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Of the two marketing articles, the first article by Cheng, Chuang and Huang
investigates the influence of emotional processing on nine-ending price effect. They
provided stronger evidence which proves that incidental emotion influences the nine-ending
price effect by using of the novel concept of processing fluency. It was found that people’s
emotional state has an influence not only on the level effect of nine-ending prices, but also
on their image effect. Besides, they demonstrated the mechanism by which processing
fluency acts as a mediator, whereby happy consumers with a high level of processing fluency
perceive nine-ending prices higher than do sad consumers with a low level of processing
fluency. They also concluded that emotional certainty induces a higher level of processing
fluency than that produced by emotional uncertainty.
The other article by Lee and Wu investigates how consumers interpret breadth of appeal
and sales volume, which are two common kinds of popularity information that often co-exist
on the Internet, with different inferences (quality evaluation or social comparison) under
conditions when the two kinds of popularity information are congruent or incongruent. It is
hypothesized that when a product’s breadth of appeal and sales volume are incongruent, the
probability of purchasing a narrow-appeal product significantly increases compared to the
condition of congruence; moreover, the magnitude of increase between the two conditions of
congruency is higher for consumers with the inference of quality evaluation compared to that
of social comparison.
For the article in the field of OM (operations management) by Chiang, Wu, and Ye, this
article is aimed to discuss the credit guarantee mechanism. The manufacturer provides
collateralization for upstream SMEs as well as the expected return after the loan is lent by
the bank, in order to reduce the risk of loaning and to make loaning easier; thus, achieving a
win-win situation for the supply chain. A leader-follower game is introduced in this article,
with the upstream suppliers as a follower, and the downstream manufacturer as the leader.
Both sides of parties are seeking to maximize profit and build up their supply chain purchase
model. Backward induction is applied to obtain the optimal decision and profit