Transformative travel as a sustainable market niche for protected areas: a new development,marketing and conservation model

Many protected areas worldwide are mandated to provide visitor enjoyment and sustainable heritage conservation but face growing challenges and competition. To satisfy modern aspirational markets, parks must design meaningful experiences delivering long-lasting participant benefits that cultivate visitation rates and a conservation constituency. Transformative travel can deliver such benefits through participants’ psycho-physiological transformation but market insights critical for experience development in parks are lacking. Our systematic quantitative review of 126 transformative travel articles provides those insights, linking experiential characteristics, participant traits and motivations to experience outcomes according to five transformative travel typologies pertinent to parks: health and wellness, nature-based physical activity, spiritual, cultural and volunteering travel. We identified 35 travel motivations, 14 participant traits and 23 experience characteristics linked to transformation and 28 purposefully or incidentally realised benefits. Transformative travel improved participants’ psychological, physiological, social, economic and environmental conditions, as well as satisfaction with and destination loyalty towards parks. Socio-demographic characteristics and propensity for independent versus social travel shaped choice of travel experience. Our results are uniquely conceptualised in a transformative travel framework and transformative market niche model which we apply to sustainable experience development and marketing in parks. We identify implementation possibilities and areas for future research and monitoring.     

Livestock Disease Indemnity Design When Moral Hazard Is Followed by Adverse Selection

Averting or limiting the outbreak of infectious disease in domestic livestock herds is an economic and potential human health issue that involves the government and individual livestock producers. Producers have private information about preventive biosecurity measures they adopt on their farms prior to outbreak ( ex ante moral hazard), and following outbreak they possess private information about whether or not their herd is infected ( ex post adverse selection). We investigate how indemnity payments can be designed to provide incentives to producers to invest in biosecurity and report infection to the government in the presence of asymmetric information. We compare the relative magnitude of the first- and second-best levels of biosecurity investment and indemnity payments to demonstrate the tradeoff between risk sharing and efficiency, and we discuss the implications for status quo U.S. policy.     

Bailouts and the modeling of bank distress

In this article, we develop a model for predicting distress events among large banks. We show that a bailout possibility induces different behaviors among small and large banks, and the proposed failure prediction model for large banks is thus considerably different from that for small banks. Major bank-level fundamentals show opposite conjecture directions for large versus small banks. The Tier 1 capital ratio, which is under the scrutiny of regulators and investors, has almost no distress prediction power among large banks. However, banks rescued by governments tend to maintain a lower Tier 1 ratio. The cost of funding in large banks is negatively correlated with the probability of failure, reflecting the fact that lenders internalize the too-big-to-fail (TBTF) policy and demand a lower interest rate from TBTF banks.     

Dispersion in Dispersion: Measuring Establishment-Level Differences in Productivity

We describe new experimental productivity dispersion statistics, Dispersion Statistics on Productivity (DiSP), jointly produced by the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) and the Census Bureau, that complement the official BLS industry-level productivity statistics. The BLS has a long history of producing industry-level productivity statistics, which represent the average establishment-level productivity within industries when appropriately weighted. These statistics cannot, however, tell us about the variation in productivity levels across establishments within those industries. Dispersion in productivity across businesses can provide information about the nature of competition and frictions within sectors and the sources of rising wage inequality across businesses. DiSP data show enormous differences in productivity across establishments within industries in the manufacturing sector. We find substantial variation in dispersion across industries, increasing dispersion from 1997 to 2016, and countercyclical total factor productivity dispersion. We hope DiSP will enable further research into understanding productivity differences across industries and establishments and over time.     

Device-mediated customer behaviour on the internet: A systematic literature review

The proliferation of smartphones, tablets and other digital devices in addition to traditional computers has transformed the Internet into a device-mediated environment. While these devices provide immediate access to similar Internet sources, they differ significantly in their characteristics, such as screen size, operation mode and context of use. As a consequence, behaviours on the Internet along the customer journey vary substantially depending on the device used. To summarize the fast-growing body of research on device-mediated customer behaviour, a systematic, framework-based literature review of 59 articles from the last decade was conducted. Through an examination of the antecedents, decisions and outcomes investigated in the publications, the review presents a conceptual framework that highlights the relation between device characteristics, decision processes and behavioural outcomes. The review further summarizes the theories, contexts and methods employed in the studies and sets an extensive future research agenda. We found that the extant literature lacks comprehensive theories and clear definitions of digital devices in the omnichannel environment. Furthermore, existing findings should be generalized for other contexts (e.g. industries and countries) and validated via the introduction of other research designs and methods. The understanding of device-mediated behaviour and the consequently arising marketing measures remains scarce. Thus, this review advances the comprehension of customer behaviour on the Internet and provides researchers and practitioners with information on the implications for customer experience and omnichannel management.