VFR travel: It is underestimated

Visiting Friends and Relatives (VFR) travel is a substantial form of tourism worldwide. In Australia, official data measure VFR in one of two ways - purpose of visit or type of accommodation. However, this is only a measurement of those factors; it is not a measure of the size by volume of VFR travel. Yet tourism practitioners often mistakenly use these data to state the size of VFR travel in their destination. Based on quantitative research undertaken in three contrasting destinations in Australia, estimates for the size of VFR travel in those destinations is provided. These results highlight that using official data for measuring VFR travel will underestimate this segment in any Australian destination. Using the VFR definitional model as a conceptual model, this research has estimated that VFR travel represents 48% of Australia’s total overnight tourism market.     

An integrated production–distribution model for the dynamic location and allocation problem with safety stock optimization

The design and management of a multi-stage production–distribution system is one of the most critical problems in logistics and in facility management. Companies need to be able to evaluate and design different configurations for their logistic networks as quickly as possible. This means coordinating the entire supply chain effectively in order to minimize costs and simultaneously optimize facilities location, the allocation of customer demand to production/distribution centers, the inbound and outbound transportation activities, the product flows between production and/or warehousing facilities, the reverse logistics activities, etc.Full optimization of supply chain is achieved by integrating strategic, tactical, and operational decision-making in terms of the design, management, and control of activities. The cost-based and mixed-integer programming model presented in this study has been developed to support management in making the following decisions: the number of facilities (e.g. warehousing systems, distribution centers), the choice of their locations and the assignment of customer demand to them, and also incorporate tactical decisions regarding inventory control, production rates, and service-level determination in a stochastic environment. This paper presents an original model for the dynamic location–allocation problem with control of customer service level and safety stock optimization. An experimental analysis identifies the most critical factors affecting the logistics cost, and to finish, an industrial application is illustrated demonstrating the effectiveness of the proposed optimization approach.     

Entrepreneurship and Independent Professionals: Social and Economic Logics

This study discusses stereotypes of entrepreneurship by looking at the overlapping areas of entrepreneurship, self-employment and professions. Professions are part of the category of self-employment and the study presents empirical findings drawn from a unique empirical dataset from Finland: a survey (N?=?733) including freelance journalists, translators, interpreters and artists at the blurred boundaries between waged work and entrepreneurship. Findings reveal that the professions are clearly different and the manifestations of entrepreneurship vary, reflecting the work and the labor market situation within the profession. Life and work situations of liberal professions cannot be interpreted in simple black-and-white schemes of winners and losers. Instead, many different socioeconomic situations can be found ‘in between,’ which are driven by different social logics. For entrepreneurship research, the study opens up new avenues by taking us beyond the push-pull dichotomy, which over-simplifies the decision to enter self-employment. The term entrepreneurship is often used in an undifferentiated way, and it easily generates myths and stereotypes which are challenged by the study. A narrower and more realistic view shows that there are diverse agents under the flag of entrepreneurship, who are usually not regarded as core entrepreneurs although they exist in everyday life.     

Quality improvement and redesign of performance measurement systems: an application to the academic field

The increasing competition both in the public and private sectors gave rise to a growing interest in quality improvement and in designing and implementing Performance Measurement Systems (PMS). Academic organizations also recognized the need for implementing performance measurement systems. Some recent works on PMS in the higher education make use of the Kaplan and Norton’s Balanced Scorecard (BSC) to translate the characteristic strategic goals (e.g. research and teaching excellence) into performance measures. However, a PMS needs to be updated when external or internal changes influence the organization modus operandi. In this way a continuous quality improvement of organization performance is required. This paper describes a methodology based on the BSC model to redesign a current PMS. In detail, a reference BSC-check matrix is proposed. A “mapping analysis” of the current PMS is developed to understand if all the operational aspects involved in goals achievement are considered and if proper indicators have been defined. As an example, the methodology is applied to a Department of the authors’ own University. The paper shows also how the proposed approach can be extended to other contexts.     

In search of a theory of debt management

The complete market approach to government debt management argues that a portfolio of non-contingent bonds at different maturities should be chosen so that fluctuations in market value offset changes in expected future deficits. However, this approach recommends huge fluctuations in positions, enormous changes in portfolios for minor changes in maturities and no presumption it is always optimal to issue long and invest short term in a wide array of model specifications. These extreme, volatile and unstable features are undesirable for two reasons. Firstly fragility of portfolios to small changes in assumptions means that it is often better to follow a balanced budget rather than issue the optimal debt portfolio under some possibly misspecified model. Secondly for even miniscule transaction costs, governments prefer a balanced budget rather than the large positions complete markets recommends. The complete market recommendations conflict with a number of features we believe are integral to bond market incompleteness, e.g. transaction costs, liquidity effects, robustness, etc. and which need to be explicitly incorporated into the portfolio problem.