Chenting Su

Destination Image, Self-Congruity, and Travel Behavior: Toward an Integrative Model

An integrative model of destination image, self-congruity, and travel behavior is described in this article. In particular, the model postulates relationships between destination environment, destination visitor image, tourists’ self-concept, self-congruity, functional congruity, and travel behavior. Travel behavior is hypothesized to be influenced significantly by both self-congruity and functional congruity. Self-congruity is the match between the destination visitor image and tourists’ self-concept (actual, ideal, social, and ideal social self-image). Functional congruity is the match between the utilitarian attributes of the destination and the tourist’s ideal expectations related to those attributes. Self-congruity is hypothesized to influence functional congruity. It is argued that the destination environment influences the formation and change of the destination visitor image and the tourist-perceived utilitarian destination attributes.

Entering guanxi: A business ethical dilemma in mainland china?

This paper represents an effort to distinguish between two types of guanxi prevalent in mainland China: favor-seeking guanxi that is culturally rooted and rent-seeking guanxi that is institutionally defined. Different rules of maneuvering the two types of guanxi are identified in light of Chinese cultural and business ethics. Strategies for entering guanxi in mainland China are also suggested.

How Face Influences Consumption - A Comparative Study of American and Chinese Consumers:

East Asia is fast becoming the world’s largest brand-name luxury goods market. This study develops the concept of face and face consumption to explain why Asian consumers possess strong appetites for luxury products despite their relatively low income. This paper distinguishes the concept of face from a closely related construct, prestige, and examines the influence of face on consumer behaviours in the United States and China. Due to the heavy influence of face, Asian consumers believe they must purchase luxury products to enhance, maintain or save face. Accordingly, face consumption has three unique characteristics: conformity, distinctiveness and other-orientation. The results of a cross-cultural survey support the existence of these three subdimensions and show that Chinese consumers are more likely to be influenced by their reference groups than are American consumers. Furthermore, they tend to relate product brands and price to face more heavily than do their US counterparts. In addition, Chinese consumers are more likely to consider the prestige of the products in other-oriented consumption than are their American counterparts.

Is Guanxi Orientation Bad, Ethically Speaking? A Study of Chinese Enterprises

Guanxi as one of the key factors leading to business success in China (PRC) has ironically been synonymous with bribery. This raises some serious questions: should Western foreign firms do business in China? How should they do business with Chinese firms? This study investigated the relationship between guanxi orientation and cognitive moral development in an attempt to determine whether the level of guanxi orientation of Chinese business people affects their ethical reasoning. Based on a classification of Chinese enterprises (Nee, 1992), it was found that Chinese enterprises rely on guanxi for business to different extents. However, their levels of cognitive moral development are not significantly different, suggesting that guanxi orientation has very little to do with ethical reasoning (as captured through an established measure of cognitive moral development). Furthermore, time in profession was found to positively affect guanxi orientation; however, age failed to predict guanxi orientation and education turned out to be a negative predictor of guanxi orientation.

Dealing with Institutional Distances in International Marketing Channels: Governance Strategies That Engender Legitimacy and Efficiency

Firms doing business in foreign institutional environments face pressures to gain social acceptance (commonly referred to as legitimacy) and difficulty in evaluating market information, both of which undercut firm performance. In this article, the authors argue that firms can design governance strategies to deal with foreign institutions to secure both social acceptance and firm performance. Using a Chinese sample of manufacturers that export products to various foreign markets through local distributors, the authors develop and test a model that bridges the effects of institutional environments and governance strategy on channel performance. Specifically, they find that firms can use two governance strategies, contract customization and relational governance, to deal with both legitimacy and efficiency issues and to safeguard channel performance. Thus, international channel managers are advised to maintain an integrated management of legitimacy and efficiency in foreign marketing channels.

A paradox of price–quality and market efficiency: a comparative study of the US and China markets

Abstract The price–quality schema rests on an assumption that price is credible information about product quality. However, the credibility of price information varies across different markets. In an inefficient market, consumers would believe in the price–quality relationship to a lesser extent because price information is less credible. Paradoxically, in such a market, sometimes consumers have to rely more on price to infer quality because other product information is less available. With a cross-national perspective, this study investigated the influences of market efficiency and consumer risk aversion on the price–quality schema between the China and the US markets. We found that due to the inefficient market environment, Chinese consumers possess a weaker price–quality schema than American consumers. Chinese consumers are more risk averse than their American counterparts. However, in China, risk-averse consumers are more likely to use price to infer product quality. Implications for global marketing are discussed, and directions for future research are suggested.

A temporal dynamic model of spousal family purchase-decision behavior

The authors examine family purchase-decision dynamics to shed light on enhancing marketing communication effectiveness. In particular, the authors are interested in understanding the temporal nature of spousal behavioral interaction in family decision making to help marketers target communication messages, shape brand choice, and guide personal selling activities. The authors calibrate a dynamic simultaneous equations model to investigate spousal family purchase-decision behavior: What are spousal behavioral interactions in a discrete purchase decision, and what are the temporal aspects of spousal decision behavior across decisions? The results indicate that spouses tend both not to reciprocate coercion in a discrete decision and to adjust influence strategies over time. The authors also investigate the effectiveness of influence strategies and spousal satisfaction with decisions and their impacts on spousal subsequent decision behaviors from a postdecision perspective as a mechanism to explain why spouses revise decision behaviors across purchase decisions. The authors discuss marketing implications of their findings and present ideas about how to use these findings creatively to target advertising and sales messages to influential spouses in specific decision contexts.

The Ethics of Consumer Sovereignty in an Age of High Tech

We argue that consumer sovereignty in an increasingly high tech world is more of a fiction than a fact. We show how the principle of consumer sovereignty that governs the societal impact of economic competition is no longer valid. The world of high tech is increasingly responsible for changes in the opportunity, ability, and motivation of business firms to compete. Furthermore, the world of high tech is increasingly responsible for changes in the opportunity, ability, and motivation of consumers to engage in rational decision making. We conclude that we cannot rely on consumer sovereignty to maintain a thriving economy. Instead, we need to develop performance standards designed to meet the demands of the various stakeholders of the organization.

Unstructured direct elicitation of decision rules

The authors investigate the feasibility of unstructured direct elicitation (UDE) of decision rules consumers use to form consideration sets. They incorporate incentives into the tested formats that prompt respondents to state noncompensatory, compensatory, or mixed rules for agents who will select a product for the respondents. In a mobile phone study, two validation tasks prompt respondents to indicate which of 32 mobile phones they would consider from a fractional design of features and levels. The authors find that UDE predicts consideration sets better, across both profiles and respondents, than a structured direct-elicitation method. It predicts comparably to established incentive-aligned compensatory, noncompensatory, and mixed decompositional methods. In a more complex automotive study, noncompensatory decomposition is not feasible and additive-utility decomposition is strained, but UDE scales well. The authors align incentives for all methods using prize indemnity insurance to award a chance at

Trust in Interorganizational Relationships A Meta-Analytic Integration

40,000 for an automobile plus cash. They conclude that UDE predicts consideration sets better than either an additive decomposition or an established structured direct-elicitation method (CASEMAP).