Customer perceptions of “McService”’: Relationship with return intention

The fast-food restaurant segment has been a dominant player in the restaurant industry since the 1960s. The recent changes in the needs and wants of guests have affected fast-food restaurants' ability to keep up with the trends regarding healthy and high-quality food options served at reasonable prices. The service quality perceptions assessed in this study were divided into the following constructs: overall experience, employees, ordering process, receiving order, and food quality. The results determined that the construct that influenced repeat intention was food quality, specifically the individual items “fresh food” and “food taste.” The study also found that males tended to evaluate employees more positively than females. Moreover, frequent fast-food diners only tended to have favorable perceptions with regard to the overall ordering process. Implications for practitioners and suggestions for future studies are discussed.     

Why do They Come Back? The Effects of Winery Tourists’ Motivations and Satisfaction on the Number of Visits and Revisit Intentions

ABSTRACT

Few studies have examined the influence of winery tourists’ motivations and satisfaction on number of visits and revisit intentions. This study examined these relationships through 1602 online survey responses from former winery visitors. The data were analyzed through a series of multiple regression analyses. Findings show that among tourists’ motivations, the reputation, reviews, and perceived quality of the winery and its wines significantly affect the number of visits and revisit intentions, while media exposure affects revisit intentions. Further, visitors’ satisfaction with the winery significantly impacts revisit intentions. While visitors’ geographic proximity to the winery increased the number of visits, as expected, distance from the winery is shown to increase revisit intentions. Finally, the number of previous visits had a significant positive effect on revisit intentions.     

Using panel data dea to measure CEOs' focus of attention: An application to the study of cognitive group membership and performance

In this study, we examine the existence and performance of cognitive groups. In accordance with the attention‐based view of managerial cognition, cognitive groups are defined as groups of firms in which the CEOs focus their attention on similar strategic elements when seeking to maximize their firm's competitive advantage. We developed a panel data extension of the original Data Envelopment Analysis to gauge CEOs' focus of attention and then clustered firms into groups. We compared our approach with other approaches that use content analysis of CEOs' letters to shareholders and CEOs' demographic characteristics to measure CEOs' attention. Although the different approaches are related, indicating the existence of a common underlying construct (i.e., mental models), our approach explains a higher proportion of the variation in organizational performance. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Wake up and smell the ginseng: International trade and the rise of incremental innovation in low-wage countries

Increasingly, a small number of low-wage countries such as China and India are involved in incremental innovation. That is, they are responsible for resolving production-line bugs and suggesting product improvements. We provide evidence of this new phenomenon and develop a model in which there is a transition from old-style product-cycle trade to trade involving incremental innovation in low-wage countries. The model explains why levels of involvement in incremental innovation vary across low-wage countries and across firms within each low-wage country. We draw out implications for sectoral earnings, living standards, the capital account and, foremost, international trade in goods.     

Misallocation and productivity

A large portion of differences in output per capita across countries is explained by differences in total factor productivity (TFP). In this article, we summarize a recent literature — and the articles in this special issue on misallocation and productivity — that focus on the reallocation of factors across heterogeneous production units as an important source of measured TFP differences across countries.     

Productive physical investment and growth: testing the validity of the AK model from a panel perspective

In this article, we analyse the relationship between productive physical investment and economic growth from a panel perspective for a sample of 61 countries spanning the period 1950 to 1992. The analysis can be thought of as two-fold. First, we test the empirical validity of AK models following the logic by Jones (1995 Jones, CI. 1995. Time series properties of endogenous growth models. Quarterly Journal of Economics, 110: 495–525. [Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]). For that purpose, we determine the degree of persistence of physical investment rates and growth by employing recently developed panel unit-root tests that enable us to make more reliable inferences about the existence of stochastic trends in the series. Second, we estimate the long-run effect of physical investment on growth by using panel data techniques rather than cross-section regressions. Overall, our findings cast doubts on the rejection of the empirical validity of the AK model, as suggested by Jones’ analysis.