Conducting Immersive Research in Second Life: A Hotel Co-Branding Case Study

This study explains the first known hospitality research conducted exclusively in a virtual world for the purpose of researching hotel co-branding. This article explains how immersive research techniques were used to capture data in real time through avatar activity in Second Life. This article considers the research methodology, the data collection process and gives a brief summary of the initial research findings. The virtual environment offers an opportunity for researchers to reach a global audience, conduct the research in a relatively short time frame, and do the research inexpensively. The study will be of interest to researchers who may wish to use a virtual 3D environment for their own research.     

The Channel That Offers the Lowest Online Room Rates: A Case Study of Hotels in Hong Kong

Online distribution channels increasingly serve as platforms hotels can use to offer competitive room rates to attract price-sensitive customers and maximize yield. Capturing the lowest and highest daily room rates over a 360-day period from five of the most popular online travel agencies, and two batches of data showing the lowest room rates over 28 days from a last-minute bookings website, this study compares the lowest prices offered. The results indicate that no single online channel outperforms the others in any of the hotel star-rating categories, and that the last-minute reservation service provides the lowest hotel room rate across different star ratings.     

Productivity and efficiency scores of dairy farms: the case of Turkey

A greater productivity level in milk production is the best answer to the increasing demand for this essential food. The main material of this study, which aims to determine the total factor productivity (TFP) and efficiency of dairy farms, consists of 100 surveys chosen from 1,429 registered farms of the Cattle Breeders Association of Aydin-Turkey by means of stratified sampling in May, 2006. The TFP decreases with farm size which shows that large farms fail to utilize their labour resource in full. In data envelopment analysis 15 farms work with an efficiency rate of 100%. The lowest efficiency rate was found to be 43%; the highest one was 100% and the mean rate was 79%. The efforts to improve efficiency levels should include participatory extension and coordinated research programs that aim to increase the productivity and efficiency levels of these small farms in the long run.     

On the role of arbitrageurs in rational markets

We investigate the role of “arbitrageurs,” who exploit price discrepancies between redundant securities. Arbitrage opportunities arise endogenously in an economy populated by rational, heterogeneous investors facing investment restrictions. We show that an arbitrageur alleviates these restrictions and improves the transfer of risk amongst investors. When the arbitrageur behaves noncompetitively, taking into account the price impact of his trades, he optimally limits the size of his positions due to his decreasing marginal profits. When the arbitrageur is subject to margin requirements and is endowed with capital from outside investors, the size of his trades and capital are endogenously determined in equilibrium.     

Strategic pricing in a differentiated product oligopoly model: fluid milk in Boston

In an imperfectly competitive industry, differentiated products compete with each other with price rather than quantity as the strategic variable. Several previous studies have employed a generalized Nash–Bertrand model: Liang (1989) , Cotterill (1994) , Cotterill et al. (2000) , and Kinoshita et al. (2002) ; however, only Liang has explored the theoretical foundations of that model. This article generalizes the Liang two‐good model to three goods. A surprising and important result follows. Price‐conjectural variations do not exist in models with three or more goods. Price‐reaction functions, however, exist in multiple‐good models. We estimate them jointly with a brand‐level demand system to evaluate the total impact of a brand manager's price change on own quantity. In a differentiated product market, this is a useful addition to a partial demand elasticity approach, because a change in one brand's price typically engenders a price reaction by other brands that affects own quantity via substantial cross‐price elasticities among substitutes. Strategic pricing in the Boston fluid milk market was also influenced by the existence of a raw milk price support program, the Northeast Dairy Compact. We find that the advent of the Compact was a focal point event that crystallized a shift away from Nash–Bertrand to more cooperative pricing. If the downstream market is not competitive, one needs to consider strategic price reactions when designing and evaluating agricultural price programs.     

Equilibrium mispricing in a capital market with portfolio constraints

This article develops a general equilibrium, continuous timemodel where portfolio constraints generate mispricing betweenredundant securities. Constrained consumption-portfolio optimizationtechniques are adapted to incorporate redundant, possibly mispricedsecurities. Under logarithmic preferences, we provide explicitconditions for mispricing and closed-form expressions for alleconomic quantities. Existence of an equilibrium where mispricingoccurs with positive probability is verified in a specific case.In a more general setting, we demonstrate the necessity of mispricingfor equilibrium when agents are heterogeneous enough. The constructionof a representative agent with stochastic weights allows usto characterize prices and allocations, given mispricing occurs.     

How do restaurant customers make trade-offs among rate fences?

This study examines how restaurant customers make trade-offs among several restaurant rate fences using a sample of mainland Chinese travelers to Hong Kong. A total of six restaurant rate fences (i.e., lunch/dinner pricing, weekday/weekend pricing, table location pricing, restricted coupon pricing, meal period, and reservation and seating policy) and menu price were selected, and a conjoint analysis was performed. Findings reveal that price, restricted coupon pricing, and meal period are the most important attributes when restaurant customers select a restaurant. This study is the first attempt to examine the relative importance of different types of restaurant rate fences. The findings will help restaurant operators to better understand the decision-making process of Chinese travelers and design appropriate rate fences accordingly.