Service robots or human staff: How social crowding shapes tourist preferences

Service providers in tourism and hospitality are beginning to welcome robots as a customer service option. Given this trend, it is important to explore the factors driving tourists' willingness to adopt such new technology. This study focuses on the role of crowding, an environmental factor widely observed in destinations susceptible to over-tourism, in shaping tourists' willingness to adopt service robots. Based on one survey and two experiments, the present research demonstrates that a destination which is more (vs. less) crowded generally motivates tourists to favor robot-provided services rather than those from human staff. Furthermore, findings reveal that this pattern manifests because more (vs. less) social crowding reduces tourists’ motivation to interact with others, as evidenced by social withdrawal tendency.     

Purely procedural preferences - Beyond procedural equity and reciprocity

We conduct experiments in which parties face a pair of two-player pie-splitting procedures. Parties submit their strategy in each, their beliefs about their opponent's choices, and are also asked whether they prefer one procedure over the other. The procedures – a yes-no game, an ultimatum game, and a dictator game – are designed such that by all existing economic preference models, whether distributive or procedural, parties should be indifferent between them. In particular, the procedures should yield the same outcomes, the same expected outcomes and carry the same information on parties' intentions. At the same time, the procedures differ in the way they distribute decision and information rights across players, and also in their complexity and efficiency. Experimentally, parties do indeed still reveal preferences over the procedures at hand. To explore why this happens, we elicit individuals' simplicity and efficiency ratings of the procedures, and also the degree by which individuals invoke the equality of basic rights and liberties in their moral judgement – an ethical criterion not yet captured by any preference model. The preferences we find link to this data. We explore formalizations for such preferences.     

Consumer reactions to olfactory congruence with brand image

Store managers tend to select odors based upon their pleasing nature without taking into account the notion of congruence between the odor and the brand image. Studies have explored the effects of odors, but little attention has been paid to olfactory congruence, and even less to olfactory congruence with the brand image. This study investigates the impact of olfactory congruence with the brand image upon consumers. The results show the positive effect of olfactory congruence upon spending, attitude, pleasure, arousal, and perception of the store atmosphere. In the strong olfactory congruence condition being tested, these reactions are more positive than in the weak congruence and control conditions.     

个体异质性、预期与公共品自愿供给——来自中国的经济学实验证据

文章基于Fischbacher和Gchter(2010)实验方法,以中国被试为研究对象,探讨了个体社会偏好异质性、预期形成方式,以及两者对公共品自愿供给的影响。研究发现,个体社会偏好的异质性与预期的动态调整共同决定了实验被试的公共品投资行为,具体而言,异质性的个体基于自己的观察不断地更新对他人公共品投资的预期,进而调整自己的投资行为。文章不仅为国际研究提供了来自中国被试的证据,同时,也为完善我国公共品供给体系提供了有益的理论支撑。     

关于人力资源管理专业实验课程设计研究——以人力资源素质测评实验课程为例

在人力资源管理专业教学中,实验课程教学是一个必不可少的环节,在培养学生实践能力和创新能力方面具有不可替代的作用。人力资源素质测评实验课程属于验证型实验,课程设计主要包括实验目的和要求、实验条件、实验组织、实验内容、实验课程总结和实验课程考核等六个方面的内容。实践证明,人力资源素质测评实验课程教学与课堂教学占有同等重要的地位,对于培养高素质人力资源管理专业人才和实现人力资源管理专业教学目标具有重要意义。     

建筑电气施工的质量问题以及应对措施分析

电气工程是建筑工程的一个重要组成部分。随着现代楼宇自动化条件的飞速发展,对建筑电气安装质量提出了更加严格的要求,需要电气工程技术人员找准电气工程施工中常见的质量问题,以对症下药,解决问题。     

The disposition effect in team investment decisions: Experimental evidence

This paper experimentally studies the disposition effects of teams and individuals. The disposition effect describes the phenomenon that investors are reluctant to realize losses, whereas winners are sold too early. Our experiments compare the investments of two-person teams to a setting where investors trade alone. We find that subjects investing jointly exhibit more pronounced disposition effects than individuals. A closer look reveals that investor teams hardly realize losses and predominately sell winners. The data suggest that decision-dependent emotions may explain the differences. That is, teams reporting high levels of regret exhibit significantly higher disposition effects than individuals.     

Belief in Mean Reversion and the Disposition Effect: An Experimental Test

The disposition effect refers to investors' tendency to disproportionately sell more winning than losing assets. The literature mostly offered indirect evidence regarding its cause. Using a lab experiment, the author directly evaluates the two competing behavioral mechanisms for this effect: belief in mean reversion and dual risk attitudes of prospect theory. The participants were endowed with some hypothetical assets, observed price charts, and made selling decisions. Sixty-one percent of them exhibited significant disposition effect. The author elicited the participants' risk attitude parameters and beliefs about price movements, and found that beliefs, especially those in the loss domain, but not the dual risk attitudes, significantly contributed to the between-subject variation of the disposition effect. The results from a goodness-of-fit test also favor the belief mechanism.     

Decentralized matching and social segregation

Social segregation is a ubiquitous feature of human life. People segregate along the lines of income, religion, ethnicity, language, and other characteristics. This study provides the first experimental examination of decentralized matching with search frictions and institutionalized segregation. The findings indicate that, without a segregation institution, high types over-segregate relative to the equilibrium prediction. We observe segregation attempts even when equilibrium suggests that everyone should accept everyone else. In the presence of a segregation institution, we find that, while the symmetric segregation institution increases matching success rate and efficiency in one environment, it has weak or no effect in a steep-incentive environment. By adding an entry cost to a flat-incentive market, however, the asymmetric segregation institution leads to an increased matching success rate and efficiency in both environments, which underscores the importance of a coordination device.     

Strive to be first or avoid being last: An experiment on relative performance incentives

We utilize a laboratory experiment to compare effort provision under optimal tournament contracts with different distributions of prizes which motivate agents to compete to be first, avoid being last, or both. We find that the combined tournament contract incorporating both incentives at the top and at the bottom induces the highest effort, especially in larger groups. Avoiding being last produces the lowest variance of effort and is more effective at motivating employees compared to competing for the top.