An examination of organizational acculturation in the U.S.‐based chain hotels in Korea

Given the relatively new concept of organizational acculturation, this study has investigated the cultural convergence of the Korean hotel employees of U.S.‐based management contract chain hotels in Korea, toward the American culture. MANOVA and subsequent univariate ANOVA tests employed have resulted in the group exhibiting a significant cultural change only in the Power Distance, one of the Hofstede's four national cultural dimensions: not in other dimensions of Uncertainty Avoidance, Individualism/Collectivism, and Masculinity/Femininity. Some possible explanations for such marginal occurrence of the organizational acculturation have been provided in the discussion. Some possible methodological limitations have also been addressed in the study.     

Spatiotemporal distribution of urban walking tourists by season using GPS-based smartphone application

The purpose of this study is to determine urban walking tourists’ spatiotemporal distribution by season. With the Bukchon Hanok Village in Seoul, South Korea, as a study site, a GPS-based smartphone application collects spatiotemporal data from 233 participants, and GIS and statistical methods are used to analyze walking tourists’ spatiotemporal distribution by season. The main results of difference analysis show that the moving and staying variables of urban walking tourists differ significantly by season. In addition, spatiotemporal distributions using ArcGIS's tools show clear spatial and temporal concentrations along commercial areas and the main access road to the study site by season, while residential areas are isolated from the benefits of walking tourism. Policy-makers and planners of walking tours should use these unbalanced spatiotemporal distributions of walking tourists to define policies that would distribute tourists spatially and temporally, thereby decreasing conflicts arise between stakeholders.     

California Resident Motives for Gambling at Indian Reservations Versus Las Vegas

The casino gaming sector has become a lucrative part of the hospitality industry. California Indian casinos have expanded to now compete with casinos in Las Vegas, but more California residents gamble in Las Vegas casinos. Little research has been conducted to reveal why California residents travel to Las Vegas to gamble at casinos when California Indian casinos are closer. Thus, this study focused on what motivates California residents to gamble at California Indian casinos as opposed to those who gamble at Las Vegas casinos. A total of 300 online surveys were used for data analysis. First, exploratory factor analysis was performed to find the underlying dimensions of casino motivations. Second, independent-samples t-tests were conducted to compare the perceptions the two groups have of casinos. Then, one-way ANOVA tests were implemented to find differences between casino motivation factors and six different demographic variables. This study will help both California Indian and Las Vegas casinos to assess their services and more effectively market to California residents.     

Consumer mistakes and advertising: The case of mortgage refinancing

Quantitative Marketing and Economics - Does advertising help consumers to find the products they need or push them to buy products they don’t need? In this paper we study the heterogeneous...     

Appropriation,Formal and Informal Sectors,and Efficient Endowment Distribution

By adding an informal sector whose output is not subject to appropriative interactions and assuming complementarity in the inputs for market production, this paper investigates how possible asymmetries in conflict affect the allocation of resources. It is shown that when the existing gap in relative appropriative skills is being closed, more resources are allocated to appropriative activities in the economy. We are, in this case, more likely to see a reduction in market activities but an increase in home activities. A poorer party is a natural producer rather than a natural fighter, which is the usual characterization of a less endowed party in the conflict analysis. By conducting a welfare analysis, this paper shows that a market-output-maximizing initial distribution of resources endowment is such that when one party has a comparative advantage in market production over appropriation, its initial fraction of total resource endowment should be greater than its relative productivity in market production.     

Managing supplier-retailer relationships: From institutional and task environment perspectives

This study develops an integrated model of managing channel relationships that involves task and institutional environment perspectives. Using survey data from automobile dealers in China, the authors provide empirical evidence to demonstrate the utility of the legitimacy-based institutional environment perspective in clarifying channel relationship issues, which have been considered mostly only from an economic efficiency-based task environment approach. As the institutional environment perspective's factors, imposition asymmetry and bypassing have indirect impacts on trust in supplier and the level of conflict in a channel relationship. As the task environment standpoint's factors, explicit contracts and supplier's transaction-specific investments (TSIs) are posited to have direct effects on trust in supplier and the level of conflict, however, the hypothesized relationship between supplier's TSIs and the level of conflict is not supported. The results also indicate both building a retailer's trust in its supplier and lowering the level of conflict lead to improved relationship performance.     

The impact of innovation intensity,scope, and spillovers on sales growth in Chinese firms

We investigate the relationship between innovation and sales growth of firms in China. Innovation theories suggest firms create the technological knowledge needed to have market impact with their products and drive sales growth in different ways. These include: (1) through firms’ overall innovation intensity, (2) through decisions on innovation scope (depth vs. diversity), and (3) through knowledge spillovers from technological neighbors. Little research exists on how effective these approaches are for emerging market firms in pursuit of growth. To address this, we integrate and test the effects of these different knowledge creation mechanisms using data from Chinese firms over a five-year period. Findings show that innovation intensity and knowledge spillovers positively impact sales growth. We also develop and test a model capturing the non-linear impact of innovation scope. As predicted, we find a U-shaped relationship for depth of innovation and an inverted U-shaped relationship for diversity of innovation.     

The effects of regulation on industry structure and trade generation in the US securities industry

This study investigates the effects of Regulation FD and the Global Research Analyst Settlement on market share within the US securities industry as well as the determinants of market share during 1996–2004. We find that these regulations did not cause top brokers to lose market share in spite of their reduction of information asymmetries existing within the brokerage industry. They did, however, significantly reduce the quarterly variability in market share changes. We find that Regulation FD and the Global Research Analyst Settlement reduce the importance of an all-star analyst, issuer affiliation, and analyst optimism for gaining brokerage market share. We further discover that the Global Research Analyst Settlement increases the importance of coverage as a market share determinant while reducing the value of analyst experience for non-top brokers. We find that our results remain robust even when we limit our analysis to a set of pure brokerage firms.     

Information content of volatility spreads

This study reexamines the determinants of volatility spreads and suggests a new forecast of future volatilities. Contrary to earlier volatility forecasts, the newly introduced forecast is applicable when investors are not risk‐neutral or when underlying returns do not follow a Gaussian probability distribution. This implies that the method is consistent with the presence of risk premia for other risks such as volatility risk. Using S&P 500 index options, we show that the new volatility forecast outperforms other volatility forecasts including risk‐neutral implied volatility and historical volatility in two aspects. First, the new forecast is superior to other estimates in terms of forecasting errors for future realized volatilities. Second, it is an unbiased estimator of future realized volatilities. This is shown using an encompassing regression analysis. © 2009 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Jrl Fut Mark 30:533–558, 2010     

Product boundary,vertical competition,and the double mark‐upproblem

We develop a model in which a main product (called product A) provides a performance quality z by itself, whereas a complementary product (called product B) is useless by itself but enhances the main product's performance quality to q > z. This asymmetric complementarity gives rise to the following results. First, if z is relatively small, then firms A and B behave as if the products are symmetrically complementary with the usual double marginalization problem. Second, if z is sufficiently large, then firms A and B price their products as if they are independent. Third, over a certain range of intermediate z, no pure‐strategy Nash equilibrium exists.