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Hierarchical loyalty programs award elevated customer status (e.g., \"elite membership\") to consumers who meet a predefined spending level. However, if a customer subsequently falls short of the required spending level, firms commonly revoke that status. The authors investigate the impact of such customer demotion on loyalty intentions toward the firm. Building on prospect theory and emotions theory, the authors hypothesize that changes in customer status have an asymmetric negative effect, such that the negative impact of customer demotion is stronger than the positive impact of status increases. An experimental scenario study provides evidence that loyalty intentions are indeed lower for demoted customers than for those who have never been awarded a preferred status, meaning that hierarchical loyalty programs can drive otherwise loyal customers away from a firm. A field study using proprietary sales data from a different industry context demonstrates the robustness of the negative impact of customer demotion. The authors test the extent to which design variables of hierarchical loyalty programs may attenuate the negative consequences of status demotions with a second experimental scenario study and present an analytical model that links status demotion to customer equity to aid managerial decision making.

In recent years, many firms have chosen to separate their CEO and board chair positions. Prior research has demonstrated that there are three forms that a CEO—board chair separation can take: apprentice, departure, and demotion. In this paper, we examine the antecedents of these three types. Our results show that the three types of separation each have different profiles in terms of the prior performance of the firm, the independence of the board, and the career horizon of the incumbent CEO. The findings in this paper provide unique insights into the factors that drive boards' structural choices. As questions about board leadership structure become more nuanced and more relevant in both scholarship and practice, a full understanding of these factors will only become more important.

The ability to monitor state behavior has become a critical tool of international governance. Systematic monitoring allows for the creation of numerical indicators that can be used to rank, compare, and essentially censure states. This article argues that the ability to disseminate such numerical indicators widely and instantly constitutes an exercise of social power, with the potential to change important policy outputs. It explores this argument in the context of the United States' efforts to combat trafficking in persons and find evidence that monitoring has important effects: Countries are more likely to criminalize human trafficking when they are included in the U.S. annual Trafficking in Persons Report, and countries that are placed on a \"watch list\" are also more likely to criminalize. These findings have broad implications for international governance and the exercise of soft power in the global information age.

Firms increasingly turn to online communities to create valuable information. These communities are empowered by new information technology-enabled collaborative tools, tools such as blogs, wikis, and social networks. Collaboration on these platforms is characterized by considerable membership turnover, which could have significant effects on collaborative outcomes. We hypothesize that membership retention relates in a curvilinear fashion to effective collaboration: positively up to a threshold and negatively thereafter. The longitudinal history of 2,065 featured articles on Wikipedia offers support for this hypotheses: Contributions from a mixture of new and experienced participants both increases the likelihood that an article will be promoted to featured article status and decreases the risk it will be demoted after having been promoted. These findings imply that, contrary to many of the assumptions in previous research, participant retention does not have a strictly positive effect on emerging collaborative environments. Further analysis of our data provides empirical evidence that knowledge creation and knowledge retention are actually distinct phases of community-based peer production, and that communities may on average experience more turnover than ideal during the knowledge retention phase.

Purpose Status demotion in hierarchical loyalty programs (HLPs) has received considerable academic attention. However, little is known about whether status demotion engenders two widely recognised behavioural intentions: revenge and avoidance. This study aims to make up this gap by examining the effects of status demotion on customers’ revenge and avoidance intentions. The underlying mechanism and boundary conditions of these effects are also explored. Design/methodology/approach Two studies were conducted to test the hypotheses. Study 1 was conducted using a structured survey from 347 active HLP members/customers of Chinese airlines. Study 2 used an online experiment amongst 268 active HLP airline customers in Australia. Partial least squares-based structural equation modelling and Hayes’ (2013) PROCESS macro were used for data analysis. Findings The results of Study 1 show that status demotion increases customers’ revenge and avoidance intentions simultaneously. Meanwhile, these effects are more significant for demoted customers with an external locus of causality than those with an internal locus of causality and demoted customers with higher entitlement tend to possess more revenge intentions than avoidance intentions. Study 2 further identified perceived inequity as a mechanism, which links status demotion to revenge and avoidance intentions of demoted customers. Research limitations/implications This study examines demoted customers’ revenge and avoidance intentions amongst Chinese and Australian airline travellers. Future research may focus on actual behaviour and test the current study’s model in cross-cultural and cross-industry settings. Practical implications Managers should deal with demotion decisions carefully as the failure to manage outraged customers may weaken customer-company relationships. Originality/value This study extends the existing literature on relationship marketing and HLPs by offering a better understanding of how and under what conditions status demotion elicits customers’ intentions for revenge and avoidance.

On a version of consent theory that tempts many, predatory sexual relations involving significant power imbalances (e.g. between professors and students, adults and teenagers, or employers and employees) are wrong because they violate consent-centric norms. In particular, the wronged party is said to have been incapable of consenting to the predation, and the sexual wrong is located in the encounter’s nonconsensuality. Although we agree that these are sexual wrongs, we resist the idea that they are always nonconsensual. We argue instead that it is possible for students, teenagers, employees, etc. to fully consent to sexually predatory encounters; denying as much renders survivors of predation vulnerable to compounding harms. Survivors face a dilemma: give up either their understanding of their experience as wrong, or their self-conception as an agent capable of consenting. We call the latter phenomenon agential demotion.

Across five studies, we find that high-power distance belief (PDB) consumers (i.e., consumers who value social hierarchy) tend to show lower loyalty after being demoted in loyalty programs than low-PDB consumers (i.e., consumers who value equality). This occurs because while low-PDB consumers are only sensitive to the monetary losses associated with the demotion, high-PDB consumers are sensitive to both the monetary and psychological losses. More importantly, we find that when consumers receive the appropriate monetary (for low-PDB) or status-symbolic (for high-PDB) compensation, the negative effect of demotion is attenuated. Additionally, we find that proactive approaches are more effective in mitigating negative responses to demotion; accordingly, marketers should warn consumers of a prospective demotion and offer consumers help in maintaining their existing membership tier. Doing so results in a win-win situation where consumers avoid demotion and marketers achieve higher profits. The theoretical and practical implications of the research are also discussed.

Online coproduction communities often face a challenge of whether to change or retain the knowledge they have created. Disparate and often conflicting theoretical models have been used to explain how these communities respond to this tension. We conducted a case study of how one online coproduction community—the nine-year history of the Wikipedia article on autism—handles this tension. We find that the nature of the change–retain tension and the community’s response to it fluctuates considerably over the life of the community. These changes bear striking similarities to processes associated with traditional software development life cycles, despite the absence of traditional control mechanisms. What initially appear to be conflicts in the extant literature actually describe different roles and production focus at the different stages of development. Disruptive events signal the need for the community to shift production focus, which often involves members joining and leaving the production process, rather than adopting new roles. This paper was accepted by Sandra Slaughter, information systems.

Purpose Status demotion in hierarchical loyalty programs (HLPs) has received considerable academic attention. However, existing research is relatively silent on whether HLP status demotion fosters service relationship fading by influencing demoted customers’ psychological disengagement and the likelihood of patronage reduction. Drawing on the relationship fading literature and the stimulus–organism–response framework, this study aims to examine these effects. It further investigates the moderating role of psychological ownership on the links of status demotion with psychological disengagement and the likelihood of patronage reduction. Design/methodology/approach Two studies (Studies 1 and 2) were conducted in the context of airline HLPs. Study 1 was a structured survey conducted among 213 demoted airline HLP customers in Australia, and Study 2 was an experiment conducted among 178 executive MBA students in Bangladesh. The PROCESS macro was used to test the moderated mediation model. Findings The results of both studies show that HLP status demotion significantly influences customers’ psychological disengagement and the likelihood of patronage reduction. The findings also reveal that psychological disengagement mediates the relationship between status demotion and the likelihood of patronage reduction. Further, customers with high (low) psychological ownership feel high (less) psychological disengagement and show high (less) likelihood of patronage reduction due to their HLP status demotion. Originality/value This study extends the existing literature on relationship marketing and HLPs by offering a better understanding of how and under what conditions status demotion elicits customers’ psychological disengagement and the likelihood of patronage reduction.

The US court case Tekoh v. County of Los Angeles is discussed. The Ninth Circuit denied the petition for rehearing en banc, leaving intact the panel's holding that using an un-Mirandized statement at trial gives rise to section 1983 liability. Though the Ninth Circuit correctly denied en banc rehearing, the dissent's demotion of Miranda warnings from \"constitutionalize[d]\" to\"prophylactic\" is unjustified and risks restricting constitutional remedies at the Supreme Court and beyond.