The impact of online reviews on inbound travellers’ decision making

This paper explores the hotel experience of inbound travellers to five-star boutique hotels of Sri Lanka and ascertains how hotels have satisfied their customers’ expectations through assessment of the positive and negative reviews. A qualitative research method of content analysis incorporating quantitative elements is engaged for this study. Data comes from a survey conducted by the TripAdvisor website. This study reveals that all dimensions of service quality played an equally important role from the perspective of customers. However, consumers are not satisfied due to the presence of perceived quality gaps. It was revealed that to maximise customer satisfaction, boutique hotels need to refer to online reviews to obtain authentic information from their guests. Sri Lanka is making strong efforts to support its tourism industry which got affected by the 2019 Sri Lanka Easter bombings, therefore the findings of this paper will undoubtedly be useful for the trade.     

Addressing privacy predicaments in the digital marketplace: A power‐relations perspective

The utilization and governance of the internet and adjacent disruptive technologies have created numerous challenges to ensuring consumer online privacy. This study employs the power–responsibility equilibrium theory to explore emerging online privacy issues in the data‐driven marketplace. This exploratory study, based on semi‐structured interviews, explains why online shopping consumers are increasingly worried about their privacy and why they behave in a manner that could be detrimental to the consumer–vendor relationship. The findings suggest that deficiencies of corporate privacy responsibility and regulatory protection have deprived consumers of privacy empowerment. These deficiencies have also accentuated perceived privacy contract violations to trigger privacy concerns and subsequent defensive responses. We identify enhancement of consumer privacy empowerment and assuagement of privacy contract violations as two separate mechanisms of addressing online privacy issues. We also highlight the importance of addressing power and responsibility dynamics for maintaining a healthy information‐exchange environment.     

An investigation of the usage of capital budgeting techniques by small and medium enterprises

Quality & Quantity - This paper examines the extent or usage of capital budgeting techniques in Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) and the effect of non-financial factors on the choice of...     

Is there a link between alcohol consumption and the level of poverty?

In many developing countries, in addition to household income, there are a number of other socio-economic determinants of poverty. One such hidden socio-economic factor is alcohol consumption and some studies argue that there is a link between alcohol consumption and poverty. The main aim of this study is to measure the effects of alcohol consumption on the level of poverty in a systematic way. Using Sri Lanka as a case study, this article demonstrates that the consumption of various types of alcoholic beverages, particularly, the illegal beverages, has a significant positive association with the level of poverty. The findings of this study suggest that, in Sri Lanka, the consumption of illegal alcoholic beverages increases the likelihood of being in a poor household by 2–3%. The results of this study also find that households who are characterized as nonpoor but are just above the poverty line behave more like the poor rather than the nonpoor in terms of alcohol consumption. Some of the conclusions from this Sri Lankan case study can be applied to other developing countries.     

Measuring and Explaining the Impact of Productive Efficiency on Economic Development

A limitation of most empirical cross-country studies that focuson determinants of GDP or GDP growth is that they fail to distinguishexplicitly between inputs used in production and conditionsthat facilitate production. For example, physical capital, humancapital, and labor are production inputs, whereas the qualityof institutions, macroeconomic stability, and market qualityare conditions that facilitate production. This article takesthis distinction seriously and uses a stochastic frontier approachto study factors affecting economic performance. A panel dataset of 71 countries for the 1980–98 period is used toestimate a production frontier with physical capital, humancapital, and labor as inputs. The article also analyzes whatdrives productive efficiency, using the institutional framework,macroeconomic stability, market quality, and urbanization aspossible explanatory factors. Urbanization turns out to be animportant determinant, with the rule of law, inflation rate,and market quality also affecting productive efficiency.     

Tourism-induced mobilities and transformation of indigenous cultures: where is the Vedda community in Sri Lanka heading to?*

ABSTRACT

Mobilities that encapsulate global- and local-level movement of people, capital, information, material and intangible heritage across boundaries influence distant socio-cultural structures and processes linking them to evolving global networks. Indigenous cultural tourism is a catalyst of mobilities that expose the habitats of distant spaces. This paper examines the Vedda community’s concurrent context and indigenous tourism-informed mobilities’ contributions to transforming their cultural character through anthropological approaches. Data were collected through a series of interviews, overt observation and review of documents. Findings indicate that the Vedda are susceptible to the influence of mobilities within and without the indigenous tourism practices. Enforced restructuring and governance push Vedda towards novel livelihoods, while automobilities, image, communication and geopolitical mobilities challenge Vedda heritage and temporalities. Vedda lead a hybrid life; real one being modern and the other being pseudo attributed for tourist attraction. Indigenous cultural tourism causes losing the inherited meaning of their cultural values. The Vedda, with their anatomically proven Mesolithic inheritance, have drawn world’s attention to preserving and recognizing them before their unique culture is subsumed by the modern world. Findings indicate that tourism planners should realize the significance of distinctive Vedda heritage parallel to commercial gains of tourism.     

Treasury return predictability and investor sentiment

We document that the Treasury market investor sentiment (TSENT) of institutional investors is a powerful predictor of bond risk premia. Specifically, TSENT positively predicts Treasury bond excess returns in and out of sample. The forecasting gains of TSENT are incremental to those in conventional bond return predictors: Fama–Bliss forward spreads, Cochrane–Piazzesi forward rate factor, and Ludvigson–Ng macro factor, as well as equity market sentiment proxies such as the investor sentiment index and the partial least squares sentiment index. Asset allocation analysis indicates the forecasting power of TSENT is economically valuable to investors. Finally, we show that the time-series bond risk premia predictability associated with TSENT relates to its predictive power for macroeconomic performance, such as payroll employment, unemployment rate, and industrial production.