PERSONALITY TRAITS AND THE PERCEPTION OF MACROECONOMIC INDICATORS: SURVEY EVIDENCE

I examine the determinants of both perceived inflation and unemployment in one single survey and include Big Five traits in the analysis. This is the first survey on this topic in Germany. My sample consists of 1771 students from different fields and levels. Using PhD students’ estimates as a reference, I create categories for underestimation and overestimation of both variables. Multinomial logit regressions show that females overestimate both variables. Education and news consumption reduce misestimation. A higher level of Neuroticism is related with a higher probability to overestimate unemployment. Overstating (understating) one indicator is associated with overstating (understating) the other.     

An experimental study to investigate the impact of image interactivity on the perception of luxury in an online shopping context

The current study investigates whether image interactivity can positively influence luxury perceptions in a virtual shopping environment, by offering shoppers a feeling of telepresence. 185 respondents were referred to either an image interactive or non-interactive virtual luxury store and completed an online questionnaire afterwards to measure their luxury perception. The results of this study show that image interactivity leads to higher perceptions of exclusivity, quality, hedonism and extended self due to a higher perceived telepresence. This study offers some guidelines for luxury brands to retain their luxury perception high in a virtual shopping environment.     

Factors influencing theme park visitor brand-switching behaviour as based on visitor perception

With the development of theme parks, which represent a multi-million-pound industry worldwide, research investigating the factors affecting theme park visitor brand-switching behaviour is an important method for improving theme park competitiveness. In the present work, models and research hypothesis are constructed based on visitor perception, and the survey data are collected and analysed to assess the hypothesis and to revise the conceptual model in this paper. The results indicate that there are seven factors influencing visitor brand-switching behaviour: ‘visitor variety-seeking', ‘visitor satisfaction', ‘switching cost', ‘perceived value', ‘competitor attraction', ‘theme park image' and ‘visitor involvement'. The perceived value and visitor satisfaction strongly influence brand-switching behaviour as intermediate variables. Visitor variety-seeking and competitor attraction are positively related to visitor brand switching behaviour, whereas the other five factors are negatively related to visitor brand-switching behaviour.     

Willingness to pay for safety improvements in passenger air travel

The risk of being involved in an airplane accident is largely ignored in air passengers’ choice models. The reason presumably is that it is hard to operationalize, because objective safety indicators often involve extremely low probabilities that are hard to grasp and interpret by passengers. In this paper, we propose an operationalization that is based on the perception of safety, which is easy to understand and resonates that perceptions often influence decisions stronger than objective variables. We conceptualize that passengers form a safety perception score of a particular flight based on their perception of airline and route attributes and that this score in turn is traded-off against other flight attributes, such as ticket costs, to arrive at a flight choice. In line with this conceptualization, two stated preference experiments are conducted. In a first experiment, combinations of airline and route attributes are evaluated in terms of safety that is captured on a rating scale. In a second experiment, safety perception is treated as an attribute and traded-off against other flight attributes to arrive at a flight choice. The paper presents the results of a regression and a Panel Mixed Logit model estimated from responses obtained from a convenience sample of 161 air passengers recruited in the Netherlands. The results of both models are then combined to calculate the willingness to pay values for improvements made to a range of airline and route attributes, taking into account socio-demographic variables and psychological traits. As expected, the results indicate that the willingness to pay for improving safety decreases with higher initial safety levels.     

Implicit attitudes toward risk: the construction and validation of the measurement method

Methods that are typically used to examine individual differences in risk attitudes (e.g. lotteries, dilemmas, questionnaires) require participants to explicitly declare their willingness to take risk. Therefore, they may be biased by the need for self-presentation or situational characteristics such as time pressure and cognitive constraints that lead to more spontaneous and automatic processing of risk-related information. The aim of this study was to construct an indirect measure of risk attitudes that is free of these methodological limitations. The method based on the Implicit Association Test shows high internal reliability and satisfactory stability over time. It correlates moderately with different explicit measures of risk attitudes that are related to sensation seeking. Finally, it is characterized by a high predictive power. Adding the implicit measure to the set of independent variables representing declarative evaluations of risk attitudes significantly improved the model predicting risky real-life behavior. We argue that the indirect assessment of risk attitudes presented in this paper may be used as an universal measure of people’s risk propensity that is free of biases related to self-presentation and situational factors.     

The Significance of CSF Among Enterprises in Latvia： An In-depth Analysis

The present research paper is dedicated to the in-depth analysis of the significance of critical-to-success factors （CSF） among enterprises in Latvia. The goal is to distinguish and find key success factors of Latvian companies who survived the economic crisis, which started in 2008, and executed the enabling objectives of the paper. Research methodology involves the analysis of the existing theoretical literature, in-depth interviews with the top management representatives of large Latvian business entities were interviewed by GFK （Custom Research Baltic agency） on behalf of the authors of the paper. It is found out that 10 largest industries for the big companies are： fuel retail and wholesale, energetics, food retail and wholesale, chemical products, logistics, metal processing, financial services, information technologies service and production, passenger transportation, and telecommunication services. For medium companies such industries are： food retail and wholesale, logistics, fuel retail and wholesale, wood processing, automotive industry, construction, financial services, pharmaceutical products, metal processing, and beverage wholesale and production. The authors also scrutinised 72 articles of 38 Forbes magazine archiving from the years 2010-2014. Thirty CSF were defmed. The most significant CSF according to the Forbes interviews are specific market niche, export, technological innovations, and high quality of products and services. The in-depth interviews with the top management representatives prove the importance of the above mentioned factors. Relevant recommendations are provided in the end of the paper.     

Premium auctions and risk preferences: An experimental study

In premium auctions, the highest losing bidder receives a reward from the seller. This paper studies the private value English premium auction (EPA) for different risk attitudes of bidders. We explicitly derive the symmetric equilibrium for bidders with CARA utilities and conduct an experimental study to test the theoretical predictions. In our experiment, subjects are sorted into risk-averse and risk-loving groups. We find that revenues in the EPA are significantly higher when bidders are risk loving rather than risk averse. These results are partly consistent with theory and confirm the general view that bidders' risk preferences constitute an important factor that affects bidding behavior and consequently also the seller's expected revenue. However, individual subjects rarely follow the equilibrium strategy and revenue in our experiment is lower than in the symmetric equilibrium.     

国际金融危机下完善中小企业税收优惠制度的法律思考

税收优惠是国家在税收方面给予纳税人和征税对象的各种优待的总称。在中国,99%的企业是中小企业。长期以来我国都有关于中小企业税收优惠的规定,从而促进了中小企业的快速发展。此次国际金融危机使我国中小企业的发展面临严峻挑战,保护中小企业迫切需要税收优惠政策的支持。完善中小企业税收优惠制度,对于帮助中小企业顺利度过难关,促进国民经济发展,维护社会稳定均有重大意义。本文通过借鉴当前金融危机形势下各国关于中小企业税收优惠制度的调整经验,对我国现存相关立法进行了全面剖析,并就完善该项制度提出几点建议。     

论“自省”的存在论意蕴

自省是儒家道德实践的重要方法。目前有关自省的研究侧重于道德领域,学界对自省的存在论这一层面给予的关注比较少,因而通过对自省的存在论这一层面的发掘,可以从理论上澄清自省可以更好地认识你自己,阐明自省中蕴含着二个层面的存在形态即意向性的自我意识和非意向性的自身意识。在哲学认识领域内,研究自省可以克服盲目性,提高自觉性。在实践上,重建对网络的自由关系乃是整个中华民族值得反省的问题。