This study uses a Delphi approach – a method which essentially canvasses the opinions of a panel of experts over successive rounds – to forecast the Chinese business environment in the next decade. A total of 61 issues covering economic, political–legal and socio–cultural factors are examined, focusing on their anticipated direction (and magnitude), as well as their importance. Overall, a very high level of consensus is revealed about how the Chinese business environment might look 10 years from now. In a number of fundamental respects it is expected to be markedly different from the present situation, but in some other respects remarkably similar.

The author reports the results of a survey on global compensation management practices in multinational firms, most of them headquartered in continental Europe and the United Kingdom. The study focuses on whether decisions on different compensation and benefits issues in these firms are taken at a headquarters or at the regional, business unit or country/local level. In addition, the author provides more qualitative information on the degree to which the respondents are satisfied with the decision-making process as well as their concrete suggestions for improvement. Finally, the author deals with the question of whether centralization or decentralization is the preferable option.

Attitudes and preferences do not always prove to be good predictors of actual behavior. Following the call for moderating variables to get a better idea of when and for whom attitude–behavior consistency exists, the current paper focuses on mood as a potential situational moderator. Results from three online studies demonstrate that (1) mood significantly affects attitude–behavior consistency, (2) not the decision style that mood activates (i.e., a deliberative style under negative mood versus an intuitive decision style under positive mood), but a fit in decision style respondents use during attitude formation and decision making underlies this mood effect, and (3) this mood effect holds for individuals who tend to experience their emotions intensively (i.e., high affect intensity individuals), but reverses for individuals who experience their emotions less intensively (i.e., low affect intensity individuals).

Existing consumer innovativeness scales ignore the multitude of motivation sources of buying innovations. The objective of this paper is to incorporate different motivations into a multi-dimensional innovativeness scale to better account for the consumer–product relationship. An extensive literature review and five studies (with about 2600 respondents in total) indicate that four types of motivation underlie consumer innovativeness: functional, hedonic, social, and cognitive. The proposed 20-item four-dimensional Motivated Consumer Innovativeness (MCI) scale proves to be reliable and internally valid and does not seem to suffer from social desirability bias. Moreover, the results of the studies indicate the predictive validity of every MCI dimension. This new scale proves to measure more than existing consumer innovativeness scales; the different MCI dimensions predict innovative purchase intentions better than both traditional and recently developed innovativeness scales, and they disprove the general consensus that older people are always significantly less innovative than younger people. This MCI scale can serve as a tool for future research on efficiently and effectively segmenting and targeting (motivated innovative) consumers.

It has been observed that ad-evoked feelings exert a positive influence on brand attitudes. To investigate the empirical generalizability of this phenomenon, we analyzed the responses of 1576 consumers to 1070 TV commercials from more than 150 different product categories. The findings suggest five empirical generalizations. First, ad-evoked feelings indeed have a substantial impact on brand evaluations, even under conditions that better approximate real marketplace settings than past studies did. Second, these effects are both direct and indirect, with the indirect effects largely linked to changes in attitude toward the ad. Third, these effects do not depend on the level of involvement associated with the product category. However, fourth, the effects are more pronounced for hedonic products than utilitarian products. Finally, these effects do not depend on whether the products are durables, nondurables, or services, or whether the products are search goods or experience goods.