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Increased ethanol accumulation during ethanol fermentation generates stress in yeast cells, which finally reduces the fermentation performance and efficiency. Trehalose, a potential stress protectant, has been reported to regulate the response of yeast to diverse environmental stresses. This study aimed to explore how exogenous trehalose application affects the survival, transcriptome and antioxidant enzymes of Wickerhamomyces anomalus grown under ethanol stress conditions.

Exogenous trehalose was applied to the growth condition of W. anomalus, and optical densitometric method was used to detect contents of intracellular trehalose and MDA and activities of CAT and SOD. The survival was evaluated using spot analysis. Differentially expressed genes (DEGs) were identified through transcriptomics analysis.

The results showed that ethanol stress induced the accumulation of intracellular trehalose, with further exogenous trehalose application improving the survival and alleviating oxidative stress in ethanol-stressed W. anomalus. Transcriptomic results showed that trehalose has pleiotropic regulating effects on ethanol-stressed W. anomalus since most DEGs annotated to energy metabolism, amino acid metabolism, translation, folding, sorting and transport were affected post trehalose addition. Therefore, it is found that trehalose protected W. anomalus against ethanol stress, and these findings provide interesting insights into the mechanistic role of trehalose in improving ethanol stress tolerance of W. anomalus.

(1) Protective effect of exogenous trehalose addition on the survival of ethanol-stressed W. anomalus was proved. (2) Exogenous trehalose addition could partly alleviate oxidative stress induced by ethanol stress and affect transcriptome in W. anomalus.

This study aims to investigate the impact of the speed of change (trend) in information technology (IT) expenditures on performance risk indicated by revenue volatility in the US hotel industry.

To systematically investigate the impacts of IT expenditures on hotel performance risks, this study collects the same store proprietary data of 1,471 hotel properties from CBRE, a leading hotel consulting firm in the USA, from 2011 to 2017, with a total of 10,297 observations.

Econometric analyses are performed and results indicate a significant and positive impact of the speed of change of IT systems expenditures on the performance risk after comprehensively controlling for confounding factors following prior research.

With the increased importance of IT in day-to-day activities, hospitality business owners have started to quickly adjust their investment in IT infrastructure and superstructure to enhance their business performance. However, their fast-changing expenditures may introduce more risks to their businesses based on the speed–accuracy tradeoff, systems theory and the Schumpeterian Growth Model. This study is one of the pioneer projects that ever assessed the impact of IT expenditure and speed of change on performance risks of hotels.

科技创新（TBI）在酒店业提高消费者体验的实践中属于首选方法。了解哪些影响消费者接受酒店TBI的因素至关重要。本论文假设, 除了常用的科技接受模型以外, 消费者对科技的态度会影响到TBI接受度。

本论文开发了一个关于对科技的态度作用于TBI的模型, 并邀请受访者观看在一家行业尖端的连锁酒店中采用无钥匙登记流程的VCR, 然后完成调研问卷。本论文采用科技接纳量表TAP来衡量消费者对科技的态度。

科技态度对酒店订房意图, 作为消费者接受酒店TBI接受度的代表, 有很大的影响。然而, 科技态度只通过信任和好奇感两个中介变量来实现订房意图。

研究结果提供有用见解, 鼓励酒店通过介绍TBI服务积极增强消费者对科技的态度。

大多数研究电子商务接受度的文章往往专注在消费者使用产品或服务的态度变化或者情感倾向。相反, 本论文研究消费者对科技的态度作用于消费者接受酒店TBI服务的态度。本论文证明了对科技的态度显著影响了酒店TBI服务接受度。此外, 本论文还提供实践证明采用TAP量表来研究TBI服务的文章。

The current work demonstrates how relationship marketing (RM) application in cultures of low power distance, collectivism, femininity, high uncertainty avoidance, and long‐term orientation, can bring about customer’s repeat purchase, customer retention and sustained loyalty via superior customer value delivery. The paper also shows the moderation and mediation effects of trust, equity, empathy, and commitment, which are the underpinnings of a relationship as well as important values in the above cultures. Theoretical and managerial implications are discussed.

This study aims to examine how operator type moderates the relationship between hotel information technology (IT) expenditures and operating performance.

By adapting and extending O’Neill et al.’s (2008) and Hua et al.’s (2015) research, this study constructed an empirical model and tested proposed hypotheses, with Newey and West (1994) errors computed to accommodate potential heteroscedasticity and autocorrelation issues.

Operator type moderates the impact of hotel IT expenditures on operating performance. In particular, it appears that the operator type of franchising exerts a stronger moderating effect compared with other operator types explored.

This study, as the first of its kind, shows that the choice of operator type shapes how a hotel can effectively use IT expenditures to improve operating performance. This finding can be beneficial for hotel owners when making operator type decisions. In addition, operator type moderates the direct impact of IT expenditures on revenues and gross operating income. This study’s results show that franchised hotels seem to use IT expenditures more effectively compared with independently owned hotels.

This study contributes both theoretically and practically to understand how operator type moderates the relationship between IT expenditures and hotel performance. The research outcome provides a more holistic view that governs the relationships between IT expenditures, operator type and operating performance.

What caused the mid-2000s world commodity price “bubble” and the recent commodity price growth? Some have suggested that rapid global industrial growth over the past decade is the key driver of price growth. Others have argued that high commodity prices are a result of excessively loose monetary policy. The purpose of this paper is to extend the current research in this area by incorporating emerging economies, the BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India, and China) nations specifically, into global measures.

The paper uses a vector error correction (VEC) model and computes variance decomposition and impulse response functions (IRFs).

The empirical analysis suggest that the “demand channel” plays a large part in explaining commodity price growth whether BRIC countries are included or excluded from the analysis. However, excess liquidity may also play a part in explaining price growth. In addition, factoring in BRIC country data leads to the conclusion that unexpected movements in liquidity eventually explain more of the variation in commodity prices than unexpected demand shocks. This specific result is not caught in the sample that only incorporates advanced economies.

Despite the theory of Frankel (1986) and the findings of previous global vector autoregression (VAR)/VEC analyses, interest rates, especially shocks, have a minimal impact on consumer and commodity prices. Perhaps future studies should include an interest rate in their analysis that more closely reflects interest rates associated with information used by commodity consumers, producers, and investors. Some analyses such as Hua (1998) use the LIBOR rate, which is highly associated with developed financial markets in the advanced economies. Data quality and availability in the BRIC countries severely limited the length of the time period analyzed and the frequency of the data. Finding longer sample periods or higher frequency data can help to minimize bias in future research. In this paper, monetary aggregates and short-term interest rates were loosely connected to monetary policy. It would also be interesting to directly examine how special programs like quantitative easing influenced global liquidity.

The results of the IRFs and variance decompositions confirm some of the previous findings reported in Belke et al. (2010), Hua (1998), and Swaray (2008) that suggest that positive shocks to liquidity positively impact commodity prices. In particular, both samples suggest that this is a short-run impact that occurs after two quarters. However, in the sample that includes information about liquidity from BRIC countries, excess liquidity positively affects commodity prices after six and seven quarters as well. The insignificant results of Granger causality tests of the effect of monetary variables on commodity prices suggests that this relationship is limited to movements in liquidity that is unexpected by agents in the system. These “shocks” could be attributed to a number of factors including exogenous monetary policy changes such as the unprecedented responses by the Federal Reserve during and after the 2008 global financial crisis.

First, empirical research that claims to analyze relationships at a “global” level needs to account for the growing influence of emerging economies and not simply the advanced economies. Otherwise, results may be biased as they were when too much of the forecast error variance in commodity prices was attributed to shocks to output when it should have been attributed to shocks to excess liquidity. Second, those who criticize expansionary monetary policy in the advanced countries, especially by the Federal Reserve, for pushing up commodity prices should also direct their attention toward monetary authorities elsewhere, especially the BRIC countries, since information on excess liquidity from these countries adds to the influence that global excess liquidity has on commodity prices. Third, monetary policymakers in the advanced countries need to closely monitor liquidity in the BRIC countries, since the discrepancies between the ALL and ADV samples suggests that BRIC excess liquidity affects commodity prices in a way that cannot be captured by examining advanced country data alone.

No other paper in this area looked at the BRIC countries.

This paper aims to examine the impacts of IT capabilities on hotel competitiveness.

This study adapts and extends Hua et al. (2015) and O’Neill et al. (2008) by incorporating the specific measures of IT expenditures as proxies for the relevant IT capabilities to explore the impacts of IT capabilities on hotel competitiveness.

This study finds that expenditures on IT Labor, IT Systems and IT Websites exert different impacts on hotel competitiveness. In addition, IT capabilities exert both contemporary and lagged effects on hotel competitiveness.

This study is the first that uses financial data to capture direct measures of individual IT capabilities and tests the individual impacts of IT capabilities on hotel competitiveness from both contemporaneous and lagged perspectives. It uses a large same store sample of hotels in the USA from 2011 to 2017; as a result, the study results can be reasonably representative of the hotel population in the USA.

本论文旨在检验IT能力对酒店竞争力的影响。

本论文延用 Hua et al. (2015) 和 O’Neill et al. (2008) 的研究, 结合IT支出的具体指标作为IT能力的指数, 以探索IT能力对酒店竞争力的影响。

研究发现支出对IT人力、IT系统、和IT网站对酒店竞争力有着不同的影响。此外, IT能力对酒店竞争力具有短期和长期的影响。

本论文是首篇使用财务数据来找出IT能力的指数并且检测IT能力对酒店竞争力短期和长期的具体影响。本论文使用美国2011年至2017年同一个酒店的大型数据; 因此, 研究结果可以代表美国酒店基本现状。

This study aims to use a sample of 2,120 individual hotel properties between 2011 and 2013 to evaluate the impact of loyalty programs on hotel operational and financial performance.

This study provides empirical support for the impact of loyalty program based on both cross-sectional and panel data analyses and uses the instrumental variable technique to avoid potential heteroscedasticity, autocorrelation and simultaneity issues.

Findings of this study show that loyalty program expenses have a significant and positive impact on all three operational performance indicators of RevPAR, ADR and Occupancy and the financial performance indicator of gross operating profit.

This study suggests that the benefits of loyalty programs should be understood against the backdrop of a reasonable set of controlled variables such as e-commerce, franchise, advertising, other marketing expenses, hotel size and hotel chain scales.

Given the conflicting viewpoints about the positive and negative impacts of loyalty programs, and that the literature is scant on empirical validation of the impact of loyalty programs on the overall operational and financial performance of hotel properties, this study is an early attempt to empirically test the impact of loyalty programs on a number of hotel operational and financial performance indicators by using an extensive list of individual hotel properties between 2011 and 2013.

This paper aims to offer empirical insights on how investing in e-commerce capabilities affects the relationship between loyalty programs and hotel operating performance so as to aid in identifying proper resource allocation strategies.

This study extended the model in Hua et al. (2015) by testing the interaction of e-commerce and loyalty programs.

The findings illustrate that proper allocation of company financial resources to e-commerce initiatives can help improve the impact of loyalty programs on hotel operating performance.

The results of this study illustrate that hotel performance can be improved by the synergy between loyalty program and e-commerce initiatives. Thus, hotel managers and owners can use results from this study to improve the efficiency of their asset allocation strategies, with five practical implications offered.

Theoretically, this study adapted and extended an integrative model of hotel operating performance (Hua et al., 2015) by identifying critical factors that elucidate the variance in firm performance. In addition, the moderating role of e-commerce provides a new conceptualization of information technology. Practically, this study makes several important contributions as well.

The existing research finds a positive financial impact of franchising for relatively short time windows, usually less than ten years. As a result, these studies leave one critical research question unanswered: does franchising influence restaurant firms' financial performance consistently in the long term? The purpose of this paper is to address the research question and offer relevant managerial implications.

This study uses and expands the models derived from Ohlson, from Amir and Lev and from Lev and Zarowin to address the financial impacts of franchise in the restaurant industry from a long-term and consistent perspective.

Carrying out empirical tests over all ten-year testing windows that span 1980-2010 with quarterly data, this study finds that franchising is an effective mechanism to systematically and consistently outperform non-franchise firms in the long term and provides compelling empirical evidence to answer the research question. Further, limited-service restaurants also exhibit consistent and positive impacts on firm financial performance in the long term, suggesting limited-service operations are also effective to enhance firm value and outperform competitors.

First, this study expands the set of variables employed by many financial researchers to explain stock price in the restaurant industry. Second, this study tests and shows that franchising systematically leads to financial outperformance over the long term. Third, this study tests and shows that limited service restaurants consistently and systematically outperform their peers in the long run. Finally, the results of this study can be used to help investors and fund managers select restaurant company stocks and offer compelling evidence in support of franchising and limited service operations.

This study aims to examine the extant E-commerce performance literature to derive a coherent framework to further the understanding, identify research gaps and suggest potential future study directions.

Based on theoretical sampling (Corbin and Strauss, 2008), this study followed Greenhalgh et al. (2009) for the paper sample collection and used exploratory methods before the snowballing technique to identify key sources to uncover the E-commerce performance themes and prior findings systematically.

By reviewing and synthesizing 155 recent articles, this study proposed an integrated framework of E-commerce performance to organize the complex literature parsimoniously. This study found that E-commerce performance exhibits three key dimensions and is influenced by market E-commerce environment, organization E-commerce environment and the dynamic and interactive relationships in between.

The proposed framework offers industry practitioners opportunities to understand determinants and be updated with current practices of E-commerce performance. The findings of this study further point practitioners to directions that can lead to better E-commerce performance.

This study produced a cohesive framework of E-commerce performance based on an extensive review of the literature in both the mainstream and hospitality and tourism fields, addressing the issue of the currently fragmented understanding on E-commerce performance in hospitality and tourism.