Identities and Store Image Formation: A Study of Retail Consumer Store Choice Behaviour

This theoretical paper develops a series of models applying social identify theory to the retail content. The shopper is conceived of as an actor whose self-image and related identities impact store image perceptions. The paper address how identify conflicts are likely to be resolved by a shopper and takes into account the `ideal` and `actual` selves. Suggestions are provided as to how retailers could employ symbolic cues to address different operating identities.

Impact of Performance and Expressiveness Value of Store Service Quality on the Mediating Role of Satisfaction with Store

This study explores the extent to which store service attributes having appeal for consumer self-image impacts store satisfaction and patronage intentions and discovers that this "expressiveness" value has significant associations with both. By using the adapted RSQS for measuring service quality in the Indian appare! retail context, this paper finds that service expressiveness value is distinct from the performance value obtained from service delivery. This paper provides empirical evidence that the mediation effect of satisfaction varies depending on consumer perceived value from service and that it is neither as universal nor as strong as retailers and researchers lend to believe.

Measuring Retail Service Quality: Examining Applicability of International Research Perspectives in India

Service quality measures developed internationally are often accepted as adequate in India. This study evaluates the Retail Service Quality Scale (RSQS) developed in the U.S. and considered valid across a variety of formats and cultural contexts. Confirmatory factor analysis of the component structures using AMOS 4.0 indicates the RSQS dimensions are not valid in India. This lowers the diagnostic ability of the scale for identifying areas requiring strategic focus. This study argues for further research and extensive scale adaptation before scales developed in other countries such as the RSQS are applied in the Indian context.

The Behavior of Epidemics under Bounded Susceptibility

We investigate the sensitivity of epidemic behavior to a bounded susceptibility constraint -- susceptible nodes are infected by their neighbors via the regular SI/SIS dynamics, but subject to a cap on the infection rate. Such a constraint is motivated by modern social networks, wherein messages are broadcast to all neighbors, but attention spans are limited. Bounded susceptibility also arises in distributed computing applications with download bandwidth constraints, and in human epidemics under quarantine policies. Network epidemics have been extensively studied in literature; prior work characterizes the graph structures required to ensure fast spreading under the SI dynamics, and long lifetime under the SIS dynamics. In particular, these conditions turn out to be meaningful for two classes of networks of practical relevance -- dense, uniform (i.e., clique-like) graphs, and sparse, structured (i.e., star-like) graphs. We show that bounded susceptibility has a surprising impact on epidemic behavior in these graph families. For the SI dynamics, bounded susceptibility has no effect on star-like networks, but dramatically alters the spreading time in clique-like networks. In contrast, for the SIS dynamics, clique-like networks are unaffected, but star-like networks exhibit a sharp change in extinction times under bounded susceptibility. Our findings are useful for the design of disease-resistant networks and infrastructure networks. More generally, they show that results for existing epidemic models are sensitive to modeling assumptions in non-intuitive ways, and suggest caution in directly using these as guidelines for real systems

A Conceptual Note on Influencing Store Loyalty: Implications for Indian Retailers

Store loyalty is the most initial variable of interest to retailers. This paper reviews existing retail literature to identify the dimensions of store loyalty; with specific focus on its antecedents such as store image. The paper also discusses methodological issues in measuring store loyalty and image in the current Indian context.

Hedonism and Culture: Impact on Shopper Behaviour

Increasingly consumer shopping behaviour is being seen from the holistic perspective of the entire shopping experience. The experiential view of shopping takes a far more holistic approach to the consumption process, right from involvement to post purchase usage, and incorporates the hedonistic perspective into the existing, primarily cognitive- rational information processing view of consumption. Hedonic shopping value refers to the sense of enjoyment and pleasure that the consumer receives from the entire buying experience associated with shopping at a store and this value perception could vary depending on individual shopping orientations, the cultural orientations as well as the economic and competitive environment in which the consumer shops. This paper attempts to understand the impact of all three factors on the purchase behaviour of shoppers by examining hedonic value across different product categories signifying different shopping orientations; across culturally distinct countries; across developing and developed economies; and across different stages of retail evolution.

Impact of Initial-Trust Image on Shopper Trust and Patronage Intentions

The objective of this study is to examine the role of store image in influencing shopper trust and patronage intentions when 1) the store has never been visited and 2) the store has been visited. This study also identifies three stages through which ‘trust-image’ progresses and uses the first stage to construct and ‘initial-trust-image’ of the store. The experimental study findings provide empirical support that initial-trust-image of the store has significant impact on trust and patronage intentions for some shoppers. Retailers entering the Indian market are advised to be conscious of the symbolic cues that they embed in the store appearance, especially since the initial-trust-image needs to convey more than just competence and expertise. Significantly, the findings also indicate that asymmetric effects of trust operate at the stage of initial-trust – negative initial-image perception causes greater mistrust than positive initial-image causes trust.

Detecting Sponsored Recommendations

With a vast number of items, web-pages, and news to choose from, online services and the customers both benefit tremendously from personalized recommender systems. Such systems however provide great opportunities for targeted advertisements, by displaying ads alongside genuine recommendations. We consider a biased recommendation system where such ads are displayed without any tags (disguised as genuine recommendations), rendering them indistinguishable to a single user. We ask whether it is possible for a small subset of collaborating users to detect such a bias. We propose an algorithm that can detect such a bias through statistical analysis on the collaborating users' feedback. The algorithm requires only binary information indicating whether a user was satisfied with each of the recommended item or not. This makes the algorithm widely appealing to real world issues such as identification of search engine bias and pharmaceutical lobbying. We prove that the proposed algorithm detects the bias with high probability for a broad class of recommendation systems when sufficient number of users provide feedback on sufficient number of recommendations. We provide extensive simulations with real data sets and practical recommender systems, which confirm the trade offs in the theoretical guarantees.Comment: Shorter version to appear in Sigmetrics, June 201

Determinants of Wages and Returns to Education in Rural India

This study focuses on estimating determinants of wages across primary, secondary and tertiary sectors in rural India by the type of work contract involved. Casual labourers, with short term work contracts and nearly absent benefits and wage employees, with long term work contracts, higher wages and benefits represent dual sections of the labour market. Here we demonstrate that human capital and other factors that has been proven to explain variation in wages in other labour markets, explain little about wages in casual employment sector. Further, pattern of returns to education for casual labourers were found to decrease with increasing educational levels and was negative for higher education. Such a trend was no t noticed among wage employees, where pattern that was similar with other studies focusing on the whole labour market.returns to education, wages, particular labour markets, Labor and Human Capital, J3, J4,