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Presents the results of an interview survey carried out in an out‐of‐town store, compares these with the impact of the store as predicted by the Lakschmanan‐Harsen real potential model. Suggests that the model is an effective way of assessing the impact of out‐of‐town stores.

Editors' Note The following article reports an empirical study designed to find out whether products on which a great deal of money is spent in advertising are on the whole of a higher quality than products less heavily advertised. The results, whilst not absolutely conclusive, indicate that this is not the case. A heavily advertised product is just as likely to be poor quality as any other.

Editors' Note In this short article the authors briefly review and comment on the most common approaches used by companies or proposed by specialists for setting the budgets to be spent on advertising in an organisation.

Despite fast-growing interest in research on political connections, most papers on this topic belong to the economics or public administration fields. Few studies, if any, look into the role of firmsʼ political connections in the Department of Defense (DoD) acquisition area. This paper attempts to bridge this gap by investigating the impact of political connections on the excessive profitability of DoD contractors. We find that, in contrast to what the “corruption hypothesis” predicts, the excessive profits are less (more) pronounced for those contractors with politically connected (non-connected) boards. Our findings suggest that those politically connected board directors may use their experience to serve a benevolent role to the public in keeping DoD contractors from opportunistic profitseeking behaviors that could reach or even cross the federal governmentʼs regulatory redline.

In this article, fiscal redistribution in the European Union (EU) of 15 member states and the enlarged EU is analyzed. Specifically, net fiscal transfers between EU member states are analyzed, i.e. which countries are net beneficiaries, which are net contributors and what factors affect countries' net fiscal balances. The results show that, at present, fiscal transfers among EU member states are partly explained by differences in countries' relative economic prosperity and partly by institutional features that systematically favor smaller EU member states. Small member states can use their overrepresentation in the Council votes to obtain more benefits than their level of economic development alone would justify. If the pre-enlargement level of redistribution is extended to include the new member states, the net costs could amount to 60 billion euros. This means that the net fiscal balance of the current member states would decrease significantly. Furthermore, the Treaty of Nice does not change the malapportionment of Council votes and European Parliament seats, which gives an advantage to small member states in bargaining for transfers

Examines the relationship between a product’s features, the consumer’s quality evaluation, and the marketer’s pricing in the context of a dynamic product/market environment. Estimates a simultaneous system model using two‐stage‐least‐squares regression on Consumer Reports data of three high‐technology consumer durables which have shared common product/market characteristics but reached different levels of household ownership in the late 1980s. The results of pairwise correlation and 2SLS regression analyses revealed that the associations between prices and quality evaluations were insignificant, but the associations between product features and prices or between product features and quality evaluations, varied across the three product categories at their different levels of market penetration. As a product’s customer base widens or the consumer’s knowledge and experience with the product accumulates, the significant association of marketer’s prices changes from “with the product’s feature availability” to “with the consumers’ experience‐in‐use advantages,” while the significant association of consumers’ quality evaluations changes from “with the consumers’ experience‐in‐use advantages” to “with the consumers’ experience‐in‐use disadvantages.” The empirical results, however, suggest no relationship between the marketer’s pricing of a product and the Consumer Reports’ overall quality evaluations on the product.

As the application of artificial intelligence (AI) becomes more prevalent, many high-tech firms have employed AI applications to deal with emerging societal, technological and environmental challenges. Big data analytical capability (BDAC) has become increasingly important in the AI application processes. Drawing upon the resource-based view and the theory of planned behavior, this study aims to investigate how BDAC and collaboration affect new product performance (NPP). Practically, a harmonic working team is particularly important for creating management synergies, this empirical analysis demonstrates the importance of BDAC and collaboration for NPP.

This paper focuses on the performance of firms that applied AI in their operations. This study collected data from firms in Greater China, including China and Taiwan, as Greater China is currently the leading manufacturer of semiconductor, electronic and electric products for AI applications in the manufacturing process. Confirmatory factor analysis and structural equation modeling is employed for statistical analysis.

The analytical results indicate that BDAC positively relates to collaboration capability (CC) in AI applications but not to team collaboration (TC). CC positively correlates with TC, and both CC and TC positively correlate with NPP. Further, the mediating effect was examined using the Sobel t-test, which reveals that CC is a significant mediator in the influence of BDAC on NPP.

The strategic implementation of BDAC and collaboration can allow an enterprise to improve its NPP when driven by the external environment to use AI, which further enhances NPP. These processes indicate that AI and BDAC are both crucial for the success of a company’s collaboration and for effective management to improve NPP in the face of global competition.

This study introduces the concept of BDAC to explain the relationship between CC and TC, as they pertain to NPP. This study presented a discussion of the theoretical and practical implications of the research findings and could provide a framework for managing BDAC.

This paper aims to identify the key antecedences contributing consumer similarity perception toward store branded lookalikes (SBLs), testing to what extent each of the antecedences influences the overall similarity perception.

Two empirical studies were conducted. Study 1 was an online experiment to test the relative importance of packaging features on similarity judgment of SBLs. Study 2 examined the impacts of consumer characteristics and store related elements on similarity perception through a Qualtrics web-based questionnaire covering seven product categories.

This research yields two key findings. First of all, it revealed that all three packaging attributes studied (i.e. size and shape, image and color) exert positive influence on similarity judgment of SBLs, among which color shows the most significant importance, followed by size and shape, and then color. Then, it showed that brand loyalty fully mediated the effect of brand familiarity on consumers' similarity perception, giving that no direct effect was found from brand familiarity to similarity perception but consumers' brand loyalty increased as they become more familiar with the NBs. As consumers become more loyal to the brands, they would perceive the SBLs to be less similar to imitated national brands.

This research confirmed the significance of proper manipulation of packaging design, either to the SBLs or to the imitated NBs. It also reveals the critical role of gaining high familiarity and strong loyalty for the NB manufacturers. For retailers, the research highlights the need to maintain a better store image in order to take advantage of SBLs to help with marketing competition.

This research contributes new knowledge on the lookalike phenomenon by uncovering the prerequisites that cause similarity perception between two products.

This study explores nurses' views as to whether they see community pharmacists as “entrepreneurial” and what this might mean for working together in primary care. Pharmacists are expected to fully integrate with their colleagues – particularly nurses – under the New Zealand health policy. Yet, there is scarce literature that examines multidisciplinary teamwork and integration through an entrepreneurial identity lens. This is particularly important since around the world, including New Zealand, community pharmacies are small businesses.

This was an exploratory qualitative study. A total of 18 semi-structured interviews were conducted with nurses from primary care, nursing professional bodies and academics from nursing schools. Interviews were audio recorded and transcribed verbatim. Coding was undertaken through general inductive thematic analysis.

In total three key themes emerged through analysis: the entrepreneurial profile of the community pharmacist, the lack of entrepreneurship across the profession, and the role identity and value that community pharmacists hold, as viewed by nurses. There appeared to be pockets of entrepreneurship in community pharmacy; nurses did not express a blanket label of entrepreneurship across the whole sector. Nurses also discussed several forms of entrepreneurship including commercial-oriented, clinical and social entrepreneurship. The social entrepreneurship identity of community pharmacists sat most comfortably with nurse participants. Overall, nurses appeared to value community pharmacists but felt that they did not fully understand the roles that this profession took on.

This paper contributes to the academic literature by identifying three domains of entrepreneurship relevant to community pharmacy as well as multi-level barriers that will need to be jointly tackled by professional bodies and policy-makers. Improving nurses' and other healthcare professionals' knowledge of community pharmacists' role and expertise is also likely to facilitate better inter-professional integration.

There is scarce literature that attempts to understand how entrepreneurial identity plays out in health organisation and management. This study adds to the knowledge base of factors influencing integration in healthcare.