Container storage and transshipment marine terminals

This study addresses the storage arrangement of transshipment containers on a container yard, in order to carry out efficiently the ship handling operations at a terminal where mega-containerships call. An optimization model is specified to investigate the flow of containers from the mega-containership to feeder ships using intermediate storage at the yard. A heuristic based on the lagrangian relaxation is formulated. The quality of the heuristic approach is tested in a number of experiments. In the experiments, various situations are analyzed with respect to mega-containership arrival rates, some strategies for stack arrangements and terminal layouts.     

Minority Employees Engaging with (Diversity) Management: An Analysis of Control,Agency, and Micro‐Emancipation*

abstract This study analyses how minority employees engage with control in organizations. Differently from most critical studies of diversity management, which focus on how minority employees are discursively controlled, we approach (diversity) management as a constellation of both identity‐regulating discourses and bureaucratic controls. We assume that minority employees are agents who actively resist and/or comply with the constellation of controls they are subject to. Based on qualitative data collected in a technical drawing company and a hospital, the specific constellation of controls in each organization is first reconstructed. Four interviews with minority employees are then analysed in depth, showing how their engagement with material and discursive controls creates both constraints and possibilities of micro‐emancipation.     

Spurious principal components

The principal component regression (PCR) is often used to forecast macroeconomic variables when there are many predictors. In this letter, we argue that it makes sense to pre-whiten the predictors before including these in a PCR. With simulation experiments, we show that without such pre-whitening, spurious principal components can appear and that these can become spuriously significant in a PCR. With an illustration to annual inflation rates for five African countries, we show that non-spurious principal components can be genuinely relevant in empirical forecasting models.     

Simultaneous exposure to a program and advertising content in an interactive context: Perceptual and semantic interference and reinforcement

New media, such as the Internet or interactive digital television (a merger of television and Internet technology), often combine different sensory inputs and different types of media content simultaneously. These combined information cues may interfere with each other or reinforce the processing of each other. Two experiments explore perceptual and semantic interference and reinforcement mechanisms and their impact on self-reported attention and clicking behavior. Experiment 1 shows that in the case of an interactive ad containing text and pictures, a simultaneous audiovisual program context leads to less attention and clicking than an auditory context. Experiment 2 indicates that in the case of goal-directed browsing, a congruent program context leads to more attention and clicking than an incongruent context.     

A Model for Fair Trade Buying Behaviour: The Role of Perceived Quantity and Quality of Information and of Product-specific Attitudes

In a sample of 615 Belgians a model for fair trade buying behaviour was developed. The impact of fair trade knowledge, general attitudes towards fair trade, attitudes towards fair trade products, and the perception of the quality and quantity of fair trade information on the reported amount of money spent on fair trade products were assessed. Fair trade knowledge, overall concern and scepticism towards fair trade, and the perception of the perceived quantity and quality of fair trade information, influence buying behaviour directly and indirectly through product attitudes. Interest in fair trade products, price acceptability and product liking have a significant impact on fair trade buying behaviour. Product interest is the most important variable influencing buying behaviour. Implications for the campaigns of governments and for the marketing strategy of fair trade organisations are offered.     

Fair-trade beliefs,attitudes and buying behaviour of Belgian consumers

• A survey of 858 Belgians (615 people drawn from the general public and 243 visitors to Oxfam World Shops), examined the knowledge, beliefs, attitudes and behaviour of consumers with respect to fair-trade issues. The results showed that the respondents' knowledge and attitudes generally supported the fair-trade concept. However, many of the people questioned believed that fair-trade organizations should provide more and better information on fair-trade products, especially in shops and on the items themselves. In addition, fair-trade products should be more readily available in regular supermarkets, and their price should be lowered. The most interesting socio-demographic target group for non-profit fair-trade organizations appears to be older people with higher education and income. Consumers from the south (French-speaking) part of Belgium in general have a more positive attitude towards fair trade.

Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Mapping leisure shopping trip decision making: validation of the CNET interview protocol

Qualitative research methods can provide an in-depth understanding of how people come to certain decisions, providing valuable input to ground behavioural assumptions in activity-based travel demand models and to implement high impact policy measures to change travel behaviour. The CNET interview protocol is a semi-structured personal interview method to elicit the mental representation of individuals’ decision making. There is a risk of bias caused by the interviewer’s interpretation of the respondents’ answers. Therefore, the quality of the CNET interview protocol is assessed by evaluating its trustworthiness using intercoder reliability tests. Krippendorff’s alpha is identified as the most appropriate measure. The intercoder reliability is sufficiently high. Consequently, the CNET interview protocol can be considered a valid method to measure and map individuals’ considerations in complex spatio-temporal decision problems.