Article
An empirical study of consumer-based city brand equity from signalling theory perspective
The concept of city brand equity has caught attention of many marketing scholars, but because of complex nature of cities it remains one of the difficult concepts to quantify. In this article, we develop an approach to measuring city brand equity by evaluating city quality. According to signalling theory, city branding is the signal for consumers that communicates the city quality. The signal credibility creates city brand equity. This cannot be measured directly but can be evaluated through the city quality, which, in turn, represents the ability to fulfil residents’ needs. This study uses the conjoint analysis technique to measure city quality as a driver of consumer-based city brand equity. The approach is applied to the case of city branding campaign in Perm, Russia, to examine the roots of the city’s brand failure and propose the ways to strengthen consumer-based city brand equity.
By analogy with contemporary business practices, nowadays, city managers need to become “residents’ – centric”, as competition for residents and resources increases. The ultimate goal of such an approach is to boost the level of satisfaction with the city. Several researches raised the problem of city satisfaction conceptualization and measurement. To contribute to this discussion, we develop an assessment method, which takes into consideration subjective and situational nature of satisfaction. To test the method we have carried out an empirical research, employing the representative sample of the residents for a large Russian city, Perm. The results allow for the illustration of the cumulative and hierarchical nature of city satisfaction, and, hopefully, contribute both to the theoretical aspects and practicalities of place management.
The article is devoted to the problem of communicative features of the constructive structure of the font identity in the city branding sphere. This problem is considered in the framework of the nonlinearity of visual communication based on typology, comparative and structural analysis of the font identity of the world's cities. The article analyzes the brand identity of the city of Murmansk (2015) with the use of qualitative research methods: an expert interview with the designer of Murmansk identity.
Real estate housing market in former USSR was highly regulated and standardized in terms of product offering. Transition economy slightly changes this situation – consumers start to demand the new quality of housing while developers begin to implement the advanced building technologies and change the product attributes. The structure of consumers’ preferences forms product utility, which could be measured by using decompositional methods. We implement hierarchical information integration approach that let us represent the real estate housing object utility as a sum of part-worth utilities of various attributes. Using special research design we estimate the utility of current market offer. The results highlight that the reason of poor sales performance could underlie in the gap between consumers’ preferences and real estate housing items configuration.
The paper examines the structure, governance, and balance sheets of state-controlled banks in Russia, which accounted for over 55 percent of the total assets in the country's banking system in early 2012. The author offers a credible estimate of the size of the country's state banking sector by including banks that are indirectly owned by public organizations. Contrary to some predictions based on the theoretical literature on economic transition, he explains the relatively high profitability and efficiency of Russian state-controlled banks by pointing to their competitive position in such functions as acquisition and disposal of assets on behalf of the government. Also suggested in the paper is a different way of looking at market concentration in Russia (by consolidating the market shares of core state-controlled banks), which produces a picture of a more concentrated market than officially reported. Lastly, one of the author's interesting conclusions is that China provides a better benchmark than the formerly centrally planned economies of Central and Eastern Europe by which to assess the viability of state ownership of banks in Russia and to evaluate the country's banking sector.
The paper examines the principles for the supervision of financial conglomerates proposed by BCBS in the consultative document published in December 2011. Moreover, the article proposes a number of suggestions worked out by the authors within the HSE research team.
This work looks at a model of spatial election competition with two candidates who can spend effort in order to increase their popularity through advertisement. It is shown that under certain condition the political programs of the candidates will be different. The work derives the comparative statics of equilibrium policy platform and campaign spending with respect the distribution of voter policy preferences and the proportionality of the electoral system. In particular, it is whown that the equilibrium does not exist if the policy preferences are distributed over too narrow an interval.
The article examines "regulatory requirements" as a subject of state control over business in Russia. The author deliberately does not use the term "the rule of law". The article states that a set of requirements for business is wider than the legislative regulation.
First, the article analyzes the regulatory nature of the requirements, especially in the technical field. The requirements are considered in relation to the rule of law. The article explores approaches to the definition of regulatory requirements in Russian legal science. The author analyzes legislation definitions for a set of requirements for business. The author concludes that regulatory requirements are not always identical to the rule of law. Regulatory requirements are a set of obligatory requirements for entrepreneurs’ economic activity. Validation failure leads to negative consequences.
Second, the article analyzes the problems of the regulatory requirements in practice. Lack of information about the requirements, their irrelevance and inconsistency are problems of the regulatory requirements in Russia.
Many requirements regulating economic activity are not compatible with the current development level of science and technology. The problems are analyzed on the basis of the Russian judicial practice and annual monitoring reports by Higher School of Economics.
Finally, the author provides an approach to the possible solution of the regulatory requirements’ problem. The author proposes to create a nationwide Internet portal about regulatory requirements. The portal should contain full information about all regulatory requirements. The author recommends extending moratorium on the use of the requirements adopted by the bodies and organizations of the former USSR government.
At present many industries reveal tendency for setting up of vertically integrated companies (VIC) the structure of which unites all technological processes. This tendency proved its efficiency in oil industry where coordination of all successive stages of technological process, namely, oil prospecting and production -oil transportation - oil processing - oil chemistry - oil products and oil chemicals marketing, is necessary. The article considers specific features of introduction of "personnel management" module at enterprises of oil and gas industry.
vertically integrated companies; personnel management