Understanding the Benefit Sought by Rural Tourists and Accommodation Preferences: A South Korea Case

Rural tourism has been widely acknowledged for its effectiveness in contributing to rural areas’ development. With strong government support, rural tourism has developed in many countries during the last several decades. This study aims to improve the understanding regarding tourism in Korean rural areas using a segmentation approach. The responses of 442 tourists in 23 rural villages were analyzed. Four segments of tourists were identified based on the different benefits they sought for their vacation in rural establishments. The estimation of a multinomial logit model determined the socio‐demographic characteristics and the preferred accommodations of a rural tourist. Discussions and implications of the detailed findings are provided in the last section. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The Impact of Gender Similarity on Employee Satisfaction at Work: A Review and Re‐Evaluation*

abstract We used data from the British 1998 Workplace Employee Relations Survey (WERS98) to examine key unanswered questions about the impact of gender similarity on employee satisfaction at work. The study sample consisted of 11,848 men and 11,278 women from over 1700 workplaces across Britain. In line with gender‐specific compositional arguments, the effects of gender similarity were found to be asymmetrical for men and women, with similarity tending to have a greater positive impact on men than on women. The effects involved were primarily linear in nature. Net of the potentially confounding influence of other factors, they were also found to be quite weak, weaker than has commonly been suggested in the literature.     

The extension of social security coverage in developing countries

We study the dynamic general equilibrium effects of introducing a social pension program to elderly informal sector workers in developing countries who lack formal risk sharing mechanisms against income and longevity risks. To this end, we formulate a stochastic dynamic general equilibrium model that incorporates defining features of developing countries: a large informal sector, private transfers as an informal safety net, and a non-universal social security system. We find that the extension of retirement benefits to informal sector workers results in efficiency losses due to adverse effects on capital accumulation and the allocation of resources across formal and informal sectors. Despite these losses recipients of social pensions experience welfare gains as the positive insurance effects attributed to the extension of a social insurance system dominate. The welfare gains crucially depend on the skill distribution, private intra-family transfers and the specific tax used to finance the expansion.     

Product survival analysis for the App Store

We empirically analyze both free and paid products on the top 100 Free and Grossing charts in the Korea App Store using Weibull parametric survival analysis on the product level. The findings are as follows: First, influences of ranking, customer ratings, and contents size on product survival are different for free and paid products. Customer ratings and contents size critically affect product survival when the price is zero. Second, the early entrant advantage exists in App Store, which results from a ranking system in the App Store and consumer learning. However, the effect of early entrant advantage differs between the Free and Grossing charts; the benefit of early entrant advantage is greater on the Free chart than that on the Grossing chart. Finally, we provide a competitive profit model that is related to free products.     

Product Market Competition and Lobbying Coordination in the U.S. Mobile Telecommunications Industry

This paper empirically investigates market behavior and firms?? lobbying in a unified structural setup. In a sequential game, where firms lobby for regulation before they compete in the product market, we derive a testable measure of lobbying coordination. Applying the setting to the early U.S. cellular services industry, we find that lobbying expenditures, as measured by campaign contributions, and market conduct were consistent with a one-shot Nash equilibrium and that price caps were binding on average. Furthermore, campaign contributions from cellular firms effectively lowered the burden of the price caps and reduced production costs.     

The effects of consumer empowerment on risk perception and satisfaction with food consumption

This study intends to measure consumer empowerment related to food consumption and determine its effect on food risk perception and satisfaction with food consumption. Data were derived from an analysis of the “2017 Research on Food Consumption Behaviour” by the Korea Rural Economic Institute. Consumer empowerment, risk perception and satisfaction with food consumption were measured using a 5‐point Likert scale. The differences in consumer empowerment according to gender, age, educational level and monthly income were statistically significant. The factors that affected risk perception were information use, healthy eating, consumer rights, consumer responsibility and monthly income. The higher the scores for information use, healthy eating and consumer responsibility, the higher the score for satisfaction with food consumption.     

The more others care,the more you share? – Social contagion as a stardom trigger of social media superstars –

Emerging superstars on social media platforms reshape the media landscape. This research analyses social contagion as a stardom trigger of social media superstars (SMS). We argue that in addition to serving as a quality indicator, the number of observed consumers of SMS performances also indicates the suitability of discussing the SMS performances with others. We experimentally manipulated the number of previous views of a YouTube video and find that a high number of previous views significantly increases the perceived quality and the video’s discussion suitability even when holding all objective video characteristics constant. We discuss implications for aspiring SMS and (online) marketers.     

The Effect of Litigation Risk Increase on Big N Auditor Exits and Audit Quality in the Korean Savings Banking Industry

This study investigates whether an increase in litigation risk results in Big N auditors leaving the industry and examines the impact of this increase on audit quality. Using a sample of Korean savings banks from 2009 to 2015, the study finds that the proportion of Big N auditors sharply decreases after a savings bank crisis, suggesting that Big N auditors are likely to reject riskier clients, while audit quality is unchanged. The results provide new evidence that an increase in litigation risk does not necessarily increase audit quality. The findings have academic and practical implications, as they suggest that policies for improving audit quality should consider auditors’ strategies in response to litigation risk.     

Willingness to compete: Between‐ and within‐gender comparisons

This paper introduces a new instrument to elicit individual willingness to compete (WTC). Experimental data corroborate the standard result according to which the average WTC of men is higher than the average WTC of women. However, our WTC measure reveals significant within‐gender heterogeneity: 10% of women are extremely competitive, and 13% of men are extremely averse to competition. Gender differences in WTC persist after controlling for ability, self‐confidence, tolerance for risk, and the gender of the partner.