Willingness to Pay for Green Products in Air Travel: Ready for Take‐Off?

We examine the willingness to pay (WTP) for green products in air travel. Green products in aviation are supplementary services, which are sold on top of the travel service (e.g. carbon offsets, organic on‐board food). We identify a set of potential green products in aviation and report the preferences for additional airline services of 811 Swiss air travellers using an adaptive choice‐based conjoint survey. We find that 20% of those passengers who are interested in purchasing supplementary services show a considerable WTP for green products. The green segment differs from the regular segment only in terms of behavioural features, not in terms of demographic or socio‐economic characteristics. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment     

Comparing linear and nonlinear forecasts for stock returns

We compare the out-of-sample performance of monthly returns forecasts for two indices, namely the Dow Jones (DJ) and the Financial Times (FT) indices. A linear and a nonlinear artificial neural network (ANN) model are used to generate the out-of-sample competing forecasts for monthly returns. Stationary transformations of dividends and trading volume are considered as fundamental explanatory variables in the linear model and the input variables in the ANN model. The comparison of out-of-sample forecasts is done on the basis of forecast accuracy, using the Diebold and Mariano test [J. Bus. Econ. Stat. 13 (1995) 253.], and forecast encompassing, using the Clements and Hendry approach [J. Forecast. 5 (1998) 559.]. The results suggest that the out-of-sample ANN forecasts are significantly more accurate than linear forecasts of both indices. Furthermore, the ANN forecasts can explain the forecast errors of the linear model for both indices, while the linear model cannot explain the forecast errors of the ANN in either of the two indices. Overall, the results indicate that the inclusion of nonlinear terms in the relation between stock returns and fundamentals is important in out-of-sample forecasting. This conclusion is consistent with the view that the relation between stock returns and fundamentals is nonlinear.     

Consumer specialization and the Romantic transformation of the British Grand Tour of Europe

This paper posits that significant changes in 19th century British recreational travel patterns resulted from a change in the manner in which tourists used entertaining stimuli in order to attain pleasure. Consumers no longer merely viewed arousing stimuli, but attempted to use them to produce emotional states of being which they could partially modify to intensify pleasurable feelings (Damasio, Looking for Spinoza: Joy, sorrow, and the feeling brain, William Heinemann, 2003). The impetus for this modification stemmed from an increasing awareness that emotional responses could be to some degree self-cultivated, as embodied in the Romantic ethos that become popular at the time via the emergence of the paperback novel and magazine industry (Campbell, The romantic ethic and the spirit of modern consumerism, Blackwell, 1987). By learning how to manipulate and modify mental images in a way that may not necessarily correspond with objective reality, Romantic tourists learned to elicit pleasure through engaging of their imagination. Such a change in the mode of pleasure seeking had important long run economic consequences for tourist regions throughout the European continent.     

Corporate social responsibility: The disclosure–performance gap

As increased stakeholder pressure requires companies to be transparent about their CSR practices, it is essential to know how reliable corporate disclosure mechanisms are, testing the gap between corporate social responsibility claims and actual practice. This study benchmarks corporate social responsibility policies and practices of ten international hotel groups of particular importance to the European leisure market. We found that corporate systems are not necessarily reflective of actual operations, environmental performance is eco-savings driven, labour policies aim to comply with local legislation, socio-economic policies are inward looking with little acceptance of impacts on the destination, and customer engagement is limited. Generally larger hotel groups have more comprehensive policies but also greater gaps in implementation, while the smaller hotel groups focus only on environmental management and deliver what they promised. As the first survey of its kind in tourism, both the methodology and the findings have implications for further research.     

Reviewing systematic literature reviews: ten key questions and criteria for reviewers

Management Review Quarterly - Systematic literature review articles are important for synthesizing knowledge in management and business research. However, to date, we lack clear guidelines how to...     

Systematic review of sourcing and 3D printing: make-or-buy decisions in industrial buyer–supplier relationships

Management Review Quarterly - Additive manufacturing (AM) is regarded as a technology that has transformative and disruptive potential in nearly all industries. However, AM is not only about new...     

Optimal forecasts in the presence of structural breaks

This paper considers the problem of forecasting under continuous and discrete structural breaks and proposes weighting observations to obtain optimal forecasts in the MSFE sense. We derive optimal weights for one step ahead forecasts. Under continuous breaks, our approach largely recovers exponential smoothing weights. Under discrete breaks, we provide analytical expressions for optimal weights in models with a single regressor, and asymptotically valid weights for models with more than one regressor. It is shown that in these cases the optimal weight is the same across observations within a given regime and differs only across regimes. In practice, where information on structural breaks is uncertain, a forecasting procedure based on robust optimal weights is proposed. The relative performance of our proposed approach is investigated using Monte Carlo experiments and an empirical application to forecasting real GDP using the yield curve across nine industrial economies.     

Encouraging employees to co-operate: the effects of sponsored training and promotion practices on employees' willingness to work overtime

The ‘mutual-investment’ model argues that when employers invest more in the social exchange relationship between them and their employees, their employees will show more effort. In this paper we relate the ‘mutual-investment’ model to training and promotion (possibilities) and examine if these kinds of career-enhancing measures influence the willingness of employees within organizations to work overtime. To test this hypothesis, a vignette experiment was conducted in five organizations (N = 388; 1,531 vignettes). Multilevel analyses show that employees are more willing to work overtime when their employer has provided for training, when the employee recently was promoted, when the supervisor was supportive in the past and when co-workers approve of working overtime and behave similarly. But we did not find that future promotion chances affect willingness to work overtime.