Trading Prior to the Disclosure of Material Information: Evidence from Regulation Fair Disclosure Form 8‐Ks*

Regulation Fair Disclosure (Reg FD) Form 8‐K filings provide a venue where managers release information to the market as a whole that they designate as being material. Using this setting, we study trading patterns immediately prior to the public disclosure of material information. We offer three main results. First, using both intraday and daily trading data, we find abnormal trading volume of 21 percent (13 percent) in the hour (day) prior to the public disclosure, respectively. Second, we find that this pre‐disclosure abnormal trading volume is concentrated in firms that are smaller, have more growth opportunities, issue fewer voluntary disclosures, and have weaker external monitoring. Finally, we find that this pre‐disclosure volume is concentrated in subsamples in which the information relates to a firm's material contracts, a firm holds investor/analyst conferences, and there is insider trading activity in a firm's shares. Our results do not concentrate in a small number of firms or industries, and do not appear to be explained by the form through which managers first release the material information (e.g., Form 8‐K, press release, website posting, or social media). Our results are also robust to controlling for the firm's other filings and peer filings that occur around the disclosure. Overall, the trading patterns we document may show that, inconsistent with the spirit of Reg FD, a subset of investors trade on information managers deem material prior to its broad, public release.     

Developing an evolutionary tourism partnership model

Partnerships have become a popular tourism management strategy for leveraging scarce resources in an era of fiscal constraint. Despite this popularity, little empirical research has been done to explain the processes that occur when such interactions take place. An evolutionary model is presented based on an empirical study of three tourism partnerships, a review of existing tourism partnership case studies, and the integration of emerging theory from the organizational behavior field. The model suggests that tourism partnerships begin in a context of environmental forces and evolve sequentially through problem-setting, direction-setting, and structuring phases. Special facultative skills are needed to sustain and nurture tourism partnerships.     

IID: independently and indistinguishably distributed

The inability of the Bayesian model to accommodate Ellsberg-type behavior is well-known. This paper focuses on another limitation of the Bayesian model, specific to a dynamic setting, namely the inability to permit a distinction between experiments that are identical and those that are only indistinguishable. It is shown that such a distinction is afforded by recursive multiple-priors utility. Two related technical contributions are the proof of a strong LLN for recursive multiple-priors utility and the extension to sets of priors of the notion of regularity of a probability measure.     

African-American travel agents: Travails and Survival

Social science research on the struggles of early and contemporary independent African-American travel agents represents a void in the literature. These agents experienced serious obstacles to survival during the past half-century, not only during times of racial segregation, but more recently with airlines and government regulations, expensive technological innovations, and significant industry demands. Six agents describe their histories, successes and failures, and the futures of independent Black travel agents; serious difficulties remain, including access to capital. A scenario identifies the start-up costs for an independent Black travel agency in a medium-sized Middle West metropolitan area to illustrate the problems that remain.     

Knowledge engineering for modelling reasoning in a diagnosis task: application to search and rescue

This paper pertains to the application of knowledge engineering methods to aeronautical search and rescue in Canada. We modelled at the knowledge level the reasoning process of a search mission coordinator when conducting a diagnosis task to determine the routes likely followed by an aircraft missing overland. Knowledge engineering allowed us to develop a reasoning model based on documents and on interviews with domain experts. Our study was conducted in the CommonKADS knowledge modelling framework. The proposed model was validated by domain experts and implemented in a rule‐based prototype. Copyright © 2007 ASAC. Published by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Measuring tourist judgment on service quality

This study measures tourist judgments on service quality in alpine ski resorts. An attribute based method was employed in order to estimate weighting schemes both for quality judgments across different tourism activity domains and different quality dimensions within winter resorts and to quantify an overall quality measure. A linear regression and Sirgy's congruity model of customer satisfaction/dissatisfaction were adopted. The results indicate that there exists a linear relationship between the overall quality measure and the partial judgments of each domain/dimension. This allows deciphering the relevance of different domains of tourism activity and quality dimensions within the process of making quality judgments.     

Stated preferences for two Cretan heritage attractions

The paper utilizes discrete choice modeling methodology to evaluate preferences of tourists for hypothetical managerial initiatives for two heritage attractions in Crete, Greece. The results show that they are willing to contribute a significant amount of money for improvements in the quality of information for both sites. Receiving information will substantially improve their satisfaction and thus their chances of visiting. Tourists also make reference to demand management issues, arguing that deterioration in congestion levels in both attractions will negatively affect satisfaction levels. The paper draws attention to future policies designed to improve the quality of the heritage experience, such as the introduction of audiovisual material to complement the presentation of exhibits.     

Integrated strategy for tourism education/training

Tourism is in need of a comprehensive framework within which to design and deliver education and training programs in a more effective manner. This paper reports the efforts of two provincial governments in Canada to formulate an integrated strategy on which to base the planning and development of a tourism education and training system. The goal of such integration is to ensure a greater degree of interdependence among different levels of the total education system so as to provide well-defined alternative career paths for present and future students. Initial results of the strategy on the development of the education infrastructure are reviewed.