: * Is corruption an additional burden in extensive regulatory environment on different types of entrepreneurship---necessity entrepreneurship, opportunity entrepreneurship, total entrepreneurial activity, self-employment, and newly registered firms? * Is corruption helpful for entrepreneurs who have aspiration to operate outside their home country border in highly regulated environment? * How does corruption affect income distribution generated through entrepreneurial activity? Entrepreneurship is an important factor for local and national economies as it generates employment and income that are crucial for economic development. Corruption can significantly influence the nature of decisions made by entrepreneurs, with profound effects on business creation, institutional development, and economic performance. For example, an entrepreneur with resources and networks might be able to influence the regulatory agencies to overlook violations, expedite permits, or bribe corrupt program administrators to violate the rules of distribution, exacerbating income inequality and obstructing economic growth and development. While corruption is not a new phenomenon, the current globalized economy has introduced trade into the corruption question as globalization puts pressure on countries to open borders to attract investments and gain a competitive advantage. However, many country level institutions do not always change as fast as the economic activity across borders, which can encourage corruption in order to bypass inefficient regulations and to successfully engage in entrepreneurship. The authors of the book examine this phenomenon. Featuring policy implications and case studies, this book will appeal to graduate students, academics, professionals, practitioners, and researchers in entrepreneurship, international business and public policy.

Cathrin Huber investigates the reputation of multinational corporations and provides novel insights and important implications for researchers and managers based on theoretical considerations and empirical analyses. She shows that country-specific factors like cultural or political factors, but also institutional differences between countries as well as firm-specific resources in a country influence the corporate reputation-consumer behavior relationship. Additionally, an overview of the main cultural approaches and how they influence consumers' corporate reputation perceptions is given.

This book is designed to meet the needs of CFOs, accounting and financial professionals interested in leveraging the power of data-driven customer insights in management accounting and financial reporting systems. While academic research in Marketing has developed increasingly sophisticated analytical tools, the role of customer analytics as a source of value creation from an Accounting and Finance perspective has received limited attention. The authors aim to fill this gap by blending interdisciplinary academic rigor with practical insights from real-world applications. Readers will find thorough coverage of advanced customer accounting concepts and techniques, including the calculation of customer lifetime value and customer equity for internal decision-making and for external financial reporting and valuation. Beyond a professional audience, the book will serve as ideal companion reading for students enrolled in undergraduate, graduate, or MBA courses.

In recent years, luxury goods markets have faced significant changes that have influenced both the dynamics of the competition, as well as their strategies. The principal changes include the following: new geographical market development, such as in the Far East, India, and some parts of Africa (these countries are added to a list of already relevant countries that are involved in luxury goods consumption, such as the Emirates, Russia, and South America); diffusion of new media and new technologies in communication, which is characterized by a high degree of interaction; the evolution of distribution channels is underway - these channels are moving towards new forms of integration that utilize both physical digital channels. This has forced firms to revise their strategies and implement multichannel marketing strategies to continue to operate in increasingly international markets that are characterized by increasingly more demanding and informed consumers. This book will enable readers to gain a clear insight into how the luxury goods market operates and amongst other things, focuses on: recent internet and social media strategies adopted by luxury companies and their brands; how luxury companies manage their communication and distribution channels to compete in the market and the impact of digital marketing on their competition; the main models of direct and indirect distribution in the digital channels; how consumers react to multichannel strategies; trends, social commerce and CSR and how luxury companies react; identifying the different social media strategies for luxury companies.

Addressing the entire care chain, this book presents the outcomes of advanced research on healthcare operations management based on real-world data and practices in China. It includes hands-on methods and applications in this interdisciplinary research field, which combines healthcare service, operations management, industrial engineering and information technology. The content is divided into three parts, reflecting the entire care chain. The first part discusses the pre-hospital service stage and explores resource deployment problems in emergency medical service, such as ambulance allocation. The second part focuses on inpatient care services, including staffing and task allocation among nurses and doctors based on multi-project management under uncertainties. In addition, a highly promising diagnosis approach is proposed and a specific algorithm is derived on the basis of real-world datasets which can improve the diagnosis accuracy remarkably. In turn, the third part considers the post-hospital service stage, which most often takes place at community hospitals, and provides a quantitative evaluation and optimization of scheduling for tasks and team members for home care services. The book is intended for a broad audience, including students, researchers and practitioners working in various areas of healthcare management, service management, and operations management.

This edited volume examines global power-rivalry in and around South Asia through Bangladeshi lenses using imperfect and overlapping interest concentric-circles as a template. Dynamics from three transitions -the United States exiting the Cold War, China emerging as a global-level power, and India's eastern interests squaring off with China's Belt Road Initiative, BRI-help place China, India, and the United States (in alphabetical order) in Bangladesh's "inner-most" circle, China, India, and the United States in a "mid-stream" circle, and the United States and Latin America, among other countries, in the "outer-most" circle, depending on the issue. In an atmosphere of short-term gains over-riding long-term considerations, the desperate, widespread search for infrastructural funding inside South Asia enhances China's value, raises local heat, releases new challenges, with costly default consequences looming, issue-specific analysis overtaking formal bilateral relations and a stubborn uncertainty riddling the Bangladeshi air as its policy preferences stubbornly show more certainty.

This book presents the latest research on national brand and private label marketing - in a collection of original and highly relevant contributions to the 2018 International Conference on National Brand & Private Label Marketing in Barcelona. It covers a wide range of topics from fields as varied as retailing, marketing, general business, psychology, economics and statistics. Further, the papers address diverse areas of application, including: purchase-decision models, premium private labels, decisions involved in introducing new products, M-commerce, private label adoption, assortment decisions, private label pricing, brand equity and collaborative relationships. The main theme of the 2018 conference was "Building Strong Brands in the Digital Age".

The nature of work is changing, due to demographic shifts, globalization, and digitization. Regional local labor markets are in global competition for (highly) qualified and specialized workers. At the same time, the workforce's desire for flexibility and the increasing speed at which skill requirements are changing are producing disparities at the spatial, social, and economic levels. This book discusses the global and local drivers behind these developments. It explores the factors which cause global inequalities between urban and rural areas, and highlights how cities, regions and countries attract these sought-after employees to address skills shortages. The book includes an in-depth case study on high-skilled workers in South Tyrol, Italy. No single academic discipline can adequately capture the dynamics of the future labor market, and the authors therefore take an interdisciplinary approach, combining insights from different disciplines. This book will be a valuable resource for policymakers, students and researchers seeking to understand the driving forces behind the ever-changing labor market and the future of high-skilled work.

This book compiles the presentations and discussions from the international symposium "Beyond Global Capitalism" that was held with the contributions of Emmanuel Todd, Ha-Joon Chang, and other scholars in Kyoto, Japan, in 2013. The book is intended make the reader aware that global capitalism, or globalism, has increased its power in recent years, bringing about a variety of harmful effects to the peoples of the world. Drawing upon a variety of academic disciplines including economics, political economic science, economic thought, anthropology, history, and political science, the contributors to this book identify theories and strategies for overcoming the worldwide problems that have been caused by global capitalism. The discussions presented here foster the development of theoretical and practical frameworks for a global economy that moves beyond global capitalism. They also argue for the development of a stable, rich, and resilient economy and society that enhances the well-being of people all over the world in the twenty-first century.

Contemporary research in strategic management, with an emphasis on different tools and skills created by scholars in the field, is evident throughout Neostrategic Management. This book is specially designed to accommodate the needs of strategy students worldwide in our fast-changing twenty-first century. The authors integrate cutting-edge research on topics including corporate performance, governance, strategic leadership, technology and internationalization. Based on real-world practices and current research in the field, Neostrategic Management features an increased emphasis on the changing global economy and its role in strategic management.

The organization of interfirm networks, such as alliances, cooperatives, franchise and retail chains, has become an important research topic in the field of economics, marketing, strategic management, and organization theory. This book contributes to the literature on formal and informal inter-organizational governance by providing new insights on contract design, ownership, evolution of cooperation, role of social capital and performance in franchising networks; includes topics of loyalty, reputation and organizational form as well as performance of cooperatives, and discusses the relationship between formal and relational governance in alliances, governance structures of innovation activities, dynamics of interfirm conflicts, and network externalities and alliance formation.

A major objective of this book is to identify the key determinants of successful inter-firm collaborations in the telecommunications industry in Australia and China, utilizing both qualitative and quantitative research methods as complementary methodologies. The findings will provide essential information and suggestions for businesses, researchers and policy makers and shed light on how to concretely improve the performance of business collaborations. Inter-firm collaboration has become increasingly important in the global economy, as firms now rely on collaborations to access new resources, new technologies, skills, the latest market information, new markets and knowledge, to accelerate innovation, to reduce costs, and to overcome government policy barriers.

In an era of globalization, technological innovation, and social transformations, universities face the challenge of training students with the competencies needed to meet the demands of the market and to successfully integrate into today's workforce. This book looks at the university as a dynamic source of essential competencies and explores various skill management models, methodologies and innovations applied by educational institutions around the world. The demands of today's society represent a major challenge for universities and their teaching staffs. Professors need to adapt their teaching methods to meet these new challenges. For example, universities need to prepare new generations of students with the ability to select, update and use knowledge, rather than processing facts and formulas. Students need to be capable of learning in different contexts and modalities throughout their professional careers and learn to adapt their knowledge to new situations. In response, a conceptual and methodological change has taken place in the university organizational culture and in student curriculums. This book presents a variety of cases and observations on the competencies developed in the curriculums of universities around the world, with the aim to assure that graduates leave fully prepared to face the challenges of the new economy.

Despite the fact that the globalization process tends to reinforce existing inequality structures and generate new areas of inequality on multiple levels, systematic analyses on this very important field remain scarce. Hence, this book approaches the complex question of inequality not only from different regional perspectives, covering Africa, Asia, Europe, Latin and Northern America, but also from different disciplinary perspectives, namely cultural anthropology, economics, ethnology, geography, international relations, sociology, and political sciences. The contributions are subdivided into three essential fields of research: Part I analyzes the socio-economic dimension of global exclusion, highlighting in particular the impacts of internationalization and globalization processes on national social structures against the background of theoretical concepts of social inequality. Part II addresses the political dimension of global inequalities. Since the decline of the Soviet Union new regional powers like Brazil, China, India and South Africa have emerged, creating power shifts in international relations that are the primary focus of the second part. Lastly, Part III examines the structural and transnational dimension of inequality patterns, which can be concretized in the rise of globalized national elites and the emergence of multinational networks that transcend the geographical and imaginative borders of nation states.

This volume showcases contributions from leading academics, educators and policymakers derived from two workshops hosted by the Interdisciplinary Center for Economic Science (ICES) at George Mason University on internationalization and competitiveness. It aims to present key areas of current research and to identify basic problems within the field to promote further discussion and research. This book is organized into two sections, focusing on: science and economics and innovation policy and its measurement, with an underlying emphasis on exploring connections across disciplines and across research, practice and policy. The first workshop was held at George Mason University (GMU) in Arlington, VA, USA in March 2013 and a second, building on the key results from the first, was held at the Royal Institute of Technology (KTH) in Stockholm, Sweden in October 2013. A variety of problems were discussed and several interdisciplinary concepts in internationalization and competitiveness have already emerged from these workshops. For example, many of the presentations emphasized a need for productivity, which is a key goal of economic development. It was proposed to shift the emphasis from productivity towards creativity by examining property right regimes and their measurement to provide incentives for creative idea generation. These regimes span across higher education, invention, labor markets, and many other markets and institutions. Addressing fundamental issues along four dimensions--economics, higher education, strategic collaboration, and new research methods--this book provides a multidimensional, interdisciplinary perspective on the challenges and opportunities for future development. This excellent collection of essays provides new insights as to how the development and diffusion of knowledge are facilitating convergence in the structure of research organizations across the globe -- a process that has enormous implications for how actors in all parts of the world compete with one another in an increasing array of arenas. The essays have valuable implications for understanding how producers of all kinds of knowledge across the globe are competing with one another and how geographical space and nation states are less important in the competition for novelty. Rogers Hollingsworth University of Wisconsin (Madison) University of California San Diego

This book addresses two countervailing challenges to theory and policy in law and economics. The first is the rise of legal origins theory, which denies the comparative law view of convergence between common law and civil law by the assertion of an economic superiority of common law. The second is the series of economic crises in the very financial markets on which that assertion was based. Both trends unsettled certainties about the rule of law and institutional economics. Meeting legal origins theory in its main areas of political science, sociology and economics, the book extends the interdisciplinary reach to neglected aspects of comparative law, legal history, dynamic econometric analysis and "quasi-natural experiments" with counterfactual evidence of different institutional regimes in divided countries. These combined methodological tools make tests of the economic impact of different legal origins much more reliable. This is shown for developed and newly industrialized countries as well as developing, transforming and emerging countries with or without financial center advantage, affected or not by financial crises. The Asian financial crises and the American subprime crisis have been, or could have been resolved using the resources of common law or civil law. These cases and data on access to justice in Africa, Asia and Latin America reveal the problem of substantive law remaining "law on the books" without efficient procedural rules and judicial structures. The single most striking common law-civil law divide is that lawyer-dominated common law procedure is slower and costlier than judge-managed civil law procedure. Countries as diverse as the Netherlands, Japan, and China show functional interaction between culture and law in legal reforms. Such interaction can reduce the occurrence of legal disputes as well as facilitate their resolution. It can use economic crises as catalysts for legal reforms or rely on regional integration, and it should replace the discredited method of legal "transplants" by sustained dialogue between legal advisors and all actors involved in legal reforms.

With a series of experiments, Lena Himbert highlights the influence of the unit price's unit of measure on the consumer's price-level perception and quality perception. Furthermore, this thesis shows that the unit price availability and prominence influences the consumer's store price image. When shopping for pre-packaged products, consumers are offered a variety of product and price information at the point of purchase. The unit price represents price information given to the consumer for which the factor package size is removed and thereby lowers the information load for consumers in the shopping situation. However, retailers have considerable leeway concerning the unit price format. Aspects that can be varied are for example the unit of measure (e.g., price per kg vs price per 100 g) or font size. There is little to no previous research that gives advice to retailers how they should indicate the unit price on the price label.

A preventative medicine physician and staff writer for The Atlantic explains the surprising and unintended effects of our hygiene practices in this informative and entertaining introduction to the new science of skin microbes and probiotics.
 
Keeping skin healthy is a booming industry, and yet it seems like almost no one agrees on what actually works. Confusing messages from health authorities and ineffective treatments have left many people desperate for reliable solutions. An enormous alternative industry is filling the void, selling products that are often of questionable safety and totally unknown effectiveness.

In Clean, doctor and journalist James Hamblin explores how we got here, examining the science and culture of how we care for our skin today. He talks to dermatologists, microbiologists, allergists, immunologists, aestheticians, bar-soap enthusiasts, venture capitalists, Amish people, theologians, and straight-up scam artists, trying to figure out what it really means to be clean. He even experiments with giving up showers entirely, and discovers that he is not alone.

Along the way, he realizes that most of our standards of cleanliness are less related to health than most people think. A major part of the picture has been missing: a little-known ecosystem known as the skin microbiome—the trillions of microbes that live on our skin and in our pores. These microbes are not dangerous; they’re more like an outer layer of skin that no one knew we had, and they influence everything from acne, eczema, and dry skin, to how we smell. The new goal of skin care will be to cultivate a healthy biome—and to embrace the meaning of “clean” in the natural sense. This can mean doing much less, saving time, money, energy, water, and plastic bottles in the process.

Lucid, accessible, and deeply researched, Clean explores the ongoing, radical change in the way we think about our skin, introducing readers to the emerging science that will be at the forefront of health and wellness conversations in coming years.

Why is BASIC MARKETING RESEARCH the best-selling marketing textbook? It is a best seller because it's written from a student's perspective. Authors Brown, Suter, and Churchill know that for a marketing textbook to be effective, students have to be able to understand it. And they've achieved that time and again. This edition is packed with the features that made it a best-seller in the first place, from study tools to updated content to an easy-to-read writing style. Plus, in this volume you'll learn more about how experts gather data and how to use it yourself to turn greater profits.

This book investigates the recent rise of the market-oriented value chain approach in development policy with a focus on the agro-export sector in the Global South. The research project aims at unveiling the political, social and cultural processes around the circulation of market rationales at the global scale and on the ground. In-depth analyses of two exemplary settings, Peru and Ghana, reveal the extent to which national policies, development programs, laws and academic curricula have adopted a "thinking in terms of value chains" in the last decade. By embracing the perspectives of policymakers, consultants, entrepreneurs and producers, this book provides exciting first-hand insights about the making of markets for scholars and development practitioners alike.

This volume focuses on the integration and globalization of Romania, a prominent emerging market in South-Eastern Europe and one of the major players in the securitization of the Black Sea and the Eastern European border, as both a part of NATO since 2004 and a fully integrated EU Member State since 2007. It will examine the challenges the country has faced in its progression from totalitarianism to democracy through several waves of reform intended to update and streamline its political and economic processes for success in the free-market capitalist arena. Having learned the hard way about some of the key aspects of public administration, Romania has learned a place for itself among the diverse global players of Europe and beyond. The first section reviews current perspectives on globalization and its impact in the late 20th century. It has "flattened" the Earth, generating better communication and exchanges than ever before, but also gathering a fair amount of criticisms from commentators seeing it as little else than neo-colonialism. Cooperative-administrative strategies are being suggested instead, in order for new public administration patterns to smoothly run in coordination with the globalized world. In the second section, the European Union is described as a complex multi-level socio-political entity, itself historically in turmoil over its own style of rule - e.g. hierarchy vs. coordination, integration vs. centralization, etc. - or even its own existence, as the European dream seemed to be losing steam with the general population of Europe several times in the previous century. Powers and responsibilities of the European institutions and agencies are also discussed. Thirdly, the recent history of Romania is approached from the Europeanization context, starting from its post-1989 days of confusion and of attempting to jumpstart democracy. Eventually, it has to undergo a series of reforms and internalize some principles fundamental to the EU in order for the much-awaited accession to occur and its multiple effects to start taking place. A country with a rich cultural heritage and straddling multiple socio-political axes, Romania has plenty more to offer in the new geostrategic, security and development contexts of the 21st-century Europe. As such, this volume provides inspiration for further research and practical application opportunities on topics of local, European and global significance.

Wilhelm Griga explores benefits of inpatriation, issues, remediation strategies, and factors influencing inpatriate assignment effectiveness to better fulfill individual and organizational demands. The author covers inpatriation theory and presents empirical research results on inpatriates from China and USA in Germany. Antecedents to inpatriate's competence build-up, goal achievement, and career development are explored and established. Significant insights and recommendations on the transfer of employees from foreign subsidiaries of multinational corporations to the headquarters of the parent company are provided.