Comparison of Product Sustainability of Conventional and Low-Carbon Apples in Korea

Apple is Korea’s most representative fruit. This study calculated absolute and relative product sustainability through environmental and cost assessments on apples by cultivation farming. The ISO 14040 life cycle assessment (LCA) methodology was used as a method of environmental assessment. Primary data for one year, 2018, were collected for the environmental assessment of conventional and low-carbon farming. The eco-points of apples cultivated by conventional and low-carbon farming using the LCA 2.07 × 10−3 and 1.17 × 10−3, respectively. The environmental impact of conventional apples was 78% higher than that of low-carbon apples. Cost assessment results show that every 1 kg of conventional and low-carbon apples costs USD 1.93 and USD 3.17, respectively, and their profits were USD 0.20 and USD 1.00, respectively. The total cost of conventional apples was lower than that of low-carbon apples, but its profit was one-fifth that of low-carbon apples. The UN Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific (UN ESCAP)’s eco-efficiency method was used to calculate absolute sustainability, and the concept of factor X was introduced to evaluate relative sustainability. Absolute sustainability for conventional and low-carbon apples was 96.01 (USD/eco-point) and 853.03 (USD/eco-point), respectively. Low-carbon apples’ relative sustainability was computed in factor 8.89. Finally, if all farms that grow conventional apples shift to cultivating low-carbon apples, they can save 58,111 tons of carbon dioxide. This amount is at least 3.4% of the nation’s greenhouse gas reduction in the agricultural and livestock sectors. This study provides a clear reason for the agricultural sector to shift its cultivation method from conventional to eco-friendly farming, including low-carbon farming.

Assortment Rotation and the Value of Concealment

Assortment rotation—the retailing practice of changing the assortment of products offered to customers—has recently been used as a competitive advantage for both brick-and-mortar and online retailers. We focus on product categories where consumers may purchase multiple products during a season and investigate a new reason why frequent assortment rotations can be valuable to a retailer. Namely, by distributing its seasonal catalog of products over multiple assortments rotated throughout the season, as opposed to selling all products in a single, fixed assortment, the retailer effectively conceals a portion of its full product catalog from consumers, injecting uncertainty into the consumer’s relative product valuations. Rationally acting consumers may respond to this structural difference by purchasing more products, thereby generating additional sales for the retailer. We refer to this phenomenon as the value of concealment and show that the retailer enjoys a positive and significant value of concealment under quite general conditions. However, we show that when consumers are forward looking, the value of concealment is context dependent. We present insights and discuss intuition regarding which product categories likely lead to a positive versus negative value of concealment. This paper was accepted by Vishal Gaur, operations management.

Impact of Pricing Practice Management on Performance and Sustainability of Supermarkets in the Urban Area of Enugu State, Nigeria

Consumer shopping behavior is becoming increasingly polarized, which has an impact on price decisions, and the performance and sustainability of supermarkets. This study sets out to empirically determine the impact that pricing practice management has on the performance and sustainability of supermarkets in the urban area of Enugu State, Nigeria. The study explicitly attempts to ascertain the impact of value-informed pricing practice, competition-informed pricing practice, and cost-informed pricing practice on supermarkets’ performance and sustainability in urban Enugu. The paper also examines the impact of adopting three different pricing practices when the relative product advantage and/or competitive intensity are/is moderating variable(s). With a population of 100 supermarkets, 48 responded to the questionnaire. A multiple regression analysis was utilized to test the hypothesis formulated for the study. The study found that the adoption of a value-informed pricing practice, competition-informed pricing practice, and cost-informed pricing practice by management has no significant impact, negatively significant impact, and positively significant impact, respectively, on supermarkets’ performance and sustainability in urban Enugu. The study also found that the impact of the three pricing practices on performance and sustainability of supermarkets in the urban area of Enugu State, changes significantly when relative product advantage and/or competitive intensity are/is moderating variable(s). Amongst others, this study recommends that the management of supermarkets should carry out an internal and external environmental assessment of a product before deciding on the appropriate pricing practice to adopt for that product. Critical consideration should be given to the relative product advantage and the competitive intensity of the product. Moreover, the adopted pricing practice must be situated within the overall performance objective of the firm in such a way that resources are optimized, and the maximum value attained.

Application of a set of interdisciplinary quantitative methods on predicting a problem of vehicle design for elder drivers and assessing a design proposal

Interdisciplinary research methods bring about more opportunities for designers to understand the users and predict some problems that hard to clarify by traditional methods. This study takes product design of the elder-friendly low-speed vehicles as an example, discussing the rationality of some quantitative methods introduced from other fields. The collected data include the subjects’ operations’ finishing time and finger moving times. By means of multiple linear regression and logistic regression, senior people’s driving behavioral model is built to clarify their operational characteristics. According to the results, a prototype design is proposed and then assessed by analytic hierarchy process. The set of feasible methods used in the research process is sorted out for solving other similar issues targeting relative product design.

A machine learning perspective on responsible gambling

Gamblers are frequently reminded to “gamble responsibly.” But these qualitative reminders come with no quantitative information for gamblers to judge relative product risk in skill-based gambling forms. By comparison, consumers purchasing alcohol are informed of product strength by alcohol by volume (ABV %) or similar labels. This paper uses mixed logistic regression machine learning to uncover the potential variation in soccer betting outcomes. This paper uses data from four bet types and eight seasons of English Premier League soccer, ending in 2018. Outcomes across each bet type were compared using three betting strategies: the most-skilled prediction, a random strategy, and the least-skilled prediction. There was a large spread in betting outcomes, with for example the per-bet average loss varying by a factor of 54 (from 1.1% to 58.9%). Gamblers’ losses were positively correlated with the observable betting odds across all bets, indicating that betting odds are one salient feature which could be used to inform gamblers about product risk. Such large differences in product risk are relevant to the promotion of responsible gambling.

Culturally Contingent Electronic Word-of-Mouth Signaling and Screening: A Comparative Study of Product Reviews in the United States and Japan

Electronic word of mouth (eWOM) is an important source of influence on consumer decision making, yet little is known about cross-cultural differences in both the occurrence of eWOM and the relationship between eWOM and sales. The authors draw on signaling theory to develop a conceptual model and assess the relationships between country and the occurrence of eWOM, as well as between online ratings and relative product sales according to country. Online reviews and sales rank data for books, CDs, and DVDs were collected from Amazon U.S. and Amazon Japan in 2009 and 2017. Results suggest cross-national differences in both the occurrence of eWOM (eWOM signaling) and the relationship between eWOM and relative product sales (eWOM screening). These national differences appear to change over time: some remain stable, some disappear, and others emerge. The proposed culturally contingent signaling and screening model may be adopted as a framework for future research on cross-cultural eWOM. The results also inform the literature on cultural change by suggesting that cultural differences in eWOM change in nuanced patterns over time.

Cosmopolitanism, Consumer Ethnocentrism, Dan Relatif Product Quality Terhadap Preferensi Konsumen Generasi Y Produk Pakaian Merek Zara Di Surabaya

The various choices and brands of domestic products as well as the global products offered by manufacturers, provide different preferences to various consumers. The purpose of this study to determine the factors that affect the consumer preferences generation Y to the product brand clothing zara in surabaya. The variables used in this study are: cosmopolitanism, consumer ethnocentrism, relative product quality and consumer preferences generation Y. Measurements were made with Likert scale. The population in this study is the Y-generation consumers who have visited the clothing brand outlets in Surabaya. The analysis technique used is partial least square.The results of this study is that cosmopolitanism contributes to the relative product quality of brand products in Surabaya, the relative quality of products contributes to the Y generation consumer preferences in the zara brand clothing products in Surabaya, cosmopolitanism contributes to consumer ethnocentrism, consumer ethnocentrism contributes to consumer preferences Y generation on zara brand clothing products in Surabaya and cosmopolitanism does not contribute to the Y generation consumer preferences on Zara brand clothing products.

Trade margins, quality upgrading, and China’s agri-food export growth

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to find out the source and pattern of China’s agri-food export growth mainly along the intensive margin and the factors affecting it, especially the determinants contributing most to sustainable export growth. Design/methodology/approach The paper phases in three empirical steps: analyzing highly-disaggregated agri-food export data of China to 213 countries or economies and attempting to find some stylized facts; consecutively decomposing China’s agri-food export volume into three trade margins and calculating each of them; based on an extended heterogeneity firm and trade model with the quality margin being introduced, investigating the source and pattern of China’s agri-food export growth and the role of relevant determinants. Findings The paper reveals that the relative quality upgrading explains most of the increase along the intensive margin, to which the relative price decrease has a negligible negative contribution. Simultaneously, the heterogeneity across products does matter, since we find that the relative quality improvement and relative product price decline are more prominent for the differentiated products with larger quantity expansion along the intensive margins. Originality/value With quality upgrading dynamically, we attribute China’s long-term agri-food export growth to the quantity penetration along the intensive margin. With the relative product price distinction reflecting factor costs and productivity differences across industries, the comparative quality upgrading in differentiated products might correlate with their upward production productivity.

Ready, Set, Slow: How Aspiration-Relative Product Quality Impacts the Rate of New Product Introduction

Performance feedback research addresses how firms respond to performance that diverges from their aspirations. Whereas the majority of research in this vein involves financial performance, we apply this framework to product quality performance, arguing that when performance diverges either below or above aspirations, firms will pursue a slower subsequent product introduction rate, either to identify the cause of the underperformance or to incorporate the successful product characteristics in the case of overperformance. We also investigate whether our predictions hold when two boundary conditions are applied. Since product quality aspirations are derived from the “reputations for quality” of the firm and its peers, we argue that the stability of these reputations will amplify the delaying effects of below- and above-aspiration performance. Consistent with research on firm responses to financial performance, we also predict that greater sales revenues relative to sales aspirations will attenuate the delaying effects of aspiration-relative performance divergence. Our analysis of 1,332 video games released by 48 publishers from 2006 to 2009 is largely consistent with these predictions.