Previous research demonstrates the critical role moral disengagement plays in unethical decision-making. This study investigates the relationships among moral endorsement, shareholder-value orientation, moral disengagement, and moral judgment on issues of different moral intensities. The results of a scenario-based survey conducted in China confirm the negative (positive) impact of moral disengagement (moral intensity) on moral judgment. The findings reveal that both moral endorsement and shareholder-value orientation of decision-makers significantly influence moral judgment and that moral intensity moderates the relationships between moral endorsement and moral judgment, and between shareholder-value orientation and moral disengagement. The study's theoretical contributions, managerial implications, and limitations are discussed.

Knowledge is a firm’s most valuable and fundamental resource (Grant 1996; Wiklund and Shepherd 2003; Vargo and Lusch 2004). However, little attention has been given to its strategic antecedents. In the marketing domain, we are specifically concerned with the following: How do differences in strategy influence a firm’s ability to develop market knowledge capabilities? How does environmental uncertainty interact with strategy to affect the development of market knowledge capabilities? The potential for market knowledge to confer competitive advantages is only realized when such knowledge is effectively applied to business processes such as new product development or technology deployment to generate cost and differentiation advantages. We conceive market knowledge as consisting of three interrelated dimensions: market knowledge routines, market knowledge culture, and market knowledge stores. In this study we develop the logic to tease apart the effects of various strategic firm orientations (customer, competitor, and technology) upon market knowledge under varying conditions of environmental uncertainty (customer, competitor, and technological). We conducted a key-informant cross-sectional survey of executives drawn from a variety of industries to test our hypotheses. Employing a hierarchical regression approach, we found support for many of our hypotheses, suggesting that strategic orientations provide a good starting point for the study of market knowledge capabilities. We also found that both customer and competitor orientations were positively associated with all dimensions of market knowledge capabilities but technology orientation was only associated with market knowledge culture. This study makes a unique contribution by elucidating the effects of various strategic orientations on the development of a market knowledge capability. Understanding how environmental factors shift managerial priorities for utilizing market knowledge capabilities is extremely insightful as we begin our quest for ways to effectively identify and appropriate value in constantly evolving markets. References Available Upon Request

Recently Biswas et al. (2013) showed that comparative price promotions could be affected by the spatial location (left vs. right) of a sale price vis-à-vis its regular price. The location of a sale price in reference to its regular price assumes importance as it influences consumers’ ability to compute the depth of a discount when performing calculations (Alba et al. 1999; Biswas et al. 2013; Lichtenstein et al. 1991). Generally, in a comparative price offer (RP − SP), the regular price (RP) will be the minuend, while sale price (SP) the subtrahend. However, in addition to determining the arithmetic difference between prices, the perceived difference between prices will also depend on the ease or difficulty with which consumers could compute price information (Thomas and Morwitz 2009). When a comparative price conforms to a normative presentation that people expect to see when performing mathematical computations (RP − SP and not SP − RP; Biswas et al. 2013), it tends to make computations easier, and influences consumers’ assessment of the discounted offer (Thomas and Morwitz 2009). However, several retailers often offer comparative prices where a regular price is presented vertically above or below its sale price (e.g., macys.com; Amazon). So far research does not inform us if consumers will evaluate a comparative price promotion that is presented horizontally differently than if it was presented vertically. Hence, the research issue is whether a spatial difference in presentation of comparative prices (vertical vs. horizontal) affects consumers’ perception of discounts and if so when?

This research examines whether spatial differences in presentation of comparative price promotions (vertical vs. horizontal) affect consumers' assessment of price discounts. Results show that when comparative price promotions are presented horizontally, consumers take longer to compute the monetary discount and are less accurate than when such prices are presented vertically. This suggests that cognitive constraints exhibit a larger detrimental effect on performing computations when prices are presented horizontally than vertically. In addition, a constraint on visual resources impacts vertical presentations more while a constraint on verbal resources influences price computations that are presented horizontally.

Prior research has shown that after receiving online services of varying quality, customer expectations are either positively disconfirmed (i.e., services exceed customer expectations) or negatively disconfirmed (i.e., services fall short of customer expectations). The present research examines expectation disconfirmation across national cultures and its subsequent impacts on e-word-of-mouth, e-satisfaction, and e-loyalty. The results show that Chinese customers are more tolerant of e-services that result in negative disconfirmations, although online shoppers from the United States are more likely to be loyal or generate positive e-word-of-mouth when experiencing positive disconfirmations. Suggestions for adjusting multinational e-tailers' strategies to better serve customers across national cultures are discussed.

Generally, consumers can get three types of benefits from brands (Aaker 1996; Keller 2003): functional, experiential, and symbolic. How to deliver these benefits more effectively than competitors is a critical challenge faced by companies that wish to build successful brands and maintain long-term consumer-brand relationships. To shed light on this managerial problem, much research focuses on the relationship between brand benefits and consumer behavior, such as the research on self-congruity and functional congruity (e.g., Aaker 1999; Kressmann et al. 2006; Sirgy et al. 1991; Wysong et al. 2002). Self-congruity refers to the extent to which a brand’s personality (image) matches a consumer’s self-concept (self-image), which is relevant to the symbolic benefits of a brand (Kressmann et al. 2006; Sirgy et al. 1991; Sirgy et al. 2000). Functional congruity is related to a brand’s functional benefits (Sirgy et al. 1991) and refers to the extent to which the functional attributes of a brand meet a consumer’s expectations “regarding how the product should perform to accomplish the focal or central goal of the product.” (Kressmann et al. 2006, p957) Many scholars have examined the impact of self-congruity and functional congruity on brand evaluation and brand loyalty (e.g., Aaker 1999; Kressmann, et al. 2006; Sirgy et al. 1991). However, the effects of such congruities on consumers’ trust in a brand have received little attention. Moreover, Sirgy (1980) examines the moderating role of product personalization in the effect of self-congruity on product preference and purchase intent; this effect is shown to be stronger for products with high personalization than for products with low personalization. Sirgy (1980) defines product personalization as the extent to which a product shows an image of the user or has symbolic associations. Products associated with a strong image of the user have high personalization and are considered as value-expressive products; while products associated with a weak user-image have low personalization and are thought of as utilitarian-expressive products (Locander and Spivey 1978). However, little research has investigated the influence of product personalization on the effects of self-congruity versus functional congruity. Although Sirgy et al. (1991) indicate that functional congruity is a stronger predictor of consumer behavior (e.g., store loyalty, brand attitude, purchase intent) than self-congruity, it is still not clear whether this finding holds across all products and all situations. Our study contributes to the two aforementioned aspects by exploring the effects of self-congruity versus functional congruity on brand trust for products with different levels of personalization. We conducted two experiments and the results indicate that both self-congruity and functional congruity lead to heightened brand trust and functional congruity has a greater impact on brand trust than self-congruity for both value-expressive products (with high personalization) and utilitarian products (with low personalization), which supports the finding of Sirgy et al. (1991). Furthermore, for utilitarian products, the stronger influence of functional congruity is shown to not be influenced by the time horizon of a consumer’s purchase decision. These findings suggest that communicating brand personality in a way that is consistent with target consumers’ personality attributes and meeting their expectations of product performance will contribute to building their trust in the brand. For both utilitarian and value-expressive products, in order to be successful, companies should make every effort to offer consumers’ desired functional benefits better than their competitors. Additionally, communicating the congruence of a brand’s personality with a consumer’s self-concept is also important for developing brand equity and a long-term consumer-brand relationship, especially for value-expressive products.

We utilize the resource-based view of the firm (RBV), complemented by organizational learning and knowledge management, in developing a conceptual framework of market orientation-product innovation-new product performance linkages in foreign markets. We argue that there are four resources and capabilities affecting a firm’s new product performance in foreign markets: market orientation, host-country knowledge (both explicit and tacit), absorptive capacity (both potential and realized), and product innovation. First, market orientation influences a firm’s level of host-country knowledge. Second, potential absorptive capacity has both a moderating effect on the relationship between market orientation and host-country knowledge and a direct effect on host-country knowledge. Third, realized absorptive capacity has a moderating effect on the host-country knowledge-innovation relationship. Finally, product innovation has a direct impact on new product performance, but its influence on new product performance is moderated by the level of turbulence in the host-country market (i.e., market and technology turbulence).

ABSTRACTMarketers often do not present prices in ways that permit easy comparisons or calculations. For many consumers, situations that involve numbers and computations lead to math anxiety. Results of three studies show that math‐anxious consumers tend to avoid alternatives that require price computations. Interestingly, such consumers find relief from math anxiety when slow tempo classical music plays in the background. However, in the absence of background music or when the tempo of such music is fast, those with high math anxiety exhibited a heightened avoidance of choices requiring price computations.