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The purpose of this paper is to investigate whether or not mavens’ dissemination activities are likely to promote or hinder retailers’ store brand premiumisation attempts, by revealing the relationship between mavens’ price and non-price on-pack extrinsic cue search and their store brand purchasing behaviours.

The paper adopts a hypothetic-deductive approach and develops a model of mavens’ store brand purchasing behaviour. The model is tested using SEM on a US data set containing 457 respondents. A full discussion of the direct, indirect and total effects is provided.

Mavens’ store brand purchasing behaviours are strongly linked to their price search activities and negatively related to their use of non-price on-pack extrinsic cues. This indicates that their dissemination activities are likely to stress lower prices and hence price competition rather than promote other cues used to infer quality. Thus, mavens are likely to inhibit retailers’ store brand premiumisation attempts. Mavens’ investments in time engaged in search activities are strongly linked to social returns rather than private financial savings.

The work is based on data collected using an online survey in one region of the USA where store brands are not as prevalent in other countries such as the UK.

The investigation of non-price on-pack extrinsic cues reduces mavens’ store brand purchasing behaviours while the use of price cues increases them. This suggests that even with mavens’ market expertise that a non-price extrinsic cue deficit continues to exist for these products. Consequently, retailers need to re-examine and rework the cues contained on pack to convey more positive consumption-related information if mavens are to become store brand advocates.

Rather than conceptualising the maven as possessing market wide knowledge, this research adopts a domain specific perspective arguing that price mavenism can be distinguished from product-related mavenism with consequences for the set of extrinsic cues used as part of the maven’s search process. In doing so, it reveals the conflicting effects that these maven dimensions have on purchasing behaviours and the likely effects on mavens’ dissemination activities.

Health apps offer a potential approach to support healthier food behaviours but a lack of sufficient engagement may limit effectiveness. This study aims to use a user engagement theoretical lens to examine the factors that influence app engagement over time and may prompt disengagement.

A phenomenological exploration of the lived experience was used. Women from a lower socioeconomic background (based on the occupation and employment status of the household’s primary income earner) were randomly assigned to use one of two apps for a minimum of eight weeks. Multiple data collection methods, including accompanied shops, researcher observations, interviews, participant reflective accounts and questionnaires, were used at different time-points to examine engagement. Theoretical thematic analysis was conducted to explore the engagement experience and relevant social, personal and environmental influences.

Healthy food involvement appears to drive app engagement. Changes in situational involvement may contribute to fluctuation in engagement intensity over time as the saliency of personal goals change. Negatively valenced engagement dimensions may contribute to the overall expression of engagement. A lack of congruency with personal goals or an imbalance between perceived personal investment and value was expressed as the primary reasons for disengagement.

Situational involvement may act as a trigger of different engagement phases. There is a need to better distinguish between enduring and situational involvement in engagement research.

Individual characteristics may shape engagement and propensity for disengagement, which highlights the practical importance of incorporating tailored features into app design.

Findings broaden the current conceptualisation of engagement within the digital space and prompt a reconsideration of the role of situational involvement and negatively valenced dimensions throughout the engagement process.

This paper aims to investigate the role of store brands as a time- and money-saving heuristic in the context of an omnipresent store brand hierarchy. Drawing on the work of Tversky and Kahneman (1982), it proposes that the store brand hierarchy is characterised by many of the traits of frequently used heuristics employed by grocery shoppers.

Based on Chaiken’s (1980) model of information processing and Stigler’s (1961) perspective on the economics of information search, the study deductively establishes a model of store brand proneness to reveal the role of store brands as time- and money-saving heuristic. The model is tested on a sample of 535 US households using structural equation modelling and subsequent multigroup analysis based on two subsamples of households experiencing high financial pressure but who differ in terms of time pressure.

The findings provide strong support for store brands as a time- and money-saving heuristic and as a substitute for price search among households experiencing financial and time pressures.

The main limitation is that the study is based on a sample of households located in one region of the US market.

Retailers need to be aware that any extension of the store brand portfolio beyond the traditional multi-tiered price/quality hierarchy risks undermining what has emerged to be a valuable heuristic used by certain shoppers.

This study extends our understanding of the role of store brands in the marketplace by going beyond their conceptualisation as a competitive device used by retailers to instead position them as a decision-making tool used by consumers. It also deepens our understanding of the boundary between rational search activities and the transition to the use of frequently flawed heuristics within the shopping process.

I am pleased to acknowledge the invaluable assistance of Mildred Harris and Anne Hasiuk in the preparation of this book. In addition, the authors responded quickly to the invitation to submit original papers and were good natured in their responses to numerous remarks and queries. I am grateful to my editors at Elsevier, Mary Malin and Helen Collins, for their attention to this book.

A large and robust empirical literature demonstrates that there is a strong relationship between the performance of a multinational enterprise (MNE) and its degree of multinationality. We develop a new metric to capture the return on foreign assets (ROFA), which we use as an alternative metric to return on total assets (ROTA) as a dependent variable representing performance. We find a significant S‐shaped relation between ROFA and the degree of multinationality across a large set of UK firms.

The librarian and researcher have to be able to uncover specific articles in their areas of interest. This Bibliography is designed to help. Volume IV, like Volume III, contains features to help the reader to retrieve relevant literature from MCB University Press' considerable output. Each entry within has been indexed according to author(s) and the Fifth Edition of the SCIMP/SCAMP Thesaurus. The latter thus provides a full subject index to facilitate rapid retrieval. Each article or book is assigned its own unique number and this is used in both the subject and author index. This Volume indexes 29 journals indicating the depth, coverage and expansion of MCB's portfolio.

AS J. L. Hobbs shows so clearly in his recent book, the interest in local history is growing enormously at present. The universities, training colleges and schools, as well as the institutions of further education, are all making more use of local studies—geographical, economic, social and historical—in their regular courses, in their advanced work, and in their publications.

This chapter is a contribution to the intellectual history of the anxiety that full employment in the modern United States depended somehow on military spending. This discourse (conveniently abbreviated as “military Keynesianism”) is vaguely familiar, but its contours and transit still await a full study. The chapter shows the origins of the idea in the left-Keynesian milieu centered around Harvard’s Alvin Hansen in the late 1930s, with a particular focus on the diverse group that cowrote the 1938 stagnationist manifesto An Economic Program for American Democracy. After a discussion of how these young economists participated in the World War II mobilization, the chapter considers how questions of stagnation and military stimulus were marginalized during the years of the high Cold War, only to be revived by younger radicals. At the same time, it demonstrates the existence of a community of discourse that directly links the Old Left of the 1930s and 1940s with the New Left of the 1960s and 1970s, and cuts across the division between left-wing social critique and liberal statecraft.

Film provides an alternative medium for assessing our interpretations of cultural icons. This selective list looks at the film and video sources for information on and interpretations of the life of Woody Guthrie.

The following bibliography focuses mainly on programs which can run on IBM microcomputers and compatibles under the operating system PC DOS/MS DOS, and which can be used in online information and documentation work. They fall into the following categories: