Are sponsors blamed for edging off? Consumer reactions to sponsorship terminations

Firms regularly terminate sponsorships, even without publicly known misconduct by the sponsee such as athlete doping. Consumer reactions to these sponsorship terminations by firms have not been studied despite being a regular occurrence. Using a set of experimental studies, this paper analyzes consumer reactions to these sponsorship terminations (i.e., early and non-renewal) that were not caused by a sponsee’s misconduct, the underlying process that causes the reactions, and the role of several moderating factors (trust, power balance, and locus of control). Our findings reveal that sponsorship terminations have a negative effect on sponsors’ brand images—particularly early terminations that occur before the end of a contract—because consumers perceive these sponsorship terminations as unfair. The results also suggest that a termination is particularly harmful for the sponsor’s perceived fairness if the sponsor is powerful and if the termination decision is under the sponsor’s control. Further, the termination effect is particularly strong for firms that consumers trust.     

Penalized empirical likelihood inference for sparse additive hazards regression with a diverging number of covariates

High-dimensional sparse modeling with censored survival data is of great practical importance, as exemplified by applications in high-throughput genomic data analysis. In this paper, we propose a class of regularization methods, integrating both the penalized empirical likelihood and pseudoscore approaches, for variable selection and estimation in sparse and high-dimensional additive hazards regression models. When the number of covariates grows with the sample size, we establish asymptotic properties of the resulting estimator and the oracle property of the proposed method. It is shown that the proposed estimator is more efficient than that obtained from the non-concave penalized likelihood approach in the literature. Based on a penalized empirical likelihood ratio statistic, we further develop a nonparametric likelihood approach for testing the linear hypothesis of regression coefficients and constructing confidence regions consequently. Simulation studies are carried out to evaluate the performance of the proposed methodology and also two real data sets are analyzed.     

Volunteer Engagement: Exploring the Distinction Between Job and Organizational Engagement

Retaining engaged volunteers is crucial to many non-profit organizations. However, research on volunteer engagement is limited, and the distinction between job and organizational engagement in volunteers remains to be investigated. In this paper, we examine both organizational- and job-level engagement, and specifically, whether perceived organizational support would enhance volunteer engagement and associated attitudes. We surveyed 221 volunteers, and asked them about their perceptions of organizational support; their engagement with their volunteer job and the organization they volunteer for; satisfaction; commitment; and turnover intentions. Both organizational and job engagements had significant relationships with the attitudinal variables. However, we found that organizational rather than job engagement mediated the relationship between organizational support and volunteer satisfaction and commitment. While organizational engagement correlated with turnover intentions, neither job nor organizational engagement mediated the relationship between support and the intent to leave. Our findings advance the research on volunteer engagement, and highlight the importance of organizational engagement for this important, but too often overlooked, workforce.     

Exploratory Study on Drug Users’ Perspectives on Quality of Life: More than Health-Related Quality of Life?

In drug treatment outcome literature, a focus on objective and socially desirable indicators of change (e.g. no drug use) has predominated, while outcome indicators that are important for drug users themselves (e.g. quality of life, satisfaction with treatment) have largely been neglected. Nonetheless, Quality of Life (QoL) has become an important concept to evaluate effectiveness of treatment in mental health care research and disability studies. Given the almost exclusive focus on Health-related Quality of Life (HRQOL) in substance abuse research and the neglect of clients’ perspectives in this field, we explore in this study the concept of QoL as perceived by drug users. Focus group discussions (n = 9) were organised in various treatment settings and community services for drug users in the region of Ghent, Belgium to identify important dimensions of QoL and their interpretation by drug users. Data were clustered and analysed based on the theoretical framework of Robert Schalock (Quality of life. Volume 1: Conceptualization and measurement, 1996). The domains ‘personal relationships’, ‘social inclusion’ and ‘self-determination’ were discussed most frequently by the participants. They stressed the importance of a supportive social network in particular. It can be concluded that QoL is not primarily associated by drug users with health and it involves much more than the aspects typically represented in measures of HRQOL.     

A functional connectivity approach for modeling cross-sectional dependence with an application to the estimation of hedonic housing prices in Paris

This paper proposes a functional connectivity approach, inspired by brain imaging literature, to model cross-sectional dependence. Using a varying parameter framework, the model allows correlation patterns to arise from complex economic or social relations rather than being simply functions of economic or geographic distances between locations. It nests the conventional spatial and factor model approaches as special cases. A Bayesian Markov Chain Monte Carlo method implements this approach. A small scale Monte Carlo study is conducted to evaluate the performance of this approach in finite samples, which outperforms both a spatial model and a factor model. We apply the functional connectivity approach to estimate a hedonic housing price model for Paris using housing transactions over the period 1990–2003. It allows us to get more information about complex spatial connections and appears more suitable to capture the cross-sectional dependence than the conventional methods.     

Does product complexity matter for competition in experimental retail markets?

We describe a first experiment on whether product complexity affects competition and consumers in retail markets. We are unable to detect a significant effect of product complexity on prices, except insofar as the demand elasticity for complex products is higher. However, there is qualified evidence that complex products have the potential to induce consumers to buy more than they would otherwise. In this sense, consumer exploitability in quantities cannot be ruled out. We also find evidence for shaping effects: consumers’ preferences are shaped by past experience with prices, and firms may in principle exploit this to sell more.     

A Diamond-Stiglitz approach to the demand for self-protection

The existing research concerning the relationship between risk aversion and prudence and the demand for self-protection assumes that the loss variable follows a Bernoulli distribution, and that changes in the level of self-protection are mean preserving. The analysis here replaces these two very strong conditions with ones which are more general. When doing this, the method of analysis is also significantly modified. This modification includes representing a change in the level of self-protection using the procedure developed by Diamond and Stiglitz (Journal of Economic Theory 8:337-360, 1974) for representing a change in risk. This alternate representation allows the existing findings to be generalized considerably, and also simplifies the analysis.     

Teacher-Based Racial Discrimination: The Role of Racial Pride and Religiosity Among African American and Caribbean Black Adolescents

This study explored the extent to which private regard and religiosity beliefs serve as protective factors for school bonding among African American and Caribbean black adolescents who experience racial discrimination in school. Findings are drawn from a nationally representative sample of (n = 810) African American and (n = 360) Caribbean black adolescents (52% girls) aged 13–17 (M_age = 15, SD = 1.42) years. Results suggest that perceiving racial discrimination from teachers was associated with lower levels of school bonding for African American and Caribbean black adolescents. For African American adolescents, perceiving more racial discrimination from teachers and reporting lower private regard beliefs was associated with less school bonding. The findings for Caribbean black adolescents revealed that endorsing moderate levels of religiosity and perceiving higher rates of teacher discrimination was associated with less school bonding. The developmental significance and implications for future research are discussed.