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In the USA, the cruise industry has generated more than $42bn in total economic activities, involving over 356,000 jobs. The largest and most aggressive operator is acknowledged as Carnival Cruise Line (CCL), with a 48.3 per cent market share including all subsidiary companies in 2013. CCL has had a strong track record of reliability and high quality; however, within the past decade, there have been several deviations from standard daily procedure that have altered the way CCL does business. When trying to interpret changes in company performance, it is important to include other factors that may have contributed to changes at the time of any given deviation.

The authors use time series empirical mode decomposition to visualize whether there are short- or long-term shocks to company performance in the wake of deviating events. Besides, a thorough analysis is carried out with multivariable linear regression to identify the factors that really impact CCL’s performance.

This case study shows the seasonal patterns of weather issues with the largest number of hurricanes and tropical storms taking place during the third quarter of each year.

Empirical results will enhance understanding of the industry with regard to such events. It will provide shareholders information and opinions to enhance their decision-making processes.

Regardless of the facts showing a booming Chinese cruise market, cruise operations in China are very different from the current practices of the two major cruise markets – the US and the Mediterranean Sea. This study aims to quantify pricing strategies and possible incentive mechanisms of cruise operations in China.

Using optimization in economic-based game theory, the complexity of the pricing strategies and interaction and/or possible coordination within the cruise value-added chain can be captured.

The results show that a coordinative pricing strategy with Shapley profit redistribution within the value-added chain offers benefits to both cruise passengers and service suppliers. With two subsidy scenarios, one to the passenger and the other to the travel agent, a cooperative pricing strategy outperforms other strategies and successfully increases market shares and total revenue.

The advantages of coordination between participants in cruise value chain are quantified. Effective strategies for attracting players participating in cruise value chain are designed. This paper will provide market participants with strategies to enhance their decision-making processes.

This study aims to develop an assessment methodology using a Bayesian network (BN) to predict the failure probability of oil tanker shipping firms.

This paper proposes a bankruptcy prediction model by applying the hybrid of logistic regression and Bayesian probabilistic networks.

The proposed model shows its potential of contributing to a powerful tool to predict financial bankruptcy of shipping operators, and provides important insights to the maritime community as to what performance measures should be taken to ensure the shipping companies’ financial soundness under dynamic environments.

The model and its associated variables can be expanded to include more factors for an in-depth analysis in future when the detailed information at firm level becomes available.

The results of this study can be implemented to oil tanker shipping firms as a prediction tool for bankruptcy rate.

Incorporating quantitative statistical measurement, the application of BN in financial risk management provides advantages to develop a powerful early warning system in shipping, which has unique characteristics such as capital intensive and mobile assets, possibly leading to catastrophic consequences.

The most challenging aspect of hospital design is the creation of an environment that heals rather than the one acting as a barrier to healing. Much has not been done in the aspect of ascertaining the level of impact “indoor environmental quality (IEQ)” has on building occupants in healthcare facilities. Therefore, this study aims to investigate the impact of IEQ on patients' health and well-being.

The study investigates the hypothesis that four IEQ parameters (thermal quality, acoustic quality, lighting quality and indoor air quality [IAQ]) influence patients' overall satisfaction with the performance of hospital wards. Questionnaire responses were sought from the patients as the main occupants of hospital ward buildings. A proposed weighted structural model for IEQ establishing the relationship between IEQ parameters, patients' overall satisfaction and patients' health outcome was analyzed using structural equation modeling (SEM).

The most influential IEQ parameters on patients' overall satisfaction with IEQ in hospital wards are thermal quality, IAQ and lighting quality. The findings from this study revealed that the parameters of influence on patients' overall satisfaction and health outcomes vary with hospital ward orientation and design configuration.

This study has explored the need for the integration of all factors of IEQ at the building design stage towards providing a hospital environmental setting that reflects occupants' requirements and expectations and also promotes patient healing processes. This should be the focus of architects and healthcare managers and providers.

Motivation significantly influences learning and memory. While a long history of research has focused on simple forms of associative learning, such as Pavlovian conditioning, recent research is beginning to characterize how motivation influences episodic memory. In this chapter we synthesize findings across behavioral, cognitive, and educational neuroscience to characterize motivation’s influence on memory. We provide evidence that neural systems underlying motivation, namely the mesolimbic dopamine system, interact with and facilitate activity within systems underlying episodic memory, centered on the medial temporal lobes. We focus on two mechanisms of episodic memory enhancement: encoding and consolidation. Together, the reviewed research supports an adaptive model of memory in which an individual’s motivational state (i.e., learning under states of reward or punishment) shapes the nature of memory representations in service of future goals. The impact of motivation on learning and memory, therefore, has very clear implications for and applications to educational settings.

The purpose of this paper is to study the optimal coverage limit in a model of deposit insurance with capital requirements and risk sensitive premia to prevent moral hazard.

The theoretical model has incorporated capital requirements, risk‐sensitive premium, and partial deposit insurance in a partial equilibrium model. The model discusses the interaction among risk‐taking banks, ex‐ante heterogeneous depositors, and a deposit insurer.

First, the paper shows that optimal coverage encourages depositors' monitoring and withdrawals. Partial deposit insurance improves social welfare. Second, risk‐sensitive premia and market discipline are essential to reduce bank risk taking behavior. Third, adjustment between level of coverage and the premium guarantees long term liquidity of the deposit insurance funds and makes banks better off. Fourth, numerical findings are consistent with the empirical evidence that shows differences in coverage between countries.

Timing and frequency of adjustments to coverage limits and the implementation of co‐insurance have been beyond the scope of this study but those implications are worth further investigation.

In the current crisis, banking regulations combined with poor management and supervision have been responsible for banks' improper leverages, lending and securitization. A bank failure could easily turn into a crisis when the financial institution is overly exposed to credit risks and when the government is least equipped to deal with those risks. Thus, the study of the partial deposit insurance is important in achieving stability in the banking sector.

The purpose of this paper is to study the effectiveness of market discipline on banks’ risk-taking behavior based on how swiftly banks respond to market information.

A simplified incentive model provides the necessary justification for two types of market disciplines: first, monitoring by uninsured market participants, and second, risk premium in terms of interest spread required by risk-averse depositors. Panel data regression is carried out for both surviving and failed US banks for the period 1999:Q4-2007:Q3 to examine the role of market discipline, bank capital, and macroeconomic shocks.

The paper finds that banks which failed during 2007:Q4-2010:Q4 suffered from fundamental weaknesses in their asset quality relative to the surviving banks prior to the crisis.

The paper focusses on two questions: In what circumstance does market monitoring exist? And how can market incentives affect banking firms’ actions? The first question is studied in a simplified incentive model that provides justification for two types of market discipline. Given that, the effectiveness of market discipline is empirically tested, using the US banking data in the period leading up to a surge in the number of bank failures in 2007-2010. The paper's results show that failed institutions with large size were relatively less responsive to early warning signals of declining uninsured deposits and rising deposit spread.

In this paper, the authors examine how economic growth shapes the shadow economy in the long and short run.

Using annual time series data from Uganda, drawn from various data sources, covering the period from 1991 to 2017, the authors apply the ARDL modeling approach to cointegration.

This paper finds that an increase in economic growth significantly reduces the size of the shadow economy, in both the long and short run, all else equal. However, the long-run relationship between the shadow economy and growth is non-linear. The results suggest that the rise of the shadow economy could partially be attributed to the slow and sluggish rate of economic growth.

These findings imply that addressing informality requires addressing underlying factors of underdevelopment since improvements in economic growth also translate into a reduction in the size of the shadow economy in the short and long run.

These findings reveal that the low level of economic growth is an issue because it spurs informal sector activities in the short run. However, as the economy improves, it becomes an incentive for individuals to operate in the informal sector. Additionally, tackling shadow activities in the short run could help improve tax revenue collection.