Search results

The purpose of this paper is to investigate how well hotel website load time performance compared against customer expectation benchmarks. In a competitive market, service interactions are important. As customers move to mobile devices, the time to load a website is a critical part of the service delivery. Long load times can lead to poor service experiences, customer frustration and lost business. Hotel website load times on both mobile and desktop devices were examined and compared to service expectations.

The study used an online service to assess and compare website load performance using both desktop and mobile devices for 259 international hotel company and sub-brand websites.

The time to load hotel websites was significantly slower on mobile devices compared to desktops. Load times on both platforms exceeded 3 s, which is considered best practice. Long load times represent a service gap and can cause dissatisfaction resulting in a potential customer abandoning the website for a competitor’s site, thus affecting sales.

While the population for the study was robust in size and contained most of the major hotel companies worldwide, it was not exhaustive. Data also represent a snapshot and will change over time. Load times vary based on test location, access device and network traffic. Additionally, web page load times and customer expectations will change as technology evolves.

Increased use of mobile devices for hotel reservations increases the importance of mobile service delivery. This is the first known study to measure hotel website load times for mobile devices, and to examine both mobile and desktop performance against best practice. The results of this study highlight a service gap, which can lead to loss of business. Given the consistency of the results, the authors suspect that this is an issue that has not been recognized within the industry. This study is valuable because it exposes an issue of website design not generally addressed in the hospitality industry, even though tools are available to monitor site performance.

Consumers as well as hotel web sites are evolving, changing the requirements and expectations for online hotel room reservations. Building on previous research, the purpose of this paper is to explore hotel web site design's influence on site appeal and likelihood to purchase.

The methodology incorporates both qualitative and quantitative methods. College‐age participants visited hotel web sites detailing their impressions. Using a grounded theory‐based approach and regression analysis, web design factors are identified and assessed.

The paper finds a preference for enhanced graphical web site design. This finding contradicts prior studies. The paper also finds continued importance in: ease of use, brand loyalty site content, and site aesthetics.

This paper uses a combination of qualitative and quantitative data. The coding of qualitative data can be affected by researcher bias. This paper also suffers from an age and geographic population bias. While this paper suggests that certain factors influence the likelihood to purchase, more extensive definition of these factors is needed. In addition, several factors, which were important in previous studies, have incongruous findings in this paper and need further examination.

The results give direction to the design of effective hotel web sites.

Rapidly evolving internet technologies and consumer behavior generate a need for ongoing research to consumer behavior. A study with valid insight and information completed previously may not accurately reflect today's internet hotel market. The findings are significant: they suggest there has been a shift in consumer preferences.

We survey banks to construct national estimates of total noncash payments by type, payments fraud and related information. The survey is designed to create aggregate total estimates of all payments in the United States using data from responses returned by a representative, random sample. In 2016, the number of questions in the survey doubled compared with the previous survey, raising serious concerns of smaller bank nonparticipation. To obtain sufficient response data for all questions from smaller banks, we administered a modified survey design which, in addition to randomly sampling banks, also randomly assigned one of several survey forms, subsets of the full survey. This case study illustrates that while several other factors influenced response outcomes, the approach helped ensure sufficient response for smaller banks. Using such an approach may be especially important in an optional-participation survey, when reducing costs to respondents may affect success, or when imputation of unplanned missing items is already needed for estimation. While a variety of factors affected the outcome, we find that the planned missing data approach improved response outcomes for smaller banks. The planned missing item design should be considered as a way of reducing survey burden or increasing unit-level and item-level responses for individual respondents without reducing the full set of survey items collected.

This paper aims to explore customers' motives and behaviours in sharing comments and information on e-service platforms, as well as what leads them to avoid sharing after consumption.

To achieve the goal, this research used a mixed-method approach. Firstly, a two-phase qualitative design involving 2 focus groups and 27 in-depth interviews was employed. Secondly, a quantitative approach was implemented to test the relationship between three factors, identified in the qualitative analysis and comment-sharing behaviours.

The three identified factors are (1) willingness to improve the product/service and customer justice; (2) willingness to share emotions and feelings; and (3) technological readiness. Sharing emotions and feelings, as well as technological readiness, have been found positively associated with high posting behaviours.

Customers' opinions, comments and feedback on online platforms represent a crucial co-creation tool that must be better understood by businesses that aim to embrace the customer-centric philosophy. Despite the importance of the topic, only recently there has been interest in exploring the motives for and behaviours of customers' post-consumption comments and information sharing about a business on an e-service platform. Based on these findings, we put forward some relevant implications for theory and specific managerial strategies to be undertaken to exploit the potential of platforms.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the relationship between overall ethical work climate (EWC) and overall organizational commitment (OC) and test the effects of types of EWC on three components of OC in Taiwanese military context.

A literature review on EWC and OC provides the basis for the research model and hypotheses. A self-completion questionnaire survey, involving 508 respondents (92.36 per cent response rate) from military officers in Taiwan included both full-time training officers of the National Defense University and officers of Department of Defense. The authors use statistical analysis, including hierarchical regression and structural equation model to test hypotheses about the relationships above.

The results indicated that overall EWC and some climate types significantly positively or negatively influenced overall OC, affective commitment, continuance commitment and normative commitment.

The findings can provide helpful perspectives on management and organizations of benefit to scholars and policy-makers to make ethical policy in military organizations. In addition, suggesting for military leaders to foster some types of ethical climates to prevent low OC.

Theoretically, the paper serves as a pioneer research for testing the concept of influence of EWC on OC and shows the effects of types of EWC on three components of OC in military context. Practically, the results and recommendations in the paper will be useful to those involved in the field of management in Taiwan military organizations.

The purpose of this paper is to elucidate and explain the origins and transformation of the study of corporate social responsibility (CSR) over its half‐century history.

This paper is a historical study in two parts. The first and larger part examines the CSR literature of the 1950s from both an intellectual and social perspective. It not only analyzes the content of these writings, but it also places them and their authors in a political and economic context. The second part explains why so many of the themes and approaches of this first generation have been abandoned by more recent CSR scholars by pointing to decisive changes in the American social and political environment.

Early CSR research was a product of the cataclysmic events that the scholars in this field experienced personally and professionally, most importantly the labor conflicts of the 1930s and the uneasy labor peace that subsequently followed. By contrast, the more modern approach that emphasizes the ethics of executive decision making became the dominant paradigm in the 1980s when institutional support for a macro perspective disappeared.

The first generation of scholars were concerned with issues of economic fairness and the independence of governments from interest group pressures. With these issues currently reasserting themselves on a global level, modern scholars could learn a great deal from studying the insights and practical experience of these neglected thinkers.

This is both the first in‐depth study of the content and origins of early CSR scholarship and an explanation of its limited influence.

Autonomous Vehicles (AVs) promise great benefits, including improving safety, reducing congestion, and providing mobility for elderly and the disabled; however, there are discussions on how they should be programmed to respond in an ethical dilemma where a choice has to be made between two or more courses of action resulting in loss of life. To explore this question, the authors examine the current academic literature where the application of the existing philosophical theories to ethics settings in AVs has been discussed, specifically the utilitarianism and the deontological ethics. These two theories are widely regarded as rivals, and are useful in demonstrating the complex ethical issues that must be addressed when programming AVs. We also look at the legal framework, specifically normative principles in criminal law used to regulate difficult choices in an emergency, which some have suggested as a plausible defence for manufacturers who seek to program AVs using a utilitarian framework. These include the doctrine of necessity, the sudden emergency doctrine, and the duty of care. The authors critique each theory, highlighting their benefits and limitations. The authors then make a case for programming AVs using a randomized decision system (RDS) and propose that it could be a viable solution in dealing with certain moral dilemmas. Finally using our assessment, the authors suggest certain objectives for manufacturers and regulators in designing and programming AVs that are technically viable, and would make them morally acceptable and fair.

In The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, Max Weber chronicled how seventeenth‐century religious tenets expounded by John Calvin inadvertently laid the ideological groundwork for the flourishing of eighteenth‐century capitalism. In this early work on the rise of capitalism, Weber examined the changes in attitudes of business and accepted ethical business behavior and the transition of justification from religious tenets and guidance to more secular, yet rational explanations. The purpose of this paper is to contend this transition from religious to secular moral cover for business ethics was aided by the harmony‐of‐interests doctrine, which provided moral, but secular, cover for the pursuit of self‐interest and personal wealth with an implicit, secular rationalization of promoting the public good.

Although Weber used Benjamin Franklin as an exemplar of the earlier Calvinist Protestantism and spirit of capitalism, advocates a case study of Robert Keayne, a seventeenth‐century Boston Puritan Merchant, as being more appropriate for Weber's thesis. The paper uses passages from Keanye's will to illustrate the seventeenth‐century Protestant ethic and spirit of capitalism, Franklin's writings to illustrate the eighteenth‐century Protestant ethic and spirit of capitalism, and various historical prose to demonstrate the legitimation of the harmony‐of‐interests doctrine which allowed for the secular moral cover for the pursuit of capitalism in the following centuries.

The original (seventeenth‐century) spirit of capitalism identified by Weber is reflected in the rational way in which Keayne conducted his business affairs and in the extent to which his business behavior mirrored Calvinist tenets.

This earlier spirit of capitalism is important in setting the stage for the emergence of the eighteenth‐century spirit of capitalism embodied in Franklin as seen through his writings of acceptable and moral behavior without the use of explicit religious explanations.

Capitalism, religion and science (including calculative sciences such as accounting) have a long and turbulent relationship that, today, is manifest in the “War on Terror”. As social ideologies, religion and science have played a sometimes decisive influence in the history of capitalism. What can one learn from these past encounters to better understand their relationship today? This paper explores the historical origins of this relationship as a struggle over the ideals of the Enlightenment: – as decline of the modern and the rise of the postmodern. The paper begins by tracing the evolution of Christianities and their different potentials in both resisting and accommodating the extant social order. Islam, in contrast, has,until recently, enjoyed a relatively sheltered existence from capitalism, and today, some factions present a militant stance against the market and the liberal democratic state. Overall, the Enlightenment and modernist projects are judged to be jeopardy – a condition fostered by orthodox economics and accounting ideology, where it is now de rigueur to divide the secular from the non‐secular, the normative from the positive, and the ethical from the pragmatic or realist. Finally, the mechanisms behind this Enlightenment regression are examined here using literary analysis, as a modest prelude to developing a new politics for a progressive accounting; one that seeks to restore the integrity and probity of the Enlightenment Ideal.