“You know that's a rip-off”: policies and practices surrounding micro-enterprises and poverty alleviation in South African township tourism

Supporting the development of small tourism businesses has been seen by policy-makers as a valuable means of alleviating poverty in South African townships. This perspective has been endorsed by several “responsible” tourism businesses and academics. Following a literature review, this paper reports the findings of an empirical study that examined the practices of 80 micro-business owners and the factors that shape their behaviour in two South African townships. In spite of significant visitor numbers, it finds that their narrow social networks, the imbalances of power between them and intermediaries such as travel agencies and tour operators, ideas of Ubuntu and Umona, and complex family and ethnic ties all represent barriers that prevent them from developing their businesses and sharing in the material gains available through tourism. This analysis has important implications for local policy-makers and those advocating responsible tourism. For the former, it suggests a cessation of current initiatives in favour of greater regulation and alternative forms of investment. For the latter, it implies a need to reassess the utility of advocating responsible tourism to consumers in a context where they do not understand the dynamics which fashion what is on offer or the implications of their choices.     

Non-Asian Tourists' preferred attributes: a choice experiment

This study aims to identify non-Asian tourists' preferred attributes for a one-day Seoul tour package by examining theoretical frameworks of values related to tourists' heterogeneity of choice behaviors. The study applies a choice experiment (CE) to capture the systematic heterogeneity of preferences in a non-Asian tourist group and examines whether different individuals' value orientations relate to heterogeneous preferences regarding the tour packages. The CE derives the preferences as a form of marginal willingness to pay (MWTP), a pecuniary value for additional units of the attributes. Historical/cultural destinations displayed the highest MWTP value of all tour sites in Seoul, which was estimated to be $74.32. The results also show that a respondent who emphasizes “money and enjoyment” and “authenticity” values is more likely to choose a tour package that includes more opportunities to visit shopping and historical/cultural sites, respectively.     

土地零租金流转与农业生产效率损失

土地零租金流转在“熟人社会”和“差序格局”特征明显的农村地区广泛存在。利用2015年中国家庭金融调查数据,检验了土地流转中的零租金现象对农业生产效率的边际影响和可能的作用机制。结果表明：土地零租金流转显著降低了农业生产的土地效率和劳动效率并扩大了农业生产中的技术无效率部分,尤其是对转入方向为普通农户和种植类型为经济作物以及土地租约期限过短或者过长的转入户带来的农业生产效率损失更加明显。具体的作用路径有两条：一是“零租金—农业生产投资不足—农业生产效率损失”,其中零租金对长期农业生产投资的挤出效应显著大于短期农业生产投资;二是“零租金—土地保护意愿下降—农业生产效率损失”。进一步研究发现,农业技术指导对零租金引致的农业生产效率损失具有缓解作用;农地确权并不能抑制土地流转中的零租金现象,但土地流转中介服务能够有效减少农户的土地零租金流转行为。因此,地方政府需要提高农业投资补贴,加快推进农业技术指导服务,积极构建统一开放、秩序规范、双向开放的农村土地流转市场,以减少土地零租金流转引致的农业生产效率损失。     

Measuring business cycles: Empirical Mode Decomposition of economic time series

This paper continues discussion on the issue of time series decomposition by presentation of the Empirical Mode Decomposition technique. This technique outperforms well-known time-series filters by providing a deeper insight into the structure of time series.     

Reconsidering Nonlinearity and Asymmetry in Customer Satisfaction and Loyalty Models: An Empirical Study in Three Retail Service Settings

The use of symmetric linear functional forms to describe the relationships among customer evaluative judgments is omnipresent in services research. However, according to several researchers, the use of symmetric linear functions to model the relationships among customer evaluative judgments leads to serious model misspecification. Although several asymmetric nonlinear functional forms have been proposed, only modest empirical evidence is available on the superiority of these more complex model specifications. Based on a formal empirical comparison in multiple service settings, we find that asymmetric nonlinear functions do not possess superior explanatory power compared to symmetric linear functional forms.     

The tax-induced holding periods of real estate Investors: Theory and empirical evidence

This article reexamines holding period decisions in real estate investment. It develops and empirically tests a holding period model recognizing not only taxes but also refinancing and investor-specific determinants. Based on a sample of over 1,000 real estate transactions with observed holding periods, the results of our tests support the conclusion that investors' consumption and investment preferences and prevailing market interest rates are more important than tax issues in determining the holding periods of real estate investors.     

A resolution of N-person prisoners' dilemma

Summary. The purpose of this paper is to show that cooperation is possible in N-person prisoners' dilemma if players have incomplete information on the order of their moves. We consider a modified version of N-person prisoners' dilemma in which players sequentially move in the order determined by Nature, and during the play they get some information about others. We provide an information partition and a condition of payoffs for which cooperation is attained in an equilibrium. Further, for the case that full cooperation is not attained, we examine the largest partial cooperation which is achieved in an equilibrium. Received: March 5, 1995; revised version August 11, 1996     

The Stock Performance of Securitized Real Estate and Master Limited Partnerships

This paper examines the stock performance of 144 master limited partnerships (MLPs) holding real estate and other types of assets. MLP stocks were found to underperform the market on a risk-adjusted basis during the period 1981–1991. The evidence indicates that the MLP organizational form has not been a superior vehicle for holding real estate. Also, the performance of real estate MLP stocks is similar to the performance of the stocks of other types of MLPs and that of real estate MLP stock performance is comparable to the performance of real estate investment trust stocks.     

Overcoming the liability of smallness by recruiting through networks in China: a guanxi-based social capital perspective

We investigate the role of guanxi in Chinese entrepreneurial firms’ recruitment practices in attempting to overcome the liability of smallness. Combining insights from the social capital and guanxi literature, we theorize the guanxi-based social capital perspective and use it to analysis 96 in-depth interviews with multiple members (entrepreneurs, senior managers and factory workers) from 15 die-casting entrepreneurial firms in Guangdong province, China. We find that the use of guanxi in recruitment practice can overcome the liability of smallness because it makes the hiring process more convenient, improves firms’ attractiveness to jobseekers and enhances the person-organizational fit between new hires and firms. We discuss how Chinese entrepreneurs and their senior managers use guanxi strategically to achieve these advantages. On the other hand, our findings suggest that jobseekers can also use guanxi to increase their options, improve their bargaining power and distract firms’ attention away from hiring the most appropriate candidate for the job in order to undermine the effectiveness of Chinese entrepreneurial firms’ recruitment procedures. We explore the implications of these findings for academic research and managerial practice.