Research traditions in marketing

INTERNATIONAL SERIES IN QUANTITATIVE MARKETING

Editor: Jehoshua Eliashberg The Wharton School University of Pennsylvania Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, U.S.A.

Other books in the series:

Cooper, L. and Nakanishi, M: Market Share Analysis

Hanssens, D., Parsons, L., and Schultz, R.: Market Response Models: Econometric and Time Series Analysis

McCann, J. and Gallagher, J.: Expert Systems for Scanner Data Environments

Erickson, G.: Dynamic Models of Advertising Competition

Research traditions in marketing

Edited by

Gilles Laurent Groupe HEC

Gary L. Lilien Pennsylvania State University

Bernard Pras University of Paris Dauphine and ESSEC

~.

" Springer Science+Business Media, LLC

Co-sponsor European Institute for Advanced Studies in Management (EIASM)

Ubrary ot Congreaa Cataloglng-In-Publlcatlon Date Research tradHions in marketing I edited by Gilles Laurent, Gary L.

Ulien, Bemard Pres. p. cm.-(Intemational series in quantitative marketing) ISBN 978-94-010-4615-2 ISBN 978-94-011-1402-8 (eBook) DOI 10.1007/978-94-011-1402-8 ,. Marketing research-Congresses. 2. Marketing research­

Europe-Congresses. 3. Marketing research-UnHed States­Congresses. I. Laurent, Gilles. 11. Lilien, Gary L., 1946-a-. 111. Pres, Bemard. IV. Series. HF5415.2. R44 1993

658.8'3-dc20 93-14432

Copyright © 1994 by Springer Scienc:e+Business Media New York Originally published by Kluwer Academic Publishers in 1994 Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1 st edition 1994

CIP

All rights reserved. No part ot this publication may be reproduced, stored in aretrieval system or lransmitted in any form or by any means, mechanical, photo-copylng, recording, or otherwise, without Ihe prior written parmission of Ihe publisher, Springer Scienc:e+Business Media, LLC.

Prin/ed on acid-frse paper.

Contents

Foreword Divergence: A Source of Creative Thinking Alain Bultez

Preface The Conference and the Genesis of this Book Gilles Laurent, Gary L. Lilien, and Bernard Pras

Quantitative Papers

1 Marketing Models: Past, Present and Future Gary L. Lilien

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xiii

Commentary by Donald G. Morrison 21

Commentary by A. S. C. Ehrenberg 24

Author's Reply by Gary L. Lilien 26

2 Marketing Science's Pilgrimage to the Ivory Tower 27 Hermann Simon

Commentary by John D. C. Little, Leonard M. Lodish, John R. Hauser, 44 and Glen L. Urban

Commentary by Leonard J. Parsons, Els Gijsbrechts, Peter S. H. Leeflang, 52 and Dick R. Wittink Marketing Science, Econometrics, and Managerial Contributions

3 Theory or Well-Based Results: Which Comes First? 79 A. S. C. Ehrenberg

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vi CONTENTS

Commentary by Albert C. Bemmaor

Commentary by John R. Rossiter

Commentary by David C. Schmittlein Marketing Science and Marketing Engineering

Author's Reply by A. S. C. Ehrenberg

4 Diagnosing Competition: Developments and Findings Peter S. H. Leeflang and Dick R. Wittink

Commentary by Piet Vanden Abeele

Commentary by Robin Wensley On a Clear Day You Can See the Market

5

109

116

123 128

133

157

163

Productivity Versus Relative Efficiency in Marketing: Past and Future? 169 Leonard J. Parsons

Commentary by A. Roy Thurik 197 Applied Econometrics and Productivity Analysis in Marketing

6 Modeling the Diffusion of New Durable Goods: Word-ot-Mouth Effect 201 Versus Consumer Heterogeneity Albert C. Bemmaor

Commentary by Frank M. Bass 224 Heterogeneity in Purchase Intention, Diffusion, and Exogenous Influence

Commentary by Vijay Mahajan 227 New Product Diffusion Models: Some Reflections on Their Practical Utility and Applications

7 Research on Modeling Industrial Markets 231 Maryse J. Brand and Peter S. H. Leetlang

Commentary by Gary L. Lilien 262

Qualitative Papers

8 Scholarly Traditions and European Roots ot American Consumer Research 265 Harold H. Kassarjian

Commentary by Christian Derbaix

Commentary by Sidney J. Levy

280

283

CONTENTS vii

9 Cross-National Consumer Research Traditions 289 Susan P. Douglas, Maureen A. Morrin, and C. Samuel Craig

Commentary by David Midgley 307

Commentary by Joseph C. Miller 314

10 The Markets-as-Networks Tradition in Sweden 321 Jan Johanson and Lars-Gunnar Mattsson

Commentary by David T. Wilson 343

11 Interorganizational Marketing Exchange: Metatheoretical Analysis of 347 Current Research Approaches K. E. Kristian Moller

Commentary by Geoff Easton 373

Commentary by Gary L. Frazier 378 A Perspective on Interorganizational Exchange in Channels of Distribution

12 The Emerging Tradition of Historical Research in Marketing: History of 383 Marketing and Marketing of History Franck Cochoy

Commentary by Terence Nevett 398

Author's Reply Understanding the Marketing of History in Marketing 402 Discipline by Franck Cochoy

13 Metaphor at Work 405 Christophe Van den Bulte

Commentary by Shelby D. Hunt and Ani! Menon 426 Is it "Metaphor at Work" or Is it "Metaphors, Theories, and Models at Work"? Author's Reply by Christophe Van den Bulte 433 Can Literal Truth Safeguard Models and Theories from Metaphor?

Contributing Authors 435

Foreword

Divergence: A Source of Creative Thinking

The outstanding job accomplished by Bernard, Gary, and Gilles is really praiseworthy: not only did they succeed in completing within a remark­ably short span of time the editing of the contributions to the conference that marked the 20th Anniversary of the European Institute for Ad­vanced Studies in Management; they have also managed to elicit numerous insightful comments from a host of dashing young scholars as well as from the fortunate few established authorities whose findings have long be­come leading articles in the best academic journals, who now chair those journals' editorial boards, and after whom great scientific awards have been named.

In so doing, our dedicated triumvirate has blended together pieces of diverse research traditions-some of them quite puzzling-and mixed significantly differentiated styles of expression. The controversial display of self-confidence by some distinguished colleagues, the amazingly emo­tional "good old" memories revived by their peers, the scapegoat-finding and moralizing confessions produced by some of their disciples together with the detached systematic rigidity of some others all combine to pro­duce a multivarious patchwork that may well prove the existence of a marketing scholar lifecycle. This cartoon-like four-class typology might even make it worth the reader's while to indulge in some guesswork to discover the sequence of the four stages as an exercise and then partition the author population accordingly.

Such heterogeneity is bound to fuel this book with bold reflections on our profession. On the face of it, some authors might sound overly self­confident or complacent or seem overinspired by their own (naturally) successful experience without due regard to fellow-academics' ap­proaches. But even the most sharply biased judgments have their

ix

x FOREWORD

merits: at least, they shake up readers' potential inelasticity (a substitute for indifference) with respect to issues of relevance to other yet bordering circles, a side-benefit that the editors will no doubt value in view of their concern for exchange of ideas (albeit resulting from conflicting opinions) and cross-fertilization between areas. We should beware, however, of a potential direct impact that would lead us, in some instances, to idolize self-appointed figureheads; visits to celebrity museums hold the risk of shaping our traditions.

As pointed out by Laurent, Lilien, and Pras, some chapters are no more than elaborated softened versions of far more radical stances taken during the conference. For those who missed the excitement of the event, I hope it will take just a little bit of imagination to extrapolate from those readings the liveliness of our discussions.

As the director of the European Institute for Advanced Studies in Management, I greatly enjoyed the rare privilege of acting as a trainee taking lessons for the future. The prevailing tone was reminiscent of the happy days when I joined EIASM as a doctoral student, one who already did not care a great deal about academic precedence. I could not stand just sitting quietly listening to some of my workmates' parables or ser­mons.

Despite the fact that I had the opportunity to voice my opinions - as biased and subjective as others-during the course of this unique celebration, the editors urged me to write a few lines to put the event into its proper perspective.

Two options were open to me: to present a historical review, unavoid­ably praising EIASM's role in fostering European management research and spinning networks of management scholars (which would mean focus­ing on the European Marketing Academy and its International Journal for Research in Marketing); or alternatively, to describe the conference itself in a way that would complement the editors' preface. I chose the latter, because I felt an irrepressible need to compliment our trio on their hard and relentless work, which has ultimately resulted in the publication of a book that is certain to become a household name, if not the ultimate stan­dard, for some time to come. I wish I had been able to revise my own manuscript and make it part of this advertising vehicle.

Having the privilege of being associated with their undertaking, I should like to back their pleas for broader interaction between research areas and traditions.

Some comments on the econometric school, my own field, will be a case in point. The econometric school has focused on the relative effec­tiveness of the marketing-mix variables. Typically, researchers obtain

FOREWORD Xl

estimates of elasticity-related parameters reflecting the response of sales or market shares to marketing tools; then they assess the reliability and face validity of those measures. Sometimes they subject the best-fitting models to a test of predictive ability or bring them to bear on the question of whether sensible normative recommendations can be derived by ana­lyzing their implications as to resource allocation.

At the outset, we were chiefly concerned with methodological break­through, and as a consequence, we experienced

increased sophistication in the specification of response functions (for example, by incorporating dynamics and advocating more con­sistent mathematical formulations); continual refining of evaluation procedures (such as relying on joint GLS and FIML techniques, looking for robust estimators); widespread use of ever more complex numerical optimization algorithms, heuristics, or routines (for example, discrete and geo­metric programming, and stochastic control).

Partly because we ignored the appropriate economic literature, but perhaps equally because economic theory seemed remote from our marketing concerns, we invested little research into integrating our ad­vanced empirical analyses into any kind of solid theoretical framework.

Yet during the '80s, integrative approaches explicitly linking data with prior theoretical constructs or norms were widely released. What used to be rather blind, fact-finding fishing expeditions or pure decision-centered numerical formalizations mimicking or supporting managerial expertise now tend to become systematized theory-driven explorations of the real world.

Clearly the editors are convinced that much is to be gained from harmonious combinations of tools and talents from all horizons. Such mixing is possible, provided open-mindedness and communication pull down the barriers that now separate research domains and doctoral­research programs. The EIASM's aims to facilitate such interfacing. For this reason, we have fostered such interfacing in Europe through a series of EDEN seminars. EDEN (EIASM's Doctoral Education Network) calls to mind the garden of delights described in the Book of Genesis, evoking the attractive and creative environment that EIASM offers to young promising doctorandi. Between June 1988 (when it was introduced) and December 1992, 354 students from all over Europe have become EDEN fellows, and 61 professors have acted as EDEN faculty members.

Whether they believe that theoretical models may add to reality or

xii FOREWORD

they are addicted to myopic data-base mining, all down-to-earth bottom­liners should eventually be able to join together and fruitfully share their findings. Thanks to the conference chairmen and the editors, the two groups have now come closer together and started to realize the mutual benefits of embarking on a policy of candid exchanges.

Alain Bultez

Preface

The Conference and the Genesis of this Book

This book resulted from a conference with the same name sponsored by the European Institute for Advanced Studies in Management (EIASM) in January of 1992. The EIASM celebrated its 20th anniversary in 1992, and the theme of the conference embodied the vision and mission of the EIASM.

Over the past two decades, the EIASM has served as a meeting point and catalyst for management scholars from Europe and overseas. Doctoral students and more advanced scholars have met for dozens of confer­ences whose goals involved both the dissemination of leading edge knowl­edge and the cross-fertilization and stimulus to new knowledge creation that emerges when scholars interact.

In contrast to North American conferences, which tend to be narrower and more specialized, European conferences are often more eclectic, mix­ing scholars with different viewpoints, who come from different research traditions. To help commemorate the 20th Anniversary of EIASM, two of us (Laurent and Pras) organized the conference at the invitation of Alain Bultez, director of EIASM. Our idea was to look back over the past 20 years by bringing scholars from different research streams together to help us all understand, evaluate, and criticize those different streams and to explore potential overlaps and divergences likely to emerge in years to come.

We asked each of the authors here, all of whom presented papers at that conference, to define or explain a research tradition, to trace some of its history and to comment on its future. The authors interpreted these guidelines quite broadly, and some of the talks (and resulting papers) fo­cused on the underlying discipline and history of the field, some on one or more specific research issues, and some provided visions for the future.

xiii

xiv PREFACE

We designed the conference to attract a balanced representation of European and North American scholars interested in quantitative and qualitative research traditions. The attending scholars expressed interest in the full range of markets- consumer/industrial, domestic/internat­ional, products/services. One of our objectives in designing such a diverse conference was to encourage discussion and debate; the comments fol­lowing the papers reflect some of the quite lively interaction that emerged.

Interestingly, participants from research traditions other than the speaker's asked rather polite questions and delivered mostly laudatory comments. In contrast, comments from within a research tradition were lively and frank (leading one presenter to forego his presentation entirely in order to rebut the comments of a "colleague").

We therefore solicited comments for the papers in this volume largely from scholars within the same research tradition to reflect the goings-on at the conference. The comments here are longer and more substantial than those at the conference, but they have lost little of the bite that was present there.

Gary Lilien joined the two conference conveners to help produce this book, published in Kluwer's International Series in Quantitative Market­ing, which is edited by Josh Eliashberg of Wharton. We gave presenters several months to revise their papers after the conference and then had them reviewed. Those published here benefited greatly, we feel, from that careful and constructive reviewing process. Authors of the papers that do not appear were either unwilling or unable (given our time sche­dule) to make the needed changes. We added to the list of conference attendees in order to enrich the set of commentators and to balance the comments between European and North American perspectives. We are delighted with the feast of papers and comments collected here and we are confident readers will be too.

Organization and Precis

We have organized the 13 papers and associated comments in the book along a quantitative/qualitative split. Within each subgroup we present papers that cover broad topics first, followed by those on more specific topics. Each paper is followed by one or more comments and a rejoinder (if the author felt moved to provide on~).

PREFACE xv

Quantitative Papers

Of the seven quantitative papers, three are on broad topics, assessing quantitative research in marketing in the past 20 years and speculating about the next decade. In the first paper, Gary Lilien describes the marketing-models field, cites past successes and trends, and speculates about future developments. His paper is rather upbeat, pointing the way to new, potentially fruitful fields of accomplishment for marketing mod­els. In their comments, Ehrenberg argues that model building should rely more on accumulated knowledge, and Morrison notes that marketing models should become more managerially oriented.

In the second paper, Hermann Simon points out limitations in the marketing science approach, specifically focusing on econometric and diffusion models. He notes that the model-based approach may be in­appropriate when the data have become obsolete (a rapid occurrence in today's dynamic markets), when the structural mechanisms at work are complex, and when those structures are dynamic. He asks if there are in­deed marketing laws of nature. He notes that too much research is de­voted to unimportant or artificial topics and that marketing science ignores important strategic issues, as well as such major economic sectors as services and industry. Finally, Simon argues in favor of researchers taking a more qualitative approach and admonishes them to listen more closely to managers. Commenting on this disappointed assessment, Little, Lodish, Hauser, and Urban argue that marketing science approaches have proved useful (that is, they have been bought repeatedly) in thousands of cases, including many nonconsumer product applications and strategic topics. They agree on the need to focus more research on managerially important problems. Parsons, Gijsbrechts, Leefiang, and Wittink center their comment on econometric analyses. They describe numerous, diverse applications, both published and unpublished, for con­sumer products, industrial products, and services. All of the applications have had impact on managerial decisions. They argue that marketing phe­nomena are "regular" enough to be studied by econometric methods, that generalizations can be developed, that new data open rich avenues, and overall, that econometrics is useful in marketing.

In the third paper, Andrew Ehrenberg argues that the key to useful model building in marketing is to validate, replicate, and slowly improve existing models over time, rather than to constantly develop new models from scratch. He makes his point with illustrations from hard sciences and engineering and leads to a discussion of his own work. He asserts that for

XVI PREFACE

a model to be good, it must routinely make good predictions of diverse aspects of consumer behavior in different settings. Rossiter points out that Ehrenberg's models do not include explanatory variables and hence are of limited interest for marketing decision making. Bemmaor suggests that some limitations in Ehrenberg's approach can be relieved by im­proved estimation and by addressing issues of heterogeneity. Schmittlein discusses knowledge accumulation versus methodology development as research objectives and weighs the merits of inductive versus axiomatic research approaches.

The other four quantitative papers are more specific. Peter Leeftang and Dick Wittink review the econometric research tradition aimed at di­agnosing competition. They contrast approaches centered on the analysis of competitors' and retailers' reactions with approaches centered on con­sumer purchase behavior (market response functions). They then show how these approaches overlap and complement one another. Vanden Abeele places Leeftang and Wittink's discussion in a broader framework, providing a detailed investigation of the meaning of competition and in­dicating avenues for research. Wensley focuses his comment on the com­plexities emerging from retailers' growing role in the competitive arena.

Len Parsons deals with another specific topic that researchers should address much more effectively in marketing models than they have in the past: the problem of how to evaluate productivity in marketing. He calls for more precise definitions for productivity (as opposed to the easier-to­measure but less relevant efficiency) and shows how some econometric methods, recently developed and applied to other areas of the firm, can be adapted to the issue of marketing productivity. Measurement prob­lems occur for certain qualitative inputs (employee competence) or out­puts (consumer satisfaction with store atmosphere). Thurik proposes two other econometric tools to analyze marketing productivity: error­correction and switching-regime models.

Albert Bemmaor addresses a problem arising in one of the best estab­lished and most productive areas of quantitative marketing, modeling the diffusion of innovations. He develops an alternative approach to the'clas­sical modeling paradigm. He criticizes most past studies for ignoring the impact that customer heterogeneity can have on the specification of the model. Furthermore, he shows that an approach relying solely on con­sumer heterogeneity, with no imitation effects between previous and potential adopters, leads to the same results as the classical model for­mulation. This could open new avenues for innovation modeling. Maha­jan discusses how to make diffusion models more useful in practice, list­ing important managerial problems that could benefit from a modeling

PREFACE xvii

analysis. Bass suggests taking into account heterogeneity across products as well as variations in consumer-stated purchase intentions.

Maryse Brand and Peter Leeflang review the literature devoted to quantitative models in the industrial marketing arena. In this domain, modeling faces difficult data problems that may be tackled by alternative methods addressing small sample descriptive problems, judgment based models and cross-sectional data-base analyses. The authors discuss a large number of models, covering organizational buying behavior as well as each element in the marketing mix. They indicate directions for future re­search and Lilien suggests four additional topics to be researched in this area.

Qualitative Papers

The six qualitative papers fall into three pairs: two on consumer behavior, two on industrial marketing and industrial marketing networks, and two presenting perspectives on marketing from different domains.

Hal Kassarjian provides a fascinating historical perspective on the European influences on the development of the field of consumer be­havior in the United States. He traces how European scholars brought their varying scientific backgrounds and fertile imaginations to the field of marketing, contributing ideas ranging from the psychological analysis of economic behavior, learning theories, studies in memory, and informa­tion processing to post-modernism and semiotic and social psychological approaches. Two comments enrich the discussion on specific trends: Der­baix focuses on family decision making and Levy describes Hal Kas­sarjian's own contributions as well as the European-developed art of semiotics.

Susan Douglas, Maureen Morrin, and Sam Craig define and discuss the status of cross-national studies of consumer behavior. They indicate the principal research traditions underlying cross-national consumer re­search, the key topic areas, and what has been learned. Given the nature of the conference and the international careers of the participants at the conference, we firid it surprising how little of the research they describe is truly international, either by design or by application. Comments by Mil­ler and Midgley expand on their perspective. Miller develops the links be­tween international marketing, international economics, and political sci­ence, while Midgley emphasizes developments in marketing channels and communication media.

The Scandinavian school, with its focus on studying networks of long-

XVlll PREFACE

term relationships in industrial markets, is an original European research tradition. Jan Johanson and Lars-Gunnar Mattsson define the network paradigm, trace the development of the tradition in Sweden, in particu­lar, and discuss its evolution and its future. Wilson comments on the de­velopment of the network approach in the US and in Europe and discus­ses its future.

Kristian Moller provides a broader perspective on the Scandinavian school in general and provides a metatheoretical comparison of four cur­rent research approaches into interorganizational marketing exchange. In his comment, Easton discusses how the dimensions proposed in Moller's article characterize approaches to interorganizational marketing ex­changes, and he introduces the social and political contexts. Frazier elaborates on the progress in channel research and discusses important challenges in the area.

Franck Cochoy considers the emerging tradition of historical research in marketing from his perspective as a historian and sociologist of science. He describes marketing historians as a group establishing itself and its subdiscipline as legitimate constituents of the marketing academic com­munity. Nevett, a leading actor in this tradition, provides a separate re­trospective of the area.

Christophe Van den Bulte focuses on metaphors in marketing and points out how awareness of the metaphors used in their discipline may help scholars to start and sustain strategic thinking and informed dia­logue. He shows how marketing scholars use metaphors but also how they are used by those same metaphors. This challenging article provides food for thought. Hunt and Menon's comment underscores the distinction between literary and theory-constitutive metaphors in the paper and opens avenues for discussion on this topic. That comment (and Van den Bulte's rejoinder) closes our volume (serving as the dessert?).

Reflections

Both participation in the conference and editing these papers and com­ments have been stimulating and provocative. Our comments and observations follow, and we hope they will encourage the reader to think globally about what this set of papers and comments means.

We had expected and hoped to see considerable cross-fertilization and overlap across research traditions. The 20 years that we reflect here has certainly provided the time for such interaction. Yet our first two ob­servations are a bit discouraging.

PREFACE xix

First, many substantial results have emerged from research traditions in which a number of researchers with common goals and methods have attacked similar problems. Those schools are related to a methodology (econometrics), an application domain (consumer behavior), a region or university (the Scandinavian school), or even to a dissertation advisor (Frank Bass). Such schools are often quite readily identifiable and sepa­rate from other schools. They provide internal cohesion, but does that cohesion result in a form of research tunnel vision?

This possibility of research tunnel vision leads to our second observa­tion. The most heated criticisms at the conference and among the com­ments here are aimed at those in the same school or in closely related schools. Such proximity provides the potential for threat; widely different traditions seem indifferent to one another. WitJt few exceptions, then, marketing scholars seem comfortable operating within a single tradition and feel little need to span traditions: traditions operate and develop in­dependently with little overlap or cross-fertilization.

If we agree that more cross~fertilization will lead to more fruitful fu­ture developments, we must question what causes this narrowness of perspective. Perhaps our doctoral programs, as currently structured, in­duce these narrow, uni-traditional perspectives, and we need to find some way to structure multi-traditional PhD programs.

A third observation, underscored by Kassarjian's paper, is just how large our debt continues to be to those who were educated outside the narrow domain of marketing. While Kassarjian's remarks were limited to the consumer behavior area, we speculate that other traditions would find similar debts to those trained outside the field. This observation rein­forces the previous one: if outsiders have brought so much to the field, why do we appear to be so narrow in our perspectives today? Cochoy's discussion of history provides another argument in favor of a broader, more open education.

A fourth observation is one that emerges in almost any forum on re­search in business. A research tradition (say, marketing models) emerges in response to real business problems to which adequate solutions are not readily available. The academics in this area are now being driven by two objectives, however. One objective is to solve the business problem that stimulated the research, while the second objective is to satisfy the de­mands for "academic rigor," "generalizability," and "mathematical ele­gance" that our academic journals demand. Our traditions, then, may be subject to two errors: the first is to do academically respectable and ele­gant research on trivial or nonexistent problems and the second is to ignore important (but messy) real problems. We must somehow bridge

PREFACE

the theory-practice gap further to reduce the incidence of both those errors to the bare minimum.

As a fifth and final point, Ehrenberg reminds us of another bias that drives much of the academic community. To get his or her work pub­lished, a researcher generally must produce something new. Our journals

. do not look kindly on replications or tests of the practical applicability of previously developed models. But without such tests, we really don't know what works, when, and why, and we are hard put to provide de­fensible guidance to our practitioner constituency.

We have enjoyed the challenge of putting this material together. We hope that it provides thought-provoking reading for colleagues across a wide range of marketing research traditions. In the spirit of the confer­ence, remember that these papers were aimed at individuals from outside the tradition, to try to make the motivation and the developments within that tradition more accessible to those with other perspectives. If a few readers look beyond their traditional borders, our efforts here will have been successful. Bon appetit!

Acknowledgement

The editors would like to thank Alain Bultez, Gerry Van Dyck and the staff of the European Institute for the Advanced Study in Management for encouraging and supporting us in developing the conference that spawned this book. We owe a special note of thanks to Mary Wyckoff, who managed the administration of the book and who tracked down au­thors, commentators and reviewers on at least three continents. Many of our authors are no doubt looking forward to meeting Mary Haight some­day. Mary Haight copyedited the manuscripts, putting them into gram­matical and clear (if too American for some) English. Some of our authors benefitted more than others from her subtle touches.

We are grateful to Josh Eliashberg, the series editor and Zachary Rol­nik from Kluwer for encouraging us to undertake this endeavor. And finally, this book could not have happened without the extraordinary efforts of a dedicated and distinguished board of referees (below). Our deepest thanks to them all:

Rajiv D. Banker, University of Mi~nesota, USA

Frank M. Bass, University of Texas, Dallas, USA

Albert C. Bemmaor, Groupe ESSEC, France

PREFACE

Louis P. Bucklin, University of California, Berkeley, USA

Gregory S. Carpenter, Northwestern University, USA

Franck Cochoy, University of Toulouse-Le Mirail, France

Ingemar Dierickx, Insead, France

Geoffrey Easton, University of Lancaster, UK Jehoshua Eliashberg, University of Pennsylvania, USA

John Farley, University of Pennsylvania, USA

A. Fuat Firat, Arizona State University West, USA

Gary L. Frazier, University of South Carolina, USA

Ronald A. Fullerton, Providence College, USA

Hubert Gatignon, University of Pennsylvania, USA

David A. Gautschi, University of Washington, U~)A Stanley C. Hollander, Michigan State University, USA John R. Hauser, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA

Douglas B. Holt, Penn State University, USA Shelby D. Hunt, Texas Tech University, USA

Michael D. Hutt, Arizona State University, USA

Wagner A. Kamakura, University of Pittsburgh, USA

Nirmalya Kumar, Penn State University, USA

Erdogan Kumcu, Ball State University, USA Donald R. Lehmann, Columbia University, USA

John D. C. Little, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA

Leonard M. Lodish, University of Pennsylvania, USA

Charlotte H. Mason, University of North Carolina, USA

David Mick, University of Florida, USA Kristian Moller, Helsinki School of Economics, Finland Donald G. Morrison, University of California, Los Angeles, USA

Eitan Muller, Tel Aviv University, Israel Terence Nevett, Central Michigan University, USA Bart Nooteboom, University of Groningen, The Netherlands Leonard J. Parsons, Georgia Institute of Technology, USA Jean Perrien, Universite du Quebec a Montreal, Canada Christian Pinson, Insead, France

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XXll PREFACE

Arvind Rangaswamy, Penn State University, USA

Brian T. Ratchford, State University of New York, Buffalo, USA

Ronald Savitt, The University of Vermont, USA

David Schmittlein, University of Pennsylvania, USA

Subrata K. Sen, Yale University, USA John F. Sherry, Northwestern University, USA Alvin J. Silk, Harvard University, USA Hermann Simon, Johannes-Gutenberg University, Mainz, Germany

Mita Sujan, Penn State University, USA

Hans B. Thorelli, Indiana University, USA A. Roy Thurik, Erasmus University, The Netherlands Piet Vanden Abeele, Catholic University of Leuven, Belgium

Berend Wierenga, Erasmus University, The Netherlands

David T. Wilson, Penn State University, USA

Gilles Laurent Gary L. Lilien Bernard Pras