Search results

Improving the competitiveness of East Africa's rice industries necessitates increased and viable production of rice of the quality desired by consumers. This paper aims to understand consumer preferences for rice quality attributes in Uganda and Kenya to inform the countries' rice breeding programs and value chain development interventions.

Rice samples are obtained from retail markets in various districts/counties across the two countries. The samples are analyzed in a grain quality laboratory for the rice's physicochemical characteristics and the resulting data are used to non-parametrically estimate hedonic price functions. District/county dummies are included to account for potential heterogeneity in consumer preferences.

Ugandan consumers are willing to pay a price premium for rice with a relatively high proportion of intact grains, but the consumers discount chalkiness. Kenyan consumers discount high amylose content and impurities. There is evidence of heterogeneity in consumer preferences for rice in Mbale, Butaleja and Arua districts of Uganda and in Kericho and Busia counties of Kenya.

The study makes a novel contribution to the literature on consumer preferences for rice in East Africa by applying a hedonic pricing model to the data generated from a laboratory analysis of the physicochemical characteristics of rice samples obtained from the market. Rather than base our analysis on consumers' subjective sensory assessment of the quality characteristics of rice, standard laboratory methods are used to generate the data, which enables a more objective assessment of the relationship between market prices and the quantities of attributes present in the rice samples.

Commonly used rent indices are based on average developments or expert opinions. Such indices often suffer from compositional biases or low data coverage. The purpose of this paper is to overcome these challenges using the authors' approach.

The authors construct a quality-adjusted rent index for the office market in Oslo using detailed data from 14,171 rental contracts.

The authors show that compositional biases can have a large impact on rental price developments. By adding building-fixed effects to a standard hedonic regression model, the authors show that the explanatory power increases considerably. Furthermore, indices excluding location-specific information, or which include less granular location controls than at the building level, portray quite a different picture of rent developments than indices that do take this into account. The authors also exploit information on contract signature date and find that a more timely detection of turning points can be achieved by using the signature date instead of the more typically used start date of the lease.

The study is confined to Norwegian data, and an avenue for future research would be to explore if similar results are obtained for other countries. A weakness with the paper is that authors' do not observe quality changes over time, such as renovation. Controlling for time-varying and unit-specific attributes in hedonic models for the commercial real estate (CRE) market would be useful to purge indices further for compositional effects and unobserved heterogeneity. While the authors do control for building-fixed effects, there are additional variations within a building (floor, view, sunlight, etc.) that the authors do not capture. Studies that could control for this would certainly be welcome, both in order to estimate the value of such amenities and to see how it affects estimated rent developments. Another promising avenue for future research is to link data on rental contracts in the CRE market with firm-specific information in order to explore how firm profitability and liquidity may affect rental contracts.

The authors show that the hedonic index yields a sharper fall in rents after the global financial crisis and more muted developments in the period between 2013 and 2015 than the average rent index. The results show that rents have followed their estimated equilibrium closely and have re-adjusted quickly in periods of deviation. From a financial stability perspective, the risk of a sharp fall in rents is reduced because rents often are in line with their fundamentals.

The authors find that a more timely detection of turning points can be achieved by using information on the signature date. This is an important finding. The financial system is heavily exposed toward CRE, and timely detection of turning points is critical for policymakers.

The financial system is heavily exposed toward the commercial real estate market and timely detection of turning points is of major importance to policymakers. Finally, the authors use our quality-adjusted rent index as the dependent variable in an error correction model. The authors find that employment and stock of offices are important explanatory variables. Moreover, the results show that rents have followed their estimated equilibrium path.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the effect on price of different cruise industry characteristics from the point of view of actual prices. The analysis is carried out from the supply side but taking into account the real prices paid by customers.

This paper uses the hedonic price methodology. To develop this research, a database of more than 36,000 prices paid by cruise passengers and different characteristics of ships in 2013 was built. To obtain the results, ten models have been developed with significant adjusted R² of between 0.85 and 0.93 making the models and results robust.

The results show that the main attributes affecting prices are the number of nights of the itinerary, the departure date, the number of days before departure the booking is made, the accommodation type and some facilities, such as casinos, cinemas and swimming pools. The results also yield a ranking of ship companies based on price and quality dimensions. Finally, the authors suggest some implications for management and new research.

This paper offers a new approach in the academic literature of the cruise industry in two respects. First, in its use of a broad database of actual prices paid by passengers – more than 36,000 observations. Second, in the application of the hedonic pricing methodology, widely used in the tourism sector (see the Methodology and Database section) but until now not in the cruising segment.

The role of list price is often discussed in a narrative describing sellers’ preferences or sellers’ price expectations. This paper aims to investigate a set of list price strategies that real estate brokers have available to influence the outcome of the sale, which may be many times self-serving.

By analyzing real estate brokers’ arguments on the choice of the list price level, a couple of hypotheses are formulated with regard to different expected outcomes that depend on the list price. This study empirically tests two hypotheses for the underlying incentives in the choice of list price from the real estate broker’s perspective: lower list price compared to market value leads to the higher sales price, lower list price compared to market value leads to a quicker sale. To investigate the two hypotheses, this paper adopts different methodological frameworks: H1 is tested by running a classical hedonic model, while H2 is tested through a duration model. This study further tests the hypotheses by splitting the full sample into two different price segments: above and below the median list price.

The results show that H1 is rejected for the full sample and for the two sub-samples. That is, contrary to the common narrative among brokers that underpricing leads to a higher sales price, underpricing lower sales price. H2, however, receives support for the full sample and for the two sub-samples. The latter result points to that brokers may be tempted to recommend a list price significantly below the expected selling price to minimize their effort while showing a high turnover of apartments.

Although there are a large number of previous studies analyzing list price strategies in the housing market, this paper is one of the few empirical studies that address the effect of list price choice level on auction outcomes of non-distressed housing sales.

The authors investigate how prices of condominiums are affected by the size of the tenant-owner associations that they belong to.

The authors use data of sold apartments in the Swedish municipality Malmö 2013–2018 and estimate hedonic price regressions. The authors also perform semi-structured interviews with three senior professionals in real estate companies.

The authors find significantly negative relationships between the prices of condominiums and the size of tenant-owner associations. Also, regression results indicate that associations should be no smaller than 6–10 apartments. The interviews support that associations should not be too small or too big. The lower and upper limit was suggested by the respondents to 40–50 and 80–150 apartments, respectively. In these ranges, economies of scale can be achieved, and residents will not lose the sense of community and responsibility.

The authors do not prove causality. Smaller associations may have relatively exclusive common amenities, about which we lack data. The same relationships may not exist in different market conditions.

The authors are not aware of previous studies with the same research question. The size of tenant-owner associations may affect the price through different channels. First, several of the banks in Sweden do not always grant mortgages for condominiums that belong to small associations. Second, larger associations may have better economies of scale and more efficient property management. Third, homeowners may prefer smaller tenant-owned associations, because they may feel less anonymous and provide more influence on common amenities.

This study examines the relationship between environmental building certification Building Research Establishment Environmental Assessment Method (BREEAM-NL) and office rents in the Dutch office market.

A hedonic price model was used to assess the impact of BREEAM certification on office rents. The study is based on 4,355 rent transactions in the period 2015 to mid-2022, in which 331 transactions took place in certified office buildings and 4,024 transactions in non-certified office buildings.

The results provide empirical evidence on quantitative economic benefits of BREEAM-certified offices in the Netherlands. After controlling for all important office rent determinants, the results show a rental premium for certified office buildings of 10.3% on average. The green premiums highly differ across submarkets and vary between 5.1 and 12.6% in the five largest Dutch cities. Additionally, the results show significant positive correlation between BREEAM-NL label score and rents, whereby better performing buildings generally command higher rents.

The study contributes to the current literature on green building economics by providing, as one of the first, empirical evidence on the existence of financial benefits for BREEAM-certified office buildings in the Dutch office market.

While most marketing research on organic products refers to the premium price levels of organic products, little research exists on consumers’ behavioural responses to price promotions or discounts of organic products. The present study aims to fill this research gap.

To develop alternative hypotheses about consumers’ behavioural responses to price promotions of organic fast-moving consumer good (FMCG) products, the authors used the researcher-introspection method in a pre-study. To test the hypotheses developed based on the pre-study, the authors conducted a field experiment on online advertising of an FMCG sold in drugstores. In the field experiment, the authors exposed consumers to an online ad featuring either a price promotion (−20%) or the regular price of the product. The ads also varied in terms of whether they contained explicit organic claims or not, and whether they included implicit organic cues or not.

The price promotion increased the clickthrough rate of the ad both when combined with an explicit organic claim and when combined with the implicit cue of green product pack. The results suggest that consumers do not have significant suspicions about price promotions of organic products, but rather presume that the price promotion of an organic FMCG product is a periodical promotional action, similar to the price promotions for conventional, non-organic products. Also, consumers seem to assume that the regular prices of organic FMCG products are so high that the retailer/manufacturer can well afford periodic price discounts.

The present research shifts the focus of organic marketing research from the premium price levels to the effectiveness of price promotions and discounts. Further, the present results contrast with certain earlier studies that have questioned the effectiveness of price promotions for organic products.

The results have different implications for marketing managers of brands not yet providing organic product versions in the market, of brands producing non-organic products, which cannot easily be rendered organic, and of brands offering organic products in the market.

This is, to the best of the authors’ knowledge, the first empirical study and field experiment on price promotions of organic products, including explicit organic claims.

This paper aims to extract the comment targets in Chinese online shopping platform.

The authors first collect the comment texts, word segmentation, part-of-speech (POS) tagging and extracted feature words twice. Then they cluster the evaluation sentence and find the association rules between the evaluation words and the evaluation object. At the same time, they establish the association rule table. Finally, the authors can mine the evaluation object of comment sentence according to the evaluation word and the association rule table. At last, they obtain comment data from Taobao and demonstrate that the method proposed in this paper is effective by experiment.

The extracting comment target method the authors proposed in this paper is effective.

First, the study object of extracting implicit features is review clauses, and not considering the context information, which may affect the accuracy of the feature excavation to a certain degree. Second, when extracting feature words, the low-frequency feature words are not considered, but some low-frequency feature words also contain effective information.

Because of the mass online reviews data, reading every comment one by one is impossible. Therefore, it is important that research on handling product comments and present useful or interest comments for clients.

The extracting comment target method the authors proposed in this paper is effective.