How different were röpke and mises?

The Review of Austrian Economics -     

Collective Choices Under Ambiguity

We investigate experimentally whether collective choice environments matter for individual attitudes to ambiguity. In a simple two-urn Ellsberg experiment, one urn offers a 45 % chance of winning a fixed monetary prize while the other offers an ambiguous chance. Participants choose either individually or in groups of three. Group decision rules vary in the level of individual responsibility for the others’ payoffs: the collective choice is taken by majority, randomly delegated to two group members, or randomly delegated to a single group member. Although most participants display consistent ambiguity attitudes across their decisions, taking responsibility for the others tends to foster ambiguity aversion.     

Patterns and drivers of post-socialist farmland abandonment in Western Ukraine

Farmland abandonment restructures rural landscapes in many regions worldwide in response to gradual industrialization and urbanization. In contrast, the political breakdown in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union triggered rapid and widespread farmland abandonment, but the spatial patterns of abandonment and its drivers are not well understood. Our goal was to map post-socialist farmland abandonment in Western Ukraine using Landsat images from 1986 to 2008, and to identify spatial determinants of abandonment using a combination of best-subsets linear regression models and hierarchical partitioning. Our results suggest that farmland abandonment was widespread in the study region, with abandonment rates of up to 56%. In total, 6600 km² (30%) of the farmland used during socialism was abandoned after 1991. Topography, soil type, and population variables were the most important predictors to explain substantial spatial variation in abandonment rates. However, many of our a priori hypotheses about the direction of variable influence were rejected. Most importantly, abandonment rates were higher in the plains and lower in marginal areas. The growing importance of subsistence farming in the transition period, as well as off-farm income and remittances likely explain these patterns. The breakdown of socialism appears to have resulted in fundamentally different abandonment patterns in the Western Ukraine, where abandonment was a result of the institutional and economic shock, compared to those in Europe's West, where abandonment resulted from long-term socio-economic transformation such as urbanization and industrialization.     

An Empirical Study of an Online Travel Purchase Intention Model

This study empirically tests a structural model of factors affecting consumers' online purchase intentions for travel products. The findings indicate that information quality, service quality, and system quality are valid measurements to evaluate the quality of travel-oriented website designs. In terms of travelers' perceptions, convenience, value, and merchandise options are three effective measurements of travelers' attitudes toward purchasing travel products online. Quality of travel website design, travelers' attitudes, and customers' satisfaction demonstrate significant influence on travelers' purchase intentions. Travelers' attitudes and customers' satisfaction also serve as strong mediators for the links between quality of travel website design and purchase intentions. Future research can capitalize on this study as a basis to formulate other models or to create a new model to test tactics that can increase travelers' repurchase intentions and strengthening consumers' e-loyalty.     

Tourists’ Experiences of Mindfulness in Dubai,United Arab Emirates (UAE)

Mindfulness is a relatively new theoretical area that has received little research focus. This is surprising, considering the wealth of benefits to individuals and businesses who adopt a mindful philosophy. The aim of this study was to reduce this gap in knowledge by attempting to understand how mindfulness affects tourists’ experiences while holidaying in a popular tourist destination, such as Dubai. Results suggested that mindfulness appears to occur indiscriminately and, almost, haphazardly. Empirical results of the study revealed that mindfulness was a likely occurrence regardless of visitor demographics, and that mindfulness would impact what visitors remembered and why.     

Absorptive capacity and innovation: when is it better to cooperate?

Cooperation can benefit and hurt firms at the same time. An important question then is: when is it better to cooperate? And, once the decision to cooperate is made, how can an appropriate partner be selected? In this paper we present a model of inter-firm cooperation driven by cognitive distance, appropriability conditions and external knowledge. Absorptive capacity of firms develops as an outcome of the interaction between absorptive R&D and cognitive distance from voluntary and involuntary knowledge spillovers. Thus, we offer a revision of the original model by Cohen and Levinthal (Econ J 99(397):569–596, 1989), accounting for recent empirical findings and explicitly modeling absorptive capacity within the framework of interactive learning. We apply that to the analysis of firms’ cooperation and R&D investment preferences. The results show that cognitive distance and appropriability conditions between a firm and its cooperation partner have an ambiguous effect on the profit generated by the firm. Thus, a firm chooses to cooperate and selects a partner conditional on the investments in absorptive capacity it is willing to make to solve the understandability/novelty trade-off.