An emerging tourism planning paradigm? A comparative analysis between town and tourism planning

This article examines the roots and the evolution of tourism and town planning theory and practice. It discusses how both fields have interacted with each other, and provides some clues about the way in which tourism and town planning theory and practice are likely to evolve in the future. It is argued that tourism planning theory is still looking for its own identity and ways of evolving in the future. Copyright © 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Market power and fiscal policy in OECD countries

We compute average markups as a measure of market power throughout time and study their interaction with fiscal policy and macroeconomic variables in a VAR framework. From impulse-response functions, the results, with annual data for a set of 14 OECD countries, show that the markup (i) depicts a pro-cyclical behaviour with productivity shocks and (ii) a counter-cyclical behaviour with fiscal spending shocks. We also use a PVAR, increasing the efficiency in the estimations, which confirms the country-specific results.     

Toward a better comprehension of Lean metrics for research and product development management

This paper presents a compilation and empirical survey‐based evaluation of the metrics most commonly used by program managers during product development management. This work is part of a bigger project of Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Project Management Institute (PMI) and International Council on Systems Engineering (INCOSE). Three methodological procedures were applied: systematic literature review, focus‐group discussions, and survey. The survey results indicate the metrics considered to be the most and least useful for managing lean engineering programs, and reveals a shift of interest towards qualitative metrics, especially the ones that address the achievement of stakeholder values, and the absence of useful metrics regarding the lean principles People and Pull.     

The impact of affective and cognitive antecedents on negative word-of-mouth intentions

Negative word-of-mouth (WOM), defined as derogatory information disseminated from person to person and aimed at defaming a product, highlighting a product complaint, and/or highlighting unsatisfactory service experiences, influences consumer behavior and can harm a company’s image. The present study was conducted to ascertain the impact of affective antecedents (negative emotions) and cognitive antecedents (distrust) in the intent of negative WOM. A proposed theoretical model was employed to analyze the effect that perceived injustice had on negative WOM and how this effect was mediated by emotional and cognitive aspects. The research was a pre-experimental design – one treatment leading to one observation – with 252 students. Through an OLS regression and mediation analyses, we found an indirect link between perceived injustice and negative WOM intent, which was mediated by negative emotions and distrust. Contributing to the field of marketing studies, this paper fills an investigative gap regarding affective and cognitive antecedents as mediators of negative WOM. The results suggest that marketing managers should create mechanisms to allow consumers to express their negative emotions and rebuild their trust in order to avoid the spread of negative WOM.     

Is globalization a road to duopoly?

In global markets, the market shares of the two or three biggest firms sum up more than 90 percent and firms do marketing efforts. However, the classical neo-walrasiano theoretical framework only is able to justify these stylized facts with particular firms’ cost structures, being one reason the presumption that there are no information costs. Towards the rationalization of those stylized facts, I study the evolution of the market structure in a model of price advertising with a variable that controls the degree of openness of regional markets. The main result of the model is that in equilibrium the structure of a global market is the duopoly.     

Perceptions of poverty attributions in Europe: a multilevel mixture model approach

The perception of the causes of poverty has long been recognized as a very important factor in the broader study of this social phenomenon. This study covers 15 European Union countries and considers three types of poverty attributions: individualistic, societal, and fatalistic. The individualistic view perception believes the poor are responsible for their situation, the societal perspective blames society for poverty and the fatalistic view considers poverty to be the result of bad luck or fate. A multilevel mixture model with three clusters of countries and six clusters of individuals was identified. Despite the generalization of the social explanations of poverty at the individual or micro level, there are also groups that emphasize more individualistic explanations, blaming the poor for their condition. At the country or macro level, the most developed cluster believes in the individualistic and fatalistic causes of poverty, whereas the least developed clusters explain poverty based on the injustices of society. There is diversity in the way these countries perceive poverty.