Consumer misbehavior: a concurrent look at the impact that the size of the victim and size of the loss have on opinions regarding the acceptance or unacceptance of 12 questionable consumer actions

This study examines the role that the size of a victimised organisation and the size of the victim’s loss have on attitudes regarding the acceptance or unacceptance of 12 questionable consumer actions. A sample of 815 American adults rated each scenario on a scale anchored by very acceptable and very unacceptable. It was shown that the size of the victimised organisation tends to influence consumers’ opinions with more disdain directed towards consumers who take advantage of smaller businesses. Similarly, the respondents tended to be more critical of these actions when the loss incurred by the victimised organisation was large. A 2x2 matrix concurrently delineated the nature of the extent to which opinions regarding the 12 actions differed depending upon the mediating variable under scrutiny.

When size matters: exploring perceptions and justifications of deviant consumer behavior

Deterrence strategies for deviant consumer behavior are criticised for their ‘one size fits all’ approach. In two studies, this paper examines how the size of harm and size of victim influences consumer perceptions of deviant consumer behavior. Deterrence strategies are recommended that overcome the differences in consumer perceptions of deviance.

Just what the doctor ordered? Investigating the impact of health service quality on consumer misbehaviour

The growth in demand and expenditure currently being experienced in the Australian health sector is also accompanied by a rise in dysfunctional customer behaviour, such as verbal abuse and physical violence, perpetrated against health service providers. While service failure and poor recovery are known to trigger consumer misbehaviour, this study investigates whether lower than expected perceived service quality generates cognitive and emotional appraisals that trigger two common forms of misbehaviour: refusal to participate and verbal abuse. Data were collected using a 2 × 2 between-subjects experiment administered via online written survey and analysed using path modelling. The findings indicate that perceptions of service encounter quality have an indirect effect on whether consumers refuse to participate in the service and/or verbally abuse the service provider through the mediating effect of anger.

The typicality and accessibility of consumer attitudes toward television advertising : implications for the measurement of attitudes toward advertising in general

Despite the wide array of contemporary advertising formats and media, television advertising remains the most dominant form to which typical consumers are exposed. Research on attitudes toward advertising in general (Att-AiG) implicitly assumes that the Att-AiG measure represents advertising as a whole. A major finding of the current research is that consumers tend to have a mental representation, or exemplar, of the most typical type of advertising—television advertising—when they report their Att-AiG. Therefore, in reality, Att-AiG primarily reflects attitudes toward television advertising. In addition, the results of our experiments indicate that television ad exemplars generate temporal changes in consumers’ reported Att-AiG and attitudes toward television advertising. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed.

Differential effects of tissue culture coating substrates on prostate cancer cell adherence, morphology and behavior

Weak cell-surface adhesion of cell lines to tissue culture surfaces is a common problem and presents technical limitations to the design of experiments. To overcome this problem, various surface coating protocols have been developed. However, a comparative and precise real-time measurement of their impact on cell behavior has not been conducted. The prostate cancer cell line LNCaP, derived from a patient lymph node metastasis, is a commonly used model system in prostate cancer research. However, the cells’ characteristically weak attachment to the surface of tissue culture vessels and cover slips has impeded their manipulation and analysis and use in high throughput screening. To improve the adherence of LNCaP cells to the culture surface, we compared different coating reagents (poly-L-lysine, poly-L-ornithine, collagen type IV, fibronectin, and laminin) and culturing conditions and analyzed their impact on cell proliferation, adhesion, morphology, mobility and gene expression using real-time technologies. The results showed that fibronectin, poly-L-lysine and poly-L-ornithine improved LNCaP cells adherence and provoked cell morphology alterations, such as increase of nuclear and cellular area. These coating reagents also induced a higher expression of F-actin and reduced cell mobility. In contrast, laminin and collagen type IV did not improve adherence but promoted cell aggregation and affected cell morphology. Cells cultured in the presence of laminin displayed higher mobility than control cells. All the coating conditions significantly affected cell viability; however, they did not affect the expression of androgen receptor-regulated genes. Our comparative findings provide important insight for the selection of the ideal coating reagent and culture conditions for the cancer cell lines with respect to their effect on proliferation rate, attachment, morphology, migration, transcriptional response and cellular cytoskeleton arrangement.

Destination Brand Performance Measurement Over Time

With increasing investments being made in brand development by destination marketing organisations (DMO) since the 1990s, including rebranding and repositioning, more research is necessary to enhance understanding of how to effectively monitor destination brand performance over time. This chapter summarises key findings from a study of brand performance of a competitive set of destinations, in their most important market, between 2003 and 2012. Brand performance was measured from the perspective of consumer perceptions, based on the concept of consumer-based brand equity (CBBE). The results indicated almost no change in perceptions of the five destinations over the 10-year period. Due to the commonality of challenges faced by DMOs worldwide, it is suggested the CBBE hierarchy provides destination marketers with a practical tool for evaluating brand performance over time; in terms of measures of effectiveness of past marketing communications, as well as indicators of future performance.

Choosing an appropriate modelling framework for analysing multispecies co-culture cell biology experiments

In vitro cell biology assays play a crucial role in informing our understanding of the migratory, proliferative and invasive properties of many cell types in different biological contexts. While mono-culture assays involve the study of a population of cells composed of a single cell type, co-culture assays study a population of cells composed of multiple cell types (or subpopulations of cells). Such co-culture assays can provide more realistic insights into many biological processes including tissue repair, tissue regeneration and malignant spreading. Typically, system parameters, such as motility and proliferation rates, are estimated by calibrating a mathematical or computational model to the observed experimental data. However, parameter estimates can be highly sensitive to the choice of model and modelling framework. This observation motivates us to consider the fundamental question of how we can best choose a model to facilitate accurate parameter estimation for a particular assay. In this work we describe three mathematical models of mono-culture and co-culture assays that include different levels of spatial detail. We study various spatial summary statistics to explore if they can be used to distinguish between the suitability of each model over a range of parameter space. Our results for mono-culture experiments are promising, in that we suggest two spatial statistics that can be used to direct model choice. However, co-culture experiments are far more challenging: we show that these same spatial statistics which provide useful insight into mono-culture systems are insuffcient for co-culture systems. Therefore, we conclude that great care ought to be exercised when estimating the parameters of co-culture assays.

Consumer phase identification in a three phase unbalanced LV distribution network

A new technique is presented for automatically identifying the phase connection of domestic customers. Voltage information from a reference three phase house is correlated with voltage information from other customer electricity meters on the same network to determine the highest probability phase connection. The techniques are purely based upon a time series of electrical voltage measurements taken by the household smart meters and no additional equipment is required. The method is demonstrated using real smart meter datasets to correctly identify the phase connections of 75 consumers on a low voltage distribution feeder.

Beyond the Producer/Consumer Divide : Key Principles of Produsage and Opportunities for Innovation

Though popular, concepts such as Toffler's 'prosumer' (1970; 1980; 1990) are inherently limited in their ability to accurately describe the makeup and dynamics of current co-creative environments, from fundamentally non-profit initiatives like the Wikipedia to user-industry partnerships that engage in crowdsourcing and the development of collective intelligence. Instead, the success or failure of such projects can be understood best if the traditional producer/consumer divide is dissolved, allowing for the emergence of the produser (Bruns, 2008). A close investigation of leading spaces for produsage makes it possible to extract the key principles which underpin and guide such content co-creation, and to identify how innovative pro-am partnerships between commercial entities and user communities might be structured in order to maximise the benefits that both sides will be able to draw from such collaboration. This chapter will outline these principles, and point to successes and failures in applying them to pro- am initiatives.

Queensland's film culture: The challenges of local film distribution and festival exhibition

Organisations at the centre of the state’s industry, such as Screen Queensland, have undergone substantial and ongoing changes in the last five years. Other organisations funded by Screen Queensland, such as QPIX, Queensland’s only film development centre, have recently closed. The Brisbane International Film Festival has been restructured to become the Brisbane Asia Pacific Film Festival as of 2014. In an uncertain industry currently characterised by limited funding and diminishing support structures, local emerging filmmakers require significant initiatives and a sophisticated understanding of how to best utilise fledgling distribution models as part of a tailored strategy for their content. This essay includes interviews with emerging Brisbane filmmakers who have used a combination of traditional and contemporary approaches to exhibition and distribution thus far in their careers. It argues that for these filmmakers, while film festivals do function as crucial platforms for exposure, in the current digital market they cannot be relied upon as the only platform in securing further mainstream or commercial release. They can, however, be incorporated into an alternative distribution model that shows awareness of the contemporary situation in Australia. The research findings are arguably indicative of the challenges faced by filmmakers statewide, and suggest that further support strategies need to be considered to revive Queensland’s film culture and provide immediate support for emerging filmmakers. Queensland’s film sector is currently in the midst of significant change.

Politics and the Press in Indonesia : Understanding an Evolving Political Culture

This book explores the evolving political culture in Indonesia, by discussing the country's dominant political philosophies, then showing how those philosophies affect the working lives of ordinary Indonesian citizens. It focuses in particular on the working lives of news journalists, a group that occupies a strategic social and political position.

All Anglos are alike? A study of whinging Poms and bloody-minded Aussies

Cross-cultural service research is an important topic with a rich array of empirical evidence for differences in customer perceptions, attitudes and behaviours. However, the extant literature is almost exclusively focused on differences between cultures at each end of the diversity spectrum (most commonly East vs. West). Contemporary researchers have observed that existing studies fail to acknowledge the substantially greater levels of intra-cluster variation that exist. A cultural cluster is a group of countries that reflect values, attitudes and beliefs stemming from a common cultural ancestry. This seems surprising given the anecdotal evidence and stereotypes that are portrayed in popular culture, media and art. One area where intra-cluster variation may be evident is consumer complaint behaviour and in particular within the Anglo-cultural cluster in countries. A cultural cluster is a group of countries that reflect values, attitudes and beliefs stemming from a common cultural ancestry. The aim of this study is therefore to explore and elucidate the nature of differences in consumer complaint behaviour between cultures traditionally conceived and operationalised as identical. This study presents a qualitative study of 60 in-depth interviews with consumers in the United Kingdom and Australia and identifies differences in complaining styles, parental influence and the conceptualisation of complaining.

Agency-generated research of consumer-generated content

Social media enable advertising agencies to engage directly with the public by participating in-and observing-real conversations. The current study recruited a Delphi panel to explore how some of the world's leading advertising professionals view the use of social media to test, track, and evaluate advertising campaigns and how they identify related risks and ethical considerations. The findings suggest that agencies primarily use social media as a tool for understanding consumers and igniting insight, not as a means of testing creative ideas. The authors believe this research provides an important benchmark of agency best practice in social-media research and outlines ethical implications.

Technology, normalisation and male sex work

Technological change, particularly the growth of the Internet and smart phones, has increased the visibility of male escorts, expanded their client base and diversified the range of venues in which male sex work can take place. Specifically, the Internet has relocated some forms of male sex work away from the street and thereby increased market reach, visibility and access and the scope of sex work advertising. Using the online profiles of 257 male sex workers drawn from six of the largest websites advertising male sexual services in Australia, the role of the Internet in facilitating the normalisation of male sex work is discussed. Specifically we examine how engagement with the sex industry has been reconstituted in term of better informed consumer-seller decisions for both clients and sex workers. Rather than being seen as a ‘deviant’ activity, understood in terms of pathology or criminal activity, male sex work is increasingly presented as an everyday commodity in the market place. In this context, the management of risks associated with sex work has shifted from formalised social control to more informal practices conducted among online communities of clients and sex workers. We discuss the implications for health, legal and welfare responses within an empowerment paradigm.