A number of factors have made franchising a successful business model: new store expansion can be accelerated because much of the investment capital and many of the management decisions come from local franchise owners, distribution of fixed costs across many outlets provides economies of scale in purchasing and advertising which only large networks can provide, and the financial risks and rewa...

OBJECTIVE The present study aimed to examine the role of health in consumers' food purchasing decisions through investigating the nature of people's discourse regarding health while conducting their food shopping. DESIGN The study employed the think-aloud technique as part of an accompanied shop. All mentions of health and terms relating to health were identified from the data set. Inductive ...

Despite increasing availability of household water treatment products, demand in developing countries remains low. Willingness to pay for water treatment products and factors that affect demand are not well understood. In this study, we estimate willingness to pay for WaterGuard, a dilute chlorine solution for point-of-use water treatment, using actual purchase decisions at randomly assigned pr...

ICD-10 will impact many areas of your practice, and your team should represent each of them. The size and complexity of your organization will influence which staff members you choose (and how many) for the internal implementation team, but at a minimum, it should include members from the clinical and administrative areas of the practice. It is preferable to ask a physician with budgetary autho...

We investigate different versions of the minority game, a toy model for agents buying and selling a commodity. The Hamming distance between the strategies used by agents to take decisions is introduced as an analytical tool to determine several properties of these models. The success rate of the agents in an adaptive version of the game is compared with the rate from a stochastic version. It is...

In the recent past, compliance with 21CFR11 has become a major buzzword within the pharmaceutical and biotechnology industries. While commercial solutions exist, implementation and validation are expensive and cumbersome. Frequent implementation of new features via point releases further complicates purchasing decisions by making it difficult to weigh the risk of non-compliance against the cost...

This study investigates impulse buying behaviors in both traditional store and online shopping contexts. The results show that impulsive buying tendency and involvement with clothing products is positively associated with impulse buying behavior of clothing in traditional store shopping, but not online. For computer peripherals, on the other hand, higher impulsive buying tendency and higher pro...

The contract between the carrier and forwarder is a long-term issue, and the repeated contract business makes the forwarder develop a reference point based on the contract prices, and this reference effect, to a large extent, affects the forwarder’s contract purchasing decisions. Based on that, this paper introduces the reference effect in the sea-cargo supply chain and studies a multipleperiod...

Data show that the food desert environment is correlated with high risk of diet-related illness in low-income urban communities. Using an empirical model of grocery purchasing decision processes, we explained how specific components of the economic and structural environment influenced purchasing decisions that conflicted with shoppers understanding of healthy eating. In this paper we describe ...

The ideology of consumption and the imperative of consumer choice have washed across the globe. In today’s developed economies there is an everincreasing amount of buying, amidst an ever-increasing amount of purchase options, amidst an ever-increasing amount of stress, amidst an ever-decreasing amount of discretionary time. This brief essay reviews research suggesting, for example, that hyperch...