在酒店快速扩张中保持风险控制力

对于酒店风险管控,"预判并提前防范"远胜于临危救火。据中国旅游研究院监控数据显示,2011年中国酒店客房总数为200万间套,预计2016年可达到500万间套,截至当前中国还有1700家星级酒店正在建设之中,全球近70%的国际一流酒店集团齐聚中国,并把这里作为未来十年的主要投资市场,在中国一     

Concentration in Retail Distribution: Measurement and Significance

Given the lack of economic studies of market structure in retail distribution there is a need to repair some 40 years of neglect. Concentration in UK retailing is here systematically measured for the first time, not using Census of Distribution or other government sources, but based on the identification of the leading 150 or so companies, and the clear identification of turnover and profits derived from UK retailing. The paper discusses the significance of these findings related to the years 1970–78 but the true importance lies in the establishment of a comprehensive, computerised data base, which can be up-dated, and on which long-term trends can be established in conjunction with behavioural studies of mergers, innovatory activities and pricing behaviour. In this way, a structure-behaviour-structure model may lay the foundations for a theory of competition in retailing, besides various policy implications.     

Customer Satisfaction in Retail Banking

Professional services firms (PSFs) engaged in international operations present a unique challenge for governments. They directly and indirectly affect governmental policies and the agencies that enforce these policies through policy development, problem solving, and implementation. Yet, governments that seek to advance rational, forward thinking public policy have little, if any, regulatory control over the input and influence of these professional experts. International professional service firms face an increasingly competitive marketplace and complex challenges that demand skill sets that are markedly different from those characteristically required of consumer service companies. This study identifies the qualities of the best performing PSFs that engage clients worldwide. Implications are discussed for governments to ensure the greater public good.     

Enjoyment of the Shopping Experience: Impact on Customers' Repatronage Intentions and Gender Influence

In this paper the authors investigate enjoyment of the shopping experience, its influence on consumers' intention to repatronise a regional shopping centre and the effect of gender differences on shopping enjoyment. Four dimensions of shopping enjoyment are proposed and a 16-item measure is developed to assess 536 consumer perceptions of the shopping experience across five counties in the United Kingdom. Findings indicate that shopping experience enjoyment has a significant positive influence upon customers' repatronage intentions. Furthermore, men are found to have a stronger relationship of enjoyment with repatronage than women. The implications of these results are discussed, together with managerial implications, study limitations, and future research directions.     

Enhancing mental models,analogical transfer,and performance in strategic decision making

Recent research suggests that managers often make strategic decisions in novel situations by utilizing past experiences to reason by analogy. However, there is substantial evidence that decision makers often fail to identify and apply knowledge about one situation to a similarly structured situation. Two experimental studies investigated the mechanisms impacting knowledge transfer from one managerial situation (the source) to an analogous situation. The results show that exposure to variation in the source situation improves transfer performance. Variation decreases performance in the short term but improves learning and increases analogical transfer. Higher performance on and systematic search of the source situation also increase transfer performance. These results yield important implications for enhancing analogical transfer in strategic decision making and for future research on reasoning by analogy. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Contract selection and performance in competitive bidding for electricity generation

Third parties bidding to supply utilities with electric generation facilities is a new and increasingly important practice. Six states have either establishes bidding programmes or are considering doing so. The paper uses data from Maine, the first state to use electric generation bidding, to examine which bids are awarded contracts, and which contracts fail to fulfill their provisions. Results show that bid price plays a very small role, if any, in the selection process.     

Estimation employing a priori information within mass appraisal and hedonic pricing models

Both statistical appraisal and hedonic pricing models decompose houses into a set of individual characteristics. Regression estimates yield the contribution of each characteristic to total value. Unfortunately, straightforward application of OLS may produce untenable results such as implausible coefficient magnitudes or incorrect signs. Often the suspected cause is multicollinearity. This article examines the effect on estimation efficiency of differing levels of multicollinearity, R², and a priori information in the form of sub-market cost data, by comparing inequality restricted least squares (IRLS) with OLS in a series of Monte Carlo experiments. The IRLS procedure investigated here hybridizes the statistical market approach implemented by OLS, and the more traditional cost approach. The experiments show dramatic gains in estimation efficiency from exploiting a priori information through IRLS.