An examination of electronic video clips in the context of hotel Websites

The Internet has become a major channel for selling a myriad of products and services. To make the on-line shopping experience more vivid, retailers and service providers frequently portray product images and video clips on their Websites. Although the dimensions of e-Service Quality have been studied in various on-line contexts, research focusing on video clips in the context of hotel Websites is limited. The purpose of this exploratory study is to examine how consumers evaluate video clips portraying experiential services such as hotels. Our results indicate that consumers evaluate video clips based on six distinct dimensions: user interface, aesthetics, customization/personalization, assurance/trust, flexibility and virtual human interaction.     

Progress in visitor attraction research: Towards more effective management

Visitor attractions (VAs) play a crucial role in the success of a tourism destination, where they act as key motivators for visits and as resources for local communities. The range of stakeholders involved means their effective management is of key importance in the destination and in the overall success of a country's tourism product, yet they are an under-researched sector of the tourism system. This Progress in Tourism Management paper reviews and reflects on research publications in relation to this sector. It sets the wider research context and identifies the key management issues experienced at VAs. The paper identifies the limitations of current work in this field and establishes how factors such as ownership and visitor volume help to explain the complexities encountered in managing VAs. The paper then covers a set of themes to structure discussion of previous research activity and offers a model of factors involved in the effective management of VAs. The paper concludes with the development of a research agenda for VA researchers.     

酒店市场营销:花得越多越好?

本文使用史密斯旅游研究(Smith Travel Research,STR)提供的酒店数据来探寻市场营销开支对酒店将来财务效益的影响.根据荻取的结论,我们有3大发现:1)市场营销支出对酒店一年后财务影响的边际效应呈递减分布;2)在个体酒店这个层次,总经营利润(gross operating profit)、纯经营利润(net operating income)以及总销售(revenue)有很强的自我预测性;3)对总经营利润、纯经营利润以及总销售的构成作进一步分析可以获得更好的预测效果.     

Consumers’ Preferences for Bread: Transgenic,Cisgenic, Organic or Pesticide‐free?

Consumers are apprehensive about transgenic technologies, so cisgenics, which limit gene transfers to sexually compatible organisms, have been suggested to address consumer concerns. We study consumer preferences for rye bread alternatives based on transgenic or cisgenic rye, grown conventionally or without the use of pesticides, relative to traditionally bred rye, grown with conventional or organic farming methods. Stated preference (SP) data from a choice experiment are combined with revealed preference (RP) data from market purchases from the same respondents. Results show that respondents prefer pesticide‐free production methods, and that while cisgenics is preferred over transgenics, the majority of respondents favour traditional breeding methods. The distribution in preferences suggests that some respondents prefer bread from cisgenic crops produced without pesticides over traditional crops produced using pesticides. Preferences for organic bread are stronger than for pesticide‐free products. From a policy perspective results suggest that excluding cisgenics from mandatory labeling in the EU, or including it in the voluntary non‐GM labelling in the US, would cause welfare losses for consumers.     

The Great War heritage site management in Trentino,northern Italy

The preparations for the 100th anniversary of the Great War outbreak turn the lights on war heritage. The purpose of this paper is to analyze the war heritage site management in northern Italy considering the role of stakeholders and the marketing efforts to promote the renovated heritage sites. Trentino-Alto Adige, an Italian Alpine region, constitutes the area of this study. In the Great War, the region, one of the historical border areas of Italy under the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy, witnessed heavy fighting in extreme environmental conditions. The tangible heritage of the frontline in the high Alps has recently been renovated and marketed in tourism. The conservation efforts to revalue the sites and to promote thematic routes linking war heritage in the region have gained interest from stakeholders. However, the institutions, museums, voluntary associations and tourism organizations involved in site management have different priorities. The findings show that significant effort has been invested to conserve and to exploit war heritage, however, regarding site management and visitor interpretation for international tourists’ needs seem to be neglected.     

The role of preconsumption affect in postpurchase evaluation of services

The primary objective of this article is to examine the impact of preconsumption affect on consumers' postpurchase evaluations. More specifically, we wanted to investigate how the two basic dimensions of affect—pleasure and arousal—contribute to customer evaluations of different types of services. To test our hypotheses, four service settings reflecting the quadrants in Russell's Circumplex Model of Affect were chosen. Data were collected at two points of time: at the preprocess stage and immediately after the core service delivery. The results of this study suggest that pleasure and arousal, the two dimensions of emotional responses to the preprocess service environment, may interact in determining postpurchase evaluations. The interaction effect was observed for global satisfaction judgments and for repeat purchase behavior, thus suggesting that the combined effects of arousal and pleasure need to be considered in the design of preconsumption service settings. © 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.     

The effect of CEO reputation and explanations for poor performance on investors’ judgments about the company’s future performance and management

Two experiments are conducted in which MBA students make judgments about a company’s future performance and management’s reputation after the company reports poor financial results. Information about the CEO’s pre-existing reputation is manipulated at three levels (favorable, unfavorable, or none) and the plausibility of management’s explanation is manipulated at two levels (plausible or implausible). Generally, the results indicate that management’s explanations influence investors’ judgments of the company’s future performance and that judgments about management were jointly influenced by both manipulated factors. Specifically, our results indicate that a pre-existing favorable management reputation is an enduring trait that is not damaged even when management offers an implausible explanation. Our results are consistent with Mercer (2004) but inconsistent with other research (40 and 53) suggesting that a good reputation is easily lost. Our results also indicate that offering a plausible explanation improves the reputation of managers with an unfavorable reputation. We also find that judgments about management’s intentions for explaining poor performance represent a partial mediator for judgments about management’s reputation. Finally, we provide evidence that judgments about the company’s future performance and management’s reputation are consequential in that they are associated with investors’ equity judgments.     

What is the Appropriate Counterfactual When Estimating Effects of Multilateral Trade Policy Reform?

Multilateral trade reforms, such as may eventually emerge from the WTO's Doha Development Agenda (DDA), tend to be phased in over a decade or so after agreement is reached. Given the DDA's slow progress, that implementation may not be completed before the end of the next decade. Ex‐ante analysis of the DDA's possible effects thus requires first modelling the world economy to 2030 and, in that process, projecting what trade‐related policies might be by then without a DDA. Typically, modellers assume the counterfactual policy regime to be a ‘business‐as‐usual’ projection assuming the status quo. Yet we know developing country governments tend to switch from taxing to assisting farmers in the course of economic development. This paper shows the difference made by including political economy‐determined agricultural protection growth endogenously in the baseline projection. We reveal that difference by projecting the world economy to 2030 using the Global Trade Analysis Project (GTAP) model with those two alternative policy regimes and then simulating a move to global free trade (the maximum benefit from a multilateral trade reform) in each of those two cases. The welfare effects of removing the counterfactual price distortions in 2030 are shown to be much larger in the case where agricultural protection grows endogenously than in the case assuming no policy changes over the projection period. This suggests the traditional way of estimating effects of a multilateral agricultural trade agreement may considerably understate the potential welfare gains.     

HRM implementation by multiple HRM actors: a social exchange perspective

Abstract

In this study, we understand HRM implementation as a social process that depends on the social exchange relationships between line managers and both HRM professionals and employees. As such, we offer a fresh approach to understanding HRM implementation by concentrating on the social exchange among HRM actors. We do so by investigating to what extent these exchange relationships influence HRM implementation, as reflected in employees’ perceptions of the presence of HRM practices and their affective commitment. We collected multilevel data from two sources (line managers and employees) and in two phases in a Dutch engineering firm, and obtained fully matched manager – employee information from 75 employees and 20 line managers. Our results show that employees perceive a larger number of HRM practices when they have a good relationship with their line managers and when their line managers are motivated to implement HRM practices. Line managers, in turn, reciprocate perceived support from the HRM department with greater motivation to implement these practices. We conclude that because HRM actors engage in social interactions, HRM practices will be implemented at the organizational level because employees perceive the presence of HRM practices and then reciprocate this with affective commitment.