The impact of religious salience on purchase intentions: evidence from the UAE

© 2019, Emerald Publishing Limited. Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to explore the role of religious salience on consumer purchase intentions in the multicultural environment of the UAE, more specifically on the willingness of a Muslim consumer to purchase a product labelled or packaged to include an Islamic appeal, i.e. an appeal with a heightened religious salience. While some attempts have been made in the literature to examine the impact of religious salience on purchase intentions, research amongst Muslim consumers remains under-explored. Design/methodology/approach: The authors used a randomized survey experiment administered to 148 Emirati educated female nationals. The survey consisted of pairs of advertisements, where each advertisement promoted the same product and the same brand, varying on whether they included an Islamic appeal or not in the labelling, packaging or slogan. The respondents were asked about their attitude to the different versions of the advertisements, as well as their willingness to purchase the product. The authors used causal mediation analysis to explore the mechanisms through which causal effects on purchase intentions are determined. Findings: This study shows that including an Islamic appeal, and therefore increasing the religious salience in product promotion, leads to higher purchase intentions amongst Muslim consumers. The authors also identified a number of additional moderating factors that influenced the consumer’s purchase intentions, such as product and/or brand awareness and the type of product being promoted, as well as the nature of the artefact that was included in the ad as the Islamic appeal. Finally, the causal mediation analysis suggests that Islamic appeals increases product attractiveness, which in turn leads to higher purchase intentions. Originality/value: This paper investigates the effect of religious salience on consumer behaviour and their purchase intentions. This paper makes an empirical contribution to understanding consumer behaviour with particular relevance to retail hubs with a majority Muslim population

Religious affiliation and religiosity: do Islamic appeals in advertising lead to higher purchase intentions among Muslim consumers in Dubai?

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to investigate whether including an Islamic appeal in a culture-neutral product advertisement has a positive effect on consumer attitudes to the advertisement leading to higher purchase intentions while considering religious affiliation and religiosity as moderating factors of the relationship. Design/methodology/approach: Conditional process analysis was applied to examine the mediation of the relationship between ad version and purchase intention through attitude to the advertisement as well as the moderating role of religious affiliation and religiosity among 819 consumers within the Dubai market. Findings: The analysis in this paper revealed that including an Islamic appeal in an advertisement does not have a positive effect on attitude to the advertisement or purchase intention, neither for Muslim consumers in general nor for Muslim consumers with high levels of religiosity. Conversely, including an Islamic appeal has a significant negative effect on the purchase intentions of Christian consumers within the Dubai market, as well as on those consumers who did not state their religious affiliation. Research limitations/implications: Marketers should reconsider the use of Islamic appeals in product advertising, especially in relation to the promotion of culture-free products within diverse expatriate populations such as that represented by the Emirate of Dubai. Originality/value: This study sheds light on the underexplored role of religious affiliation and religiosity in relationship to consumer behavior within the field of Islamic marketing in a major retail hub in the Middle East

A structural approach to handling endogeneity in strategic management: The case of RBV

In this paper we posit that the lack of consensus about empirical tests of resource based view (RBV) could be the result of endogenous resource picking on the part of firms. If resources are endogenously selected, regression based methods that examine their connection to firm performance will be mis-estimated. We show that traditional remedies for endogeneity do not resolve this problem when returns to resources are heterogeneous (as theorized under RBV) and when managers act with at least partial knowledge of the expected, idiosyncratic return (as theorized under the strategic factor market hypotheses). As such, we develop a Bayesian approach that solves this endogeneity problem by directly incorporating resource picking into the modeling framework. We illustrate the validity of our approach through the use of a comprehensive simulation study and show that our proposed approach outperforms traditional linear models (including traditional cures of endogeneity and unobserved heterogeneity) under a variety of conditions. Our findings suggest that: (1) research in strategy requires a more careful and deeper understanding of potential sources of endogeneity and (2) the use of Bayesian methods in management can help develop more theoretically motivated empirical approaches to hypothesis testing. © 2014 European Academy of Management

Critical thresholds for budget consolidations: a semi-parametric approach

© 2015 Taylor & Francis. While a lot is known regarding the determinants of successful fiscal consolidations, previous studies do not allow for the possibility of nonlinearities in factors impacting budget consolidations. By using a semi-parametric modelling approach employing penalized spline regression on a data-set for 28 OECD countries for the period 1978–2007, we demonstrate the existence of critical thresholds not only for the initial debt level but also for the accompanying monetary policy. The latter result shows when monetary policy matters most and suggests, counter to previous studies, that too lax a monetary policy decreases the success probability of a fiscal adjustment episode

Revisiting the Determinants of Entrepreneurship: A Bayesian Approach

© The Author(s) 2014. Entrepreneurship has long been seen as an important instrument in stimulating and generating economic growth. The amount of research trying to identify key factors that drive entrepreneurship is considerable; yet, little consensus has been achieved. We argue that this lack of consensus could be on account of model uncertainty as empirical studies often tend to be selective on what variables are included in the final model. Drawing on recent literature, we demonstrate the benefits of Bayesian model averaging (BMA) in reducing the impact of model uncertainty on empirical research in entrepreneurship. Additionally, BMA provides measures of variable importance and can be seen as a complementary approach to dominance/relative importance analysis. We show that when model uncertainty is corrected for, gross domestic product per capita, unemployment, the marginal tax rate, and the volatility of inflation are the only macro variables significantly and universally associated with aggregate entrepreneurship. Furthermore, the emphasis on inflation and taxation suggests that governments have the power to influence the quantity and distribution of entrepreneurial activity by setting incentives that are not entrepreneurship specific but overlap significantly with general and fundamental principles of economic stability

Heterogeneity and Strategic Choices: The Case of Stock Repurchases

Strategic decisions are fundamentally tough choices. Theory suggests that managers are likely to display bounded rationality. Empirics on the other hand assume rationality in choice behavior. Recognizing this inherent disconnect between theory and empirics, we try to account for behavioral biases using a theoretically consistent choice model. The traditional approach to modeling strategic choice has been to use discrete choice models and make inference on the conditional mean effects. We argue that the conditional mean effect does not capture behavioral biases. The focus should be on the conditional variance. Explicitly modeling the conditional variance (in the discrete choice framework) provides us with valuable information on individual level variation in decision-making. We demonstrate the effect of ignoring the role of variance in choice modeling in the context of firm’s decisions to conduct open market repurchases. We show that when taking into account the heterogeneity in choices, manager’s choices of conducting open market repurchases displays considerable heterogeneity and that not accounting for such heterogeneity might lead to wrong conclusions on the mean effects

MACROECONOMIC DETERMINANTS OF INTERNATIONAL FINANCIAL REPORTING STANDARDS (IFRS) ADOPTION: EVIDENCE FROM THE MIDDLE EAST NORTH AFRICA (MENA) REGION

The adoption of International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) as a country’s Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (GAAP) has accelerated in the last 5 years with approximately 120 sovereign governments designating IFRS as the required financial reporting framework for at least some companies in the country. The American Institute of Certified Public Accountants (AICPA) reports that of these, about 90 countries have adopted it fully for all businesses, large and small. In an annual update, PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) lists 147 countries that have some relationship with IFRS (the U.S. is listed, for instance, as it allows foreign companies with a capital market presence to use IFRS instead of converting their results to U.S. GAAP). Yet many of the world’s 201 recognized countries have resisted fully adopting IFRS, particularly in the Middle East North Africa (MENA) region of the world. This begs the question: what are the perceived benefits of adopting IFRS at the country level