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Little research has been done on how university information sources influence advice-seeking attitude, intention, and behavior between students with high and low susceptibility to online information. Our study addressed this gap by empirically demonstrating the role that students’ susceptibility to online information plays in terms of the effect of attitude, social norm and perceived behavioral control on their advice-seeking intention and behavior using the Theory of Planned Behavior (TPB). The purpose of this study is to examine differences in the susceptibility to online sources on students’ advice-seeking behavior when making an institution choice.

A cross-sectional survey was involved, and this empirical study was performed on the basis of a sample of 621 students from publicly-funded high schools in Hong Kong. Multigroup analysis (MGA) was conducted to (i.e. students with high susceptibility to online sources/ students with low susceptibility to online sources) to examine students’ behavioral intention regarding advice seeking about institution choice. 10;

The results of the study revealed that students with high susceptibility to online information were likely to be influenced by the social norm in applying the TPB model. Conversely, students with low susceptibility to online information had low intention to seek advice from others as they are independent and noninformation seekers. Implications for higher education institutions are discussed.

This study provides a modified version of the TPB model while also demonstrating how students with high/low susceptibility to online sources affect their behavioral intention to seek advice from others about making a university choice. Also, this study provides insights into institutions regarding the promotion of marketing information via online and offline sources.

Understanding the influences in the decision-making process of prospective students when choosing a university is crucial in student recruitment. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the impact of perceived source credibility on attitudes and intentions towards taking advice from significant others (e.g. parents, peers and teachers) on university choice.

In total, 626 samples from eight government-subsidised secondary schools were collected and tested using the component-based structural equation modelling of partial least squares.

The findings verified factors of source credibility that determine prospective students’ attitudes towards taking advice from others. Attitudes and subjective norms explained 49 per cent of the variance in intention to take advice from others on university choice. The findings of the present study provide practical marketing insights for enrolment and recruitment managers.

While most studies focus on students’ university choice in the recruitment process, studies on perceived source credibility of significant others in the university choice decision-making process are limited.

The purpose of this study is to demonstrate a method for estimating the tradeoffs that banking customers make between different attributes of a service, thus allowing businesses to estimate the likely impact on customer loyalty of changes in different attributes of a service.

The data were collected using a mail survey that was sent to small to medium‐sized enterprise (SME) decision makers in Hong Kong. The data were then analyzed using a choice modeling approach in the form of ordinal logistic regression.

Both affective components, such as relational bonds, and cognitive components, such as perceived service quality, are shown to influence customers' switching behavior. The specific tradeoffs that customers make between these attributes are also estimated.

This study is the first to quantify the effect of different variables on SME customer loyalty in a largely disloyal services sector. The study also demonstrates and quantifies the tradeoffs that customers make between various cognitive and affective attributes.

The tradeoff analysis shows how improvement in one attribute can have an impact that is equivalent to a change in another attribute. This provides additional strategic options for financial services marketers to cost‐effectively achieve a higher level of loyalty.

The study is the first to show how choice modeling can be used to calculate the tradeoffs that customers make in their purchase decisions, thereby providing financial services marketers with an effective way to estimate the impact of alternative strategies on customer loyalty.

To investigate the extent of loyalty, and the reasons underlying banking behaviour by business customers from the small to medium enterprise (SME) sector in Hong Kong, and to thereby contribute to a better understanding of the drivers of customer loyalty.

A total of 32 in‐depth qualitative interviews were carried out with decision makers from SMEs in Hong Kong. Content analysis was employed to analyze the interview data.

In contrast with earlier studies on banks' share of wallet in the SME segment in the USA and Australia, a lack of loyalty or “disloyalty” appears to be the norm within this sector in Hong Kong. Perceived service quality and the length of business relationship appear to have strong associations with loyalty behaviour, in terms of customers' willingness to continue to use a bank and/or to recommend the bank to others.

Since the study is qualitative, a larger empirical study would be useful to attempt to replicate our results in this and other geographic markets.

The results suggest that the Hong Kong SME market is characterized by high level of disloyalty, and that attaining 100 per cent loyalty from this group of customers will be very difficult. Instead, a banking strategy that focuses on service and on developing a sustained relationship with the customer may have the greatest chance of maximising the share‐of‐wallet of SME customers. The study offers important marketing implications for banks which are operating, or are planning to operate, business banking in Hong Kong and comparable Asian markets.

It is the first paper to study the incidence of, and reasons underlying, SME banking loyalty in an Asian market. It shows that disloyalty appears to be the norm in this sector, presenting a reminder to managers and researchers that customer loyalty may be the exception, rather than the norm.

The purpose of this paper is to focus on the challenges faced by the public and private sectors in developing output specifications for Australian public private partnership (PPP) projects. In particular, this study aims to examine how the stakeholders (including facilities managers) should cater for future changes in output specifications and make them flexible enough to meet the evolving project objectives.

The research is based on 19 semi‐structured interviews with key stakeholders from the public and private sectors in three States of Australia where PPP procurement has been used, including New South Wales (NSW), Queensland and Victoria. The results are triangulated with relevant literature for supports and contrasts.

For PPP projects, a good set of output specifications is conducive to the achievement of value for money, innovation, risk transfer, whole life asset performance through a clear abatement regime and an effective linkage of performance criteria to the payment mechanism. For existing specifications, it was found that too many and complex KPIs were specified, which were difficult to monitor, measure and implement by the client. Very prescriptive specifications hindered innovations and did not allow appropriate risk allocation. Further, the research study suggests that after the global financial crises, the private sector had less appetite to take the patronage risks in road and rail PPP projects. To mitigate these pitfalls, it is imperative that output specifications need to be aligned with the type of PPP projects they represent; in particular foreseeable changes should be addressed by some pre‐agreed framework to facilitate negotiation.

The significant contribution of this research is the identification of the common issues faced in drafting output specifications for Australian PPP projects. Stakeholders of future PPP projects should find the lessons useful for achieving value for money and appropriate risk transfer, stating the user requirements through clear and concise output specifications rather than input or prescriptive specifications in procuring social and economical PPP projects. Their relationships with facilities management are highlighted.

The research presented in this study replicates and extends the QSport-10 scale proposed by Rial, Varela, Rial and Real in their 2010 study, by incorporating the Programme dimension into the original measurement of service quality in Physical Activity and Sports Centres (PSCs). The objective of this research is to examine the dimensionality of the QSport-10 scale and extend it to capture the additional Programme service quality dimension. Study results confirmed the dimensionality of the service quality measurement offered by the QSport-10 scale and presented strong empirical support for the existence of Programme, Installations and Staff dimensions. Programme dimension was considered the most important factor for the largest consumer segment in the study.

The purpose of this paper is to appraise the current status of enterprise risk management (ERM) in the Gulf Co‐operation Council (GCC) oil and gas entities to develop a practical, region‐specific, and systematic action plan for the GCC oil and gas industry that can transform the existing ERM models to a mature and robust framework.

The paper reviews current relevant literature on Committee of Sponsoring Organization of the Treadway Commission ERM Framework; and enterprise wide risk framework within the precincts of the GCC oil and gas industry to identify the knowledge gaps which form the basis for the research questions. The paper then empirically investigates the GCC oil industry through six case studies, encompassing the six countries in the GCC (GCC comprising of Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and United Arab Emirates). The case study has focused by exploring the ERM system per se through comparative case studies to answer the research questions. The research questions and the work have been done from the perspective of the naturalistic (inductive) research paradigm.

This paper establishes the understanding of the current existing ERM models while identifying the determinants of ERM adoption and the most significant challenges for its implementation. Furthermore, the paper also develops the best practice approach for successful ERM implementation in the GCC oil and gas entities.

The use of a case study has been made precluding the use of other direct methods such as survey questionnaires. The analytical methods used are deductive and discursive in nature, limited to the nature of the methodology of case study used. Rigorous statistical methods could not be applied owing to the limitations of the case study method. The paper explores and compares the industry structure of oil and gas sector in GCC countries, for this purpose, only a few selected entities in the upstream and downstream oil and gas sector are discussed.

Although ERM is conceptually straightforward, its implementation in practice is not. Furthermore, ERM is accepted as a contemporary hot topic and also a board room priority in most industries. The present paper steers the way forward for an improved understanding of the ERM system in a strategic industry dealing with a strategic commodity.

There is a need for a proactive ERM program in the oil and gas industry and also a need for additional research especially in terms of its implementation. Nevertheless, an apparent caveat in the ERM system is that there is no standard approach to implementing and entities grapple with how they should go about putting together an ERM program. The findings provide useful and timely analysis of the GCC oil and gas industry from the perspective of implementation of an ERM framework which is contemporaneous business priority item in most entities in the GCC hydrocarbon sector.

This paper reviews the normative literature of performance measurement within the context of Public-Private Partnerships (PPPs). The purpose of this paper is to examine the effectiveness of current ex post evaluations of PPPs and identify a feasible direction to comprehensively and effectively measure the performance of PPP infrastructure projects.

An in-depth literature review is conducted in this paper. The focus of the review is associated with the general performance measurement and performance measurements of PPPs.

This paper identifies that conventional ex post evaluation is not robust enough to measure the performance of PPP projects. Based on the characteristics of PPPs, the life-cycle (process-based) evaluation under performance measurement system is a promising approach to comprehensive and effective PPP performance measurement.

The outcomes of this paper can be used as a theoretical base for the development of PPP performance measurement framework.

Performance measurement is essential to business success, whether it is at the organisation or project level. Limitations on public funds have encouraged more and more governments across the world to use PPPs to procure economic and social infrastructure projects. Similar to traditional procurement, ex post evaluation is being widely used in PPP projects. However, PPPs are more complicated than other traditional procurement approaches. Exploration of literature suggests that limited research has been undertaken to examine if conventional ex post evaluation is sufficient to measure the performance of PPPs. This paper will bridge this significant knowledge gap.

In this research, we empirically examine the impact of Business Intelligence (BI) systems on operational capability in high-tech sectors. We also seek to understand the contextual factors that facilitate the adoption of BI systems.

We adopt Propensity Score Matching (PSM) and event study methodology, and analyze the financial data for a sample of 144 US firms which adopted BI systems from 2005–2014, and compare them to control firms without BI systems.

We find that the implementation of BI systems leads to higher operational capability, particularly for large high-tech firms with high technology intensity. We further show that technology intensity and firm size are important contextual factors for firms to reap the benefits of BI systems.

We demonstrate how benefits from the adoption of BI systems are likely to be strengthened. The benefits of BI systems depend on firms' technology intensity and firm size of high-tech firms. Accessing relevant and timely reports for decision-making is particularly important in the highly dynamic, volatile and competitive high-tech sectors.

We contribute to the literature by providing empirical evidence that the adoption of BI systems can improve firms' operational capability and show that technology intensity and firm size are important contextual factors for firms to reap the benefits of BI systems. We advance the understanding regarding the contextual factors in which firms are more likely to gain additional benefits from their adoptions of BI systems.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the alternative procurement procedures that will address the complexity of issues surrounding timber procurement for housing reconstruction after the Tsunami in Banda Aceh. It reviews construction supply chain management (SCM) and procurement philosophies with a project management (PM) perspective to facilitate the logistics of post‐disaster reconstruction.

Based on two fieldtrip experiences in Banda Aceh in 2006 (one month) and 2008 (two months) with the housing reconstruction program of an international non‐governmental organisation, this paper examines the modern literature on SCM and analyses this process associated with construction material procurement in practice, reviews the problems inherited in the Indonesian context and analyses the proposed procedures of local and international procurement of timber to streamline the supply for reconstruction in Banda Aceh, Indonesia.

The incorporation of sustainable considerations into the design of procurement routes in the overall PM process for post‐disaster construction should be well recognized. The paper shows that basic SCM philosophies of ensuring stakeholder integration and collaboration could reduce the problems in timber procurement in Banda Aceh. Sustainable construction and triple bottom lines criteria are proposed to ensure a value creation process for a wider stakeholder engagement and overall reconstruction project delivery.

The paper provides useful PM insights into SCM and sustainable construction literature. The case study reviews the timber procurement problems and goes further to present two alternative procurement models that could be implemented as more sustainable responses to post‐disaster reconstruction in Banda Aceh.