Differences in Tourism Marketing Strategies Between Wineries Based on Size or Location

While the number of United States wineries has doubled and wine production tripled, only three states represent the majority of wineries and wine production. Yet, small wineries must contend with similar production issues that larger wineries face: cultivation of grapes, fermentation of juice, and finally bottling of the product.By comparison small wineries face an even tougher challenge—attracting consumers' attention to their products, much of which must be sold directly to consumers at the winery. These cellar door sales account for substantial dollar and case volume and are particularly lucrative.This study examined the relationship in off‐site and on‐site marketing strategies based upon winery size and location. The results indicated differences in tourism marketing strategies particularly with wine education at rural wineries and food/wine pairing techniques at larger wineries.     

Harnessing Product Complexity: Step 2—Measuring and Evaluating Complexity Levels

In today's market, companies are forced to balance the requirements of sales growth through increased product complexity against the requirements of cost control and operational efficiency. Therefore, how to meet the increasing needs of customers while managing the impact of product complexity becomes a great challenge for a company to gain competitive advantage.

Although some have tackled the issue of product complexity, it still remains a theoretical concept. There is yet no generalized approach to identify complexity sources, measure complexity levels, and manage its impact throughout the different stages of the product's lifecycle. Our work seeks to help formulate strategies to manage the cost impacts of product complexity. This article builds on prior work that identified sources and indicators of product complexity, categorized them into five dimensions, and linked the indicators to direct and indirect costs. Now, we develop a product complexity measurement framework as a second step in establishing the overall methodology and support tool. The article also describes the application of the developed framework to existing product lines.     

Accessing material art through technologies of mediation and immediation

In this paper, we explore touch technologies and the kinds of engagements with art that they enable. We discuss implications of using these technologies, and technology more generally, to access art via electronic displays within museums and galleries and outside of museums over the Internet. Our discussion is put in the context of how museums, both now and in the past, have constructed experiences of objects. We trace a trajectory from museum environments in which all senses were active to contemporary ones, which are purely visual. We argue that emerging technologies can be used to reverse this movement.     

Foreign direct investment,political risk and the limited access order

The common explanations for political risk in foreign investment focus on the opportunism of host-country governments. However, when governments are too weak to regulate and effectively control them, domestic business elites may also cause political risk. In the literature on political risk, the host state is mostly modelled as a single, cohesive actor and elites outside of the government are not taken into account. By contrast, this paper conceptualises political risk as a lack of government assertiveness vis-à-vis domestic business elites, drawing on the limited access order (LAO) concept developed by Douglass North and his co-authors. It presents the case of Swedish Tele2’s investment in Russia. The mobile telecommunications provider was highly successful in Russia until it became a threat to the business interests of three Russian oligarchs. Regulatory agencies in Russia lacked the necessary authority to provide a level playing field in the telecommunications industry. They did not intervene when Tele2’s access to vital licenses was blocked by competitors, effectively squeezing the Swedes out of the Russian market. This paper concludes that in LAOs foreign investors are initially welcome, but political risk is high when the market competition with domestic elites becomes intense.     

Employers and child workers: an institutional approach

This article explores employers' perspectives on the introduction of child employment legislation in Australia 1 through the lens of the three pillars—regulative, normative and cultural‐cognitive—of institutional theory. The study extends the traditional industrial relations (IR) focus on regulation to examine how human resource (HR) practices around child employment become legitimised, normalised and socially supported.     

Mixed Causal–Noncausal Autoregressions: Bimodality Issues in Estimation and Unit Root Testing1

This paper stresses the bimodality of the likelihood function of the Mixed causal–noncausal AutoRegressions (MAR), and it is shown that the bimodality issue becomes more salient as the causal root approaches unity from below. The consequences are important as the roots of the local maxima are typically interchanged, attributing the noncausal component to the causal one and vice-versa. This severely changes the interpretation of the results, and the properties of unit root tests of the backward root are adversely affected. To circumvent the bimodality issue, this paper proposes an estimation strategy which (i) increases noticeably the probability of attaining the global MLE; and (ii) selects carefully the maximum used for the unit root test against a MAR stationary alternative.     

Distributive trade and regional productivity growth

The paper aims to investigate the relationship between distributive trade (wholesale and retail trade) and productivity growth across Italian provinces. In most studies, the potential determinants of productivity in the distributive trade have been investigated, while the impact of these activities on economic growth of the whole system has received less attention. By using panel data during the time period 2000–2013, the paper tests if the increase in the share of employees in distributive trade over the given period has promoted the productivity growth. This study applies both a random-effects model and, among the dynamic panel data estimators, a generalized method of moments estimator (GMM). In order to control both the issue of endogeneity, due to the presence of some potentially endogenous variables among the explanatory variables, and the problem of instrument proliferation, the GMM estimator is implemented together with a statistical method, which reduces the number of instruments when the set of endogenous variables is wide. The findings show that the distributive trade has a strong positive impact on the productivity growth. Moreover, this link is reinforced when we control the potential endogeneity. The results also support the idea that distributive trade can promote provincial convergence.