Cause-Related Marketing and Ethnocentrism: The Moderating Effects of Geographic Scope and Perceived Economic Threat

Amongst the various factors that managers need to consider when designing a CRM campaign is the cause’s geographic scope, i.e., should the CRM campaign benefit local, national, or international communities? Although previous research has examined the importance of geographic scope in the effectiveness of the CRM campaigns, it has largely ignored consumer reactions to CRM campaigns from a local cultural identity perspective, such as ethnocentric identity. This study brings together these two important factors to examine (through the lens of Social Identity Theory) how consumer ethnocentrism affects CRM effectiveness in campaigns varying in geographic scope. We test our hypotheses through an experimental study of 322 British consumers and three different geographic scopes (UK, Greece, and Ethiopia). Our results show that ethnocentric consumers show a positive bias towards products advertised through national CRM campaigns; however, there is a diversity of reactions towards different international geographic scopes, based on the levels of ‘perceived economic threat’. Ethnocentric consumers prefer international CRM campaigns that benefit people located in a country posing a lower vs. a higher economic threat to the domestic economy and the self. Our study contributes to a broader understanding of factors affecting the effectiveness of CRM campaigns and help managers design better CRM campaigns by carefully selecting the geographic scope, after considering a rising consumer segment: the ethnocentric consumer.

Candice Amich. Precarious Forms: Performing Utopia in the Neoliberal Americas.

Precarious Forms provides a useful and convincing examination of how performance, as a utopic endeavour, resists the logics of neoliberalism. Although lacking the rich historical and cultural specificity necessary for its geographic scope, the book offers a hopeful invitation to remain invested in the possibilities of performance and its potential to affect audiences.

Predicting the tripartite network of mosquito-borne disease

The potential for a pathogen to infect a host is mediated by traits of both the host and pathogen, as well as the complex interactions between them. Arthropod-borne viruses (arboviruses) require an intermediate vector, introducing an additional compatibility layer. Existing predictive models of host-virus networks rarely incorporate the unique aspects of vector transmission, instead treating vector biology as a hidden, unobserved layer. We explore two possible extensions to address this: first, we added vector traits into predictions of the bipartite host-virus network; and second, we used host, vector, and virus traits to predict the tripartite host-vector-virus network. We tested both approaches on mosquito-borne flaviviruses of mammals. Using host-virus models, we find that the inclusion of vector traits may improve inference in some cases, while viral traits proved to be the most important for model performance. Further, we found that it was possible, though quite difficult, to predict full tripartite (host-vector-virus) links. Both approaches are interesting avenues for further model development, but our results keenly underscore a need to collect more comprehensive datasets to characterize arbovirus ecology, across a wide and less biased geographic scope, especially outside of North America, and to better identify molecular traits that underpin host-vector-virus interactions.

Geographic Scope and Real Estate Firm Performance during the COVID-19 Pandemic

This study examines the effect of geographic scope in mitigating the adverse impact of the COVID-19 pandemic in the real estate sector. Utilizing the Chinese setting over the two-month period in 2020 from the beginning of the outbreak to the successful containment of the spread of virus, we show that while the pandemic has negatively impacted real estate firm returns, firms with broader geographic scope and more geographically diversified property allocations have managed to better endure the crisis. We further find that firms with higher leverage report lower returns during the pandemic irrespective of their geographic scope, but larger firms can lessen the adverse impact of the pandemic only if they have adopted a more diversified strategy. Overall, our study provides novel evidence on the benefit of diversification by demonstrating the importance of geographic scope and diversification at times of crises. Specifically, we show corporate diversification could be especially useful to mitigate the negative stock market reactions resulting from the pandemic. Moreover, diversification could even become essential for larger firms that are expected by the market to be more diversified.

Achieving Equitable Social Health Insurance Benefits in China: How Does Domestic Migration Pose a Challenge?

Background: Universal coverage through social health insurance is promoted by many researchers and policymakers to improve health equity within a country or region. In China, the mass internal migration since 1980s has posed challenges for the social health insurance to ensure equitable benefits for migrant population. This study evaluated the benefit distribution of social health insurance among internal migrants in China.Methods: Using the 2014 China National Internal Migrants Dynamic Monitoring Survey, , by applying a two-part model, we conducted a benefit analysis of social health insurance among a representative sample of migrants in China.Results: The study found that the broader the geographic scope of migration, the lower the probability of receiving reimbursements from the social health insurance and the reimbursement ratio; but among those who received reimbursements, the broader the geographic scope of migration, the larger amounts they were reimbursed for health care use. We attributed this unequal benefit distribution to the current insurance design that replies on localized administration and patients paying services up-front and requesting reimbursement later.Conclusion: To improve the equity in social insurance benefits between migrants and non-migrants and among migrants, policies that promote the insurance portability across regions and immediate reimbursement are warranted, while at the same time efforts should be done to control inflation of health care expenditures and to prevent inverse government subsidies from the regions that have more out-migration to regions that have in-migration.

Traders

The eighteenth-century expansion of the Durrani, Qing and Romanov empires deeper into Eurasia brought liquid wealth from the increasingly globalised economy into this space, stimulating commercial opportunities and the closer integration of the continental interior. This chapter uncovers one of the outcomes of this process as the empowerment of new commercial groups. Afghans, Pashtuns and Muslims from the Indo-Afghan frontier—generally seen by scholars only as pastoralists and peddlers—were the entrepreneurial lynchpins of the developments examined in this chapter. As former peddlers harnessed market opportunities and channelled the benefits accrued from political patronage into new business ventures, they accumulated capital and widened the geographic scope of their operations. In so doing, they posed serious competition to established north-Indian magnate groups, while also changing the character of commerce itself.

Longer study length, standardized sampling techniques, and broader geographic scope leads to higher likelihood of detecting stable abundance patterns in long term deer tick (Ixodes scapularis) studies

Ixodes scapularis (deer ticks) are a taxon of ecological and human health concern due to their status as primary vectors of Borrelia burgdorferi, the bacteria that transmits Lyme disease. Deer ticks are thought to be expanding in geographic range and population size across the eastern US, leading to concern that tick-vectored illness will correspondingly rise. However, because of wide variability in deer tick monitoring strategies, synthesis efforts may be limited by the sensitivity and reliability of data produced by existing long term studies, especially to inform forecasting and proactive deer tick management. To address this, we explicitly examined the role of how study design parameters affect the likelihood of observing temporal trends in deer tick studies. We used a moving window approach to investigate the temporal stability of deer tick population trajectories across the US. We found several study factors can have an impact on the likelihood of a study reaching stability and the likelihood of tick abundance data leading to misleading results if the study does not reach stability. Our results underscore the need for longer studies of deer ticks when trying to assess long term or broad spatial patterns. Moreover, our results showcase the importance of study length, sampling technique, life stage, and geographic scope in shaping the inferences from deer tick studies. This is especially important for synthesizing across the variety of existing surveys and for potential ecological forecasting.