Effect of Diversity of Large Wildlife Species on Financial Benefits to Local Communities in Northwest Namibia

There exist few quantitative assessments of the relationship between biodiversity per se and economic benefits at scales that are relevant for conservation. Similarly, the merits of Community-Based Natural Resource Management programs for both wildlife and people are contested. Here, we harness two databases, on wildlife surveys and financial benefits, to address these issues for communal conservancies in northwest Namibia. We use ordination methods to characterize the diversity and stability of large wildlife assemblages on conservancies, and demonstrate that diversity (but not stability) is an important explanator of conservancy financial benefits. Our results indicate that for this area of Namibia, biodiversity, as represented by large wildlife assemblages, has an important, positive effect on the tangible financial benefits that people derive from conservation programs.     

Analyzing online reviews in hospitality: data-driven opportunities for predicting the sharing of negative emotional content

Hospitality is one of the sectors that are nowadays most heavily characterized by consumers’ tendency to share online reviews on dedicated digital platforms. While most past work has focused on understanding the effect of online reviews and ratings on consumers’ evaluation and purchase decisions, this research tackles the issue of what drives the sharing of certain types of online content. Specifically, we investigate the sharing of user-generated content characterized by negative emotional valence, and study the effect of two factors on the extent to which user-generated content contains negative emotions. One such factor is reviewer's expertise, while the other is hotel quality. Our analysis of 1200 TripAdvisor reviews on Italian hotels located in three major Italian cities confirm our hypothesis that expert reviewers might share reviews containing less intense negative emotional content compared to less expert reviewers especially when the hotel is of high quality. To support our hypothesis, we build on the research on psychological antecedents of word-of-mouth behaviour suggesting that expert consumers are particularly reluctant to share negative word-of-mouth to avoid projecting a negative image of themselves in social contexts, thus possibly damaging their reputation.     

The impact of mood states and surprise cues on satisfaction

Mood effects have been studied in consumer behavior literature, but prior research investigating the joint impact of mood and surprise on satisfaction is scant. To bridge this gap, this study examines the relationship among these three constructs. We manipulated customers’ pre-consumption mood and provided surprise cues with hypothetical scenarios in a 2 by 2 factorial design in a restaurant setting. The results show that a positive surprise yields high satisfaction without a significant effect from customers’ pre-consumption mood. Conversely, with a negative surprise, customers in a negative pre-consumption mood indicate lower satisfaction than those in a positive mood.     

Other consumers in service encounters: A script theoretical perspective

Hospitality service consumptions often involve sharing the service environment with other consumers. Drawing upon the Script Theory, this research provides a theoretical perspective of consumer responses to behaviors of other consumers in service encounters. The results from an experimental study provide strong support for the dual-mode consumer responses (felt emotions and displayed emotions) and for the moderating effect of psychological closeness on consumer responses. Managerial implications for training, service management and service design in hospitality businesses are also discussed.     

Farmers,Middlemen and Exporters: A Model of Market Power,Pricing and Welfare in a Vertical Supply Chain

Markets for cash‐crops in developing countries are typically characterized by a concentration of buyer power at different levels of the supply chain. For instance, small‐scale coffee farmers sell their produce to a middleman, who in turn sells the coffee onward to an exporter, often a foreign multinational, with monopsony power in the hands of the purchasers at both levels. We analyze pricing behavior and welfare with different assumptions regarding market power. In particular, we show that a more powerful exporter is likely to benefit the producers and may even lead to higher welfare for the producer country as a whole.     

Understanding the determinants of information technology adoption: evidence from Italian manufacturing firms

Our empirical study aims at identifying the determinants of Information Technology (IT) adoption by small and medium sized Italian manufacturing firms. An ordered probit analysis is conducted on a sample of about 17?000 firms surveyed by the Italian Statistical Institute, using as a dependent variable an index of IT adoption. Our results show that firm size, geographical location, functional composition of the workforce, R&;D activity, subcontracting, exports and collaboration between firms are all highly significant determinants of IT adoption. Such results are consistent with most of the predictions advanced in the few studies existing on this topic.     

U.S.-China Economic and Political Relations: Youths’ Perceptions

This paper is a study of the perceptions of young adults in the U.S. and China on the relations between the two nations. We conducted a case study by distributing a 17 question survey to 201 American undergraduate students (NYC) and 164 Chinese undergraduate students (Shanghai). The questions probed their views of U.S. and China’s economic and political systems, the future economic growth and political power in the world of the two nations, and the future political and economic relations between the two powers. The results of our study reveal a number of important perceptions that both U.S. and Chinese students have, some being similar and others being in sharp contrast. Most students in both countries view future political and economic relations between the U.S. and China predominantly as cooperative but only based on each nation’s self-interests. Both Chinese and American students agree that China is gaining political strength and economic influence among the advanced and the emerging nations of the world. While most of the U.S. students believe that China has been and will continue to grow at a much faster rate than the U.S., Chinese students are more likely to believe that this rate of growth is unsustainable. The results from our survey are compared and contrasted to the findings of national surveys for both countries. We believe that the study provides valuable insights into the similarities and differences in viewpoints of the next generation of adults in both nations about future U.S.-China relations.     

Search practices in the early phase of the innovation process and ambidexterity: testing a sample of high-tech companies

This paper investigates the relationship between the practices put in place by firms to search for local and distant knowledge, ambidexterity and firms’ performances; attention is then focused on analysing the antecedents and consequences of ambidexterity in the search phase of the innovation process. Structural equation modelling has been used in order to test these hypotheses in a sample of Italian high-tech companies. Results of the study show a positive impact of the practices used by firm to search for distant knowledge on both ambidexterity and firms’ performances as well. Implications of these results are discussed in the paper.     

A Comment on Dehez and Tellone, “Data games: sharing public goods with exclusion”

This comment shows that the data cost game introduced in Dehez and Tellone (Journal of Public Economic Theory, 2013) coincides with the nonadditive component of the library cost game studied in Driessen, Khmelnitskaya, and Sales (TOP, 2012) where the core, nucleolus, and Shapley value were also investigated.