The inventor of the first personal computer in the world advocates a conceptual shift in the way companies will have to nurture customers and seek innovations in products or services that were designed to satisfy yet to be defined needs.

This paper explores the link between quality, cost and concentration. Using concentration and cost data and product quality indicators for 2,244 products in over eighty industries in 1997 and 2002 in the US, a two-stage, ordered probit, random effects estimation explores the impact of...

Purpose – In this study, an optimal green product is selected from three newly developed ecological products and a non-environmentally friendly product. An analytic network process (ANP), used widely for multi-criteria decision making (MCDM), is applied to account for the tradeoff issues among...

Discusses the threats and opportunities presented to US manufacturers by the elimination of the trade restrictions for the European Community (EC), the unification of Germany, and the move towards capitalism in Russia. The biggest challenge will be to get involved in Europe′s industry early...

Examines the use of warranty and warrantor reputations, which have been shown to be credible signals of product quality for uni‐national products, to overcome consumers’ negative perceptions about hybrid products. An experiment is conducted, in which the level of warranty coverage and the...

Purpose – This paper examines consumer motivations for shopping abroad and explores the role of demographic versus socio‐psychological factors in explaining the phenomenon of cross‐border shopping. Design/methodology/approach – Empirical data were collected via personal interviews from...

Purpose – This paper aims to examine the concept of “consumer animosity”, model its antecedents, and assess its influence on intention to purchase. Design/methodology/approach – Survey questionnaires were distributed by a quasi‐random sample of school pupils across Taiwan to an adult...

Examines the relationship between the price cue and buyers′ perceptions of product quality in a cross‐cultural environment: Poland and Sweden are chosen to explore relationships in the construct between the newly emerging free market economies in Eastern Europe and traditional market...