Ethics in business is a major topic both in the social sciences and in business itself. Anthropologists, long attendant to the intersection of ethics and practice, are particularly well suited to offer vital insights on the subject. This timely collection considers a range of ethical issues in business through the examination of anthropologically informed theory and case examples.
Today’s media landscape affords people access to richer information than ever before, with many individuals opting to consume content through social channels rather than traditional news sources. Although people frequent social platforms for a variety of reasons, we understand little about the consequences of encountering new information in these contexts, particularly with respect to how content is scrutinized.
In this paper we show how simple text mining and semantic network analysis may be used to (i) improve our theoretical understanding of idea generation, (ii) help people improve the creativity of their ideas. From a theoretical perspective, we contribute to the cognitive idea generation literature by establishing a link between the set of concepts used to form an idea and the creativity of the idea. Each idea contains a subset of the semantic network of concepts related to the topic.
Ethics in business is a major topic both in the social sciences and in business itself. Anthropologists, long attendant to the intersection of ethics and practice, are particularly well suited to offer vital insights on the subject.
Shopping is sometimes a source of stress, leading to avoidance coping behavior by consumers. Prior research suggests that store-induced stress makes shopping an adverse experience and thus negatively affects consumers' purchase likelihood. We propose that consumers' response to shopping stress depends on their motivational orientation. The greater the in-store stress, the more likely task-oriented consumers are to abandon the trip without making purchases. However, recreation-oriented consumers will be, up to a point, less likely to end the trip.
This research considers how marketers can encourage or 'nudge' consumers to transmit word of mouth (WOM), such as referrals or recommendations to friends, in a manner that helps reach, inform, or influence large numbers of consumers quickly, which is an outcome referred to as faster diffusion. Building on studies showing diffusion is faster when higher-connectivity people are involved; the authors propose a mechanism based on network externalities that encourages regular customers to select receivers who have higher levels of social connectivity.
We study a dynamic learning model in which heterogeneously connected Bayesian players choose between two activities: learning from one's own experience (work) or learning from the experience of others (search). Players who work produce an inflow of information which is local and dispersed around the society. Players who search, instead, aggregate the information produced by others and facilitate its diffusion, thereby transforming what inherently is a private good into information that everyone can access more easily.
Loan maturity provides insurance against changes in the price of credit. We examine whether, consistent with theories of insurance markets with private information, maturity choice leads to adverse selection. We compare two groups of observationally equivalent borrowers that took identical unsecured 36-month loans, only one of which had also a 60-month maturity choice available. We find that when long maturity is available, fewer borrowers take the short-term loan, and those that do, default less.