Do U.S. citizens support government intervention in agriculture? Implications for the political economy of agricultural protection

The persistence of agricultural protectionism throughout the world is intriguing given the widely recognized benefits of free trade. The political economy literature over the last decades has considered groups’ interest, politicians’ preferences, and their interactions within domestic politics as the primary forces driving agricultural protection. Yet, a growing body of studies suggests that it would be judicious to weigh in consumers’ or taxpayers’ perspectives in deciphering the nature of agricultural protection. This study examines U.S. citizens’ preferences about government intervention in agriculture and trade. Results show that they are in strong support of agricultural protection and their perceptions of national food security, family farms, environmental sustainability, and multifunctionality of agriculture play a significant role in shaping their support/opposition toward government intervention. The conventional political economy literature theorizes that consumers or taxpayers would oppose public policies that increase their tax burden; however, in the case of the farm sector, they have little incentive to voice their objections given the costs of farm programs are spread across a large number of consumers and taxpayers. U.S. citizens’ support for government involvement in agriculture as reported in this and other prior studies does not lend support for such political economy explanation.     

Tourist experience quality and loyalty to an island destination: the moderating impact of destination image

This study aims to explore the relationships among tourist experience quality, perceived value, perceived price reasonableness, tourist satisfaction with tour experience, and loyalty to an island destination by considering the moderating effect of destination image. The survey was distributed in person at an international airport. The findings revealed that tourists’ involvement with tours is the core of perceived value and price reasonableness, which increases tourists’ satisfaction. Perceived value is a stronger mediator between involvement and satisfaction than perceived price reasonableness. The moderating effect of island image is also uncovered. The theoretical and practical implications are discussed based on the findings.     

The Importance of an Innovative Product Design on Customer Behavior: Development and Validation of a Scale

The importance of innovative product design (IPD) has increased in recent years because customers' decision‐making factors have changed from product price to product design. However, a definition and measurement of IPD have not been developed adequately. Building on the customer perspective, this study defines IPD and develops its standard measurement with three product design attributes: aesthetics, features, and ergonomics. Results of the empirical test indicate strong evidence for the reliability and validity of the measurement. Overall, this study shows that our measurement captures unique customer perceptions on product innovativeness from the product design. Additionally, theoretical and practical implications are discussed.     

Content analysis of fake consumer reviews by survey-based text categorization

As the influence of online consumer reviews grows, deceptive reviews are a worsening problem, betraying consumers' trust in reviews by pretending to be authentic and informative. This research identifies factors that can separate deceptive reviews from genuine ones. First, we create a novel means of detection by contrasting authentic versus fake word patterns specific to a given domain (e.g., hotel services). We use a survey on a crowdsourcing platform to obtain both genuine and deceptive reviews of hotels. We learned the word patterns from each category to discriminate genuine reviews from fake ones for positively and negatively evaluated reviews, respectively. We show that our All Terms procedure outperforms current benchmark methods in computational linguistics and marketing. Our extended analysis reveals the factors that determine fake reviews (e.g., a lack of details, present- and future-time orientation, and emotional exaggeration) and the factors influencing people's willingness to write fake reviews (including social media trust, product quality consciousness, deal proneness, hedonic and utilitarian consumption, prosocial behavior, and individualism). We also use our procedure to analyze more than 250,000 real-world hotel reviews to detect fake reviews and identify the hotel and review characteristics influencing review fakery in the industry (e.g., star rating, franchise hotel, hotel size, room price, review timing, and review rating).     

Firm heterogeneity, productivity and spatially bounded knowledge externalities

In this paper, we argue that conceptually disentangling the ‘context versus composition’ aspects of regional growth is a multilevel issue. By applying multilevel models (also called random-effects models), we show (1) the importance of considering firm-specific characteristics simultaneously with region-specific characteristics, as we find that a large part of what is traditionally assigned to the impact of the region should be assigned to firm-specific characteristics and (2) that existing single-level methodologies can be problematic, as they are vulnerable to the charge of estimating significance levels that are too liberally assigned and promote exaggerations. This is illustrated empirically by showing that single-level approaches would lead to the conclusion that innovation spillovers are highly significant in a setting of Dutch urban growth differentials, while multilevel analyses shows less liberally assigned significance levels. We conclude that multilevel-effect models better fit research questions that combine firm and spatial characteristics simultaneously, especially because they allow firm-specific characteristics to be differently linked to their regional contexts.     

Barriers to the “key supplierization” of the firm

The phenomenon of key supply management (KSM) in business companies is far less investigated than the phenomenon of key account management (KAM) which beneficiates, both in practice and in an academic context, from a growing interest. This article is based on the empirical analysis of a sample of 10 international companies which have recently launched KSM programmes or are currently working on launching such programs. It examines the difficulties these companies come up against when implementing such programmes and proposes to organize these difficulties around three dimensions: 1) the difficulties in implementing real supplier portfolio approaches; 2) the narrow view of value co-creation with suppliers, and 3) the persistent lack of integration of the purchasing function with other internal functions within the company. The conclusion of the article is that KSM is far from being a mere symmetric phenomenon of KAM. Several implications are then discussed in relation to the implementation of KSM programmes within companies.     

Readability of accountants’ communications with small business—Some Australian evidence

This paper explores the readability of a new and non-corporate narrative area, accountants’ communications with small business. The distinctive motivations, agendas and interests of small business managers are considered. The findings are informed by rationales from Shearer's (2002) thesis on the influence of neoclassical economics on accounting discourse. The study finds low readability accentuated by potentially low reader interest with accounting documents composed according to conventional accounting's rules and statutory requirements. Higher readability and document content which informs small business managers’ interests is evident when accountants are not compelled to author documents with reference to these professional rules and legislation.     

Vertical alliance portfolios and the business performance of small technology-based firms

This paper discusses how small technology-based firms (STBFs) effectively manage vertical alliances by choosing proper alliance structures to both manage challenges and pursue higher performance. We consider the main challenges of STBFs’ vertical alliances as opportunistic risk and coordination concern between partners, and derive four types of vertical alliance portfolios with different extents of risk and return based on the relational perspective. We then examine the impact of each portfolio on performance and the moderating effect of STBFs’ age and technological capability. The results show the portfolio focusing on bilateral alliances is not helpful for STBFs, while the others are useful. The portfolio focusing on unilateral alliances promises young firms better performance, while hybrid portfolios of unilateral and bilateral alliances are more helpful for older STBFs. In hybrid portfolios, bilateral alliance in the upstream is beneficial to specific technology-focused firms, while bilateral alliance in the downstream is recommended to STBFs whose technology covers a wider range.