This paper investigates the implication of three channel power structures (i.e., manufacturer-led, vertical Nash and retailer-led) on supply chain management in a setting where a manufacturer ...determines whether to introduce a direct sales channel and a retailer has two capital status (i.e., capital-constrained status or capital-sufficient status). The capital-constrained retailer faces the decision of financing by trade credit or bank credit. We find that compared to cooperating with a capital-sufficient retailer, cooperating with a capital-constrained retailer will make the manufacturer bear a higher encroachment cost. Surprisingly, the capital-constrained retailer choosing trade credit financing may deter the manufacturer’s encroachment behavior, which means that trade credit financing has a positive financing effect with manufacturer encroachment. However, bank credit financing always makes the retailer worse off after encroachment, and the positive trade credit financing effect achieves the most efficient performance under manufacturer-led structure, yet remarkably impoverished under retailer-led structure. In addition, although conventional wisdom suggests that the manufacturer will lower the wholesale price to boost retail channel’s demand with encroachment, we obtain a different conclusion by demonstrating that manufacturer encroachment has a negative wholesale price effect that the manufacturer will raise the wholesale price after encroachment to ensure that direct sales channel enjoys a price advantage in a Bertrand competition market. Interestingly, we find that retailer-led is the most conducive structure to manufacturer’s encroachment, and manufacturer-led is the most unfavorable structure for manufacturer’s entry except when the manufacturer cooperates the capital-sufficient retailer in a high-risk market. Furthermore, with the increase of channel competition/market risk/production cost, the manufacturer has less motivation to enter the market.
Megachurches have a reputation for savvy use of digital media; however, little is known about their advertising strategy or which strategies elicit engagement. By assessing megachurches' promotional ...content on social media, this study draws on the devotional campaign framework to examine audience-centric engagement strategies: God-Congregant, Church-Congregant, and Intra-Congregational. The quantitative content analysis of Facebook and Instagram posts from 15 megachurches in five countries revealed that megachurches used the combination God-Congregant & Church-Congregant engagement strategies, as well as the singular Church-Congregant engagement strategy, the most often. Yet, audiences engaged significantly more with posts using the God-Congregant engagement strategy when compared to all other strategies. The use of engagement strategies and engagement received on posts varied according to geographical location and cultural differences, suggesting there may be a cultural aspect to what earns engagement from followers. Advertisers looking to increase online engagement should focus their efforts on persuasive messages that include the object-audience engagement strategy. This study advances advertising theory on engagement by suggesting that engagement is contingent upon the engagement strategy utilized as well as the specific region's norms around the brand and community.
The labor market has long included individuals seeking nonemployee, alternative work arrangements. Now, alternative work arrangements such as freelancing, independent contracting, and temporary ...contracts have entered the lexicon through the following terminology: the gig economy, the sharing economy, the YouEconomy, agile workforce, and contingent workers. There are currently an estimated 18.6 million independent contractors engaged in direct selling. This article reports the first attempt to empirically investigate and document both the economic and social impacts of direct selling in the U.S. Our findings suggest that direct selling has a consequential impact on the U.S. economy and that the direct selling experience fosters a variety of skills that benefit professional activities as well as the personal lives of millions of independent workers.
This paper investigates the impact of channel selection power on the firms' channel configuration strategies in a market with two upstream manufacturers providing complementary products and one ...downstream retailer who can resell the products. Each manufacturer can sell its product either directly by incurring a selling cost or indirectly via the retailer, in which the decision is further dependent on the relative channel selection powers between itself and the retailer. We investigate three scenarios depending on the possible power structures among the firms and show that the equilibrium channel configuration strategy hinges highly on the channel selection power, the direct selling cost and the degree of complementarity between the two products. The manufacturer may prefer direct selling when it is more powerful than the retailer and both the direct selling cost and the degree of complementarity are relatively low. However, when the degree of products' complementarity is sufficiently high, a manufacturer would not choose direct selling even though there is no direct selling cost. We also show that a stronger channel selection power does not necessarily benefit but may occasionally hurt a manufacturer's profitability. For the manufacturer who does not have channel selection power before, the enhanced channel selection power endows it with more selling options but also encourages the leading manufacturer (who already has the channel power) to design a more aggressive channel configuration strategy that only benefits itself but hurts the others.
This paper proposes a novel atmosphere-informed predictive satellite channel model for beyond the fifth-generation (B5G)/the sixth-generation (6G) satellite-terrestrial wireless communication systems ...at Q-band to model/predict channel attenuation at any specific time. The proposed channel model is a data-driven model based on either of two deep learning networks, i.e., multi-layer perceptron (MLP) and long short-term memory (LSTM). The accuracy of the proposed channel model is measured by cumulative density function (CDF) of absolute error and mean square error (MSE) between modeled/predicted and measured channel attenuation. The complexity of the proposed channel model is assessedby the training time, loading time, and test time of deep learning networks. To further improve the accuracy of the proposed channel model, weather classification is developed at the stage of database construction. Based on our established channel and weather measurement campaign, the performance of the proposed data-driven channel model based on different deep learning networks, e.g., MLP and LSTM, with or without the weather classification is investigated and analyzed comprehensively. Finally, the close agreement is achieved between the channel attenuation modeled/predicted from the proposed atmosphere-informed predictive satellite channel model and the one from real channel measurements, verifying the utility of proposed channel model.
Consider a bilateral monopoly selling to a market with uncertain demand. The retailer has access to a demand signal. The supplier can add a direct channel, which grants it market access as well. The ...supplier and the retailer can acquire signals from each other with payments. We show that direct selling by the supplier improves information flow to realize system-wide information transparency, which has mixed effects on the profits for the retailer and the system.
This research aims to examine and contrast trust in consumer-salesperson/organization relationships in direct selling and Internet (online) marketing in China, a large and fast-growing market for ...both approaches in B2C marketing. A personal interview survey involving two different measures of trust (i.e., cognitive trust and organization trust) was conducted. Two sample groups were obtained independently from southern and northern cities in China. For cognitive trust, there is a significant difference between the two shopping approaches (Internet marketing vs. direct selling), with the value of trust generally being greater for direct selling. In contrast, for organization trust, the value is greater for Internet marketing. However, the overall results show that neither the measure of cognitive trust nor the measure of organization trust is a good predictor of consumer behavior. Managerial implications and recommendations for future research directions are discussed.
Top performing salespeople are attracted to organizations that provide opportunities to make full use of their abilities. Responses from 1450 sales directors from a leading direct selling ...organization were used to examine salesperson's experienced meaningfulness. Results show that experienced meaningfulness is critical to sales because it impacts salesperson's performance, turnover intentions and felt stress. Further, ethical climate and customer demandingness influence experienced meaningfulness perceptions.
Strategic Behavior in Queues
Pooled queues are employed in many service settings (e.g., call centers, grocery stores) as a way to improve operational performance by reducing the variability in ...customer arrivals. However, in some settings, such as hospital emergency departments, empirical evidence suggests that pooled queues may not always lead to better operational performance. In “Pooling Queues with Strategic Servers,” Armony, Roels, and Song develop a game-theoretic model that compares the performance of pooled vs. dedicated queues when servers choose their capacities strategically and exhibit varying scopes of customer ownership. They find that dedicated queues can yield substantial benefits when servers’ degree of customer ownership is so low that they choose to operate at high utilization, and when they care much more about their customers’ processing times than about their waiting times; otherwise, the queue configuration makes little difference. These results have important implications for managers trying to determine which queue configuration to adopt.
Although pooling queues offer in principle many operational benefits, these may not always be achieved in practice. One reason, observed in, prior empirical studies, relates to customer ownership. In this paper, we formalize these empirical observations by developing a game-theoretic model to assess the performance of pooling when servers choose their capacities strategically and exhibit varying scopes of customer ownership, captured by two cost components, respectively, associated with the processing time and the waiting time of a server’s customers. We show that the core benefits of pooling are mostly annihilated in this setting. In fact, for any given scope of customer ownership, the queue configuration has almost no impact on the customers’ average throughput time unless (i) servers’ degree of customer ownership is so low that they choose to operate at high utilization and (ii) they care much more about their customers’ processing times than about their waiting times. Under these conditions, adopting a dedicated queue configuration can yield significantly lower throughput times. This prescription becomes even more pertinent if the switch to a dedicated queue configuration is associated with an expansion in the scope of customer ownership, as may happen in practice.
Prior research finds that the more attached salespeople are to a brand they sell, the more effort they extend on behalf of the brand, thus improving sales performance. However, high salesperson brand ...attachment may also have undesirable consequences that are only evident when viewed from the customers' perspective. We argue that brand attachment can have a "blinding effect" on salespeople, leading them to adopt emotionally laden sales strategies that diminish customer brand trust and, by extension, their intent to purchase the brand. We explore these ideas using data collected from salespeople in the direct selling industry. The data collected includes 20 exploratory interviews with salesperson-customer dyads, a field study of 153 salespeople and 98 matched customers, and analyses that allow for the presence of non-linear, moderated effects. The salesperson data provide evidence of a brand attachment bright side (affirming prior research findings) while the dyadic data confirm the existence of a dark side that emerges when salespeople employ inauthentic selling strategies. The study findings point to the potential perils of internal marketing investments directed at enhancing salesperson-brand bonds.
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