Effects of Brand Local and Nonlocal Origin on Consumer Attitudes in Developing Countries

Peer Reviewedhttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/142164/1/jcpy83.pd

Indirect learning: how emerging-market firms grow in developed markets

Some emerging-market firms have recently achieved substantial growth in developed markets despite having had little prior experience in these markets. What explains the performance of these firms? Building on the organizational learning literature, the authors argue that indirect learning (i.e., learning from the experience of others) plays a crucial role in explaining this phenomenon. Specifically, they propose that emerging-market firms that grow in developed markets overcome their lack of direct experience in such markets by learning indirectly through their leaders, competitors, and interfirm networks. The authors test their thesis by comparing the international growth in developed markets of a sample of emerging-market firms (116 Indian firms) with a sample of developed-market firms (160 U.K. firms). The results support the authors' thesis about the importance of indirect learning in explaining the international growth of emerging-market (relative to developed-market) firms in developed markets. The authors discuss the implications of these findings for policy makers in the areas of higher education, competition policy, and international trade as well as for managers in the areas of middle-management recruitment, competitor analysis and tracking, and managing interfirm networks

Dancing with a Giant: The Effect of Wal-Mart's Entry into the United Kingdom on the Performance of European Retailers

The authors examine the value-destroying and value-enhancing effects of a giant player's foreign entry on incumbents operating in that region. They use Wal-Mart's entry into the United Kingdom, through its acquisition of Asda, as the empirical context. Drawing on the marketing, strategy, and finance literature streams, the authors develop hypotheses as to why some incumbents are negatively affected whereas others actually may benefit from the entry of a giant competitor. Their measure of performance impact is the change in shareholder value around the announcement date, which has recently been recognized as an important metric to evaluate the effectiveness of marketing actions. The authors find strong support for the conceptual model, which distinguishes between the seriousness of the threat to the incumbents and their capacity to withstand the threat. The authors validate their findings using three alternative measures of company performance: percentage growth in the incumbent retailer's sales, earnings before interest and taxes, and return on assets between 1998 (the year before the Asda takeover) and 2002 (three years after the takeover). The authors discuss various managerial implications of their results. By acting proactively, incumbents can mitigate the negative performance consequences, while maximally benefiting from the positive implications of a giant competitor's entry

Horizontal Branch Stars: The Interplay between Observations and Theory, and Insights into the Formation of the Galaxy

We review HB stars in a broad astrophysical context, including both variable and non-variable stars. A reassessment of the Oosterhoff dichotomy is presented, which provides unprecedented detail regarding its origin and systematics. We show that the Oosterhoff dichotomy and the distribution of globular clusters (GCs) in the HB morphology-metallicity plane both exclude, with high statistical significance, the possibility that the Galactic halo may have formed from the accretion of dwarf galaxies resembling present-day Milky Way satellites such as Fornax, Sagittarius, and the LMC. A rediscussion of the second-parameter problem is presented. A technique is proposed to estimate the HB types of extragalactic GCs on the basis of integrated far-UV photometry. The relationship between the absolute V magnitude of the HB at the RR Lyrae level and metallicity, as obtained on the basis of trigonometric parallax measurements for the star RR Lyrae, is also revisited, giving a distance modulus to the LMC of (m-M)_0 = 18.44+/-0.11. RR Lyrae period change rates are studied. Finally, the conductive opacities used in evolutionary calculations of low-mass stars are investigated. [ABRIDGED]Comment: 56 pages, 22 figures. Invited review, to appear in Astrophysics and Space Scienc