Estimating the aggregate value of forest recreation in a regional context

Public goods and services supplied by nature require active government intervention to ensure their provision. Nevertheless, prior to the implementation of any policy, planners should compare the costs and benefits caused by their decisions, a difficult task when policies and regulations are developed at a regional or national level (i.e. fire and pest control policies included in forests national plans), and their impacts spread out across a large number of people and ecosystems. In this context, although environmental economics has provided the necessary information for decision-making guidance related to site-specific interventions, little attention has been given to the information requirements of policies affecting large geographical areas, that is, to the estimation of an aggregate value for a specific region. The purpose of this paper is to improve current applications, inferring the recreational value of forests through the implementation of a discrete-count linked model including all the forest areas in the region of Mallorca (Spain).     

Use of quality tools and techniques in services

The purpose of this article is essentially twofold: to evaluate the use of quality control (QC) tools and statistical process control (SPC) in certain services and to underline the key management prerequisites that help ensure their effective use. It involves a study of a sample of case service organisations, namely banks, hospitals, courier services and utilities, to assess the (in)effective use of QC tools and SPC and what this could signify for the future. A theoretical model is proposed and conclusions are drawn on the basis of it. For the use of QC tools and SPC to be more readily accepted and valuable in service organisations, certain critical success factors are identified here. The question is also raised as to which tools and techniques might be more appropriate in services and why.     

The Business Ethics of Short Selling and Naked Short Selling

The controversy over short selling has continued unabated from the introduction of modern equity trading in Amsterdam in 1610 to the present day. Nevertheless, the business ethics literature has not really addressed short selling. Short sellers not only profit from the misery of others, they also create it through their selling activities. However, they also provide a socially useful service by making prices better reflect true values, protecting other investors from purchasing overpriced securities. Short sellers can also help to provide liquidity in the markets. Recently, there has been a hue and cry against so called “naked” short selling, which involves not delivering the shares that have been sold. This gives manipulators a tool for depressing stock prices and deprives purchasers of voting rights and potential stock lending revenue. Naked short selling creates ethical issues for short sellers, buyers, brokers, market makers, and regulators. Is it ethical to exploit a legal loophole that permits sellers to sell stock and delay delivering shares indefinitely?     

The shared reward dilemma on structured populations

In this paper we study the recently introduced “shared reward dilemma” (Cuesta et al. in J Theor Biol 251:253–263, 2008) in the presence of a structure governing the interactions among the population. The shared reward dilemma arises when the prisoner’s dilemma is supplemented with a second stage in which a fixed reward is equally distributed among all cooperators. We first extend our previous results on the equilibrium structure of this game to the case of a one-shot game taking place on a regular network. Subsequently, we consider an evolutionary version of the game on both lattices and random networks. We show that the evolutionary game on graphs exhibits important differences with the case of well-mixed populations. In particular, there exists an important parameter range in which the cooperation is boosted and a single cooperator can invade a population of defectors. We study the dependence of the cooperation levels on the neighborhood size, finding that on random networks the level of cooperation reached decreases as the neighborhood size increases. Moreover, square lattices favor cooperation more than random networks, and on them cooperation may be almost full for certain parameter regions even for large neighborhood sizes. Further, we show that the effect of the population structure is never detrimental for cooperation. We interpret our results in terms of weak versus strong temptation and discuss the nontrivial issues involved in trying to promote cooperation exogenously by means of such a reward mechanism.     

An integrative model of destination brand equity and tourist satisfaction

This paper develops an integrative model that includes the dimensions of destination brand equity (i.e. awareness, image, quality and loyalty), as well as a key behavioural variable that is tourist satisfaction. In particular, our paper aims to contribute to the literature: (1) by examining the relationships between the dimensions of destination brand equity, which is not a deeply investigated issue so far; and (2) by adding tourist satisfaction, a key concept in loyalty formation, to the variables usually considered in destination brand equity models. The model was tested in two samples, national and international tourists visiting a destination in Spain, in order to also explore the role of the geographical and cultural distance between tourist and destination. Our results from a multi-group analysis indicate: (1) a robust link between “quality-satisfaction-loyalty” in both samples of tourists; (2) a chain of effects among awareness, image (separately considering the cognitive and affective dimensions) and perceived quality, although with the presence of some significant difference between both samples of tourists; and (3) a positive influence of cognitive image on affective image in both cases.     

Institutional Sources of Distrust in Government Contracting

Abstract

This interview-based study explores trust in public–private co-operation by addressing the research questions: What are the main sources of distrust in public–private contracting? And why? We compare two Spanish social services subfields: one with high levels of cross-sector distrust and another one with low distrust between public and private sectors. We conclude that the sources of the identified cross-sector distrust are institutional: insufficient regulation and legislation, lack of business certification, and low local government administrative capacity. The article is a pioneering exploration of the under-researched theme of institutional distrust and its effect on public–private co-operation management.     

Achievement predictors in a secondary students’ sample

In this study several factors that influence academic achievement are going to be presented. 492 students, 190 men and 302 women, with ages from 12 to 18?years old, and from the first and third year of compulsory secondary school and the first year of voluntary secondary school have participated, completing four questionnaires about IQ, motivation, learning strategies, adjustment and study habits. The academic marks selected to be related with the questionnaires we have mentioned before were the Mathematic, Spanish Language and Grammar, English language and Physical Education. We applied the structural equation analysis, by LISREL procedure, to find the best explanatory model about the academic achievement predictors. The results show that the learning strategies and the personal adjustment do not predict the academic performance as much as the intelligence, the motivation and the study habits. Therefore, it is very important to consider these variables as predictors in the works and research, of adolescents?? achievement.     

An efficiency and effectiveness model for international tourist hotels in Taiwan

Taiwan's economic growth has improved the quality of life and raised the standard of the tourism industry in Taiwan. This paper selects the hotel industry, in order to assess how international tourist hotels operate their business by applying data envelopment analysis (DEA) to measure their operational efficiency and effectiveness. By using the DEA model to assess the results of the relative efficiency and effectiveness of hotels to improve their operations, the paper also aims to rank the hotels by applying the VlseKriterijumska Optimizacija I Kompromisno Resenje method combined with entropy weight among the criteria.     

Cooperation and the Ability to Minimize the Time and Cost of New Product Development within the Spanish Automotive Supplier Industry

New product development (NPD) cycle time has become a strategic competitive weapon for corporations and a focus for research on product development management. Reducing NPD cycle time may create relative advantages in market share, profit, and long‐term competitiveness. This article follows recent research that already has moved beyond anecdotes and case studies to test factors empirically and variables that are associated with the company's NPD time and cost minimization abilities. One emerging research area is the impact of comprehensive lists or sets of firm variables (not project variables) on the ability to speed up NPD. At the same time, several authors' findings suggest a contingency approach to speeding up innovation. Contingency theory argues that there is not one “best answer” to a particular problem: Instead, the appropriateness of managerial interventions is dependent on the prevailing conditions that surround that problem. On the issue of NPD, several scholars point out that cooperation accelerates learning and product development: Firms that combine resources can gain a competitive advantage over firms that are unable to do so, and this is viewed as one of the key benefits of interfirm cooperation. A firm's network of cooperations represent a valuable resource that can yield differential returns in the same way as other tangible and intangible assets such as product brands or R&D capabilities. Combining both lines of research, this study seeks to add to the growing literature and further to inform practicing managers in speeding up NPD by analyzing the relationship between cooperation and the use of some NPD firm practices. This article shows the results of a survey of 63 Spanish automotive suppliers to test the moderation effect of cooperation in the relationship between the use of NPD firm practices and the company's NPD time and cost minimization abilities. Factor and regression analyses were used to test the article's hypotheses. It was found that high‐cooperation companies used more intensively sets of firm practices than low‐cooperation companies. It also was found that two out of four identified factors of NPD firm practices—Design‐Manufacturing Interface and Cross‐Functional Design—were related positively to the company's NPD time and cost minimization abilities in the subsample of high‐cooperation companies but not in the low‐cooperation companies. These results support late research in the area of speeding up NPD. The article discusses some implications for managers.     

The Ethics of Managerial Compensation: The Case of Executive Stock Options

This paper examines the ethics of contemporary managerial compensation in the context of executive stock options. Economic considerations would dictate that executive stock options should be adjusted to eliminate the effect of overall stock market movements which are beyond the control of the executive. However, in practice, most executive stock options are not adjusted to control for these outside factors. Agency considerations are the most likely culprit. Adjusting for the influence of outside factors, such as a generally rising stock market, from executive stock options sets a higher bar for managers to reach. Furthermore, traditional accounting standards permitted firms that did not adjust options to avoid reporting options as expenses. This presents CEOs and boards of directors with a major ethical dilemma. On the one hand, their duty to their shareholders and stakeholders dictates that executive stock options should be adjusted to eliminate outside noise from unrelated movements in the overall stock market. However, financial statements are presented in the language of accounting. If the overwhelming majority of the users of a language define a particular item in one way, then to deviate from the norm implies that the recipient of such a deviant statement may not properly interpret the statement. Likewise, if the standard practice is for firms to use unadjusted options and thus under-report expenses, to deviate from this industry norm risks that users of financial statements would not properly interpret the financial statements, with perhaps negative consequences for the shareholders. In short, if “everyone else does it,” then it could be wrong for an individual firm to deviate from the norm as that would harm the shareholders. James J. Angel is an Associate Professor of Finance at the McDonough School of Business at Georgetown University. He is a financial expert whose research focuses on the operation of financial markets in the United States and other countries. He currently serves on the OTCBB Advisory Board, and he has served as Chair of the Nasdaq Economic Advisory Council. He earned his undergraduate degree from the California Institute of Technology, his MBA from the Harvard Business School, and he earned his Ph.D. in Finance from the University of California at Berkeley. Douglas M. McCabe is a Professor of Management at the McDonough School of Business at Georgetown University. He serves on the Editorial Boards of 20 scholarly journals, including Research on Ethical Issues in Organizations, JAI Press as well as the Employee Responsibilities and Rights Journal. Considered by the media to be an expert in his field, he has appeared more than 200 times on international (CNN), national (ABC, NBC, and CBS), and local television and radio. He holds a Ph.D. from Cornell University and is a member of Phi Beta Kappa.