Loss or gain? The role of message framing in hotel guests’ recycling behaviour

Abstract

One of the major challenges for the tourism sector is enacting sustainable behaviours. A key strategy for hoteliers is developing persuasive messages, with the goal of encouraging guests’ voluntary participation in green programmes. Through the lens of prospect theory and construal level theory, the present study investigates to what extent a loss or gain-framed message influences recycling of hotel guests via a field and a laboratory experiment. The field experiment tests the moderating effect of message construal level (concrete or abstract) on the message frame that activate pro-environmental behaviour, while the laboratory study delves further into the mechanism by showing that perceived self-efficacy is the mechanism behind the activation of these behaviours. The findings from both studies suggest that hotel guests are more likely to engage in recycling behaviour when a concrete message is paired with a loss-framed message, because of a greater perceived self-efficacy. These results help to understand the theoretical psychological mechanisms and offer managerial implications for operators on how to engage guests to be active partners in sustainable tourism behaviours.     

Case Study: The Engineering Economics of RFID in Specialized Manufacturing

Calibrated tools are essential to producing highly specialized, defect-free parts. These tools are used in many processes in specialty manufacturing operations. Personnel could use the improper tool if the calibrated tool has been lost or stolen. This results in reduced business productivity and increased cost due to poor quality. This study demonstrates the cost effectiveness of using a radio frequency identification (RFID) system to track calibrated tools throughout a production facility. The costs of RFID tool tracking are described and return on investments of plausible scenarios are determined. Also, sensitivity analysis is performed utilizing spider plot and tornado diagrams.     

Family control and adjustment to the optimal level of cash holding

Given the predominance of family control in most European corporations, understanding how this type of ownership affects firms’ cash holding policy is important. The literature has yet to address this subject satisfactorily; therefore, we outline a way to model how family firms define their cash policy, specifically, the way in which they adjust their cash holding to an optimal level. We base our analysis on trade-off theory and the precautionary motive for holding cash. Our empirical results show that family firms adjust their cash holding level more aggressively than non-family firms, and, therefore, family firms are capable of achieving optimal cash holding faster and more efficiently than non-family firms. Further, we find that family firms have a heterogeneous cash policy; in particular, young family firms, financially constrained family firms, and family firms that operate in countries with strong investor protection adjust their cash holding more aggressively.     

DOES SOCIAL SECURITY AFFECT RETIREMENT AND LABOR SUPPLY? EVIDENCE FROM CHILE

This paper explores the effects of the social security system on retirement and labor supply decisions. Due to the regulations established by Chilean social security law reform, two social security systems coexist in Chile: the “Pay‐As‐You‐Go” and the individual account system. The coexistence of the systems allows us to better understand the effects of both social security systems on retirement and labor supply. We find that (1) larger benefits in any social security system induce earlier retirement and (2) larger variance of benefits in the individual account system induces later retirement. We do not find major impacts of social security on labor supply of individuals in the labor force.     

Modeling fertilizer externalities around Palo Verde National Park,Costa Rica

Irrigated rice farming in Costa Rica involves use of agrochemicals that pollute important wetlands ecosystems, such as the Palo Verde National Park in the northeastern province of Guanacaste. We characterize rice farming in this region, apply duality theory to estimate conditional factor demand for fertilizer, and then simulate the impacts of alternative policies on fertilizer use. Using a normalized profit function, we also estimate policy impacts on farmer profits. As expected, prices of rice seeds and fertilizer significantly affect use of fertilizer. Price incentives or taxes could encourage farming practices that reduce the threat to downstream ecosystems.     

Socioeconomic Index for Income and Poverty Prediction: A Sufficient Dimension Reduction Approach

The present paper introduces a novel method for the construction of Socioeconomic Status (SES) indices that are specific to a target variable of interest. It is based on the Sufficient Dimension Reduction (SDR) paradigm and uses a factorized model-based approach to simultaneously deal with predictor variables of mixed nature (i.e. quantitative, binary, and ordinal), which are usual in microeconomic data. These SES indices also identify relevant predictor variables using a two-step regularized matrix factorization approach. Using data from household surveys for Argentina (Encuesta Permanente de Hogares-EPH), the proposed method is compared with other existing dimension reduction algorithms such as standard Principal Component Analysis (PCA) and its version for mixed variables, regression on the full set of variables and Least Absolute Shrinkage and Selection Operator regression (LASSO).     

The effect of presidential election outcomes on alcohol drinking

The growing political polarization and the increasing use of social media have been linked to straining social ties worldwide. The 2016 presidential elections in the United States reflected this trend with reports of fear and anxiety among voters. We examine how election results can be linked to episodes of anxiety through the use of alcohol as self-medication. We analyze a daily dataset of household purchases of alcohol in the weeks following presidential elections. We find that, within 30 days from Election Day, a 10 percentage point increase in support for the losing candidate increases alcohol expenditure by 1.1%. The effect is driven by counties with a higher share of supporters of the losing candidate and is robust to controlling more flexibly for omitted variables related to alcohol consumption. The increase in alcohol consumption is present in the 2016 elections and absent in the previous three presidential elections.     

Contextualizing employment outcomes in family business research: current findings and future research avenues

Management Review Quarterly - The empirical evidence of family business phenomenon in terms of employment outcomes is contradictory highlighting the micro–macro gap in the existing research....