In the domain of services marketing, the most researched area is in service quality. Since the pioneering stage of service quality research in the early 1980s, most of the studies have been conducted in the context of consumer services and consumer professional services. The pur…
This thesis is concerned with the subject of ethical decision making. A large number of theoretical models of ethical decision making have been developed in recent years. Apart from a small number of studies, there has been very little empirical testing of the theoretical framew…
This thesis is a study formulated under the rubric of understanding ethically questionable behaviour in consumption. It is argued that ethics research in the market place has tended to focus with a perspective of business practice, leaving an understanding of the consumer perspe…
The services advertising literature has called for additional studies of the type of tangible cues and advertising appeal that reduce the intangibility of services. This research proposes that the display of service attributes, as tangible cues, that consumers can easily link to…
This thesis employs the CGE approach to appraise three distinctive issues. Using hypothetical data, Essay 1 estimates how customs union outcomes are sensitive to market size and competitiveness. Further, common external tariffs are adjusted to ensure necessarily welfare-improvin…
In the last two decades, we have been watching a dramatic change in the nature of buyer-seller relationships. Relationship quality (RQ) is nowadays seen as the source of superior performance and competitive advantage, rather than service quality and/or customer satisfaction. As …
The aim of this thesis is to make a comprehensive assessment and comparison of the quantitative economic impacts at both the domestic and the international level of four alternative FTA options in East Asia - ASEAN-China, ASEAN-Japan, ASEAN-Korea and East Asia - by using a stati…
This thesis concerns case definitions for work-related stress; that is, the criteria used for the identification of a person as presenting a case. It has its focus on case definitions used as the basis for measurement in two related domains in the British context: large-scale na…
Recent media reports have drawn attention to entrepreneurs who have successfully owned several businesses. Entrepreneurs who have owned at least two businesses are known as 'habitual entrepreneurs'. However, not all habitual entrepreneurs are consistently successful. Further, st…
The rate of growth of investment in mutual funds has increased dramatically over the past decade. Many studies have developed models for performance evaluation and have examined whether fund managers provide value added for investors. Most of these studies, however, have focused…
This research is an in-depth study of Korean GTCs (General Trading Companies) and Japanese Sogo Shoshas (the Japanese version of General Trading Companies), which are unique big business conglomerates but not well-known in Western countries. It investigates several of their feat…
Although much has been written about knowledge management and information systems, there is little empirical evidence of their actual effect on organisational performance and their interrelationship. Aiming at addressing this gap, this thesis investigates the relationships betwe…
Everest and Blanc (E&B) is at a crossroad. It grew from a ‘mom and pop’ operation into a small professional firm and plateaued. Thus, there is a desire to bring about operation efficiency, followed by expansion of the company. In order to be successful, a systematic decision mak…
Selling stock to the general public is one important method by which firms are able to raise new equity capital. If the firm sells stock for the first time to the general public, it is called an initial public offering (IPO). Subsequent to the IPO, firms may seek to raise furthe…
The fundamental structures that underpin business activities must evolve and change in order to equip companies to thrive in a market whose characteristics are increasing competition and instability. The incremental advances in applied computing technology and business methodolo…
This thesis studies the origin and role of wealth in the Viking Age (late 8th to 11th century) and Late Norse (11th to 15th century) earldoms of Orkney and Caithness, northern Scotland. It has four aims. Firstly, it attempts to elucidate the key sources of wealth in the earldoms…
By adapting industrial organisation, resource based theories and PIMS database research, the study proposes the organisation-environment-strategy-performance (OESP) framework and a model of property marketing in the Taiwan property market. The thesis proposed and tested an integ…
In this thesis, current work carried out on analyzing the strategic behaviours in electricity trading is first reviewed. An intelligent decision-making and support technique, game theory, is often used in the market practice. Game theory is a discipline concerned with how indivi…
This thesis is concerned with the development of a Fair Trade social movement in Britain between 1960 – 2000. It situates the analysis of Fair Trade within the context of historical debates about political consumption. It examines the role of the ethical consumer as a political …