Search results

Beverage serving affects consumers’ taste and price perceptions. Therefore, the correct selection of the presentation cues is essential when a consumer evaluates a product. This study aims to determine how haptic (weight) and visual (colour) cues of drinking vessels affect the taste and price perception of coffee.

The authors created three different experimental designs. Given that coffee is a popular drink among the younger population, the authors invited undergraduate students in the 18–24 age group into this study. The participants tasted the same coffee from cups differ in weight (heavy and normal) and colour (congruent, incongruent and neutral), after which their opinions about the taste and price were recorded.

According to the results, increasing the weight of the cup creates a more positive perception of the smell and density of the coffee. Moreover, coffee served in a heavy cup was perceived to be more expensive than in other cups. The authors also found that incongruent cups received a lower score in all evaluations regarding taste perception. In the final experiment, the authors used the weight and colour manipulations together. According to the participants, the most fragrant coffee was perceived from a heavy and congruent cup.

Small sample is one of the limitations of this study. Future studies could be conducted with bigger and more diverse sample using different kinds of coffee beans.

It will be appropriate for coffee producers to design the cups in light of the said results.

The paucity in the existing literature of sensory marketing studies using hot drinks is remarkable, especially takeaway coffee, which is becoming more popular with an increasing number of coffee chains, and needs to be examined in detail.

The purpose of this paper is to measure the financial efficiency and productivity of 23 public universities founded in 1992 in Turkey over the period between 2004 and 2013. The results obtained will provide managerial information and act as a guide to public universities’ administrations, in using their resources more effectively.

Data envelopment analysis is applied to assess the relative financial efficiency of these universities, while Malmquist total factor productivity index is used to measure the total factor productivity change concerning financial inputs of the universities.

The number of financially efficient universities and the number of universities showing an increase in their productivity according to their financial inputs change annually and both of them display a rough trend over the years. A decrease of about 5 percent in the financial productivity of the universities is observed which stems from a technological recession. Therefore, public universities in Turkey are not able to develop effective policies to diversify, increase and use their financial resources.

When the lack of studies within the literature measuring the financial efficiency of higher education institutions is taken into account, this study can fill a gap in this area. The analyses conducted here distinguish from existing studies on this subject with regards to the extent and diversity of financial data set and the measurement of both efficiency and productivity change of universities considering financial inputs concurrently.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the impact of earthquakes on the labor market. The authors try to estimate the impact of two major earthquakes (Izmir and Elazig) in Turkey.

In order to analyze the effects of devastating earthquakes in the nearby regions of the province where the earthquake took place, on the labor market, monthly and annual data from the TUIK and ISKUR database will be used. For this purpose, the authors consider the earthquake a natural experiment and employ a Synthetic Control Method (SCM). In addition, the analysis will be carried out using seasonally adjusted data, taking into account the seasonal effects of the monthly data to be used in the study.

The results show that the impact varies based on the labor market structure of the regions. While the earthquake positively affects the labor market of agriculture-oriented regions, it harms the labor market of nonagricultural-oriented regions.

A major limitation of the study is that we cannot fully separate the impact of Covid-19 from our estimate. The authors believe that Covid-19 overestimates the negative impact of earthquakes on the labor market.

Earthquakes have adverse effects on the labor market. The estimation of the earthquake-related costs may provide a useful guide on policy planning and government incentives.

The originality of the study lies in the fact that this is the first study to evaluate how the dynamics of the labor market has changed as a result of the earthquakes that have taken place in Turkey, within the framework of causality.

The peer review history for this article is available at: https://publons.com/publon/10.1108/IJSE-08-2022-0568