Madhu Viswanathan’s research while affiliated with Loyola Marymount University and other places

This commentary reiterates the essence of the subsistence marketplaces stream in light of the focal paper. The subsistence marketplaces stream provides a granular, micro-level understanding of the intersection of poverty and marketplaces. The term ‘subsistence marketplaces’ was deliberately coined to keep the focus on preexisting marketplaces to learn from in order to design solutions for all contexts. Such marketplaces should be studied in their own right, and not as a means to a preconceived end, whether it be for outside companies or government policy and so forth. We study subsistence marketplaces inside-out rather than outside-in – beginning at the micro level and being bottom-up in deriving implications for many sectors of society. We traverse a journey which is in the opposite direction to beginning with ideological lenses, wherein we have developed an ecosystem of research, forums, curricular innovations and community outreach.

The present opening paper aims to introduce the Forum on Marketing and Bottom of the Pyramid. The four Forum papers are analyzed from the Bottom-Up perspective of the Subsistence Marketplace. This approach seeks understanding consumers, entrepreneurs and individual and circumstantial behaviors to the daily life of the people in poverty environment, at the micro level. KEYWORDS: Subsistence marketplace, bottom of the pyramid, bottom-up approach. RESUMO O presente texto de abertura tem como objetivo apresentar o Fórum de Marketing e Base da Pirâmide. Os quatro artigos do Fórum são analisados sob a perspectiva Bottom-Up da abordagem do Mercado de Subsistência. Essa abordagem busca compreender os consumidores, os empreendedores e os comportamentos individuais e circunstanciais ao cotidiano das pessoas no ambiente de pobreza, no nível micro. PALAVRAS-CHAVE: Mercado de subsistência, base da pirâmide, abordagem bottom-up.

Research summary : Strategy scholars increasingly conduct research in nontraditional contexts. Such efforts often require the assistance of third‐party intermediaries who understand local culture, norms, and language. This reliance on intermediation in primary or secondary data collection can elicit agency breakdowns that call into question the reliability, analyzability, and interpretability of responses. Herein, we investigate the causes and consequences of intermediary bias in the form of faked data and we offer Response Pattern Analysis as a statistical solution for identifying and removing such problematic data. By explicating the effect, illustrating how we detected it, and performing a controlled field experiment in a developing country to test the effectiveness of our methodological solution, we encourage researchers to continue to seek data and build theory from unique and understudied settings . Managerial summary : Any form of survey research contains the risk of interviewers faking data. This risk is particularly difficult to mitigate in Base‐of‐Pyramid or developing country contexts where researchers have to rely on intermediaries and forms of control are limited. We provide a statistical technique to identify a faking interviewer's ex post data collection, and remove the associated data prior to analysis. Using a field experiment where we instruct interviewers to fake the data, we demonstrate that the algorithm we employ achieves a 90 percent accuracy in terms of differentiating faking from nonfaking interviewers . Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

We discuss an international immersion research experience conducted by an interdisciplinary team of business and environmental engineering students and faculty in Tanzania. Using this experience as “data,” we bring out methodological and substantive issues in studying the intersection of poverty and the environment. The approach we describe is bottom-up, beginning with micro-level details of life circumstances. Such micro-level details are often the most challenging to learn and the most neglected in terms of informing practice. Our work speaks to a number of issues such as organizing a short research immersion for effectiveness and efficiency, covering different units of analysis in terms of individuals, households, communities, village-level leadership, and the outside ecosystem of organizations using a bottom-up approach, and combining natural science analytical testing with social science to focus on the substantive domains of environments in subsistence contexts.

There are millions of “subsistence” entrepreneurs around the world, located primarily in developing countries, engaging in micro enterprise to eke out a survival living when other labor market options become unavailable. However, the vast majority of them are trapped in a “survival and maintenance” cycle. This paper focuses on a phenomenon involving a subset of subsistence entrepreneurs who do manage to thrive and grow their enterprise. We label the phenomenon transformative subsistence entrepreneurship, reflecting (1) significant positive change in their personal, social and economic well-being, and (2) significant positive influence on their immediate communities. Drawing on 18 in-depth qualitative interviews, we show how the phenomenon plays out and how transformative subsistence entrepreneurs carry out vital marketing activities in their local exchange contexts, rising above substantial life challenges. We contend that the contributions of a network of such transformative subsistence entrepreneurs, each seen at a micro enterprise level of analysis, can accumulate and coalesce to emerge as the backbone of the informal economy at a macroeconomic level.

We report that for highly damaging hurricanes, not for less damaging hurricanes, name femininity predicts more fatalities (1). We suggest this may be because, for damaging storms, factors such as storm names that motivate protective action are more predictive of survival. Bakkensen and Larson (2) assert that our modeling suffers from endogeneity and lack of adjustment for population. The authors report reversed or no effect of hurricane names in models with completely different inputs. We show below that their approach and analyses are flawed, yielding incorrect conclusions.

Our article (1) reports evidence for a relationship between femininity of hurricane names and fatality rates, along with experimental evidence that female-named storms elicit lower risk perceptions and preparedness intentions. In response, Malter (2) cites some bloggers’ critiques about inclusion of hurricanes from the era of female-only names, interpretation of results, and external validity of experiments. Christensen and Christensen (3) assert that the conclusions are invalidated by another significant interaction in the model. We show below that these critiques arise from inappropriate statistical treatments or other misunderstandings and do not qualify our findings.

Significance Meteorologists and geoscientists have called for greater consideration of social science factors that predict responses to natural hazards. We answer this call by highlighting the influence of an unexplored social factor, gender-based expectations, on the human toll of hurricanes that are assigned gendered names. Feminine-named hurricanes (vs. masculine-named hurricanes) cause significantly more deaths, apparently because they lead to lower perceived risk and consequently less preparedness. Using names such as Eloise or Charlie for referencing hurricanes has been thought by meteorologists to enhance the clarity and recall of storm information. We show that this practice also taps into well-developed and widely held gender stereotypes, with potentially deadly consequences. Implications are discussed for understanding and shaping human responses to natural hazard warnings.