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One central business activity that companies increasingly outsource is the information systems (IS) function. Previous research has shown that outsourcing of back-office IS generally has a positive effect on shareholder value of the outsourcing firm. Much less is known about the performance implications of outsourcing of another important IS function, namely, front-office customer relationship management (CRM) systems, where the vendor uses its own personnel and software to perform several CRM tasks. Previous, largely anecdotal evidence shows that the performance implications of outsourcing CRM range from very negative to very positive. To address this unsatisfactory state of knowledge, we provide and empirically test a contingency perspective on the performance implications of outsourcing CRM processes. We do so using the event-study methodology. The results are largely consistent with our contingency model. CRM outsourcing is more beneficial to firms that are high on information technology capabilities and low on marketing capabilities, and less beneficial when it concerns presales CRM. Similarly, although vendor economic distance has a positive influence on the outsourcing firm's shareholder value, vendor cultural distance has a negative influence. These effects are in turn significantly moderated by the type of CRM process outsourced. This paper was accepted by Sandra Slaughter, information systems.

Measurement invariance is necessary before any substantive cross-national comparisons can be made. The statistical workhorse for conducting measurement invariance analyses is the multigroup confirmatory factor analysis model. This model works well if a few items exhibit clearly differential item functioning, but it is not able to capture, model, and control for measurement bias that affects all items, i.e., this model cannot account for common method variance. The presence of common method variance in cross-national data leads to poorly fitting models which in turn often results in biased, if not incorrect, results. We introduce a procedure to analyze and control for common method variance in one’s data, based on a series of factor analysis models with a random intercept. The modeling framework yields constructs and factor scores free of method effects. We use marker variables to support the validity of the interpretation of the random intercept as method factor. An empirical application dealing with material values in Spain, the UK, and Brazil is provided. We compare results with those obtained for the standard multigroup confirmatory factor analysis model.

Since the publication of Williamson's Markets and Hierarchies, many empirical articles have investigated the tenets of transaction cost theory. Using meta-analytic techniques, we quantitatively synthesized and evaluated transaction cost--based empirical research on organizational boundary (make, buy, or ally) decisions. We found strong support for the theory for both make versus buy and ally versus buy decisions. However, we did not find evidence that asset specificity had stronger predictive power than uncertainty. Hierarchical and relational governance appropriately aligned with transaction dimensions both led to enhanced performance. On the basis of our meta-analysis, we provide directions for future research.

The authors investigate the effectiveness of service transition strategies for generating shareholder value by evaluating secondary data pertaining to 477 publicly traded manufacturing firms during 1990-2005. The impact of a firm's transition to services on firm value (as measured by Tobin's q) remains relatively flat or slightly negative until the firm reaches a critical mass of service sales (20%-30%), after which point they have an increasingly positive effect. Furthermore, the effect of service sales on firm value depends on both firm and industry factors. Service transition strategies are more effective at enhancing value when the service offerings are related more to the firm's core business and when firms have more available resources (i.e., resource slack). The impact of adding services to core products on firm value amplifies as industry turbulence increases but diminishes when the firm's core products are in high-growth industries. [PUBLICATION ABSTRACT]

The growing sales of private labels (PLs) pose significant challenges for national brands (NBs) around the world. A major question is whether consumers continue to be willing to pay a price premium for NBs over PLs. Using consumer survey data from 22,623 respondents from 23 countries in Asia, Europe, and the Americas across, on average, 63 consumer packaged goods categories per country, this article studies how marketing and manufacturing factors affect the price premium a consumer is willing to pay for an NB over a PL. These effects are mediated by consumer perceptions of the quality of NBs in relation to PLs. Although the results do not bode well for NBs in the sense that willingness to pay decreases as PLs mature, the authors offer several managerial recommendations to counter this trend. In countries in which PLs are more mature, the route to success is to go back to manufacturing basics. In PL development countries, there is a stronger role for marketing to enhance the willingness to pay for NBs.

Firms are under increasing pressure to justify their marketing expenditures. This evolution toward greater accountability is reinforced in harsh economic times when marketing budgets are among the first to be reconsidered. To make such decisions, managers must know whether, and to what extent, marketing's effectiveness varies with the economic tide; however, surprisingly little research addresses this issue. Therefore, the authors conduct a systematic investigation of the business cycle's impact on the effectiveness of two important marketing instruments: price and advertising. To do so, they estimate time-varying short-and longterm advertising and price elasticities for 150 brands across 36 consumer packaged goods categories, using 18 years of monthly U.K. data from 1993 to 2010. The long-term price sensitivity tends to decrease during economic expansions, whereas long-term advertising elasticities increase. During contractions, the long-term own and cross price elasticities increase. Moreover, throughout the observation period, the short-term price elasticity became significantly stronger. Finally, patterns differ across categories and brands, which presents opportunities for firms that know how to ride the economic tide.

Socially desirable responding (SDR) has been of long-standing interest to the field of marketing. Unfortunately, the construct has not always been well understood by marketing researchers. The authors provide a review of the SDR literature organized around three key issues—the conceptualization and measurement of SDR; the nomological constellation of personality traits, values, sociodemographics, and cultural factors associated with SDR; and the vexing issue of substance versus style in SDR measures. The authors review the current \"state of the literature,\" identify unresolved issues, and provide new empirical evidence to assess the generalizability of existing knowledge, which is disproportionately based on U.S. student samples, to a global context. The new evidence is derived from a large international data set involving 12,424 respondents in 26 countries on four continents.

The authors examine how country characteristics systematically moderate the effects of individual-level drivers of the perceived value that consumers derive from visiting a brand manufacturer's Web site. They test hypotheses on data collected from 8886 consumers from 23 countries on three continents, involving 30 Web sites of the world's largest consumer packaged goods companies. They find that the effect of privacy/security protection on perceived value is stronger for people from countries with a weak rule of law, whereas people from countries that are high on national identity give more weight to whether there is cultural congruity between the site and themselves. People who live in more individualistic countries give more weight to pleasure, to privacy/security protection, and to customization in their perceived value judgments than people from collectivistic countries. The authors discuss implications for Web site design strategies.

This study tested whether, among consumers in developing countries, brands perceived as having a nonlocal country of origin, especially from the West, are attitudinally preferred to brands seen as local, for reasons not only of perceived quality but also of social status. We found that this perceived brand nonlocalness effect was greater for consumers who have a greater admiration for lifestyles in economically developed countries, which is consistent with findings from the cultural anthropology literature. The effect was also found to be stronger for consumers who were high in susceptibility to normative influence and for product categories high in social signaling value. This effect was also moderated by product category familiarity, but not by consumer ethnocentrism. The results, thus, suggest that in developing countries, a brand's country of origin not only serves as a “quality halo” or summary of product quality (cf. Han, 1989), but also possesses a dimension of nonlocalness that, among some consumers and for some product categories, contributes to attitudinal liking for status-enhancing reasons.

In a study of 362 buyer-salesperson dyads using triadic data (from buyer, salesperson, and sales manager), the authors examine both a customer's overall loyalty to the selling firm and the customer's loyalty vested specifically in his or her salesperson. They find that only salesperson-owned loyalty, a newly identified construct, directly affects the more tangible seller financial outcomes of sales growth and selling effectiveness, whereas both salesperson-owned loyalty and loyalty to the selling firm increase the customer's willingness to pay a price premium. A longitudinal study verifies that the positive effect of salesperson-owned loyalty on sales growth persists over time. However, because salesperson-owned loyalty simultaneously increases the seller's risk of losing business if the salesperson defects to a competitor, managers need to manage effectively the benefit-risk trade-off. Increasing relationship-enhancing activities and value received by the customer builds both salesperson-owned loyalty and loyalty to the selling firm. The loyalty-building impact of relationship-enhancing activities is moderated by selling-firm consistency and by the selling firm's and salesperson's loyalty-capturing strategies.