The Impact of Termination Severity on Customers’ Emotional, Attitudinal, and Behavioral Reactions

Purpose: This paper empirically examines the direct and indirect effects of perceived termination severity on customers' behavioral reactions via betrayal and justice. It also examines the moderating effects of attitude toward complaining (ATC). Design/methodology/approach: This paper employs a quantitative method approach using a scenario-based experiment in a banking setting. Findings: The results show that a more severe termination approach results in higher customer negative reactions. Betrayal is shown to be a key driver of customers' behavioral reactions, and ATC moderates these effects. Research limitations/implications: Future studies should examine the effects of different termination strategies in markedly different cultures and should also examine other boundary conditions such as prior warning, relationship quality and service importance in influencing customers' negative behavioral responses. Originality/value: This paper contributes to the service termination literature by shedding light on the impact of termination severity on customers' reactions. It also unveils the mechanism that explains customers' reactions to service termination. Further, it reveals that ATC moderates customers' public (but not private) complaining behaviors

Tragedy of the Regulatory Commons: LightSquared and the Missing Spectrum Rights

The endemic underuse of radio spectrum constitutes a tragedy of the regulatory commons. Like other common interest tragedies, the outcome results from a legal or market structure that prevents economic actors from executing socially efficient bargains. In wireless markets, innovative applications often provoke claims by incumbent radio users that the new traffic will interfere with existing services. Sometimes these concerns are mitigated via market transactions, a la “Coasian bargaining.” Other times, however, solutions cannot be found even when social gains dominate the cost of spillovers. In the recent “LightSquared debacle,” such spectrum allocation failure played out. GPS interests that access frequencies adjacent to the band hosting LightSquared’s new nationwide mobile network complained that the wireless entrant would harm the operation of locational devices. Based on these complaints, regulators then killed LightSquared’s planned 4G network. Conservative estimates placed the prospective 4G consumer gains at least an order of magnitude above GPS losses. “Win win” bargains were theoretically available, fixing GPS vulnerabilities while welcoming the highly valuable wireless innovation. Yet transaction costs—largely caused by policy choices to issue limited and highly fragmented spectrum usage rights (here in the GPS band)—proved prohibitive. This episode provides a template for understanding market and non-market failure in radio spectrum allocation

The Omnichannel Marketplace: A Look at Modern Consumers

Since the advent of the digital marketplace, marketing techniques to reach consumers have shifted. Traditional media and demographic analysis are no longer the only means for brands reaching consumers. Marketing has now taken an omnichannel approach. This study examined the relationship between the omnichannel consumer, the consumer benefits sought online versus in brick and mortar, and the modern marketer’s approach to omnichannel marketing. It outlines a psychographic and demographic profile of today’s omnichannel consumer, which will ultimately create a more detailed profile for businesses to market across integrated channels ultimately delivering a hybrid consumer experience (HCE). Findings in this study include cluster analyses related to consumer benefits sought and demographics as well as correlations between psychographic profiling data and demographics

Measuring the impact of market coupling on the Italian electricity market using ELFO++

This paper evaluates the impact on the Italian electricity market of replacing the current explicit auction mechanism with market coupling. Maximizing the use of the cross-border interconnection capacity, market coupling increases the level of market integration and facilitates the access to low-cost generation by consumers located in high-cost generation countries. Thus, it is expected that a high-priced area such as Italy could greatly benefit from the introduction of this mechanism. In this paper, the welfare benefits are estimated under alternative market scenarios for 2012, employing the optimal dispatch model ELFO++. The results of the simulations suggest that the improvement in social surplus is likely to be significant, especially when market fundamentals are tight.Market coupling; market integration; Italian day-ahead electricity market.

Agricultural monopolistic competitor and the Pigovian tax

A monopolistically competitive agricultural market structure has some features of competition and some features of monopoly. Monopolistic competition has the following attributes: (a) many sellers; (b) product differentiation; and (c) free entry. In the long-run equilibrium, price equals average total cost, and the agricultural firm earns zero economic profit. The aim of this paper is to construct a relatively simple chaotic long-run monopolistic competitor’s agricultural output growth model that is capable of generating stable equilibria, cycles or chaos. A key hypothesis of this work is based on the idea that the coefficient plays a crucial role in explaining local stability of the monopolistic competitor’s agricultural output, where d is the coefficient of the marginal cost function of the agricultural monopolistic competitor; b is the coefficient of the inverse demand function; a is the coefficient of average cost growth; m is the Pigovian tax rate; and e is the coefficient of the price elasticity of demand

Evidence of 'evergreening' in secondary patenting of blockbuster drugs

Secondary patents associated with blockbuster drugs are granted for follow-on innovations relating to the active pharmaceutical ingredient (‘API’) of the drug. Our analysis of all sec-ondary patents for 13 top-selling drugs in Australia shows that, while the majority of fol-low-on innovations are made by entities other than the originator of the drug, the innova-tions with the highest private value are undertaken by the drug’s originator and concern a delivery mechanism or an alternative formulation for the API. Since that is the type of follow-on innovation most commonly undertaken by drug originators, and considered most likely to result in a de facto extension of marketplace monopoly over the drug, we see in these findings evidence that the originators of blockbuster drugs engage in secondary patenting that has an ‘evergreening’ effect

'Bad teacher? Using films as texts when teaching business ethics: Exploring the issues'

The contemporary teaching of business ethics necessarily involves the recognition that texts, materials and modes of assessment ought to be rendered appealing to students, while at the same time ensuring the quality of teaching. Prima facie the use of film can be seen as a way to address this dilemma: Students may be attracted to the ‘delivery’ of course content through the medium of film as opposed to, for example, standard lecture format, participation in online activities or, at a stretch, reading and writing. An alternative scenario can also be envisioned where the use of film in teaching business ethics is bad professional practice, pandering to both the requirement for positive assessments from students and for technological change. This paper discusses these issues by critically examining the films recommended by a contemporary business ethics text, Crane and Matten (2010). We identify significant problems with the use of two films, The Corporation (2005) and Michael Clayton (2007). Against our own criticisms of these two texts, the paper then focuses upon Ken Loach’s (2007) film It’s a Free World, arguing that it is a useful text for the illustration of what students, more often than not, regard as the clichéd issue of unskilled foreign wage labourers being exploited in ‘advanced’ western economies. Despite the considerable virtues of Loach’s particular text, we argue that any recourse to film as an alternative method of examining a range of issues in business ethics has to be treated with caution

The Current and Future State of the Indian Pharmaceuticals Industry

India’s pharmaceuticals industry is growing at a very fast pace. At present, this industry is the second largest growing industry within India, and in terms of size, it is the third largest in the world, crossing the US$20 billion threshold by the year 2015. Having said so, the industry is also currently in a transition phase from process re-engineering (duplication of patented generic drugs) to new product research and development. This paper examines the current state of the industry as well as key future trends. Strengths and weaknesses of the industry are outlined, and potential risks to the industry are identified as well

Market Driven Multi-domain Network Service Orchestration in 5G Networks

The advent of a new breed of enhanced multimedia services has put network operators into a position where they must support innovative services while ensuring both end-to-end Quality of Service requirements and profitability. Recently, Network Function Virtualization (NFV) has been touted as a cost-effective underlying technology in 5G networks to efficiently provision novel services. These NFV-based services have been increasingly associated with multi-domain networks. However, several orchestration issues, linked to cross-domain interactions and emphasized by the heterogeneity of underlying technologies and administrative authorities, present an important challenge. In this paper, we tackle the cross-domain interaction issue by proposing an intelligent and profitable auction-based approach to allow inter-domains resource allocation