Caribbean cruise tourism : A business of transnational partnerships

The cruise industry has grown dramatically during the 1980s to the extent that over four million North Americans will have opted for a cruise holiday in 1990. The Caribbean is perfectly placed to take advantage of this market but the governments concerned have not supported tourism development appropriate to the transnational cruise line operators. Cruise ship arrivals in the Caribbean are growing faster than stopover arrivals so it is vital that the various Caribbean governments cooperate with the transnational cruise line operators in planning and providing the necessary infrastructure to tempt the cruise ship arrivals to part with their dollars at the Caribbean destinations.     

A study of communication behaviour in an R & D laboratory

There is still much uncertainty about the determinants of technical communication flow in UK R & D laboratories and even more uncertainty about the causal link between communication behaviour and performance. Hence it is not clear what managerial action should be taken to improve technical communication flow and what effect such action would have on research productivity. In this study the main factors influencing communication flow are identified and the role of basic human characteristics in determining both communication behaviour and performance are studied and discussed.     

Depreciation of Business R&D Capital

We develop a forward-looking profit model to estimate the depreciation rates of business R&D capital. By using U.S. government data between 1987 and 2007, and the newly developed model, we estimate both constant and time-varying industry-specific R&D depreciation rates. The results comprise a set of R&D depreciation rates for major U.S. high-tech industries. They align with the main conclusions from recent studies that the rates are in general higher than the traditionally assumed 15 percent and vary across industries. The relative ranking of the constant R&D depreciation rates among industries is consistent with industry observations and the industry-specific time-varying rates are informative about the dynamics of technological change and the levels of competition across industries. Lastly, we also present a cross-country comparison of the R&D depreciation rates between the U.S. and Japan, and find that the results reflect the relative technological competitiveness in key industries.     

On the backfitting algorithm for additive regression models

We analyse additive regression model fitting via the backfitting algorithm. We show that in the case of a large class of curve estimators, which includes regressograms, simple step-by-step formulae can be given for the back-fitting algorithm. The result of each cycle of the algorithm may be represented succinctly in terms of a sequence of d projections in n-dimensional space, where d is the number of design coordinates and n is sample size. It follows from our formulae that the limit of the algorithm is simply the projection of the data onto that vector space which is orthogonal to the space of all n-vectors fixed by each of the projections. The formulae also provide the convergence rate of the algorithm, the variance of the backfitting estimator, consistency of the estimator, and the relationship of the estimator to that obtained by directly minimizing mean squared distance.