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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 study aims to provide an exploratory investigation of the magnitude of the customer-centric approach in the specific area of healthcare as a contribution to the scarce and preliminary literature on this topic. In particular, it explores the role of sharing economy-based (SE-based) platforms as an experiential touchpoint to co-create value within different levels. Specifically, the purpose of the study is threefold. First, it aims to address the service experience innovation in healthcare with a customer-centric approach. Second, it seeks to define the role of the SE-based platform as a touchpoint to redefine business processes, and third, it measures the co-created value within the network when redesigning the service experience.

To address the research question, the authors proposed an analysis of service innovation and customer centricity in healthcare networks by using the case study of Saluber, an SE-based platform that offers logistics services for non-emergency medical transportation in the Campania region (south of Italy). By using a qualitative approach, the authors analysed primary and secondary data from multiple sources of evidence.

The results show that a customer-centric approach based on the SE-based platform can improve the customer experience and help to redesign and expand the business processes of healthcare organisations. A multilevel model demonstrates the possible service innovations that use SE principles that can co-create value for the customer (micro level), for the healthcare network (meso level) and for the community (macro-level).

This study provides managerial implications for the players who intend to take advantage of the possibilities offered by service innovations developed by the health and social organisations in the network. The SE-based platform helps redefine business processes to improve clinical and financial outcomes and improves the overall customer experience within this network.

This study allows new and important reflections from ethical, social and managerial points of view and underlines how digital platforms act as a support for healthcare services, not as a substitute.

This study aims to increase the understanding of the drivers of mobile shopping, by analyzing when and how two personality traits – value consciousness and shopping enjoyment – impact mobile shopping intention through usefulness and ease-of-use perceptions.

To test the conditioned indirect effects, path analysis is used.

The results indicate that both consumers’ value consciousness and shopping enjoyment have a positive indirect effect on mobile shopping intention. However, shopping enjoyment is related only through usefulness, whereas value consciousness is related via both usefulness and ease of use. The results also suggest the need to consider boundary conditions when examining the impact of personality traits.

Mobile retailers need to conduct market segmentation based on users’ personalities when trying to increase their customer base.

Despite the relevance of personality traits on individual behavior, studies on the effects that different aspects of personality have on the participation of individuals in mobile commerce are very scarce and show inconsistent results regarding their impact. Thus, this study tries to contribute to the mobile commerce research by analyzing the interplay between two customer characteristics and two mediating variables: ease-of-use and usefulness perceptions.

Esta investigación busca aumentar la comprensión de los antecedentes de las compras móviles, analizando cuándo y cómo dos rasgos de personalidad – conciencia de valor y disfrute por la compra – afectan a la intención de compra móvil a través de las percepciones de utilidad y facilidad de uso.

Para comprobar los efectos indirectos condicionados propuestos se emplea un análisis path.

Los resultados indican que tanto la conciencia de valor como el disfrute por la compra de los consumidores tienen un efecto indirecto positivo en la intención de compra móvil. Sin embargo, el disfrute por la compra se relaciona sólo a través de la utilidad, mientras que la conciencia de valor se relaciona tanto a través de la utilidad como de la facilidad de uso. Los resultados también sugieren la necesidad de considerar factores moderadores al examinar el impacto de los rasgos de personalidad.

Los minoristas a través del móvil que quieran aumentar su base de clientes necesitan segmentar el mercado en base a la personalidad de los usuarios.

A pesar de la relevancia que tienen los rasgos de personalidad en el comportamiento de los individuos, los estudios sobre los efectos de distintos aspectos de la personalidad sobre la participación de los individuos en el comercio móvil son muy escasos y muestran resultados inconsistentes. Así, este estudio intenta contribuir a la investigación sobre comercio móvil analizando la relación entre dos características del consumidor y dos variables mediadoras: las percepciones de facilidad de uso y utilidad.

This paper investigated the impact of firms' service recovery efforts on consumers' desire to reciprocate and forgiveness in the hospitality industry of Pakistan. Additionally, this study examined the mediating role of perceived justice between service recovery efforts and their outcomes.

Using snowball sampling technique, an online survey was administered and 259 responses were collected from casual-dining restaurant customers. A partial least squares structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM) and multivariate analysis of covariance (MANCOVA) were used to examine the hypotheses.

The results indicate that perceived justice significantly mediates the effect of service recovery efforts on the consumers' desire to reciprocate and forgiveness. Moreover, high (vs. low) service recovery efforts lead to high consumer forgiveness.

The study provides insights for managers into how optimal recovery efforts predict consumers' positive responses and minimize the effect of service failure in South Asian consumers.

This research is among the early endeavors to examine consumers' desire to reciprocate in service recovery context. Also, this is the first study to validate the impact of service recovery efforts on consumers' desire to reciprocate and consumer forgiveness in a South Asian country.

This paper aims to study the effect of the establishment of bankruptcy courts on bond issuance market. This paper helps to predict that the introduction of bankruptcy courts in China can mitigate price distortions caused by the implicit government guarantees and promote the development of the high-risk bond market.

This paper exploits the staggered introduction of bankruptcy courts across cities to implement a differences-in-differences strategy on bond issuance data. Using bonds issued in China between 2018 and 2020, the impact of bankruptcy courts on the bond issuance market can be analyzed.

This paper reveals that bond issuance credit spreads increase and is more sensitive to firm size, profitability and downside risk of issuance entity after the introduction of bankruptcy courts. It also reveals a substantive increase in bond issuance quantity and a decrease in issuer credit ratings following the establishment of bankruptcy courts. In addition, the increase of credit spreads is more prominent for publicly traded bonds, those whose issuers located in provinces with lower judicial confidence, bonds issued by SOEs and bonds with stronger government guarantees. Finally, the role of bankruptcy courts is more pronounced in regions with higher marketization.

This paper relates to previous studies that investigate the impact of laws and institutions on external financing. It helps provide new evidence to this literature on how improvements of efficiency and quality in bankruptcy enforcements relate to the marketization of bond issuance. The results provide further evidence on legal institutions and bond financing.

This study aims to identify the marginal impact of introducing a signal attribute of pasture-raised beef on consumer willingness to pay (WTP) for other independent attributes.

The study is divided into two steps. The first, qualitative, consisted of investigating the values consumers have regarding beef production. To this end, 52 interviews with Brazilian and US consumers were conducted using laddering. In the second, quantitative, six experiments, (face to face and online) with 267 consumers of beef were performed.

As a result, the main value found for the Brazilians was security, while for the Americans was self-direction. For consumers, the WTP for animal welfare was the most important in the choice experiments where this information was present.

These findings offer an alternate beef differentiation, enabling it to be sold with higher added value by integrating these.

The purpose of this paper is to contribute to the debate on blockchain (BC) adoption for preventing counterfeiting by investigating BC systems where different options for BC feeding and reading complement the use of BC technology. By grounding on the situational crime prevention, this study analyses how BC systems can be designed to effectively prevent counterfeiting.

This is a multiple-case study of five Italian wine companies using BC to prevent counterfeiting.

This study finds that the desired level of upstream/downstream counterfeiting protection that a brand owner intends to guarantee to customers through BC is the key driver to consider in the design of BC systems. The study identifies which variables are relevant to the design of feeding and reading processes and explains how such variables can be modulated in accordance with the desired level of counterfeiting protection.

The cases investigated are Italian companies within the wine sector, and the BC projects analysed are in the pilot phase.

The study provides practical suggestions to address the design of BC systems by identifying a set of key variables and explaining how to properly modulate them to face upstream/downstream counterfeiting.

This research applies a new perspective based on the situational crime prevention approach in studying how companies can design BC systems to effectively prevent counterfeiting. It explains how feeding and reading process options can be configured in BC systems to assure different degrees of counterfeiting protection.

The purpose of this paper is to provide insights for flower retailers, horticultural practitioners and marketing managers into the prioritisation of cut flower attributes by German residents.

Applying a best–worst scaling approach, this analysis identified the relative ranking of importance amongst product attributes relevant to German consumers when buying fresh cut flowers. A latent class analysis determined four flower consumer segments for further study. The study builds on a sample of 978 consumers and is consistent with the most recent German census in terms of age, gender, income and federal state.

The best-worst analysis showed that intrinsic flower attributes, in particular appearance, freshness and scent were found to be more important to German consumers than the extrinsic attributes studied, namely, price, country of origin and a certification indicating fair trade. The latent class analysis determined four consumer segments that desire either budget, luxury or ethical flowers or more information about flowers. For all identified consumer segments, appearance was the attribute of greatest importance. The segments that desired luxury or ethical flowers, as well as the segment that desires more information were interested in appearance, but also had relatively large shares of preferences dedicated to flower freshness guarantees. The preference for freshness guarantees in addition to appearance may be interpreted jointly as a desire for not only beautiful and aesthetically pleasing flowers, but for sustained beauty.

Internationally, the study fills a research gap by exploring consumer’s relative preference for cut flower attributes. In contrast to existing studies on consumer preferences for flowers in Germany, the present study builds on a sample that was targeted in terms of age, gender, net household income and federal state to the most recent German census.

This paper examines whether farmers' knowledge of the minimum support prices (MSPs) affects farm-gate prices. MSP is the minimum guaranteed price for agricultural commodities announced by the Government of India for 24 commodities. Most farmers in India prefer to sell their produce at the farm-gate due to a small marketable surplus and hence do not directly benefit from MSP. The authors test the common argument in the political discourse that if farmers have knowledge of MSP, then they can bargain with traders during the farm-gate transaction and demand a better price close to MSP.

The authors use matching methods to examine the impact of knowledge of MSP on farm-gate prices.

Using nationally representative data, the authors show that there is no empirical evidence that the knowledge of MSP of the crops leads to higher bargaining power and better farm-gate prices.

Price information (MSP in this case) alone cannot improve the bargaining power of farmers and result in a better price realization. As a safety net, MSP fails in the absence of procurement of products by the government. This also raises the question of the equitability of the price support system in India and calls for a rethink of the MSP policy.

This study is the first of its kind to examine the anchoring effect of knowledge of MSP on farm-gate prices using a nationally representative dataset.

The purpose of this study is to understand the effect of governance structure alignment, property rights protection, and reputation in generating efficiency in dairy agro-industrial system in Paraná, Brazil, and Midi-Pyrénées, France.

Descriptive qualitative research, comprising semi-structured interviews with producers, processors and key agents of the dairy agrindustrial system in Brazil and France, in 2016/2017.

As a result, it was identified that measurement generates information about transacted dimensions and when it is shared can generate affect reputation in transactions that leads to system improvement. It was also observed that, in the dairy agro-industrial system, reputation acquired does not reduce all the measurement costs, as the product requires measurement in each all collection, regardless of the reputation created.

As a limitation of the study, there is a difference in the moments when the interviews were done. In 2016, in France, the context was low prices, while in 2017, in Brazil, there was a rise in prices. This difference could have influenced some responses to the interviews, mainly about efficiency by producers.

Reputation, protecion of property rights by measurement and information sharing allows reduction costs (transaction, measurement and negotiation costs). This efficiency implies improvement to the system, in cases of milk producers and processors.

Improvements in the dairy system can have repercussions on several other improvements such as better distribution of income among agents in the chain; better-paid producers, which implies the improving quality of lives of these people; better products offered to consumers.

From a complementary perspective of transaction cost economics and measurement cost economics, reputation and protection of property rights are discussed with a focus on efficiency. Empirically, the paper contains heterogeneous data collected from two countries: Brasil and France.