Sustainable culinary tourism and Cevicherías: a stakeholder and social practice approach

This study proposes a theoretical framework based on stakeholder and social practice theory in the context of sustainable culinary tourism development. This framework emanates from the examination of issues affecting such development, and ways to adapt, from the perspective of a key SCT stakeholder group, restaurant operators, in a developing gastronomic destination. In-depth, face-to-face interviews revealed socio-economic and environmental issues, namely, perceived impacts from larger fish/seafood exports, over-fishing, and weather patterns affecting the quantity and consistency of product supply, which resulted in increased prices. Ethical and proactive principles, and taking the leadership in limiting socio-economic and environmental issues were the main ways to adapt. Moreover, operators were incorporating alternative fish/seafood products, reinforcing ethical conduct, rejecting unacceptable business practices, and strictly adhering to closed seasons/bans. Participants’ ways to adapt are strongly related to the tenets of the two employed theories; these associations will be discussed, and future research streams suggested.     

The Measurement and Behavior of Uncertainty: Evidence from the ECB Survey of Professional Forecasters

We examine matched point and density forecasts of output growth, inflation and unemployment from the ECB Survey of Professional Forecasters. We construct measures of uncertainty from individual histograms, and find that the measures display countercyclical behavior and have increased across all forecast horizons since 2007. We also derive measures of forecast dispersion and forecast accuracy, and find that they are not reliable proxies for uncertainty. There is, however, evidence of a meaningful co‐movement between uncertainty and aggregate point predictions for output growth and unemployment. These results are robust to changes in the composition of the survey respondents over time. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

CLASSICAL AND IMPULSE STOCHASTIC CONTROL FOR THE OPTIMIZATION OF THE DIVIDEND AND RISK POLICIES OF AN INSURANCE FIRM

This paper deals with the dividend optimization problem for a financial or an insurance entity which can control its business activities, simultaneously reducing the risk and potential profits. It also controls the timing and the amount of dividends paid out to the shareholders. The objective of the corporation is to maximize the expected total discounted dividends paid out until the time of bankruptcy. Due to the presence of a fixed transaction cost, the resulting mathematical problem becomes a mixed classical-impulse stochastic control problem. The analytical part of the solution to this problem is reduced to quasivariational inequalities for a second-order nonlinear differential equation. We solve this problem explicitly and construct the value function together with the optimal policy. We also compute the expected time between dividend payments under the optimal policy.     

Optimal Taxation when Consumers Have Endogenous Benchmark Levels of Consumption

I examine optimal taxes in an overlapping generations economy in which each consumer's utility depends on consumption relative to a weighted average of consumption by others (the benchmark level of consumption) as well as on the level of the consumer's own consumption. The socially optimal balanced growth path is characterized by the Modified Golden Rule and by a condition on the intergenerational allocation of consumption in each period. A competitive economy can be induced to attain the social optimum by a lump-sum pay-as-you-go social security system and a tax on capital income.     

Risk-Hedging in Real Estate Markets

Topics in real estate markets have attracted much attention recently. In this article, we first address the risk-hedging issues of speculators based on an American put option pricing model, and then investigate their risk-hedging behaviors using a generalized swing option so as to take capacity effects into account. Semi-analytic solutions are derived, and examples are presented. Results have important implications in the real estate markets and contribute to the operational research literature on risk measuring and risk management.     

Practices that Support Team Learning and Their Impact on Speed to Market and New Product Success

Competition is fierce today. Businesses are feeling extreme pressure to innovate and do so quickly. If they take too long in bringing a product to market or make a mistake along the way, they can be preempted by a faster moving competitor. One technique gaining popularity to help companies compete is establishing learning teams—teams that create and use knowledge rapidly and effectively. But how do teams learn? By studying the learning practices of 95 new product teams, we have uncovered several factors that improve a new product team’s ability to learn, innovate faster, and be more successful. These factors include thoroughly reviewing project information, having stable project goals, and following a rigorous new product development process.     

Dynamic behavior of capital accumulation in a cash-in-advance model

This paper analyzes the dynamic behavior of capital accumulation in Stockman's cash-in-advance model. If the cash-in-advance constraint applies only to consumption, then money is superneutral along the transition path as well as in the long run. Alternatively, if the cash-in-advance constraint applies to gross investment as well as consumption, then a permanent increase in the rate of monetary growth reduces the steady state capital stock. The effect on the speed of adjustment depends on the sign of a certain simple function of the parameters of preferences and technology.     

The Political Entrepreneur and the Coordination of the Political Process: A Market Process Perspective of the Political Market

The aim of this article is to apply the Austrian analysis of the entrepreneur to the political process. By distinguishing the political process from the economic process, we will endeavour to show to what extent an analysis in terms of the political market process is both possible and relevant. The existence of an information conveyance which can be assimilated to a price system within the political process, with its resulting profits, are motivating elements for the political entrepreneur. The political entrepreneur is doubly specialised and possesses all the Kirznerian functions of the Austrian entrepreneur as a coordinating agent for the political process.     

Economies of Scale Could Be Key to Profitability

Abstract

The growth of China's tourism hotel industry has been accompanied by declining profitability. Using cross-province tourism hotels data of 2000, this study attempts to empirically quantify the impact of operation scale on hotel performance. Controlling for the effect of overcapacity, this study found a significant and positive association between operation scale and profitability. The findings suggest that to improve performance, the Chinese tourism hotel industry needs not only to reduce the overcapacity but also reverse the property-downsizing trend and pursue economies of scale.