A Customer Perspective on Product Eliminations: How the Removal of Products Affects Customers and Business Relationships

Regardless of the apparent need for product eliminations, many managers hesitate to act as they fear deleterious effects on customer satisfaction and loyalty. Other managers do carry out product eliminations, but often fail to consider the consequences for customers and business relationships. Given the relevance and problems of product eliminations, research on this topic in general and on the consequences for customers and business relationships in particular is surprisingly scarce. Therefore, this empirical study explores how and to what extent the elimination of a product negatively affects customers and business relationships. Results indicate that eliminating a product may result in severe economic and psychological costs to customers, thereby seriously decreasing customer satisfaction and loyalty. This paper also shows that these costs are not exogenous in nature. Instead, depending on the characteristics of the eliminated product these costs are found to be more or less strongly driven by a company’s behavior when implementing the elimination at the customer interface

Doctor can I buy a new kidney? I've heard it isn't forbidden: what is the role of the nephrologist when dealing with a patient who wants to buy a kidney?

Organ trafficking is officially banned in several countries and by the main Nephrology Societies. However, this practice is widespread and is allowed or tolerated in many countries, hence, in the absence of a universal law, the caregiver may be asked for advice, placing him/her in a difficult balance between legal aspects, moral principles and ethical judgments. In spite of the Istanbul declaration, which is a widely shared position statement against organ trafficking, the controversy on mercenary organ donation is still open and some experts argue against taking a negative stance. In the absence of clear evidence showing the clinical disadvantages of mercenary transplantation compared to chronic dialysis, self-determination of the patient (and, with several caveats, of the donor) may conflict with other ethical principles, first of all non-maleficence. The present paper was drawn up with the participation of the students, as part of the ethics course at our medical school. It discusses the situation in which the physician acts as a counselor for the patient in the way of a sort of “reverse” informed consent, in which the patient asks advice regarding a complex personal decision, and includes a peculiar application of the four principles (beneficence, non-maleficence, justice and autonomy) to the donor and recipient parties

Liberty

entrée Encyclopédie, Encyclopedia of Law and Economics, Springer Science+Business Media New York, 201

Shifting sands : interrogating the problematic relationship between international public finance and international financial regulation

International public finance and international financial institutions have regained prominence in wake of the global financial crisis. The conscription of international public finance to crisis resolution and management in recurrent sovereign debt crises has highlighted the centrality of international public finance and its institutions to global economic regulation. In particular, the financial crisis has underscored the fundamental role of international public finance in managing the negative externalities caused by failures of international economic law and governance. This paper interrogates the problematic relationship between international public finance and international economic law, in particular their shared responsibility for the distribution of international economic resources. It investigates the role played by international financial aid in mitigating the distributive dislocations resulting from international law’s allocation of the risks and benefits of a globalized economy and examines how utilisation of aid finance in this manner has influenced the regulatory trajectories of international economic law. Drawing on the example of sovereign debt relief and international financial regulation, this paper argues that the deployment of development finance as a response to the regulatory crises of the global financial system has had an adverse effect on regulatory change, especially on efforts to reorient international financial law towards a more progressive social and economic agenda. It demonstrates how current practices of financial aid not only fail to address the systemic failings of the international financial system, they serve to sustain, if not entrench, existing asymmetries in international economic law, thereby exacerbating its negative distributive outcomes. This paradox, the paper, argues stems from the fact that international aid is traditionally premised on the notion of philanthropy rather than on principles of restitution and redistribution. This disembeds the policies and practices of international public finance from the conduct of international economic relations and inserts both recipients and financiers into relationships of power, significantly affecting their international economic engagements