EXPRESS: Cross-National Differences in Market Response: Line-Length, Price, and Distribution Elasticities in Fourteen Indo-Pacific Rim Economies

Our field’s knowledge of marketing-mix elasticities is largely restricted to developed countries in the North-Atlantic region, even though other parts of the world—especially the Indo-Pacific Rim region—have become economic powerhouses. To better allocate marketing budgets, firms need to have information about marketing-mix elasticities for countries outside the North-Atlantic region. We use data covering over 1,600 brands from 14 product categories collected in 7 developed and 7 emerging Indo-Pacific Rim countries across more than 10 years to estimate marketing elasticities for line length, price, and distribution, and examine which brand, category, and country factors influence these elasticities. Averaged across brands, categories, and countries, line-length elasticity is .459, price elasticity is -.422, and distribution elasticity is .368, but with substantial variation across brands, categories, and countries. Contrary to what has been suggested, we find no systematic differences in marketing responsiveness between emerging and developed economies. Instead, the key country-level factor driving elasticities is societal stratification, with Hofstede’s measure of power inequality (power distance) as its cultural manifestation and income inequality as its economic manifestation. As the effects of virtually all brand, category, and country factors differ across the three marketing-mix instruments, the field needs new theorizing that is contingent on the marketing-mix instrument studied.

Local adaptation and spatiotemporal patterns of genetic diversity revealed by repeated sampling of Caenorhabditis elegans across the Hawaiian Islands

The nematode Caenorhabditis elegans is among the most widely studied organisms, but relatively little is known about its natural ecology. Wild C. elegans have been isolated from both temperate and tropical climates, where they feed on bacteria associated with decomposing plant material. Genetic diversity is low across much of the globe but high in the Hawaiian Islands and across the Pacific Rim. The high genetic diversity found there suggests that: (1) the origin of the species lies in Hawaii or the surrounding Pacific Rim; and (2) the ancestral niche of the species is likely similar to the Hawaiian niche. A recent study of the Hawaiian niche found that genetically distinct groups appeared to correlate with elevation and temperature, but the study had a limited sample size. To better characterize the niche and genetic diversity of C. elegans on the Hawaiian Islands and to explore how genetic diversity might be influenced by local adaptation, we repeatedly sampled nematodes over a three-year period, measured various environmental parameters at each sampling site, and whole-genome sequenced the C. elegans isolates that we identified. We found that the typical Hawaiian C. elegans niche is moderately moist native forests at high elevations (500 to 1500 meters) where temperatures are cool (15 to 20°C). We measured levels of genetic diversity and differentiation among Hawaiian strains and found evidence of seven genetically distinct groups distributed across the islands. Then, we scanned these genomes for signatures of local adaptation and identified 18 distinct regions that overlap with hyperdivergent regions, which are likely maintained by balancing selection and enriched for genes related to environmental sensing, xenobiotic detoxification, and pathogen resistance. These results provide strong evidence of local adaptation among Hawaiian C. elegans and a possible genetic basis for this adaptation.