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Governments in many countries have deregulated the retail pharmacy market to offer easier and broader access to pharmacy services. Such deregulation has spurred the competition by allowing the entry of new drug distribution channels. Current research leverages the Pharmaceutical Affairs Law revision introduced in South Korea in November 2012. The policy change allowed 24-hour convenience stores to sell 13 first-aid drugs directly to patients. This research investigates the causal effect of new retailers’ entry on incumbent pharmacies’ financial performance in terms of pricing, revenue, and market exit. The findings, based on the panel data of 2,795 pharmacies in a 36-month period from 2011 to 2013, suggest deregulation posed a significant competitive threat to incumbent pharmacies, resulting in lower average prices for the deregulated drugs, significant drops in revenue and accelerated financial failures. A significant heterogeneity in the treatment effect is found across pharmacies. Pharmacies with less loyal customers and poorer financial performance suffered more after deregulation. Our findings suggest that although such deregulation is intended to enhance consumers’ access to health care, opening the OTC drug market to new retailers may hamper consumers’ access to pharmacy services because of the exit from the market of underperforming incumbents.

PurposeThis study aims to identify, within the context of the French fashion industry, the characteristics of multichannel shoppers, that is, consumers who use more than one channel in a single shopping trip. We especially investigate whether consumers' focus on quality versus price affects their multichannel shopping tendency and their flexibilities in their shopping lists (basket flexibility).Design/methodology/approachWe surveyed a representative sample of 400 French shoppers regarding fashion apparel purchasing. We use a logistic regression framework to measure the probability of a shopper becoming a multichannel shopper based on the key constructs and a battery of control variables.FindingsThe analysis shows that, in fashion buying, shoppers focused on quality and those with high basket flexibility have a higher probability of becoming multichannel shoppers. The probability becomes even greater when a shopper is both quality oriented and has basket flexibility.Research limitations/implicationsWe focus on the fashion apparel market for a deeper understanding of multichannel usage of products with both experience and search features. Future research can investigate other industries for higher generalizability.Practical implicationsOur research provides insights into multichannel fashion companies whose managements aim to effectively manage high-value customers who tend to use more channels when shopping. Specifically, an omnichannel marketing strategy should focus on capturing the quality-oriented and highly basket-flexible segment of consumers.Originality/valueOur study provides evidence that for products having high experiential as well as search features, quality-oriented and highly flexible shoppers engage more in multichannel shopping. Because these characteristics are related to the long-term value of customers, we provide the link between multichannel marketing and firm profitability in the context of the fashion industry.

This research investigates the impact of usage restriction in South Korea on both gamers and the industry using individual-level game usage and spending data.

Much effort has been exerted to analyze online texts and unders tand how empirical results can help improve sales performance. In this research, we aim to extend this stream of research by decomposing online texts based on text sources, namely, companies and consumers. To be specific, we in vestigate how online texts driven by companies differ from those generated by consumers, and the extent to which both types of online texts have different effects on online sales. We obtained sales data from one of the biggest game publ ishers and merged them with online texts provided by companies using news articles and those created by consumers in user communities. The empirical analyses yield the following findings. Word visualization and topic analyses s how that firms and consumers generate different contexts. Specifically, companies spread word to promote their own events whereas consumers produce online words to share winning strategies. Moreover, online sales are influenced by co nsumer-generated community topics whereas firm-driv-en topics in news articles have little to no effect. These find ings suggest that companies should focus more on online texts generated by consumers rather than spreading their own wo rds. Moreover, online sales strategies should take advantage of specific topics that have been proven to increase online sales. In particular, these findings give startup companies and small business owners in variety of industries the advantage when they use the online channel for distribution and as a marketing platform.