Customer Roles in Self-Service Technology Encounters in a Tourism Context

This paper reports on a study which explored the customer perspective on their roles in SST encounters in a tourism context, through the theoretical lens of service-dominant logic. The study employed short qualitative interviews with airline passengers at an international airport. The findings suggest that customers can assume six roles in an SST encounter which can be viewed as either positive or negative in terms of value creation. Therefore, a key contribution of this paper is the development of a role–experience continuum which depicts the variations in customer experiences of value creation in a tourism context.     

Are stricter investment rules contagious? Host country competition for foreign direct investment through international agreements

We argue that competitive diffusion is a driver of the trend toward international investment agreements with stricter investment rules, namely defensive moves of developing countries concerned about foreign direct investment (FDI) diversion in favor of competing host countries. Accounting for spatial dependence in the formation of bilateral investment treaties and preferential trade agreements that contain investment provisions, we find that the increase in agreements with stricter provisions on investor-to-state dispute settlement and pre-establishment national treatment is a contagious process. Specifically, a developing country is more likely to sign an agreement with weak investment provisions if other developing countries that compete for FDI from the same developed country have previously signed agreements with similarly weak provisions. Conversely, contagion in agreements with strong provisions exclusively derives from agreements with strong provisions that other FDI-competing developing countries have previously signed with a specific developed source country of FDI.     

On sustained economic growth with wealth effects

In a discounted one-sector convex model of optimal economic growth where utility may depend on both consumption and capital stock, I derive necessary and sufficient conditions for sustained growth (unbounded expansion of capital and consumption). Conditions for bounded growth and extinction are also outlined. Optimal paths may be non-monotone. Sustained growth may occur even though the asymptotic marginal productivity is less than the discount rate and may require the initial capital stock to be above a critical level. The behavior of the marginal rate of substitution between consumption and capital plays a crucial role in the conditions.     

Farmers' Preference for Farming: Evidence From a Nationally Representative Farm Survey in India

Using data from a nationally representative farm survey in India, we have analyzed Indian farmers' stated preference for farming as a profession. Findings show that more than 40% of farmers dislike farming as a profession because of low profits, high risk, and lack of social status, yet they continue with it owing to a lack of opportunities outside agriculture. Farmers who express a preference for moving out of agriculture are mostly those with small landholdings, poor irrigation facilities, fewer productive assets including livestock, and follow a cereal‐centric cropping pattern. They also have relatively lower access to credit, insurance, and information, and are weakly integrated with social networks such as self‐help groups and farmers' organizations. Importantly, the disinclination for farming, conditional on other covariates, is not significantly differentiated by caste, an important indicator of social status in rural India. Yet, within a caste group, the dislike for farming moderates with larger landholdings.     

Do Potential Skilled Emigrants Care about Political Stability at Home?

In this paper, we consider the role of political stability in the source country as a potential reason for skilled emigration. We control for all prospective source country characteristics, and yet skilled emigration is seen to be driven by a relatively better situation of political stability in the home country. Our research clearly shows that government stability, socioeconomic conditions, investment profiles, democratic accountability, internal conflict, and ethnic tensions in source nations have significant impacts on the rate of skilled emigration for a sample of developed and developing countries. The results retain robustness even for a subset of only developing nations.     

Industry dynamics: Foundations for models with an infinite number of firms

This paper explores the connection between three important threads of economic research offering different approaches to studying the dynamics of an industry with heterogeneous firms. Finite models of the form pioneered by Ericson and Pakes (1995) capture the dynamics of a finite number of heterogeneous firms as they compete in an industry, and are typically analyzed using the concept of Markov perfect equilibrium (MPE). Infinite models of the form pioneered by Hopenhayn (1992), on the other hand, consider an infinite number of infinitesimal firms, and are typically analyzed using the concept of stationary equilibrium (SE). A third approach uses oblivious equilibrium (OE), which maintains the simplifying benefits of an infinite model but within the more realistic setting of a finite model. The paper relates these three approaches. The main result of the paper provides conditions under which SE of infinite models approximate MPE of finite models arbitrarily well in asymptotically large markets. Our conditions require that the distribution of firm states in SE obeys a certain “light-tail” condition. In a second set of results, we show that the set of OE of a finite model approaches the set of SE of the infinite model in large markets under a similar light-tail condition.     

The Effect of Risk Context on the Value of a Statistical Life: a Bayesian Meta-model

This paper presents the first value of statistical life (VSL) meta-analysis that empirically estimates correction factors for ‘out of context’ benefits transfer (BT) purposes. In the field of mortality risk reductions elicited willingness to pay values in one risk context, say road safety, are frequently applied in other risk contexts like air pollution. However, differences in risk perception and the population at risk across contexts are likely to result in diverging VSL estimates. In a meta-analysis of 26 international stated preference studies, a Bayesian model is estimated regressing contingent values for mortality risk reductions, originating from three different risk contexts, on the characteristics of the risk reduction itself and additional variables characterizing the underlying studies. A willingness to pay (WTP) premium for mortality risk reductions in the air pollution and general mortality risk context relative to improving road safety is observed. Evaluated at the mean, road safety VSL estimates should be multiplied by a factor 1.8 before being applicable in the air pollution context. Moreover, in an illustrative BT exercise we find limited overlap in the set of context specific predictive VSL distributions. Consequently, ‘out of context’ BT results in a substantial over- or underestimation of the VSL.     

Candidate gene studies and the quest for the entrepreneurial gene

Candidate gene studies of human behavior are gaining interest in economics and entrepreneurship research. Performing and interpreting these studies is not straightforward because the selection of candidates influences the interpretation of the results. As an example, Nicolaou et al. (Small Bus Econ 36:151?C155, 2011) report a significant association between a common genetic variant in the DRD3 gene and the tendency to be an entrepreneur. We fail to replicate this finding using a much larger, independent dataset. In addition, we discuss the candidate gene approach and give suggestions to avoid the publication of false positives.     

宝洁公司在RFID技术应用中的实践

宝洁公司对RFID技术的应用方式非常了解。早在第二次世界大战之后它就开始了RFID技术的研究,并且意识到此项技术的研发能够提供所需的信息和管理办法。当前的供应链系统被看成是到处充满各种暗示的猜谜游戏,因此RFID技术的研究是非常必要的。随着研究工作的不断深入,越来越多的公司加入其中。