‘Swift Rail’—funding local rail transit through smarter growth

Many medium-size cities suffer from severe traffic congestion and poor accessibility, limiting their potential to improve their economy, environment, and social equity. These problems could be addressed by creating high-quality transit linking such cities with suburban and other catchment areas through use of existing rail lines and abandoned former railway alignments. This concept, termed ‘Swift Rail’, would call for an innovative approach to local railway and transport development.     

Visitors’ learning for environmental sustainability: Testing short- and long-term impacts of wildlife tourism experiences using structural equation modelling

Wildlife tourism experiences have the potential to positively impact tourists’ awareness, appreciation and actions in relation to the specific wildlife they encounter and the environment in general. This paper investigates the extent of such impact across multiple sites, and uses Structural Equation Modelling to identify factors that best predict positive long-term learning and environmental behaviour change outcomes. Three sets of variables were measured – visitors’ entering attributes (including pre-visit environmental orientation and motivation for the visit), salient aspects of the experience, and short- and long-term learning and environmental behaviour change outcomes. Although attributes such as pre-visit commitment and motivation to learn were among the best predictors of the long-term impact of the experience, there was evidence that aspects of the experience were also important. In particular, reflective engagement which involved cognitive and affective processing of the experience was found to be associated with short- and long-term environmental learning outcomes. The implications for wildlife tourism managers are discussed.     

The increasing service intensity of European manufacturing

In this study, using fixed-effects models based on the manufacturing sector for 18 European Union countries for the period 1995–2008, we find that the employment share of service occupations is significantly and positively related to the output share of producer services in manufacturing. In particular, the increase in the output share of services accounts for an average of 13% of the increase in the share of service occupations. When service occupations are disaggregated by different categories, we find that the output share of services is significantly and positively related to the share of managers, professionals, and technicians. In contrast, the remaining service occupations do not benefit from the increase in service revenues. Finally, professionals and technicians are complementary to purchased services (from either domestic or foreign suppliers).     

Are multi‐resort ski conglomerates more efficient?

This paper compares the efficiency of large ski resort conglomerates with independent ski resorts using data on four countries (Canada, France, United States, Switzerland). Using the stochastic frontier production approach, I find that ski resorts that are owned and managed by the Intrawest group are significantly more efficient than independent ski resorts. The efficiency gap is about nine percentage points on average. The remaining ski resort conglomerates (American Skiing, Vail Resorts Inc., and Compagnie des Alpes SA) do not operate more efficiently than independent ski resorts. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Explaining the American Dream: Telling Chinese Academics What'Liberty and Justice For All'Means Taxes Even an Eager Audience

Abstract . For more than a generation, contemporary mainland Chinese have lived under first a military dictatorship and now a political party dictatorship. How to explain to an eager Chinese academic audience what the American dream of ‘liberty and justice for all’—realized only in part in some areas but approached progressively nearer in others—really means? The U.S. has predominantly a capitalist system but its people are committed to equality of opportunity. It tempers ‘rugged individualism’ by concern for the poor, the handicapped and the unfortunate. It has many serious economic, social and cultural problems but its citizens, drawn from most of the peoples of the world—not the special interest groups trying to benefit at the expense of others—are determined to solve them equitably and rationally. The trade and budget deficits are related to government instrumentalities.     

User,Use & Utility Research

Business and Information Systems Engineering (BISE) is at a turning point. Planning, designing, developing and operating IT used to be a management task of a few elites in public ad-ministrations and corporations. But the continuous digitization of nearly all areas of life changes the IT landscape fundamentally. Success in this new era requires putting the human perspective – the digital user – at the very heart of the new digitized service-led economy. BISE faces not just a temporary trend but a complex socio-technical phenomenon with far-reaching implications. The challenges are manifold and have major consequences for all stakeholders, both in information systems and management research as well as in practice. Corporate processes have to be re-designed from the ground up, starting with the user’s perspective, thus putting usage experience and utility of the individual center stage. The digital service economy leads to highly personalized application systems while organizational functions are being fragmented. Entirely new ways of interacting with information systems, in particular beyond desktop IT, are being invented and established. These fundamental challenges require novel approaches with regards to innovation and development methods as well as adequate concepts for enterprise or service system architectures. Gigantic amounts of data are being generated at an accelerating rate by an increasing number of devices – data that need to be managed. In order to tackle these extraordinary challenges we introduce ‘user, use & utility’ as a new field of BISE that focuses primarily on the digital user, his or her usage behavior and the utility associated with system usage in the digitized service-led economy. The research objectives encompass the development of theories, methods and tools for systematic requirement elicitation, systems design, and business development for successful Business and Information Systems Engineering in a digitized economy – information systems that digital users enjoy using. This challenge calls for leveraging insights from various scientific disciplines such as Design, Engineering, Computer Science, Psychology and Sociology. BISE can provide an integrated perspective, thereby assuming a pivotal role within the digitized service led economy.     

Corporate patents and knowledge sourcing from universities

This paper provides empirical evidence on the link between different external knowledge sourcing strategies from universities and firms’ innovation output measured by the number of patent applications. Three strategies for acquiring external knowledge are distinguished: buying, cooperating and contracting out. The empirical model is based on the instrumental variable version of the ordered probit model. Geographical distance to local universities is employed as an instrument for the different knowledge sourcing strategies. The empirical results show that buying knowledge from universities is significantly positively related to the number of patent applications, while cooperating with universities and contracting out does not have an impact. This also holds for buying knowledge from domestic universities.     

The Ranchers' Choice Cooperative: What Happened?

This case considers a "new generation" value-added cooperative in southern Colorado that marketed kosher and natural beef and lamb products until a fire in the processing plant halted operations. The case profiles the history and strategy of the Ranchers' Choice Cooperative and illustrates the challenges of transforming a good idea into a profitable one.     

Cross-sectional earnings risk and occupational sorting: The role of risk attitudes

This paper investigates to what extent individuals' risk preferences are correlated with the cross-sectional earnings risk of their occupation. We exploit data from the German Socio-Economic Panel, which contains a direct survey question about willingness to take risks that has been shown to be a behaviorally valid measure of risk aversion. As a measure of earnings risk, we use the cross-sectional variation in earnings that is left unexplained by human capital variables in Mincerian wage regressions. Our evidence shows that individuals with low willingness to take risks are more likely to work in occupations with low earnings risk. This pattern is found regardless of the level of occupation categories, region, gender and labor market experience.