Prior research has firmly established that consumers draw benefits from a firm's engagement in corporate social responsibility (CSR), especially the feeling of a “warm glow.” These benefits positively affect several desirable outcomes, such as willingness to pay and customer loyalty. The authors propose that consumers do not blindly perceive benefits from a firm's CSR engagement but tend to suspect that a firm's prices include a markup to finance the CSR engagement. Taking customers’ benefit perceptions and price markup inferences into account, the authors suggest that CSR engagement has mixed effects on consumers’ evaluation of price fairness and, thus, on subsequent outcomes such as customer loyalty. The authors conduct one qualitative study and four quantitative studies leveraging longitudinal field and experimental data from more than 4,000 customers and show that customers indeed infer CSR price markups, entailing mixed effects of firms’ CSR engagement on price fairness. The authors find that perception critically depends on customers’ CSR attributions, and they explore the underlying psychological mechanisms. They propose communication strategies to optimize the effect of CSR engagement on perceived price fairness.

Drawing on neo‐institutional and stakeholder theory, this study examines the link between a firm's corporate social responsibility (CSR) actions and its financial performance. The authors investigate whether and how a firm's symbolic (“talk”) and substantive (“walk”) CSR actions, alone or combined, affect financial performance depending on the main stakeholder group they are directed at (i.e., high‐proximity internal stakeholders such as employees versus low‐proximity external stakeholders such as customers or the wider society). In a comparison of two domains targeting either high‐ or low‐proximity stakeholders, results show that substantive/symbolic CSR actions have a positive impact/no impact on financial performance if directed toward high‐proximity stakeholders, and that the opposite is true of actions directed at low‐proximity stakeholders. Further, results show that low‐proximity stakeholders have greater difficulty distinguishing between mere talk and real walk. The study relies on an international, cross‐industry dataset from Thomson Reuters’ Asset4ESG and Datastream from 2002 to 2011. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment

Co-production offerings, in which customers engage in the production of goods and services, are ubiquitous in everyday life (e.g., ready-to-assemble products, self-service technologies).However, while previous research has predominately identified beneficial aspects of coproduction in contrast to traditional firm production, the pivotal role of co-production intensity within co-production processes has largely been neglected. Furthermore, little is known about strategies that firms can employ to positively influence customers' perceptions of co-production processes. Drawing on a large field experiment with 803 customers engaging in actual coproduction processes, the current study makes a first attempt to address these research voids.Results show that co-production intensity negatively affects customers' satisfaction with the coproduction process. Further, the study offers first insights into how firms can mitigate these negative effects by employing corporate communication strategies that either emphasize specific co-production value propositions (value-enhancing communication strategies) or highlight additional co-production service supplements (intensity-reducing communication strategies). The findings of the study offer important theoretical and managerial implications.

The literature proposes numerous so-called pseudo-R2 measures for evaluating “goodness of fit” in regression models with categorical dependent variables. Unlike ordinary least square-R2, log-likelihood-based pseudo-R2s do not represent the proportion of explained variance but rather the improvement in model likelihood over a null model. The multitude of available pseudo-R2 measures and the absence of benchmarks often lead to confusing interpretations and unclear reporting. Drawing on a meta-analysis of 274 published logistic regression models as well as simulated data, this study investigates fundamental differences of distinct pseudo-R2 measures, focusing on their dependence on basic study design characteristics. Results indicate that almost all pseudo-R2s are influenced to some extent by sample size, number of predictor variables, and number of categories of the dependent variable and its distribution asymmetry. Hence, an interpretation by goodness-of-fit benchmark values must explicitly consider these characteristics. The authors derive a set of goodness-of-fit benchmark values with respect to ranges of sample size and distribution of observations for this measure. This study raises awareness of fundamental differences in characteristics of pseudo-R2s and the need for greater precision in reporting these measures.

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Retailers are increasingly using round prices, a trend at odds with the marketing belief in the superiority of just-below prices. However, conclusive empirical evidence on the effectiveness of different price endings is still missing. Addressing this void, this paper presents four fieldexperimental studies with a broad array of samples revealing the central role of convenience in the context of price endings. Findings indicate that consumers perceive round prices as more convenient because their high cognitive accessibility saves time and effort during transactions, which is corroborated using a reaction time measure. Accordingly, round prices increase sales in purchase situations characterized by a high importance of convenience. Further, consumers' convenience consciousness explains preferences for different price endings. This research thus contributes to the behavioral pricing literature by challenging traditional marketing beliefs and providing convincing evidence of the superiority of round prices in a complex world where many customers attach great importance to convenience.

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