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Medical tourism is growing rapidly in the recent years in various Asian countries. The success of the hospitals engaged in medical tourism largely depends on their abilities in maintaining the repeating customers and to attract new customers. Hence, the purpose of this study is to examine the impacts of word-of-mouth and social media on hospital brand image. It also attempts to examine the relationships between brand image, perceived service quality, patient satisfaction and behavioral intention.

A questionnaire survey was used to collect data from 386 medical tourists to test the proposed model. All the measurement scales adopted in this study were adapted from the existing literature. The data collected in this study were analyzed using both SPSS and structural equation modeling approach via AMOS.

The findings from the structural analysis indicated that both word-of-mouth and hospital-generated social media have a significant impact on brand image. Hospital brand image positively influences medical tourists’ perception of service quality, and their perceived service quality is significantly related to their satisfaction, which in turn, leads to their behavioral intention.

This study is one of the few studies that considers the importance of hospital’s brand image in influencing medical tourists’ perceptions on the quality of healthcare services that they experienced during their medical trips. This research study also raises the significance of word-of-mouth communication and social media that influence hospitals’ brand image, which has been neglected by many studies.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the voluntary horizontal M&A impact on operating performance in Nigeria between 1995 and 2012 under different complementary approaches.

Residual income valuation (RIV), economic value-added (EVA), data envelopment analysis (DEA) and stochastic frontier analysis (SFA).

Results showed a statistically significant improvement in the technical efficiency of both bidder and target companies, the reduced efficiency levels of the bidder firms under DEA scores reveals the specifics of the productive technology. This may suggest that resulting merged companies in Nigeria may have not even become too big in scale or even reached the most productive scale size, despite their almost monopolistic position in the sector. This happens because the scale size of the sector is small per se, implying that the investments necessary to achieve synergistic gains have to be partially covered by price increases.

This study will guide both the M&A practitioners, investment banks, and the policy makes. In terms of having to review M&A policy as well as seeing to the improvement in the infrastructural needs.

With improved performance, employment can be created thereby giving employment to the youths. This will reduce social problems.

From the literature and records, no long-term operating performance on voluntary mergers and acquisitions has not been carried out in Nigeria. The paper seeks to know the fundamental value of the firms after these transactions with the current methodology that is acceptable from the literature.

This paper aims to examine the productivity and spillover effect of Malaysian horizontal merger and acquisition (M&A) activities in the long run.

In terms of analytical tools, economic value added (EVA) and data envelopment analysis (DEA) are used.

The results of this study reveal that M&As in the absence of antitrust laws could be driven by managerial self-interest to create market power instead of realizing synergistic gains. Also, in Malaysia, the non-merging rival firms have significantly higher productivity improvement than the control bidder firms, and therefore, this study has identified the spillover effect as a behavior of M&A reaction.

This paper differs from previous studies in that it attempts not only to examine the real long-term gains of horizontal M&A activities in Malaysia but also the spillover effects of M&A activities on similar but non-merging firms.