Travel deterrents to regional destinations

Travel motivation is prevalent in the tourism literature. Very few studies however have examined travel deterrents to visiting popular destinations. This study approaches from travel motivation understand why tourists do not visit regional destinations and from tourists’ background to identify who do not visit these destinations with a focus on well-known regional destinations in Australia. The results show that convenience to the destinations, timing, motivation and tourist attractions are the major deterrents, and the level of these deterrents is dependent upon some of the demographic background of tourists. The findings and implications conclude this paper.     

Using deep learning and visual analytics to explore hotel reviews and responses

This study aims to use computational linguistics, visual analytics, and deep learning techniques to analyze hotel reviews and responses collected on TripAdvisor and to identify response strategies. To this end, we collected and analyzed 113,685 hotel reviews and responses and their semantic and syntactic relations. We are among the first to use visual analytics and deep learning-based natural language processing to empirically identify managerial responses. The empirical results indicate that our proposed multi-feature fusion, convolutional neural network model can make different types of data complement each other, thereby outperforming the comparisons. The visualization results can also be used to improve the performance of the proposed model and provide insights into response strategies, which further shows the theoretical and technical contributions of this study.     

Service-Oriented Computing for intelligent train maintenance

The purpose of this work is to apply the servicization of enterprise information systems in maintenance, particularly in the management of the maintenance process of the component parts of trains. Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) is an architectural approach that permits servicization since it provides a flexible set of design principles used during the modeling practices (abstraction and realization). With a view to supporting the model-driven engineering of software systems, Mode Driven Architecture (MDA) is a design approach delivering a set of guidelines for the configuring of specifications in systems development. Therefore, the combination of these two approaches can be fruitful to address the challenging issues the enterprise information system is facing today. Our study is based on a methodological approach using the MDA models for the automatic generation of web service. The case study concerns a Railways Maintenance Workshop (RMW) at Sidi Bel Abbes (Algeria). Finally, the information system for the management of maintenance of the component parts of passengers and baggage railcars, using the generated solution, is realized and deployed. This software helps to have better management of the RMW by the effective planning of interventions, improve performance by increasing reliability, traceability, and availability of the equipment (parts).     

Development of a conflict management model as a tool for improved project outcomes in community based tourism

Community based tourism (CBT) offers many opportunities, however, conflict frequently occurs while developing CBT in communities around the world. Despite conflict limiting the potential of CBT, conflict management in CBT has not previously been systematically studied. To investigate conflict and conflict management during CBT, a linear model of conflict management was developed and subsequently tested through a three phase qualitative process: analysis of CBT literature, online international survey of 29 CBT stakeholders, and in-depth interviews of 23 CBT stakeholders. Results endorse the proposed linear model of ‘conflict themes’: an ‘instance’ of conflict, followed by a ‘response’, which results in an ‘impact’. The rich data highlights the complexity involved, which was incorporated into the expanded model with three additional scenarios: ‘new conflict develops’, ‘interrelated conflict themes’, and ‘simultaneous conflict themes’. The complete Conflict Management Model provides stakeholders with a tool to address conflict, thereby improving the outcomes of CBT.     

Trade credit and supplier competition

This paper examines how competition among suppliers affects their willingness to provide trade credit financing. Trade credit extended by a supplier to a cash constrained retailer allows the latter to increase cash purchases from its other suppliers, leading to a free rider problem. A supplier that represents a smaller share of the retailer’s purchases internalizes a smaller part of the benefit from increased spending by the retailer and, as a result, extends less trade credit relative to its sales. In consequence, retailers with dispersed suppliers obtain less trade credit than those whose suppliers are more concentrated. The free rider problem is especially detrimental to a trade creditor when the free-riding suppliers are its product market competitors, leading to a negative relation between product substitutability among suppliers to a given retailer and trade credit that the former provide to the latter. We test the model using both simulated and real data. The estimated relations are consistent with the model’s predictions and are statistically and economically significant.     

To gift or not to gift: How providing a memento affects a restaurant magician’s tips

Tipping is an important source of income for many service workers, who would benefit from a better understanding of things they can do increase their customers’ tips. Among the many studies providing such knowledge are two studies reported by Strohmetz et al. (2002), who found that restaurant servers can increase their tips by leaving their customers with free candy at the completion of the dining experience. The current study tests how the “candy gift” effect generalizes for table magicians who leave their customers with a souvenir playing card. Data suggest that a table magician receives more frequent and larger tips when he gives the customer one of the cards from his deck as a memento. This finding suggests that gift effects on tipping are reliable and generalize beyond gifts of candy from waiters and waitresses. Apparently, workers in different areas of the service industry can use a variety of different gifts to create a need for their customers to reciprocate with larger tips.     

Investigating pharmaceutical logistics service quality with refined Kano's model

This study applies the refined Kano model and importance-satisfaction model to investigate medical institutions' satisfaction with and perceptions of importance of domestic pharmaceutical logistics services. Survey data involving 104 respondents from medical institutions are analyzed with importance-satisfaction and the refined Kano model. The results demonstrate that the refined Kano model will generate different classification of quality attributes for the pharmaceutical logistics industry, and medical institutions with different characteristics really have varying responses to quality attributes of pharmaceutical logistics services. The present research contributes to the literature by demonstrating that provision of high-value-added and crucial quality attributes by service providers can give them an edge in the market. In addition, when service providers understand their customers’ attitudes toward innovative service, it can enable them to strengthen their tactics in a competitive market.     

Trade and dietary diversity in Eastern Europe and Central Asia

In public and academic debates, the linkages between agricultural markets and nutrition across the world are vividly discussed. This paper contributes to the ongoing debate by analyzing the relationship between greater openness to trade and dietary diversity. It focuses on the post-communist countries of Eastern Europe and Central Asia where trade reforms triggered growth in trade flows and foreign direct investment, which in turn affected food systems in these countries. This shift provides a natural experiment for studying the effects of trade openness on agricultural markets and consumer behaviour. Reduction in trade barriers, for instance in the context of the accession to the WTO and the EU, and the gradual integration with world markets after 1991 had implications for diets through changes in production, prices and incomes. We utilize country-level panel data for 26 post-communist countries in the period 1996–2013 to assess the effects of trade costs, agricultural trade openness and incomes on dietary diversity measured by the Shannon entropy index. The results from fixed effects and instrumental variables estimation are consistent with previous findings that income growth affects dietary diversity positively. They also provide novel evidence that trade barriers reduce variety of products available in domestic markets, in particular fruits and vegetables.     

A non-additive multiple criteria analysis method for evaluation of airline service quality

Subjective preferences with interactive property are often involved in the evaluation of airline service quality. It may not be possible, however, to correctly evaluate service quality using conventional additive measures. The fuzzy measure, which is a non-additive measure, is more suitable for this situation. Given the presence of arduousness in current fuzzy measure identification and in the calculation of the comprehensive performance values of alternatives in terms of the Choquet integral, this paper proposes the λ_k fuzzy measure and introduces Marichal entropy of the λ_k fuzzy measure to reach a solution. This paper also presents the aggregator Choquet integral with respect to the λ_k fuzzy measure. To verify the method's effectiveness, an application study of the comprehensive performance of 15 US airlines was conducted, using data collected over a 10-year period. Our results show that the proposed method is a suitable multi-criteria analysis method, which can be used to evaluate the performance of airline service quality when man–made interaction phenomena are not existent.     

Outsourcing customer support: The role of provider customer focus

An increasing number of firms are outsourcing customer support to external service providers. This creates a triadic setting in which an outsourcing provider serves end customers on behalf of its clients. While outsourcing presents an opportunity to serve customers, service providers differ in their motivation and ability to fulfill customer needs. Prior research suggests that firms with a strong customer focus have an intrinsic motivation to address customer needs. We suggest that in an outsourcing context, this intrinsic motivation does not suffice. Using a Motivation–Opportunity–Ability framework, we posit that the effect of a provider's customer focus will be moderated by a set of relational, firm, and customer characteristics that affect its ability to serve end customers. We test our conceptualization among 171 outsourcing clients from the Netherlands and then validate these results among 135 Indian outsourcing providers. The findings reveal that customer-focused providers achieve higher levels of customer need fulfillment but this effect is contingent on their ability to serve end customers. In particular, customer-focused providers more effectively fulfill customer needs when clients and providers share close relational ties, when clients also have a high level of customer focus, and when end customer needs exhibit a low degree of turbulence. In addition, we find that, in turbulent markets, equipment-related services offer greater opportunity for effective customer need fulfillment than other outsourced services.