Sustainable tourism and its use as a development strategy in Cambodia: a systematic literature review

Governments in many developing countries endorse sustainable tourism, despite associated practical limitations and challenges as a development strategy. Using the case of Cambodia, this paper illustrates how sustainable tourism issues in a developing country may be better understood through a systematic review of scattered relevant peer-reviewed and grey literature. This can help in identifying emergent themes and challenges, gaps in knowledge, and opportunities for future research. Analysis of 77 documents on Cambodia's sustainable tourism revealed themes and challenges relating to: (1) an emphasis on nature-based tourism (ecotourism); (2) calls for greater community engagement for sustainable outcomes; (3) stakeholder perceptions and values as drivers of tourism success; (4) cultural heritage as a key tourism attraction; and (5) foreign investment shaping Cambodia's tourism future. Unequal emphasis is given to key government policies for tourism development and there is limited practical guidance on how to realise a vision of sustainable tourism. There is a lack of consideration of how the socio-economic and cultural context affects sustainable tourism. The evidence suggests that sustainable tourism in Cambodia is questionable until fundamental economic, social capacity and policy issues are addressed, along with greater emphasis given to the tourism system's demand side.     

A Comparison of Option Prices Under Different Pricing Measures in a Stochastic Volatility Model with Correlation

This paper investigates option prices in an incomplete stochastic volatility model with correlation. In a general setting, we prove an ordering result which says that prices for European options with convex payoffs are decreasing in the market price of volatility risk.As an example, and as our main motivation, we investigate option pricing under the class of q-optimal pricing measures. The q-optimal pricing measure is related to the marginal utility indifference price of an agent with constant relative risk aversion. Using the ordering result, we prove comparison theorems between option prices under the minimal martingale, minimal entropy and variance-optimal pricing measures. If the Sharpe ratio is deterministic, the comparison collapses to the well known result that option prices computed under these three pricing measures are the same.As a concrete example, we specialize to a variant of the Hull-White or Heston model for which the Sharpe ratio is increasing in volatility. For this example we are able to deduce option prices are decreasing in the parameter q. Numerical solution of the pricing pde corroborates the theory and shows the magnitude of the differences in option price due to varying q.JEL Classification: D52, G13     

Douglas Brinkley. Wheels for the World: Henry Ford, His Company, and a Century of Progress, 1903-2003. New York: Viking, 2003. xxii + 858 pp. ISBN 0-670-03181-X, $34.95. * Max Wallace. The American Axis: Henry Ford, Charles Lindbergh, and the Rise of the Third Reich. New York: St. Martin's Press, 2003. 465 pp. ISBN 0-312-29022-5, $27.95

In recent years the line dividing scholarly histories from popularones has grown blurry. Changes in how books are marketed andretailed over the past two decades have whetted the appetiteof general readers for history, and many academic historians,though trained to write for specialists, now seek to tap into this audience more broadly. The commercial success of suchscholars as Joseph Ellis and James M. McPherson has inspiredacademic historians to try to write more readable books. Atthe same time, journalists and other writers are producing ambitiousnarratives based on primary sources. Still, important differencesremain between the kinds of history that academic and popularwriters produce. These differences surface in interesting waysin two new books on Henry Ford. The author of the first, Douglas Brinkley, is a professor anddirector of the Theodore Roosevelt Center for American Civilizationat     

The trend level of imports by CMEA countries

Some evidence is presented for the view that the trend level of imports for centrally planned economies is lower than that for comparable market-type economies. We also found strong evidence that this relationship did not change between 1969–1971 and 1977–1979. This trend was consistent with the relative rise in income and, to a lesser extent, with population. These conclusions are robust to plausible revisions of our data.     

Book reviews

Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science -     

The accountability demand for information in China and the US – A research note

This study replicated Evans, Heiman-Hoffman and Rau’s (hereafter, EHR) [Evans, J. H., III, Heiman-Hoffman, V. B., & Rau, S. (1994). The accountability demand for information. Journal of Management Accounting Research, 6, 24–42] US study, using Chinese MBA students as participants. The Chinese students acted as owners and selected one of two control systems. One control system requires truthful reporting and the other control system permits the manager to falsify the report. The two systems have the same expected payoff to the owner if the owner believes that the manager will always lie when given the opportunity. If the owner believes that there is any probability that the manager will tell the truth, then the more Lenient System has the higher expected payoff. We compared the US versus Chinese control system choices, and examined whether the Chinese owner-participants would be willing to sacrifice wealth to get accountability. The results indicate that a significant proportion of Chinese participants do have an accountability demand for information, and that this proportion is at least as high as that of the US participants in EHR.     

Local disaggregation of negative demand and excess demand functions

The literature on the characterization of aggregate excess and market demand has generated three types of results: global, local, or ‘at a point’. In this note, we study the relationship between the last two approaches. We prove that within the class of functions satisfying standard conditions and whose Jacobian matrix is negative semi-definite, only n/2+1$n/2+1$ agents are needed for the ‘at’ decomposition. We ask whether, within the same class, the ‘around’ decomposition also requires only n/2+1$n/2+1$ agents.     

Retailer service acceptance: simply adding a service to the offer portfolio or committing to marketing it

By virtue of their significant influence on customers’ decisions, retailers’ acceptance of a service plays a significant role in the success of that service. Therefore, retailers’ acceptance of the service and commitment to selling the service must be ensured. However, this issue has attracted limited attention in acceptance research, which tends to focus on goods, technologies and consumers. Based on a survey of consumer durables retailers in three countries, this study focuses on retailer acceptance of a complimentary use-guarantee service, which is meant to maintain customer’s ability to use a semi-durable consumer product. The results of this study link retailers’ perceived usefulness, and commitment & effort to their service acceptance. Manufacturer support was found to moderate the relationship between ease of use and acceptance. Further, nationality, retailer’s own use of the service as a consumer and the importance of the manufacturer’s business for retailers were important for retailer acceptance. Thus, manufacturers need to focus as strongly on retailer acceptance as on the end customer acceptance to ensure service success. They also need to ensure the usefulness of the service for retailer, give retailers a reason to commit to the service sales and provide enough support to make retailers comfortable in selling the service.