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Profiles heavy buyers of store brand products and compares them with light buyers in terms of demographics, socio‐economic, and attitudinal variables. The results suggest that younger, unmarried, and smaller sized households tend to avoid store brands. As compared with heavy buyers, light buyers of store brands are less familiar with them and perceive them to be of lower quality, less value for money and as riskier choices.

The authors examine the relative importance of extrinsic versus intrinsic cues in determining perceptions of store brand quality in an experiment using a sample of 1564 shoppers for five products. Results of the experiment suggest that consumers’ evaluations of store brand grocery items are driven primarily by the extrinsic cues that these products display rather than intrinsic characteristics. In addition, the authors found that a value for money orientation taken by retailers in the marketing of their private label lines may represent a suboptimal strategy; they recommend a quality orientation.

The paper reviews international literature on corporate governance and firm performance and investigates the relationship in the Indian context, taking into account the endogeneity in the relationship. Governance parameters include board size, directors' shareholding, institutional and foreign shareholding, while the fragmentation in shareholding is captured by public shareholding. A simultaneous equation regression model for Tobin's Q, as a measure of firm performance, is attempted using these variables, while controlling for industry effects and other non-governance variables. The data corresponds to a panel of 340 large, listed Indian firms for the period 1997-2001 spread across 24 industry groups.