The main paths of eTourism: trends of managing tourism through Internet

Drawing from the tourism and hospitality literature, this paper highlights the main research trajectories and themes in the context of eTourism. We use main path analysis to investigate the development trend of the synergistic relationship between innovative tourism applications and the new technologies. Further, the literature is classified into six groups through discovering the coherence structure in a citation network. The analyses show that research on websites, blogs, and social media on tourism is experiencing accelerated growth, which hints that there is a pendulum shift whereby the information and negotiation power asymmetry between the supply and demand sides are moving from provider-centric to consumer-centric. This study also elucidates the associated market disintermediation phenomenon and long tail effects on the distribution of destinations.     

Measuring technical and allocative efficiencies for banks in the transition countries using the Fourier flexible cost function

The transition economies are known to have quite different market structures from the market economies. State-owned banks accounts for a major part of the financial sector in East European countries before the transition period. Since the input prices of the sector are frequently under the control of those governments, the misallocated resources may incur the loss of economic efficiency. This paper attempts to gauge the technical and allocative efficiency using unbalanced panel data of 340 banks from 14 transition countries under the framework of the Fourier flexible shadow cost function. Accommodating technical and allocative efficiencies simultaneously, as suggested by Atkinson and Cornwell (Int Econ Rev 35:231–243, 1994a) and Kumbhakar and Wang (J Econom 134:317–340, 2006a), avoids potential specification errors and leads to consistent parameter estimates. The average total cost savings resulting from greater technical and allocative efficiency are around 28.31 and 7.13%, respectively. Foreign-owned banks are found to be the most economically efficient. The enforcement of financial liberalization does gradually improve upon the sample banks’ technical efficiency. The allocative inefficiency arises from over capitalization and excess funds. Scale diseconomies appear to prevail in the sample states with a few exceptions.     

Images of the Virtuous Employee in China's Transitional Economy

We examine contemporary images of employee virtue and managers' perceptions of actual employee conduct in Wuhan, Beijing and Xi'an, drawing on document analysis and structured interviews with 112 respondents in ten case study companies. The image promulgation strategies of the one joint venture enterprise and the two private enterprises in our sample entailed active avowal of tradition linked employee virtue, drawing on a mixture of Communist and Confucian moral imagery. In contrast, most of the seven state-owned or predominantly state invested enterprises had abandoned or marginalized traditional Communist imagery, none promoted Confucian imagery, and two emphasized alternative images of one-sided servility toward the customer. We infer, from managers' accounts, that the abandonment of tradition linked images by the state-owned sector was a tacit acknowledgment of prior covenant violation, and that outside the state-owned sector, tradition linked moral propaganda contributed to moral atmosphere only when part of a consistent high-commitment HRM strategy. In drawing out implications for theory and further research, we note the different socio-political contexts of organizations in China and the West, discuss the relationship between bonds or covenants and psychological contracts, and compare tradition linked employee virtues with dimensions of organizational citizenship.     

The impact of problem-based learning strategies on STEM knowledge integration and attitudes: an exploratory study among female Taiwanese senior high school students

This study was designed to explore the effects of problem-based learning (PBL) strategies on the attitudes of female senior high school students toward integrated knowledge learning in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM). Content analysis and focus group methods were adopted as the research processes. Data and information about the STEM internet platform, an attitude scale and the contents of interviews were also collected for analysis. The subjects were 10th grade students at a girls’ senior high school who volunteered to organize teams for a Solar Electric Trolley Contest. A total of 40 students were grouped into 18 teams. The results of the study indicate: (1) that PBL strategies can be helpful in enhancing students’ attitudes toward STEM learning and the exploration of future career choices; (2) that the PBL teaching strategy helped to lead students step by step toward completing the contest’s mission and to experience the meaning of integrated STEM knowledge; (3) that not only that students can actively apply engineering and science knowledge, but also that students tend to gain more solid science and mathematics knowledge through STEM learning in PBL; and (4) that PBL can enhance students’ abilities and provide them experiences related to knowledge integration and application. Therefore, it is recommended that the curriculum at the girls’ senior high school include more content related to specialty subjects to enhance their technological capabilities. In addition, a learning mechanism should be offered to aid advisers or teachers in strengthening students’ integrated and systematic knowledge about STEM.     

Estimating the wetland rental fee: a case study involving a Taiwan wetland

Wetlands provide many functions that are both economic and recreational and are valuable in terms of their ecological diversity, while at the same time being nonmarket value products. The purpose of this study is to estimate the optimal wetland rental through estimations of both the demand and supply functions in relation to wetland. The wetland supply function is directly estimated based on the data provided by the owners of the wetland, while the estimation of the wetland input demand function involves using the bootstrapping and contingent visitation approaches. Such estimation approaches could also be applied to other nonmarket value products that give rise to environmental externalities. The estimation of rental fee could provide a long-term leasing contract that gives the landlord with a particular rent to lease their lands to support a wetland eco-tourism park to maintain wetland for substantial management. Several environmental management policy implications are also addressed.     

Fuzzy Seasonal Time Series for Forecasting the Production Value of the Mechanical Industry in Taiwan

Based on the seasonal time series ARIMA(p,d,q)(P,D,Q)_s model (SARIMA) and fuzzy regression model, we combine the advantages of two methods to propose a procedure of fuzzy seasonal time series and apply this method to forecasting the production value of the mechanical industry in Taiwan. The intention of the article is to provide the enterprises, in this era of diversified management, with a fresh method to conduct short-term prediction for the future in the hope that these enterprises can perform more accurate planning. This method includes interval models with interval parameters and provides the possibility distribution of future value. From the results of practical application to the mechanical industry, it can be shown that this method makes good forecasts. Further, this method makes it possible for decision makers to forecast the possible situations based on fewer observations than the SARIMA model and has the basis of pre-procedure for fuzzy time series.