The interplay between psychometric and sociometric data and the willingness to adopt innovations

Due to high failure rates of new products, marketers are seeking ways to actively manage the diffusion of innovations. It is well accepted that individuals, who exert a remarkably strong influence on others and are usually called opinion leaders, play an important role in the diffusion process. In marketing, such opinion leaders are typically identified by self-designation, which can be biased. A second option to identify opinion leaders is the use of sociometric data which becomes increasingly available. In this paper we examine the effect of social position on the perceived opinion leadership and the resulting behavioral intention in terms of adoption behavior. In an empirical study, we examine the adoption of a new drug called “Byetta” and find that sociometric opinion leadership is an antecedent of the psychometric characteristic. Our results also confirm that such opinion leaders are more likely to adopt innovations. We also find that opinion seekers, individuals who often sought information or opinions from interpersonal sources, can be more easily identified with psychometric data. They are more restrictive in terms of adoption. Interestingly, both types are active as market mavens and thus may either advocate the adoption of the innovation or may be frankly conservative regarding the new product adoption. If opinion seekers can, however, be persuaded to adopt the innovation, they may also serve as an important multiplier. This has several implications for pharmaceutical firms that try to optimize their sales force—influencing opinion leaders may indeed start and fasten the adoption process of innovative products. But it is also necessary to allay opinion seekers’ doubts since they might slow down the adoption process. The identification of opinion leaders might not only be based on difficult to obtain psychometric data, but also on sociometric data from social networks, which is becoming more and more available.     

Electronic Health Record Breaches as Social Indicators

Social Indicators Research - This study presents compelling social indicators of such magnitude that they cannot be ignored. The statistical evidence shows that data breaches of electronic health...     

Projective Identification or Relational Introjection? Gender, Metaphor, and Theory

This paper explores how gender determined metaphors may influence theoretical constructs. It provides a historical review of how the deconstruction of male metaphors has influenced changes in drive and structural theories and examines the influence of male metaphors on object relations theory. Specifically, the construct of projective identification is explored in relation to inconsistencies in how it is conceptualized and how it is a construct more in keeping with a male model of development. The self-in-relation model of female development is explored in order to offer an alternative construction of similar clinical phenomena. Through a feminine metaphoric lens these phenomena could be seen as relational introjections. The latter conceptualization is also supported by early infant research and current literature on intersubjectivity in the therapeutic process. A case vignette is used to illustrate how a particular piece of therapeutic work could be conceptualized as either projective identification or relational introjection.     

On the complete convergence for randomly indexed partial sums and the limit behaviour of a sequence of quantiles

This note contains result on the complete convergence of randomly indexed partial sums of independent non-identically distributed random variables. We use them to investigate the limit behaviour of quantiles of a sample with a random numbers of items.     

Optimal replacement strategies in network infrastructures under quality penalties

As a consequence of liberalization, electric utilities have developed different asset management strategies with the aim of reducing total maintenance costs by prolonging replacement cycles. A cost-minimizing network operator has to optimize the trade-off between costs for early replacement and quality penalties he faces in the case of outages (due to a resulting higher number of failures). The basic purpose of this paper is to identify the optimal decisions for a network operator under output-based quality regulation and to determine the main drivers for his decisions. In order to derive general insights, an analytical framework is chosen for this paper. This work builds on the foundations of optimal maintenance and replacement strategies as developed across Operations Research, Production Economics and Engineering Production Theory. As main results we are able to analytically derive optimal replacement strategies for network components depending on the characteristics of their failure distributions linked to the equipment’s cost, respective replacement cost, and quality penalties.     

Simultaneous inference for functional data in sports biomechanics

AStA Advances in Statistical Analysis - The recent sports science literature conveys a growing interest in robust statistical methods to analyze smooth, regularly-sampled functional data. This...