In this article, we describe the preliminary results of an ongoing project to improve the dynamics of innovative teams. We investigate how to design a system that allows employees in an open space to swap the place with a colleague for one day. We call this system “Pick my desk and go” and we combine notions from people analytics and organizational design to illustrate how the system enhances collaboration among team members and knowledge exchange. We tested the system for a period of eight weeks and we collected empirical evidences and insights from semi-structured interviews that support our claim concerning the effectiveness of the system to improve team creativity. We conclude the paper by illustrating the features of the next version of the system in order to increase its effectiveness as a persuasive system.
In this article, we describe the preliminary results of an ongoing project aiming at increasing the attractiveness of Alpine destinations in Switzerland, by means of a very widespread hotel. We investigate how to design new services for wellness tourism, which target (a) “young elderly”, whose age is comprised between 60 and 75 years, and (b) enterprises interested in meetings, incentives, conferencing and events. The first customer segment is known to be proactive in seeking to improve or maintain health and quality of life, while medical tourists generally travel reactively to receive treatment for a diagnosed disease or condition. The second customer segment mostly seeks for complementary activities to be done after work or as main topic for a seminar. Accordingly, we have conducted interviews with different stakeholders: hotel managers, owners of firms producing natural components for wellbeing and tourist officers. In the end, we highlight a set of relevant findings that should be taken into account when setting up wellness tourism in a dispersed area.
We introduce a heterogeneous agent model to explain the price dynamics of fine wine. Our results show evidence of the existence of both fundamentalists – those who trade on mean-reversion towards a fair value – and chartists – those who extrapolate recently observed price trends – in the wine market. Moreover, we document that market participants switch between the two trading strategies, allocating more weight to the strategy that has been the most accurate in forecasting prices in the recent past. This switching behaviour can explain the large price variations (bubbles and crashes) that are observed in the fine wine market. Specifically, we document that large positive or negative deviations from fair values coincide with the majority of investors trading on the basis of a chartist belief. Further analysis reveals that switching behaviour (and thus bubble-like behaviour) is most prominent among wines that are popular with speculative traders.
The objective of this paper is to assess the precise impact of status on prices of Bordeaux fine wines. We identify several variables that can be used to model a wine’s status and make use of the coexistence of the longstanding 1855 classification in Pauillac and the very short-lived 1943 classification in Pomerol to examine the effect of status on the wine market. Overall, we show that quality, reputation and status jointly contribute at explaining wine prices. Status-related variables have a highly significant impact on Pomerol wines for which a current classification system is inexistent, while in Pauillac status is subsumed by the 1855 classification.
We examine how the systematic risk of large commercial real estate owners is associated with geographic diversification. In particular, we analyze time-varying equity betas and geographic exposure of publicly traded pure-play lodging REITs. Contrary to popular expectation, we find that stock investors perceive smaller risk in geographic focus rather than diversification. Further, regional focus becomes insignificant in reducing the risk if the focus expands beyond two or three regions. The findings are robust to multiple measures of geographic diversification. Our study re-affirms the impact of geographic focus in the context of commercial real estate as a risk minimization strategy.
Despite the prevalence of peer-to-peer accommodation-sharing platforms, what incentivizes individual hosts to expand their listings on platforms such as Airbnb remains unknown. This study investigates the economic/financial, social, and community incentive of hosts to expand listings and the interplay among these incentives in driving the listing expansion. Using large-scale but granular field data collected from an emerging accommodation-sharing platform in Beijing, China, we found that economic/financial, social, and community incentives significantly affect listing expansion in accommodation-sharing services. In addition, while the economic/financial and social incentives jointly motivate hosts to expand, such effects are both mitigated as the hosts’ experiences of accommodation sharing increases. This study adds to the extant literature a unique but less studied perspective of host expansion and provides important implications on incentivizing and regulating hosts for a healthy and viable accommodation sharing community.
We use the vector autoregressive model (VAR) to test the impact of tourism on the New Zealand economy. The variables of interest used in this study are: the index of real exchange rate between the NZ dollar and currencies of the 14 New Zealand’s top trading partners, the travel export in New Zealand and the real GDP of New Zealand. The variables contain all a unit root and are collected at quarterly frequency from 1990 to 2013. The model is fitted first for the whole period from 1990 to 2013 and then for the two sub periods anticipating and following the 2008 financial meltdown (i.e. 1990-2008 and 2008-2013). The results show that before the financial crisis the variables were linked by long run relationships that then disappeared once the financial crisis hit New Zealand. Between 1990 and 2008, an increase in GDP leaded to an appreciation while a depreciation of the exchange rate leaded to an increase in tourist receipts in the long run. In the short run, an increase of tourist receipts leaded to an appreciation for both the entire period and the sub period following the financial crisis while an increase in GDP leaded to an appreciation only for the sub period from 2008 to 2013.
Tourism is a data rich domain and the tourism industry is one of the core areas where effective use of data analytics can change the way business is done. Tourism businesses have recognized the importance of big data analysis, but they face an incredible volume and variety of data to work with. Although the amount of data available today is increasing exponentially, organizations easily get confused by the complexity of data. Data visualization makes huge amounts of data more accessible and understandable and helps to communicate complex information more accurately and effectively. Therefore, this study attempts to discuss how to utilize user-generated data in the tourism industry by comparing the results of three text analysis tools.
We use a unique and very deep database to examine the performance of wine investments during 2003–2014. Our results reveal that the returns stemming from those investments are important but can largely be explained by their exposure to common risk factors. As such and contradicting prior evidence, fine wines do not seem to offer abnormal returns. While explicitly accounting for non-synchronous trading, we indeed show that the market beta of wine is always positive and significant. Liquidity risk also turns out to be an essential determinant of wine returns. The fact that the liquidity factor, which is estimated on the basis of stock returns, can explain the returns on an exotic asset such as wine suggests that illiquidity is a common, cross-asset source of risk. Hence, this paper contributes to the literature on alternative investments and wine as an asset class and provides additional evidence regarding the nature of liquidity risk.
