The Right Choice at the Right Time: A Herding Experiment in Endogenous Time

Herding describes the phenomenon in decision-making where an economic agent disregards his own private information to follow the actions of his predecessors as in Banerjee (1992). With later decision-makers simply copying earlier decisions their private information cannot be inferred by other decision-makers and will be forever lost. There is some experimental evidence on simple sequential herding of this type in the literature, notably Anderson and Holt (1997). This paper differs by allowing subjects to delay their decision-making in order to benefit from observing others' actions as in more recent herding models such as Chamley and Gale (1994). The results in this paper suggest that subjects will indeed delay when their private information is not sufficiently strong. Despite this ability to wait, as predicted in the theoretical literature, cascades remained ubiquitous and more worrying still, reverse-cascades occurred in which incorrect decisions made by early decision-makers produced informational cascades on the wrong action. In an alternative design, informing subjects that they had made incorrect choices only made matters worse as subjects moved further away from rational behavior.     

Youssef Cassis and Ioanna Pepelasis Minoglou, eds. Entrepreneurship in Theory and History

In a paper delivered during the founding of Harvard's ResearchCenter in Entrepreneurial History, Joseph Schumpeter commented,"Personally, I believe that there is an incessant give and takebetween historical and theoretical analysis and that, thoughfor the investigation of individual questions it may be necessaryto sail for a time on one tack only, yet on principle the twoshould never lose sight of each other" [Joseph Schumpeter, "EconomicTheory and Entrepreneurial History," in Change and the Entrepreneur(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1949), p. 264]. With thenotable exception of the theoretically inspired work producedat the Research Center in the early 1950s, historians largely     

Can tourism be part of the decarbonized global economy? The costs and risks of alternate carbon reduction policy pathways

Global leaders agree on the need to substantially decarbonize the global economy by 2050. This paper compares potential costs associated with different policy pathways to achieve tourism sector emission reduction ambitions (?50% by 2035) and transform the sector to be part of the mid-century decarbonized economy (?70% by 2050). Investment in emissions abatement within the tourism sector, combined with strategic external carbon offsets, was found to be approximately 5% more cost effective over the period 2015–2050 than exclusive reliance on offsetting. The cost to achieve the ?50% target through abatement and strategic offsetting, while significant, represents less than 0.1% of the estimated global tourism economy in 2020 and 3.6% in 2050. Distributed equally among all tourists (international and domestic), the cost of a low-carbon tourism sector is estimated at US$11 per trip, equivalent to many current travel fees or taxes. Exclusive reliance on offsetting would expose the sector to extensive and continued carbon liability costs beyond mid-century and could be perceived as climate inaction, increasing reputational risks and the potential for less efficient regulatory interventions that could hinder sustainable tourism development. Effective tourism sector leadership is needed to develop a strategic tourism policy framework and emission measurement and reporting system.     

Understanding Event Sport Tourism Experiences of Support Partners: A Research Note

The purpose of this research reflection is to set the stage for a more detailed research agenda in exploring event sport tourism experiences of support partners (SPs) during events. Using photo elicitation, the article presents a preliminary empirical case study. Visual materials were assembled by three female participants to interrogate how SPs experience “spectator space” and explore the processes that produced those experiences, an area of study that remains relatively unexplored in leisure research. Initial findings show how waiting to see the triathlete can be anxiety-provoking, but the release of emotion when smiles are exchanged constitutes core activities of being there. However, there are more questions than answers, and there is a need for further inquiry. Suggestions for future research on the impact of serious leisure on intimate others are given.     

“Step into the Real Texas”: Associating and claiming state narrative in advertising and tourism brochures

Texas is one of the most popular states for tourists. Using quantitative and primarily qualitative methods, we analyzed how marketers of small cities and towns associate their place to four central components of the Texas state narrative – the flag, official and unofficial symbols, territory, and social–historical mythology – in advertising and tourism brochures in the years 2008–2010. We discovered that in parallel to the overuse of the “associating to well-known brand/narrative” strategy, marketers also invest efforts toward claiming the narrative. Thus our second goal was to discover which techniques were used in order to claim the state narrative. Using the state of Texas as an example may provide a test case for typology, associating and claiming state narratives in promotional materials.     

Buchbesprechung

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Social norms and core outcomes in a sharecropping economy

This paper employs Greenberg'sTheory of Social Situations to explain the variation of sharecropping contracts across economies as a function of social norms that satisfy von Neumann-Morgenstern stability. We demonstrate that equal division and core outcomes are jointly possible when bargaining is unrestricted. By contrast, when the landlord acts as a monopsonist, core outcomes are the only possible social norm. In addition, if the presence of an outside wage is recognized, core and equal division norms may coincide.