Preference to Local Food vs. Preference to “National” and Regional Food

In the environment of globalisation and progressive liberalisation of the market, many small local producers were excluded from the market as uncompetitive to the producers realising scale economy due to their presence in large global market and being able to meet requirements of large retailers’ chains. As there is growing consumers’ interest to recover their identity, those of the local cultures and traditional values, there is a new chance for those small local producers. The problems of locally produced food recently awakened interest and aroused many discussions of practitioners and scholars as well. The aim of the presented study has been to test the parameters that influenced preferences among food product branded as national, regional, or local product. Presented models identified several consumers’ attitudes and feelings that are the main predictors of the relation between consumers’ preferences for local food and the preferences for national or regional food. Food made by local producers is perceived by consumers as being of higher quality and better complying with their habits and requirements than “regional” or “national” food products.     

A socio-political approach to exploring the innovation culture in post-socialist countries: the case of Croatia

Innovation culture and the social determinants of national innovation capacities have rarely been empirically researched in innovation-weak post-socialist countries despite the fact that innovation is considered one of the main drivers of their economic growth and convergence. Applying an alternative approach to identifying the factors that shape a national innovation culture is challenging as there has been little empirical research in the area. Moreover, the global cross-cultural concepts of national innovation culture hold little relevance for post-socialist countries. The trans-disciplinary socio-political approach employed in this article relies on the qualitative analysis of the dominant concepts used in political economy and sociology to identify the socio-cultural and political aspects of Croatia’s post-socialist transformation into a capitalist country. This is presented as one of the critical formative determinants of innovation culture. Croatia is chosen as a typical innovation-weak post-socialist country, where innovation remains weak. The analysis presented here suggests that transition-induced factors dominated by ‘crony variance of capitalism’ have an equal, if not a greater, suppressive impact on the current innovation culture than standard explanations based on the socio-cultural heritage of socialism and cultural inertia.     

Analysing the fulfilment of service recovery paradox in retailing

The literature dealing with the Service Recovery Paradox (SRP) is vast, but some results are confusing and contradictory. In addition to this, scarce attention has been paid to service recovery in the context of retailing. This paper aims at verifying the compliance of the SRP in the context of retailing. Considering a sample of consumers that experienced a failure in the service delivered by a retailer and are very satisfied with the solution provided by the store employee, we test first the fulfilment of the SRP in the context of retailing. Secondly, we test the existence of significant differences in the customer satisfaction levels with the store before and after experiencing the problem considering several factors potentially influencing the impact of service recovery on customer satisfaction, therefore providing an encompassing analysis of the SRP and its main influencing variables, including some potential factors not previously explored. While we do not find evidence of the fulfilment of the SRP in retailing, differences in customer satisfaction before and after service recovery are highly related with consumer sociodemographic characteristics and shopping experience. Findings raise some practical implications.     

DISENTANGLING DEMAND AND SUPPLY SHOCKS IN THE CRUDE OIL MARKET: HOW TO CHECK SIGN RESTRICTIONS IN STRUCTURAL VARS

Sign restrictions have become increasingly popular for identifying shocks in structural vector autoregressive (SVAR) models. So far there are no techniques for validating the shocks identified via such restrictions. Although in an ideal setting the sign restrictions specify shocks of interest, sign restrictions may be invalidated by measurement errors, data adjustments or omitted variables. We model changes in the volatility of the shocks via a Markov switching (MS) mechanism and use this device to give the data a chance to object to sign restrictions. The approach is illustrated by considering a small model for the market of crude oil. Earlier findings that oil supply shocks explain only a very small fraction of movements in the price of oil are confirmed and it is found that the importance of aggregate demand shocks for oil price movements has declined since the mid 1980s. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

On the Discursive Construction of Corporate Social Responsibility in Advertising Agencies

As the interest in corporate social responsibility (CSR) within advertising industry is growing, this paper explores the discourse on CSR among employees in advertising agencies. Different sensemaking dimensions are taken into account to examine how employees, as one of the key stakeholders involved in the joint meaning construction, make sense of CSR. In addition, this paper studies the legitimation approaches that employees use to address CSR of advertising agencies. The empirical evidence of discursive examples also indicates that there is a linkage between sensemaking and legitimation perspective in CSR discourse analysis and supports the idea that both may be a potential route toward institutionalization of CSR inside organizations or sectors.     

Estimating the Intertemporal Risk–Return Tradeoff Using the Implied Cost of Capital

We argue that the implied cost of capital (ICC), computed using earnings forecasts, is useful in capturing time variation in expected stock returns. First, we show theoretically that ICC is perfectly correlated with the conditional expected stock return under plausible conditions. Second, our simulations show that ICC is helpful in detecting an intertemporal risk–return relation, even when earnings forecasts are poor. Finally, in empirical analysis, we construct the time series of ICC for the G–7 countries. We find a positive relation between the conditional mean and variance of stock returns, at both the country level and the world market level.     

Geosite assessments: comparison of methods and results

Geotourism as a rapidly evolving and attractive tourism form expands into many regions. This ‘new’ tourism form brings new research issues to be solved including, e.g. geosite identification, geosite assessment, geopark establishment, (geo)tourist trail definitions. One of the biggest challenges of researchers not only in the field of geotourism is to set specific value of an individual locality. The aim of this paper is to compare selected assessment methods of geosites. Different quantitative methods were selected due to fact that it is possible to compare final score of assessments. The results show that using different assessment methods on selected localities gives different results and geosite rankings. Based on this fact, further research in the field of geosite assessment is needed for (geo)tourism planning and management as discussed in this paper.     

Restoring tourist flows and regenerating city's image: the case of Belgrade

The aim of this research is to examine the effects of the post-1990 transition on the relocation of tourism and changes in the structure of tourism over the last 20 years in Belgrade. Economic and social development altered spatial relations of tourist factors and elements. Apart from the old city core, new tourist zones and directions appeared. Tourist flows and economic challenges influenced the rationalisation of doing business and relocating the hotels outside the central city municipalities. Belgrade has been acknowledged as a low-cost destination of fun and nightlife and the city's new image has attracted more foreign tourists. Both the volume of foreign tourists and their countries of origin have changed significantly over the last several years. However, there have been negligible economic effects on the city's economy, despite this increase in the number of foreign tourists. In conclusion, we examine the implications of new directions in tourism development for the future position of Belgrade as a tourist destination in a competitive European market.     

Coefficients of ergodicity for Markov chains with uncertain parameters

One of the central considerations in the theory of Markov chains is their convergence to an equilibrium. Coefficients of ergodicity provide an efficient method for such an analysis. Besides giving sufficient and sometimes necessary conditions for convergence, they additionally measure its rate. In this paper we explore coefficients of ergodicity for the case of imprecise Markov chains. The latter provide a convenient way of modelling dynamical systems where parameters are not determined precisely. In such cases a tool for measuring the rate of convergence is even more important than in the case of precisely determined Markov chains, since most of the existing methods of estimating the limit distributions are iterative. We define a new coefficient of ergodicity that provides necessary and sufficient conditions for convergence of the most commonly used class of imprecise Markov chains. This so-called weak coefficient of ergodicity is defined through an endowment of the structure of a metric space to the class of imprecise probabilities. Therefore we first make a detailed analysis of the metric properties of imprecise probabilities.