Assessment of blockchain applications in travel and tourism industry

Quality & Quantity - Blockchain technology (BCT) is a network-based system, which is developed to create secure, smart and transparent distributed ledgers. Recently, BCT has been gaining more...     

Forecasting Turkish real GDP growth in a data-rich environment

This study generates nowcasts and forecasts for the growth rate of the gross domestic product in Turkey using 204 daily financial series with mixed data sa     

What has New Zealand gained from The FTA with China?: Two counterfactual analyses†

We investigate the effects of the 2008 New Zealand (NZ)–China free trade agreement (FTA) on exports from NZ to China, and real GDP per capita in NZ using the synthetic control method to estimate the counterfactuals. NZ exports to China were more than 200% higher in 2014 than what they would have had the FTA never been signed. NZ's food and live animals exports to China were more than 180% higher in 2014 than the counterfactual. Our counterfactuals indicate a small but negative effect of the FTA on NZ's real GDP per capita between 2009 and 2012.     

Negative Spillovers Across Partnerships for Responsible Innovation: Evidence from the 2014 Ebola Outbreak

Humanity faces ongoing and contemporaneous grand challenges. Occasionally, abrupt shocks escalate a grand challenge’s salience over others. Prior research has advocated forming partnerships to address grand challenges via responsible innovation. Yet, it remains unclear how temporal changes in the salience of a grand challenge impact innovation performances of partnerships. We address this research gap by bridging the literature on issue salience, responsible innovation and interorganizational relationships. We argue that shocks either aid or harm the performance of partnerships for responsible innovation depending on whether their domains are directly or indirectly affected. The Ebola outbreak in 2014 sets the empirical context to test our theory. We find that while the innovation performance of Ebola partnerships formed after the outbreak rose eleven-fold, the performance of partnerships treating Influenza fell by 84.9 per cent. Our theory and findings have immediate implications for today’s COVID-19 outbreak, cautioning against salience shifts among concurrent grand challenges.     

Consumers' awareness,acceptance and attitudes towards functional foods in Turkey

The aim of the present study was to investigate consumers' awareness, acceptance and attitudes towards functional foods in Turkey. Eight hundred and eight people participated in this study: aged between 20 and 80 years, 38.5% were male and 61.5% were female. Participants were given a questionnaire and were asked to fill it in by themselves to minimize the influence of the interviewer. Results indicated that socio‐demographic characteristics such as age, education level and income level are important indicators of consumers' awareness and consumption of functional food. The results show that the female respondents were 2.987 times more aware of functional food than the male respondents. Similarly, the likelihood of respondents having awareness of functional food was 1.431 times greater among those who had a higher educational level than among those with a lower educational level. Consumers who used vitamin supplements were 1.228 times more aware of functional food than other consumers. The results show that older respondents were 3.395 times more aware of functional food than younger respondents. Respondents with a history of familial diseases were more likely than others to have consumed margarine with plant sterol, fruit juices fortified with vitamin C, and breakfast cereals fortified with vitamins and minerals. Those with a diet‐related problem were more likely to have consumed cholesterol‐lowering products than those without a problem. As a conclusion, this study has shown that socio‐demographic characteristics such as age, education and income levels, and prices are important indicators that influence consumers' awareness and consumption of functional food. These results suggest that this type of knowledge could affect consumers' interest in functional foods, and therefore educational strategies might be necessary to encourage the consumption of functional foods.     

Dynamic routing of time-sensitive air cargo using real-time information

The route planning of time-sensitive air-cargo is becoming more important with the growing air-network congestion and delays. We consider a freight forwarder’s routing of a time-sensitive air-cargo in the presence of real-time and historical information regarding flight availability, departure delays and travel times. A departure delay estimation model is developed to account for real-time information inaccuracy. A novel Markov decision model is formulated and solved with online backward induction. Through synthetic experiments and case studies, we demonstrate that dynamic routing with real-time information can improve delivery reliability and reduce expected cost.     

Economic viability of private commons: Framework and guidelines for profitability

Ongoing regulatory reforms have led to several novel spectrum sharing models under the general umbrella of dynamic spectrum sharing. The private commons model introduced by FCC in 2004 allows spectrum licensees to provide secondary access to spectrum on an opportunistic basis while retaining ownership. Since wireless communication systems are typically overprovisioned in order to deliver service-level guarantees to (primary) users under short-term load variations, this model bears significant potential by facilitating utilization of temporal and spatial surplus of capacity through serving secondary users at possibly different service levels. A potential barrier to adoption of the private commons model is the uncertainty about secondary price–demand relationship which is difficult to predict in an emerging market: A selected price for secondary access may be profitable for some values of secondary demand but not for others, leading to a profound uncertainty about ultimate benefit of spectrum sharing. This paper aims to eliminate such an uncertainty by devising concrete guidelines and methods for profitability. The paper establishes that the price of secondary spectrum access can be chosen to guarantee profitability for any value of secondary demand: It is shown that for both the coordinated and uncoordinated commons regimes a profitable price should exceed a threshold value, which can be calculated. Hence profitability of private commons is insensitive to the demand function. This observation has two complementary interpretations: From a business perspective it provides a constructive approach to profitability; and from a regulatory perspective it provides reassurance that private commons is a healthy model. The paper also leverages the insensitivity property and outlines a technique to further enhance revenue via iterative spectrum offerings.     

OPTIMAL MONETARY POLICY WITH THE STICKY INFORMATION MODEL OF PRICE ADJUSTMENT: INFLATION OR PRICE‐LEVEL TARGETING?

I investigate the optimal monetary policy in a New Keynesian macroeconomic framework with the sticky information model of price adjustment. The model is solved for optimal policy, and welfare implications of three alternative monetary policy regimes under this optimal policy are compared when there is a cost‐push shock to the economy. These monetary policy regimes are the unconstrained policy, price‐level targeting and inflation targeting regimes. The results illustrate that optimal policy depends on the degree of price stickiness and the persistence of the shock. Inflation targeting emerges as the optimal policy if prices are flexible enough or the shock is persistent enough. However, the unconstrained policy or price‐level targeting might be preferable to inflation targeting if prices are not very flexible and the shock is not very persistent. The results also show that as prices become more flexible, the welfare loss usually gets bigger.     

Trans‐Tasman Transmission of Government Spending Shocks

This paper investigates the international transmission of fiscal shocks between two closely‐linked, open economies. We estimate impulse response functions using a semi‐structural vector auto regressive (VAR) model and quarterly data from Australia and New Zealand for the period 1973:3–2008:4. We compare our empirical results with impulse response functions from a calibrated two‐country international real business cycle model with habit formation and adjustment costs to investment. We show that a positive shock to Australian government consumption leads to an increase in Australian output initially and then to a decline in the medium term, while the New Zealand output is negatively affected both in the short and medium term. This result is in line with the recent literature that reports beggar‐thy‐neighbour effect of positive government spending shocks.