Dimentions of tourist satisfaction with a destination area

Pizam, Abraham, Yoram Neumann, and Arie Reichel.. “Dimensions of Tourist Satisfaction with a Destination Area,” Annals of Tourism Research, Vol. V, No. 3, July/September 1978, pp. 314–322. This paper empirically identifies eight factors of tourist satisfaction with Cape Cod, Massachusetts (USA) as a tourist destination area; and it suggests the means to measure them. By using a factor-analytic approach based on data obtained from a survey of 685 vacationing tourist, the following factors of tourist satisfaction were derived: beach oppurtunities, cost, hospitality, eating and drinking facilities, accommodation facilities, environment, and extent of commercialization.     

The future oriented society Axioms and methodology

A social psychologist looks at modern man's image of things to come and assesses its very powerful motivation. He deduces that this image is split into a number of planes—short range, medium range, long range and very long range, and he describes the characteristics of each. Having established how these attitudes are conditioned he then describes a series of methods in which they are used.     

Local taxes and political influence: evidence from locally dominant firms in German municipalities

We analyze the impact of locally dominant firms—i.e. firms that contribute a sizeable share to municipalities’ revenues—on local business tax rates. We argue that these firms have considerable political power locally even if they are not large in the regional or national perspective. These locally dominant firms can use their political power to voice their concerns directly vis-à-vis the local government—a channel of influence that is hardly available in municipalities with an atomistic structure of tax payers. We hypothesize that municipalities with locally dominant firms will set lower tax rates than municipalities in which tax-payers’ concentration is low. We test the impact of tax-payers’ concentration on local business tax rates using data from 423 municipalities in the German state Hesse between 1998 and 2005. The estimation technique accounts for spatial lags and autoregressive disturbances. Results support our central hypothesis: the higher the tax-payers’ concentration, the lower the municipal business tax rates.     

Brand trust and engagement in social commerce

With the surge in social media (SM) users around the world, the scope of social commerce (SC) in brand engagement is a prominent area of discussion. The present study empirically investigates the effect of social commerce construct (SCC), multi-dimensional constructs of social presence theory (SPT) and consumer generated content (CGC) on brand trust and brand engagement in SC platforms. An online survey was conducted among 625 Indian consumers who had made more than one purchase using SC platforms in the previous 6 months. Structural equation modelling technique was employed for testing the hypotheses and conceptual model. The results suggest that each element of SCC, SPT and CGC positively contributes to brand trust and engagement. Further, the study provides insight into brand trust and brand engagement in SM, which prompts brand usage intention of the consumers. The insights can be used by managers to create long-term customer relationship management action plans that emphasize brand trust and engagement.