Tourism and the Precautionary Principle

The precautionary principle is an emerging norm of international environmental policy affirmed in many treaties and laws. The principle, congruent to the ideal of sustainable development, is a controversial future-focused planning and regulatory mechanism which mandates that to protect against threats of serious and irreversible damage, precaution should be exercised even before harm can be scientifically demonstrated. The intent of this paper is to provide a literature review of the precautionary principle, examine the fundamental concepts underlying the principle and present an introductory discussion regarding its applicability to the tourism industry. Time and again numerous direct and indirect impacts are produced by the tourism industry, yet the potential for integrating precaution into tourism planning has not been examined. The authors consider the critical elements of the principle (uncertainty, risk, costbenefit analysis and science) in relation to the tourism industry, and provide examples of reference to the principle in the policy documents of non-governmental tourism organisations. An adapted framework is proposed for incorporating the precautionary principle into better tourism-industry decision-making. The precautionary principle is predicated as a viable tourism development tool and planning mechanism that safeguards environmental and human health by anticipating and controlling for future impacts of tourism.     

Does Cue competition reduce conditioned liking of brands and products?

The present studies investigated whether the visual co‐presentation of a brand name and a product visual increases or decreases the acquisition of liking toward these stimuli in a conditioning paradigm. In Study 1, participants were presented with an elemental brand name, an elemental product visual, or a compound of both stimuli, along with liked faces. Results indicated that the mere pairing with the liked face led to increased liking in the elemental condition, but not in the compound condition (i.e., cue competition). Study 2 showed that this effect is due to the divided attention toward the compound, but not due to competition among conditioned stimuli (CSs) to predict the unconditioned stimulus (US). © 2011 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.     

Exact welfare measures and economic index numbers

Summary Welfare measures and economic index numbers are usually defined by formulae or by verbal definitions. This paper develops characterizations of some important measures and corresponding index numbers by an axiomatic approach. These results facilitate the choice between different welfare indicators, and they show the strength of assumptions like MM and RM. Indeed these properties rule out CI and yield the Hicksian measures EV and CV, and their dual counterparts, respectively. At the same time one can conclude that these measures have to be used very carefully, if one considers the limitations implied by these properties.The author would like to thank Dieter Elixmann, Sigrid Müller, and an anonymous referee for valuable suggestions and criticism.     

New firm survival: the interdependence between regional externalities and innovativeness

Small Business Economics - Many studies have shown that regional externalities play a crucial role for the survival prospects of newly founded companies. However, recent research provides evidence...     

Facets of Trust in Relationships – A Literature Synthesis of Highly Ranked Trust Articles

This article offers a literature synthesis of 800 highly ranked trust articles published between 1966 and 2006. The literature synthesis is a tool for the development of a general trust model. The empirical findings support eight main clusters gained from forty identified key variables and three trust interaction types: trust between persons, trust between organizations, and trust between a person and an organization.     

On measurability and comparability: Comment on Pauwels's “the implicit welfare weights used when maximizing aggregate surplus”

The note demonstrates that the unweighted sum of the Hicksian equivalent variations is not a reasonable welfare indicator if consumers have different wages. It recommends the unweighted sum of the individual money metrics, all evaluated at thesame reference pricesand reference wage. For this measure the comparability and necessary measurability of utility functions and welfare changes can be guaranteed. In contrast to Pauwels's measure the indicator proposed possesses the properties one expects.     

A Simple Axiomatization of the Foster, Greer and Thorbecke Poverty Orderings

The paper presents a simple characterization of the poverty orderings which are represented by a poverty measure belonging to the Foster, Greer, and Thorbecke class. All properties introduced are formulated within an ordinal framework. Furthermore, a new concept is proposed: the equivalent societal income which—if given to each individual in society—yields the same level of poverty as the actual income distribution. It is a specific indicator of the underlying poverty ordering, has attractive properties and allows us to prove the main result in a direct way.