Metaverse as a disruptive technology revolutionising tourism management and marketing

Metaverse is the next disruptive technology that will impact society in the coming decades, by enabling immersive experiences in both virtual and physical environments. Although still conceptual, Metaverse converges the physical and digital universe, allowing users to seamlessly traverse between them. Digital immersion offers opportunities for people to travel in time, supporting users to experience virtually ancient encounters, space explorations or dangerous natural phenomena, such as volcano eruptions. Users can explore immersive environments for working, learning, transacting, exploring interests and socialising with others. This is already evident in gaming ecosystems, where gamers effectively interact in the metaverse. Although still experimental, Metaverse is expected to revolutionize travel and tourism management and marketing. It empowers destination awareness, positioning and branding, as well as coordination and management, through digital twins. Metaverse provides opportunities to support trip planning, interaction and engagement, effectively transforming consumer behaviour. Visiting and engaging with destinations virtually is expected to motivate real travel, rather than replace it. This paper provides a vision of how Metaverse can revolutionize tourism experiences and transform tourism management and marketing. Drawing on a systematic review of scholarly works, articles from media and industry reports, this study defines and conceptualizes the Metaverse ecosystem for tourism and travel. It explores the foundations of the disruptions that Metaverse brings to tourism destinations and organisations and identifies the building blocks of Metaverse tourism. The study outlines research directions so that the tourism industry can take full advantage of the Metaverse capabilities and opportunities emerging as well as identify challenges for the future.     

珠三角工业设计与工业互动比较研究：双重需求拉动与设计驱动增长的区域验证

动态比较珠三角工业发展阶段和设计水平不同的典型区域内，工业用户和最终消费者用户双重需求拉动设计创新以及设计驱动工业增长作用机制的异同，提出克服互动系统短板并因地制宜实施设计驱动转型升级的对策建议。基于SVAR建模的脉冲响应和方差分解分析发现：珠三角工业确实可以通过工业设计创新驱动实现内生性可持续增长，而设计水平的地区差异对设计驱动绩效有调节作用；工业发展质量和结构欠佳，无法有效拉动区域工业设计创新，是珠三角多数地区工业设计有效需求不足的根本原因。区域工业设计与工业互动系统的短板是缺乏内行和挑剔的最终消费者有效需求。最后基于模型稳健性检验，提出因地制宜科学实施设计驱动发展战略的对策建议。     

Performance evaluation of China's high-tech innovation process: Analysis based on the innovation value chain

The Chinese high-tech industry has developed greatly since the beginning of China's “National High-tech R&D (863) Program” and “China Torch Program”. This paper introduces a conceptual model extended from the innovation value chain model to simultaneously estimate the R&D and commercialization efficiencies for the high-tech industries of 29 provincial-level regions in China. To match reality, a network DEA incorporating both shared inputs and additional intermediate inputs is constructed to open the “black box” view of decision making units used in single-stage DEA. This study is the first attempt to link the R&D and commercialization with a solid theoretical foundation and feasible mathematical methods. The empirical findings show that most of the 29 regions have low efficiency in the commercialization sub-process compared to the R&D sub-process, although there are regional differences in China's high-tech industry. Pearson correlation shows that the R&D sub-process is not closely correlated to the commercialization sub-process in terms of efficiency. Our analysis can provide information for the formulation of policies to achieve high innovation efficiency.     

Overconfidence and tax avoidance: The role of CEO and CFO interaction

We investigate how overconfident CEOs and CFOs may interact to influence firms’ tax avoidance. We adopt an equity measure to capture overconfident CEOs and CFOs and utilize multiple measures to identify companies’ tax-avoidance activities. We document that CFOs, as CEOs’ business partners, play an important role in facilitating and executing overconfident CEOs’ decisions in regard to tax avoidance. Specifically, we find that companies are more likely to engage in tax-avoidance activities when they have both overconfident CEOs and overconfident CFOs, compared with companies that have other combinations of CEO/CFO overconfidence (e.g., an overconfident CEO with a non-overconfident CFO), which is consistent with the False Consensus Effect Theory. Our study helps investors, regulators, and policymakers understand companies’ decision-making processes with regard to tax avoidance.     

Stochastic Frontier Estimation of Market Power in the Food Industries

We use a modified version of the stochastic frontier model to estimate oligopoly markups above the perfectly competitive frontier, separating out deterministic markups from purely stochastic markups. Using data from 42 US food processing industries between 1990 and 2010, empirical results indicate a widespread incidence of oligopoly power, with Lerner indexes averaging approximately 21%. Further, the estimated markups increase with industrial concentration but decrease with price elasticities and imports. Finally, the estimated Lerner indexes are in the range of previous food industry estimates using New Empirical Industrial Organization (NEIO) models.     

Characteristics and implications of Chinese macroeconomic data revisions

The research examining macroeconomic data for developed economies suggests that an understanding of the nature of data revisions is important both for the production of accurate macroeconomic forecasts and for forecast evaluation. This paper focuses on Chinese data, for which there has been substantial debate about data quality for some time. The key finding in this paper is that, while it is true that the Chinese macroeconomic data revisions are not well-behaved, they are not very different from similarly-timed U.S. macroeconomic data revisions. The positive bias in Chinese real GDP revisions is a result of the fast-growing service sector, which is notably hard to measure in real time. A better understanding of the revisions process is particularly helpful for studies of the forecast errors from surveys of forecasters, where the choice of the vintage for outcomes may have an impact on the estimated forecast errors.     

Reviewing the DATAS of aviation research data: Diversity,availability, tractability,applicability, and sources

The field of aviation research is entering the era of big data. While data-driven advancements in aviation have clearly brought about applicable models and results with immediate implications, we argue that the influx of aviation data should be better characterized and documented to enable more efficient and standardized usage. To this end, we examine 200 well-cited research articles from sub-disciplines ranging from revenue management to air traffic control published on or after 2010 in order to analyze the diversity, availability, tractability, applicability, and sources (DATAS) of data utilized in aviation research. We find high levels of data diversity within aviation research, with 16 data categories ranging from air traffic flow management-type data to data from distributed sensors in line with the Internet-of-Things (IoT) paradigm. We identified a dominance of proprietary, non-public data in aviation research, with 68% of the 200 research articles utilizing solely proprietary data in deriving their results, and a further 8% utilizing a mixture of proprietary and publicly available data. The pervasiveness of proprietary data has implications on reproducibility and extending research results. We also highlight the increasing tractability of the data by surveying the computational power required to process the data sets, and present vignettes of applications and results that stem from these data-driven studies. Finally, we propose several recommendations regarding standardizing data source nomenclature as well as increasing the availability of and usage of publicly available data.     

Economic Competition,Policy Interdependence,and Labour Rights

Extant scholarship treats national policies concerning labour rights as a function of economic factors and yet neglects influences of policies among economically competing states. Relying on the policy interdependence theory, this study argues that labour rights policy in a state is dependent on its economic competitors’ labour policy decisions. It specifically maintains that the intensifying competition for foreign direct investment and exports as well as against imports channels negative externalities of deteriorating labour protection in competing states which drives expansive downward policy mimicking and leads to a global decline in labour rights – a race to the bottom. Utilising spatial econometric technique to analyse a new data on labour rights for the period 1994–2009, it finds that labour rights practices are interdependent among economic competitors and experience global deteriorations; whereas labour rights laws remain largely independent due to high policy and reputational costs of lowering them and show more fluctuations.     

Reward meritocracy or nepotism: The case of independent financial advisors appointed by Chinese listed companies

As independent financial advisors, securities firms are the core intermediaries in major asset reorganization (MAR) of listed companies. Furthermore, they play the dual roles of transaction and authentication. Based on this institutional background, this paper studies how listed companies choose between industry experience (“meritocracy”) and relationships (“nepotism”). Using the MAR of A-share listed companies from 2008 to 2013 as the sample, this paper shows that higher transaction costs (i.e., greater demand for the transaction function of advisors) are related to the higher possibility of advisors with weaker relationships and more industry experience being hired. It also shows that higher suspicion of tunneling (i.e., greater demand for the signal of fairness associated with advisors’ authentication function) is related to the higher possibility of advisors with weaker relationships being hired, but it is not significantly related to whether advisors have more or less industry experience. This paper also shows that reputation has a certain governance effect on the negative consequences of relationship. For the most part, listed companies reward meritocracy but not nepotism when appointing independent financial advisors.     

Use and misuse of information in supply chain forecasting of promotion effects

Demand forecasting is critical to sales and operations planning (S&OP), but the effects of sales promotions can be difficult to forecast. Typically, a baseline statistical forecast is judgmentally adjusted on receipt of information from different departments. However, much of this information either has no predictive value or its value is unknown. Research into base rate discounting has suggested that such information may distract forecasters from the average uplift and reduce accuracy. This has been investigated in situations in which forecasters were able to adjust the statistical forecasts for promotions via a forecasting support system (FSS). In two ecologically valid experiments, forecasters were provided with the mean level of promotion uplift, a baseline statistical forecast, and quantitative and qualitative information. However, the forecasters were distracted from the base rate and misinterpreted the information available to them. These findings have important implications for the design of organizational S&OP processes, and for the implementation of FSSs.