Sharing versus collaborative economy: how to align ICT developments and the SDGs in tourism?

Great hopes have been placed in the sharing economy to provide a new business model based on peer-to-peer (P2P) exchanges of underutilized assets. As a model, the sharing economy has been expected to make significant contributions to sustainability, providing new opportunities for entrepreneurship, more sustainable use of resources, and consumer co-operation in tight economic networks. However, in recent years, digital platforms have turned into the most important actors in the global sharing economy, turning global corporations, such as AirBnB, Booking, or TripAdvisor into intermediaries controlling and profiting from most transactions. Focused on accommodation, this paper conceptualizes the sharing economy in comparison to the wider collaborative economy, and discusses its social, economic, environmental, and political impacts in comparison to the sustainable development goals. It concludes that the sharing economy has great potential to make very significant contributions to sustainability, though the model is increasingly being replaced by the collaborative economy, which performs as an extension and acceleration of neoliberal economic practices.     

Accounting for Negative,Zero and Positive Willingness to Pay for Landscape Change in a National Park

In contingent valuation, despite the fact that many externalities manifest themselves as costs to some and benefits to others, most studies restrict willingness to pay to being non‐negative. In this paper, we investigate the impact of allowing for negative, zero and positive preferences for prospective changes in woodland cover in two UK national parks, the Lake District and the Trossachs. An extended spike model is used to accomplish this. The policy implications of not allowing for negative values in terms of aggregate benefits are also investigated, by comparing the extended spike model with a simple spike making use of only zero and positive bids, and a model which considers positive bids only. We find that ignoring negative values over‐states the aggregate benefits of a woodland planting project by up to 44%.     

Wissensvermittlung durch ProduktplatzierungenProduct Placement and Knowledge Transfer

Although product placement research differentiates between specific placement effects, the placement of Brands and Brand information, which goes far beyond the mere presence of brands in media entertainment, are simply not taken into account. We assume that this form of product placement can generate knowledge and produce a learn effect. Actual insights on the cognitive effect of product placements, brand knowledge and Neurobiology, working theories and a Hypothesis on the growing knowledge gap, only go to reinforce this assumption and confirm that the learn effect through factors such as brand know-how, relevance, education and attractiveness of the media protagonist can be influenced. The results of an experiment in which audio-visual stimulus material was presented with or without placement showed the the information placed was recognized, remembered and therefore learned. While brand know-how and relevance have no influence on the intensity of this learn effect, attractive and well educated protagonists contributed to strengthen memory performance.     

Effects of scale economies and production seasonality on optimal hub locations: the case of regional fresh produce aggregation

Interest in supporting local and regional food systems is rising and food hubs have attracted considerable attention among Federal, State, and local policymakers. This study explores the problem of endogenous hub location in fresh produce value chains in the Northeastern United States. To overcome limitations in the literature, we incorporate the effects of economies of scale and production seasonality into our models. Three experimental models are designed to examine the effects of alternatively applying yearly, quarterly, and monthly data on model solutions. We explicitly assess how interactions of scale economies and seasonality influence the structure and spatial attributes of an optimal regional produce aggregation hub system. The three models generate marketed different solutions and in many respects they lead to different conclusions about developing local/regional supply chains. The monthly model allows for production seasonality and actual hub operation cycle frequency and thus leads to more efficient hub solution with rich policy implications.     

Editorial: Special Issue on the Impact of Business Ethics on Public Life

Even though management scholars have offered several views on the process of corporate sustainability, these efforts have focused mainly on the technical aspects of sustainability while omitting the fundamental role played by individual moral competences. Therefore, previous work offers an incomplete and somewhat reductionist view of corporate sustainability. In this article, we develop a holistic framework of corporate sustainability in which both the moral and technical aspects of sustainability are considered. We do so by integrating the ethical, normative perspective of the Catholic social teaching (CST) with the competitive view of the natural resource-based view. This framework highlights the importance of CST principles and ideas in developing executive moral competences such as moral sensitivity and awareness, and moral cognition and motivation. Moral competences, in turn, influence the organizational selection of environmental strategies, giving leaders the intrinsic motivation to promote both a longer-term stance on corporate sustainability efforts and a relentless search for greener business models. Such strategies move the firm closer towards achieving environmental sustainability. Hence, by bridging the individual, normative-ethical with the organizational, implementational levels of corporate sustainability, our framework provides a more realistic, coherent, and complete perspective on the complex process of achieving corporate sustainability.