International tourism demand and the business cycle

The focus of this study is on presenting causes and hypotheses for the existence of asymmetric income and price effects on tourism demand across business cycles. The theoretical assumptions were tested by analyzing tourism import demand in different source markets, drawing on econometric models that provide for the magnitudes of price and income effects either to vary depending on the phase of the business cycle or to remain stable across the business cycles. The major outcome of this study is that the general assumption in most of the tourism demand studies—i.e. that the income effects are symmetric—should not be expected to be automatically true for every source market.     

Effects of ownership change on organizational settings and strategies in a Taiwanese hotel chain

The purpose of this study was to explore the effects of ownership change on a local-chain hotel in Taiwan: how the new chief executive officer (CEO) planned a blue ocean strategy and how he led all employees to achieve pre-established goals. This study applied qualitative research methodology whereby the data were collected by participant observations in the study field and subsequent in-depth interviews with an application of the QSR NVivo software program. This study implies that, in the assimilation stage of the change, (1) the CEO should use democracy instead of dictatorship; (2) sub-cultures, factions and conflict could be prevented by organizational socialization and equal opportunity treatment; and (3) blue ocean strategies enable a shift of organizational image and identity. This qualitative study supplements the existing literature by showing that organizational politics might be affected by organizational change and how the concept of blue ocean strategy might be implemented in the course of organizational change.     

The entrepreneurial imagination and the impact of context on the development of a new venture

This paper sets out to explore the impact of a new venture's context on its development. The study consists of a single case study based on a new venture attempting to exploit an opportunity in the life sciences and charts the impact that the context, in particular actors that the venture are trying to gain resources from, have upon the plans, activities and resources developed by this nascent firm. Spanning the time period of 1999-2006, this case outlines four periods of development of the venture. This accounts for the initial plans of the venture, their struggle to gain venture financing, the development of the venture's technological resources and the attempts to create commercial relationships. The study shows the impact that institutions used in a context have on this venture leading to, among other things, the discovery of IP, finding a CEO and developing a product line.     

An information-based adaptive strategy for resource exploitation in competitive scenarios

Given an exploitation problem, in which a number of agents compete for a limited renewable resource, the optimal harvesting strategy depends on the ratio between resource availability and exploitation effort. For scarce resource a purely competitive, greedy strategy outperforms a more collaborative approach based on the Collective Intelligence, while for more abundant resource the opposite holds. The rationale for this behaviour lies in the amount of information each strategy is able to provide and a combined strategy is possible according to which agents choose dynamically the most informative strategy according to a minimum entropy criterion. This approach, which provides best performance for both under and over-exploited scenarios, can be used to monitor the resource status for management purposes and is effective in both centralised and decentralised decision making.     

Health Information Technology and Financing's Next Frontier: The Potential of Medical Banking

Calls to action for widespread adoption of electronic health records have come from a broad spectrum of the private and public sectors. The problem, to date, is not that information does not exist, as much as that the data have not been organized around the patient. An integrated Personal Health Record is a patient- or family-centered technology designed to capture not only the contacts with health care providers, but also personal information on insurance, diet, and personal preferences that a physician's health record will not capture. Medical banking, based on a new technology platform called the Integrated Health Card, is emerging as a solution to the problem of collecting and combining information from the electronic health record with personal health information. It may also be the only way for fledging health savings accounts to enable the price and quality transparency of the medical market that has been called for repeatedly in this decade. In analyzing the political and patient applications of widespread adoption of this new innovation, the positive contributions to social welfare are very likely to outweigh the negative.     

Economic development and resource degradation: Conflicts and policies

The paper develops a model that shares common features with computable general equilibrium (CGE) models. It is used to address two questions. First, what are the future prospects of a green gross domestic product (GDP); should we be concerned with resource degradation or not; and, to what extent, and under which conditions? Secondly, which policies are more effective than others? Model closures are simulated using different specifications of exogenous variables. Further, alternative policies are treated: human capital, price incentives, property rights and poverty reduction. In the African context, we show that while the prospects of environment-friendly economic development, i.e. a rising green GDP, are weak in the medium-run, under certain structural conditions there is a range of effective policies that resolves the conflict between economic growth and resource degradation, thus contributing to a rising green GDP.     

Category reviews as market-shaping events

This paper examines a series of category review meeting between manufacturers of fast-moving consumer goods and retailers as instances of market-shaping. Our point of departure is that markets are performed and shaped by multiple calculative agencies whose encounters are organized in routine fashion. Our empirical case focuses on the presentations of manufacturers of non-alcoholic beverages to one retailer during the annual cycle of reviews and negotiations that punctuate the implementation of exchange routines between these actors. Each presentation draws on a range of arguments, data, metrics, as well as ways of defining and segmenting the category to propose strategies that either reinforce the status quo or overturn well-established conventions. Category reviews illustrate both the negotiated and distributed character of market practices as well as their paradoxical character, at once dependent on stable institutional arrangements whilst continuously undermining the foundations of that stability.     

The effects of influence strategies on dealer satisfaction and performance in Taiwan's motor industry

The studies of influence strategies in channel relationships have focused on western, individualistic countries. This study seeks to extend the empirical findings in Taiwan's motor industry to elucidate differences among diverse context. The results reveal that the promise strategy must be separated from coercive strategies and the request strategy must be separated from noncoercive strategies under the context of Taiwan's motor industry. Moreover, discrimination between economic and social satisfaction helps relationships between influence strategies and satisfaction and the effects of satisfaction on performance to be understood. The dealer's satisfaction is positively related to his performance, and social satisfaction is more important than economic satisfaction.     

Measuring and managing customer relationship risk in business markets

There have been repeated calls from top management and marketing academics for greater accountability in marketing so that the financial returns of marketing investments can be more robustly evaluated. These are coalescing around the issue of whether or not marketing delivers shareholder value. One promising line of enquiry explores customer lifetime value and the profitable management of these relationships. Although helpful, this approach fails to make the final link with shareholder value since customer lifetime value is still essentially a profit or cash flow measure and does not fully account for customer risk. This paper describes empirical research which explores differing approaches to measuring customer risk and the creation of shareholder value through customer relationship management (CRM). We develop a customer relationship scorecard which proves an innovative tool for managers to use in determining the risks in their customer relationships and developing risk mitigation strategies. The scorecard is then used to forecast retention probabilities, from which a risk-adjusted customer lifetime value is calculated. Both the scorecard and the calculations have an impact on the CRM practices of the customer relationship managers. From a theoretical perspective, an enhanced consideration of customer risk and returns is an important additional step towards demonstrating that marketing creates shareholder value.