Browsing by Subject "Consumer behavior"
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Item Open Access Consumers' use of country-of-manufacture information: Turkey versus the U.S.A.(Allied Academies, 2016) Kurpis, L. V.; Helgeson, J. G.; Ekici, A.; Supphellen, M.Globalization and the growth of international trade increase the importance of strategic decisions involving the positioning of brands for successful entry into foreign markets. One of these marketing decisions concerns whether the use of the country-of-manufacture information should be emphasized or masked in brand positioning. Country-of-manufacture (the "made in") information has been shown to influence consumers' purchase decisions. However, a number of researchers have been recently questioning the universality of this impact by pointing out at the instances when consumers stated or demonstrated that the country-of-manufacture information did not significantly influence their purchase decisions. The purpose of this study is to expand our understanding of the boundary conditions for the country-of-manufacture (COM) effect. Specifically, this study examines whether the consumers from Turkey (an emerging market) or the U.S.A. (a developed market) differ in their reliance on the country-of-manufacture information. The study was conducted in non-laboratory setting, a condition that provides a more rigorous test for the study hypotheses since the influence of the country-of-manufacture information cue was examined in our study in the presence of many other information cues (product appearance, retailers' reputation, salespeople advice, etc.) that could have potentially weakened the country-of-manufacture influence on consumer decisions. The results indicate that consumers in Turkey rated the COM importance higher, were more aware of the country-of-manufacture of their recent purchases, and cited the "made in" information as a purchase-influencing factor more frequently than consumers in the U.S.A. The effects of country/culture was significant even when the data were adjusted for individual differences in consumer ethnocentrism, and the influence of income, age, and education were taken into account. Consumers' age, income, ethnocentrism and perceived importance of brands as sources of product quality information were positively related to COM importance in both countries while retailers' role as guarantors of product quality was negatively related to COM importance in the U.S.A only. This exploratory study has tested the differences between Turkish and American consumers' perceptions of the role of retailers as guarantors of product quality and their reliance on brands (ratings of brand importance). As expected, Turkish consumers gave higher ratings to brand importance and lower ratings to retailers' role as guarantors of product quality. Several possible explanations including cultural differences and stage of market development were discussed in this explanatory study.Item Open Access Consumers’ use of country-of-manufacture information? Norway and the United States : ethnocentric, economic, and cultural differences(Routledge, 2017) Helgeson, J. G.; Kurpis, L. H. V.; Supphellen, M.; Ekici, A.The influence and use of the country-of-manufacture (COM) information on purchase decisions is examined in Norway and the USA in a nonlaboratory setting. Ethnocentrism, dependence on imported products, market size, and cultural difference are variables that may have led to differences in measured behaviors between Norway and the USA. Respondents in Norway showed less ethnocentrism, were less aware of COM, and showed no difference in the rating of COM importance, but cited self-reported COM as a purchase influencing factor more frequently than consumers in the USA. The overarching finding is that COM is rarely used by the studied consumers in actual purchase decisions with little difference found between Norway and the USA. © 2017 Taylor & Francis Group, LLC.Item Restricted Gelenek ve gelecek : "Şarkıcı" ikonu ve Ajda(1982) Oktay, AhmetItem Open Access The impact of abusing return policies: a newsvendor model with opportunistic consumers(Elsevier, 2018) Ülkü, M. A.; Gürler, ÜlküConsumers may return a product for a variety of reasons, such as the product having the wrong color or size, having poor functionality, being damaged during shipment, or simply prompting regret for an impulsive purchase. Retailers generally provide lenient return policies not only because they may signal high quality but also because they act as risk relievers for consumers’ purchasing decision processes. However, increasing product returns have become particularly challenging for the efficient management of inventory. As such, at the crux of a holistic inventory model lies the understanding of consumer return behavior. In this study, we introduce a variant of the classical single-period inventory (newsvendor) model with returns, in which heterogeneous consumers decide, based on their post-purchase valuation of the product, whether to return the product after using it. From the perspective of the retailer, such deliberate returns may abuse the return policy, which in turn may exacerbate reverse logistics and environmental costs. To that end, we incorporate demand uncertainty and consumer valuation uncertainty by explicitly gauging return probabilities and differentiated salvage values into a newsvendor model. We derive analytical results for the profit-maximizing order quantity for a single-period product that comes with a retailer return policy and exclusively identify the impact of return type as abused or normal. Also offered are closed-form optimal solutions in the cases where market demand is exponentially or uniformly distributed. Structural and numerical results lend managerial insight into how optimal ordering amount, profit, return rates and salvage values change with the price, return window, and hassle cost of returning the product.Item Open Access Malls and the orchestration of the shopping experience in a historical perspective(Association for Consumer Research, 1999) Csaba, F. F.; Askegaard, S.This paper discusses the founding principles and the historical development of the American mall, with a particular emphasis on the designs and writings of Victor Gruen, architect of the first mall. It does so in order to shed light upon the importance of the orchestration of shoppingexperiences, which traditionally hasbeen neglected in consumer research. Our focuson the orchestration also illuminates a discussion between postmodern theorists in consumer research accused by somecritics for lackofempirical foundation.The traditional suggestion is to engage in consumer ethnographies to examine the alleged postmodern reality of consumers. We, however, suggest that an ethnography of the orchestration efforts are of equal importance for an understanding of the present shopping and consumer environment. We conclude by advocating more emphasison macro-level institutional aspectsof the production-consumption interaction in interpretive consumer research.Item Open Access Zero-free-parameter modeling approach to predict the voltage of batteries of different chemistries and supercapacitors under arbitrary load(Electrochemical Society, Inc., 2017) Özdemir, E.; Uzundal, C. B.; Ulgut, B.Performance modeling of electrochemical energy storage systems is gathering increasingly higher attention in recent years. With the ever increasing power demand of mobile applications, predicting voltage behavior under different load profiles is of utmost importance for communications, automotive and consumer electronics. The ideal modelling approach needs not only to accurately predict the response of the battery, but also be robust, easy to implement and have low computational complexity. We will present a new algorithm that is algebraically straightforward, that has no adjustable parameters and that can accurately predict the voltage response of batteries and supercapacitors. The approach works well in a variety of discharge profiles ranging from simple long DC discharge/charge profiles to pulse schemes based on drive schedules published by regulatory bodies. Our approach is based on Electrochemical Impedance Spectroscopy measurements done on the system to be predicted. The spectrum is used in the frequency domain without any further processing to predict the fast moving portion of the voltage in the frequency domain. DC response is added in through a straightforward lookup table. This widely applicable approach can predict the voltage of with less than 1% error, without any adjustable parameters to a large variety of discharge profiles.