economic implications of intergenerational equity for biodiversity conservation the rights of future generations to enjoy sustainable development have been formally recognised internationally this has important implications for the economic analysis of biological diversity which as an integral attribute of natural capital is of critical importance to both current and future generations the dominant economic paradigm involves no explicit recognition of the rights of future generations thus it can give rise to outcomes of dubious intergenerational equity merit rawls contractarian theory attributes intrinsic value to rights and is considered here in relation to the intergenerational distribution of natural resources some problems of theoretical and practical character for the implementation of the rawlsian approach are noted an incremental and adaptive learning process in the use and distribution of natural resources is recommended in order to ensure the well being of future generations three degrees of intergenerational equity are derived i extensive ii intermediate and iii minimal in terms of biodiversity conservation this implies an ethical base for countries to at least fund the establishment of protected area pa systems therefore economic analysis should not be used at this conceptual level to decide if pa systems should or should not be established this question would necessarily be answered in the affirmative on the basis of the interests of future generations at the practical level of deciding which specific ecosystems should make up particular pa systems economic analysis should a contribute to a holistic approach to the identification of the areas to be protected b investigate the most cost effective way of carrying out the initiative c assess of the intragenerational equity outcomes and d consider the institutional features relevant to the successful implementation of the conservation initiative

transforming competitiveness into economic benefits does tourism stimulate economic growth in more competitive destinations abstract this research note investigates the impact of a destination s competitiveness upon tourism s contribution to economic growth using a cross section with 131 countries destination competitiveness is measured with the world economic forum s travel and tourism competitiveness index while tourism s contribution to economic growth is measured with the growth decomposition methodology results reveal that destination competitiveness has no statistically significant impact on tourism s contribution to economic growth tourism policy implications and directions for future research are also discussed

environmental quality competition and eco labeling abstract a three stage game of investment environmental quality provision and price competition is developed to study the impact of green technology investment eco labeling in a duopoly model of vertical product differentiation the firms incentives to invest in green technologies depend on their relative cost structure when firms are identical with respect to fixed costs both firms will always invest but if one firm is more efficient in investing then the other firm may or may not invest depending on the level of unit cost of investment quality competition will be tighter when the low quality firm is more efficient and looser when the high quality firm is more efficient in investing socially optimal investment for both firms is always positive but lower than in the duopoly solution in the absence of environmental externalities the quality dispersion chosen by profit maximizing firms may be too high or too low while environmental externalities increase the possibility low quality dispersion that is too low within the market solution finally and importantly ecolabeling can be used as a means of reducing excessive investment and increasing environmental quality that is too low

the tragedy of tourism resources as the outcome of a strategic game a new analytical framework abstract game theory is rarely used to deal with the overuse and misuse of tourism resources when it happens the issue is normally explained within a non cooperative setting in which because of the free riding option a problem emerges as the socially irrational outcome of an individually rational behaviour social dilemma in some cases the assumptions upon which this explanation rests risk lacking both descriptive accuracy and predictive power since tourism is the encounter of a stable residents with a changing tourists population the paper asserts that in many cases the issue may be better investigated within a strategic game in which the players do not know an aspect of their environment that is important for their choice bayesian game building on this the paper demonstrates why an unsustainable path may emerge even when both players prefer preservation to exploitation and no free ride incentive exists then it addresses some policy issues to prevent the dreaded result that non cooperative behaviour would yield

the eco efficiency of tourism the use of fossil energy is one of the major environmental problems associated with tourism and travel consequently the need to limit fossil energy use has been highlighted as a precondition for achieving sustainable tourism development however tourism is also one of the most important sectors of the world economy and fears have thus been expressed by the tourist industry and its organisations that increasing energy prices for example as a result of eco taxes could substantially decrease the economic welfare of countries and destinations in this article the interplay of environmental damage and economic gains is thus analysed within the context of tourism carbon dioxide equivalent emissions are assessed in relation to the revenues generated allowing for conclusions about the eco efficiency of tourism

supply chain disruption management and evolutionarily stable strategies of retailers in the quantity setting duopoly situation with homogeneous goods this paper develops an indirect evolutionary game model with two vertically integrated channels to study evolutionarily stable strategies ess of retailers in the quantity setting duopoly situation with homogeneous goods and analyzes the effects of the demand and raw material supply disruptions on the retailers strategies every channel consists of one manufacturer and many a sufficiently large number of retailers that sell products in different markets by adopting two pure marketing strategies profit maximization and revenue maximization we find that revenue maximization strategy may prevail and profit maximization strategy may become extinct two strategies may coexist i e all retailers in one channel will choose profit maximization strategy and all retailers in the other will choose revenue maximization strategy the ess of retailers depends on the relative size of the market scale and unit cost the supply chain disruptions affect the ess of retailers we also introduce a recovery model of the supply chain under disruptions and illustrate the effect of disruptions on the ess and on the average profits of channels in a market using a numerical simulation

why do diners tip rule of thumb or valuation of service when diners decide how much to tip is the decision based on social convention or on conscientious appraisal of server productivity previous researchers in economics and social psychology are generally inconclusive on this question a common finding in the literature is that tip size and service quality are unrelated a result usually obtained from ols regressions ols is only appropriate if service quality is exogenous it is argued that service quality is very likely endogenous in any regression of tip size good quality encourages good tips but server expectations of good tips encourage good quality this simultaneity is accounted for by jointly estimating percentage tips and customer rankings of service quality on a sample of 247 diners in a central minnesota restaurant included are explanatory variables consistent with both the social psychology and economic views of tipping in contrast to previous studies it is found that service quality significantly affects tip size and when servers expect hi

toward a theoretical model of voluntary overcompliance abstract we explain why some firms voluntarily overcomply with environmental regulation in our model all consumers value environmental quality but differ in their willingness to pay which depends on their income levels publicly available information on environmental performance of firms enables consumers to identify clean firms firms participate in a two stage duopoly game where they first choose their levels of cleaning technology and next engage in price competition the market gets segmented by income levels a minimum standard binding on the dirty firm has the effect of improving the performance of the cleaner firm a subsidy obtains the same competitive outcome

economic incentives for tourism firms to undertake voluntary environmental management abstract the management of natural assets at tourism destinations has relied strongly on the traditional assumption that agents free ride tourism firms are expected to overuse resources for their private interest and be subject to a trade off between being green and being competitive however there are many examples of voluntary environmental actions undertaken by the tourism industry the present paper reviews the literature on the economic consequences of voluntary environmental action taken by tourism firms and presents three challenges to the commonly held tragedy expectations these results suggest the viability of alternative environmental policymaking that takes potential voluntary action under consideration

is tourism firm competitiveness driven by different internal or external specific factors new empirical evidence from spain abstract the quest to understand the multilevel antecedents of competitiveness has led to a separation of approaches on one side of the question are the environment theories that analyze the structural characteristics of the general and competitive environment on the other side are the resource based view and its extensions that highlight firm specific resources and capabilities as the main basis of firms competitiveness however in recent years the nature of competition and shifting economic conditions have given rise to new theoretical approaches that complement the assumptions underlying both environmental and firm theories specifically this study contributes by examining the regional environment effect the district effect and the strategic group effect through a study of 364 spanish tourism firms this research explores the relative importance of distinct external forces such as the general environment or country effect the regional effect the competitive environment or industry effect the district effect and internal factors such as the firm s tangible resources capabilities and strategy selection the results demonstrate that firms capabilities are more important than environment effects and tangible resources

environmental management of a tourist destination a factor of tourism competitiveness although research to date has addressed various elements of destination competitiveness there has been little attempt to systematically and comprehensively study the environmental competitiveness from the managerial perspective since the calgary tourism competitiveness model brought a systematic approach to tourism competitiveness research this paper selectively uses its management element as a tool to link the competitiveness and environmental management following the model the destination management is divided into two parts 1 managerial and 2 marketing e orts this paper studies them from environmental perspective first destination environmental competitiveness can be increased by appropriate managerial e orts related to environmental impact ei and environmental quality eq management second the destination competitiveness can be enhanced through certain environmental marketing activities further environmental management is categorised into groups management by codes of conduct by self developed environmental practice by certi ed or awarded best practice and by accreditation schemes their usefulness for environmental destination management and competitiveness is evaluated 1999 elsevier science ltd all rights reserved

supply side investments an international analysis of the return and risk relationship in the travel leisure sector abstract this study investigates supply side investments in the tourism sector analysing the return and risk relationship of investments in tourism across several countries the performance of tourism sector companies listed on the stock exchange for the top one dozen countries according to the world economic forum wef tourism rankings is investigated by region across these countries and within each country by comparison to other sectors several metrics are used to compare the risk adjusted returns over a 15 year period ending march 2007 and sub periods to check the persistence of performance over time the results present a strikingly different ranking than those of the wef the implications for the flow of investment funds are of importance in a global capital market money will flow to those investments with the highest expected returns for a given risk level and this has consequential impacts for economic growth and employment in the tourism sector

can ecolabeling schemes preserve the environment a three stage game of production technology signal and price competition is developed to study the impact of eco labeling in a duopoly model of vertical product differentiation the production technology and the subsequent pollution level are non observable by consumers the only way to inform consumers about the environmental quality of the product is to stick an ecolabel on it however a polluting firm may also usurp the ecolabel by incurring a certain cost by assuming that consumers are altruistic and willing to pay for environmental quality we show that ecolabels can reduce the pollution level finally and importantly under restrictive conditions on labeling cost ecolabeling can constitute to some extent an environmentally effective and economically efficient policy however ecolabeling cannot alone internalize the whole negative externality until the optimum point

can ecolabels survive in the long run the role of initial conditions abstract this paper analyzes the interaction between three environmental strategies within a population of firms brown green and certified green strategies we first present a restricted version of an evolutionary game where only brown and green strategies are possible next the model is extended to allow green firms to certify their environmental strategies by joining an ecolabel our analysis shows that when it survives the ecolabel tends to fully replace other uncertified environmental initiatives and to increase the proportion of firms implementing voluntary abatement nevertheless the long run survival of the ecolabel is not a necessary outcome of the model although it can be facilitated via policies that reduce abatement or certification costs increase consumer s environmental concerns or improve the credibility of the certifier whereas it may be reduced by green wash news about the sector an ecolabel s survival may also depend on how and when it is launched in those common situations where the model has two stable equilibria initial conditions play a key role in determining the ecolabel s survival specifically important determinants are the degree of adoption of voluntary abatement when the ecolabel is launched and the amount and composition of firms that participate in the creation of the ecolabel

environmental policy in a green market this paper studies the impact of some frequently used environmental policies in a duopolistic market where purchasers are willing to pay more for less polluting goods when consumers differ in their environmental awareness a cleaner and a dirtier variant coexist in equilibrium the higher the average willingness to pay for the good the lower are variants unit emissions but the higher are industrial aggregate effluents a maximum unit emission standard reduces unit emissions of both variants but boosts firms sales and consequently increases industrial aggregate emissions as a result social welfare may be reduced we also explore the effects of technological subsidies and product charges including differentiation of charges

a dynamic approach to voluntary environmental contributions in tourism abstract in an evolutionary game theoretical model of tourism firms that use an endogenous natural common pool resource cpr we show that stable equilibria with voluntary environmental initiatives may coexist with other equilibria where voluntary abatement is absent the basins of attraction of the equilibria are identified and a bifurcation analysis is carried out producing two results with policy implications first there is a highly non linear relationship between the cost of abatement required to be green and the share of green firms second increases in the number of the cpr s users will ultimately dissipate the incentives to make abatement beyond regulation

incentives and service quality in the restaurant industry the tipping service puzzle tipping is a significant economic activity tips in the us food industry alone amount to about 42 billion annually that was claimed to improve service quality and increase economic efficiency because it gives incentives to provide excellent service and therefore allows to avoid costly monitoring of workers the article suggests that this common wisdom might be wrong a simple model shows formally that tips can improve service only if they are sensitive enough to service quality empirical evidence suggests that tips are hardly affected by service quality nevertheless rankings of service quality by customers are very high the co existence of these two findings is denoted the tipping service puzzle and several possible explanations for it are offered

active and passive waste in government spending evidence from a policy experiment we propose a distinction between active and passive waste as determinants of the cost of public services active waste entails utility for the public decision maker whereas passive waste does not we analyze purchases of standardized goods by italian public bodies and exploit a policy experiment associated with a national procurement agency we find that i some public bodies pay systematically more than others for equivalent goods ii differences are correlated with governance structure iii the variation in prices is principally due to variation in passive rather than active waste and iv passive waste accounts for 83 percent of total estimated waste

do people play nash equilibrium lessons from evolutionary game theory evolutionary game theory provides an answer to two of the central questions in economic modeling when is it reasonable to assume that people are rational and when is it reasonable to assume that behavior is part of a nash equilibrium and if it is reasonable which equilibrium the traditional answers are not compelling and much of evolutionary modeling is motivated by the need for a better answer evolutionary game theory suggests that in a range of settings agents do eventually play a nash equilibrium moreover evolutionary modeling has shed light on the relative plausibility of different nash equilibria

destination competitiveness applying different models the case of slovenia abstract a tourism country s competitiveness is important especially when countries strive for bigger market shares tourism managers have to identify and explore competitive advantages and analyse the destination s competitive position the degree to which a country can benefit from its tourism sector depends largely on this sector s competitive position in the international tourist market this paper refers to the de keyser vanhove model of a competitive destination which was applied to slovenia in 1998 it also studies the integrated model of destination competitiveness developed in a collaborative effort of researchers dealing with the cases of korea and australia and examines its determinants and individual competitive indicators as perceived by slovenian tourist stakeholders on the supply side the result shows that slovenia is more competitive in its natural cultural and created resources but less competitive in the management of tourism and according to the integrated model demand conditions with both uncompetitive elements reducing the slovenian tourism industry s ability to add value the end discussion points out weaknesses in the development of tourism competitiveness models and calls for greater unity with the competitiveness factor theory and for more caution when creating the main competitiveness factors and models

beyond the rhetoric of sustainable tourism abstract recent years have witnessed an upsurge of interest in the concept of sustainable tourism for the most part attention has focused on defining the concept authors have reasoned that in order to achieve sustainable tourism a sound understanding must first be gained of what the concept means this article does not take issue with this general approach but nevertheless argues that the time has now come to move on from defining sustainable tourism to begin to consider how it may best be implemented in practice an approach based on the methodology of environmental economics is suggested as a possible way forward

ladies first a field study of discrimination in coffee shops despite anecdotal and survey evidence suggesting the presence of discrimination against customers in stores restaurants and other small transaction consumer markets few studies exist that identify or quantify the nature of any unequal treatment we provide evidence from a field study of wait times in boston area coffee shops that suggests that female customers wait an average of 20 seconds longer for their orders than do male customers even when controlling for gender differences in orders we find that this differential in wait times is inverse to the proportion of employees who are female and directly related to how busy the coffee shop is at the time of the order this supports the conclusion that the observed differential is driven at least in part by employee animus and or statistical discrimination rather than unobserved heterogeneity in the purchasing behaviour of female customers

must contingent valuation surveys cost so much abstract in 1989 the exxon valdez ran aground and spilled 11 million gallons of oil in alaska great controversy has surrounded the assessment of monetary damages for this oil spill the source of this controversy has been the use of hypothetical contingent valuation surveys to assess damages to individual households and the aggregation of these survey values over all households in the united states the assessment prepared for the state of alaska is reported to have cost several million dollars to undertake we show that considerable economy can be effected in the elicitation of such survey responses our approach is to use a cheaper convenience sample to generate a statistical model of behavioral responses to the valuation questions and then to use sample averages of population characteristics to predict the behavior of the population thus we use a model of the behavior of students to predict the behavior of all of the adult citizens of the united states we find that we can obtain essentially the same damage estimates as a more expensive probability sample of the entire nation

on the sustainability of common property resources abstract we provide a model where a common property resource is managed by two types of agents cooperators and non cooperators who adjust their extraction strategies in response to persistent differential payoffs in our model the social approval of cooperators works as a reward mechanism which as we show favors both the pervasiveness of cooperative behavior and the sustainable management of natural resources specifically we show that in the presence of such a reward mechanism a stable equilibrium can be reached with both strategies being practiced simultaneously and a decentralized and sustainable management of common property resources is possible

social benefit certification as a game tourism ecocertification programs persist and proliferate despite low market penetration and apparent consumer indifference this has been viewed simply as an early adoption phase a two decade historical analysis of development patterns for 17 programs however suggests that they can be analysed as a multi move political game between corporate and civic advocates where neither can quit without losing the political game framework yields predictions which are testably different from a pure market early adopter framework it also draws a key distinction between consumer benefit and social benefit measures applicable to corporate social responsibility initiatives in many industry sectors

a bargaining model of voluntary environmental agreements abstract we present an explicit model of firm regulator negotiations in a market with several firms we describe how the regulatory surplus is distributed between firms and regulator and analyse the impact of various parameters on the resulting level of environmental regulation our main result is that a toughest firm principle holds the outcome of negotiations is essentially determined by the firm with the most aggressive attitude towards environmental control

single versus multiple supplier sourcing strategies successful supply chain management necessitates an effective sourcing strategy to combat uncertainties in both supply and demand in particular supply disruption results in excessive downtime of production resources upstream and downstream supply chain repercussions and eventually a loss in the market value of the firm in this paper we analyze single period single product sourcing decisions under demand uncertainty our approach integrates product prices supplier costs supplier capacities historical supplier reliabilities and firm specific inventory costs a unique feature of our approach is the integration of a firm specific supplier diversification function we also extend our analysis to examine the impact of minimum supplier order quantities our results indicate that single sourcing is a dominant strategy only when supplier capacities are large relative to the product demand and when the firm does not obtain diversification benefits in other cases we find that multiple sourcing is an optimal sourcing strategy we also characterize a non intuitive trade off between supplier minimum order quantities costs and supplier reliabilities finally we examine the robustness of our results through an extensive numerical analysis of the key parameters of our model

do people tip because of psychological or strategic motivations an empirical analysis of restaurant tipping one of the most interesting and central questions about tipping is why people tip the two major potential reasons are strategic behaviour aimed to ensure good future service and social psychological motivations data on tipping behaviour suggests that there is no positive effect of patronage frequency on the sensitivity of tips to service quality this implies that people tip only because of social and psychological motivations and not because of strategic reasons and future service considerations

differentiated price loss aversion in destination choice the effect of tourists cultural interest abstract this article looks into the differentiated effects of loss aversion depending on whether individuals show cultural interest when choosing a destination based on the fact that perceived value implies not only sacrifices but also the expectations of a certain level of quality and prospects of satisfaction together with the idea the prospect theory applies to tourism prices the article states the hypothesis that interest in culture when choosing a destination lowers people s loss aversion by incorporating the reference dependent model into a multinomial logit model with random parameters which controls for heterogeneity the empirical application shows that culture interested tourists are less loss averse i e the negative effect of finding a higher than expected price diminishes with cultural interest the expectation of enjoyment of these attributes and the more conscious attitude toward maintenance restoration activities of cultural sites are hypothesized to lead prices to be evaluated differently when selecting a destination

cooperation in the commons with unobservable actions we model a dynamic common property resource game with unobservable actions and non linear stock dependent costs we propose a strategy profile that generates a worst perfect equilibrium in the punishment phase thereby supporting cooperation under the widest set of conditions we show under what set of parameter values for the discount rate resource growth rate harvest price and the number of resource users this strategy supports cooperation in the commons as a subgame perfect equilibrium the strategy profile that we propose which involves harsh punishment after a defection followed by forgiveness is consistent with human behavior observed in experiments and common property resource case studies

consistency between contingent valuation estimates a comparison of two studies of uk national parks bateman i willis k and garrod g 1994 consistency between contingent valuation estimates a comparison of two studies of uk national parks reg studies 28 457 474 recent years have seen a significant increase in the application of the contingent valuation method to the evaluation of environmental preferences in the uk recent theoretical and methodological developments suggest that this increase is likely to be sustained for the foreseeable future this paper examines the issue of consistency across studies carried out to date in the uk attention is initially focused upon two major studies which allow the comparison of a number of findings analysis is then extended to a large number of smaller studies these comparisons suggest that the results obtained to date are both consistent and logically ordered with reference to the environmental good and the change in provision under consideration across studies bateman i willis k et garrod g 1994 la coherence des estimations contingentes une

product line competition customization vs proliferation we study a market with customers who have heterogeneous preferences for product attributes we consider two types of firms that compete on price and product variety a traditional firm which chooses a limited set of product configurations and a customizing firm which can produce any configuration to order the traditional firm carries product inventories and experiences a lead time delay the customizing firm does not carry inventory and its customers incur waiting costs until they receive their orders we assume that the customizing firm has limited capacity in the short run e g when it does not outsource production to high volume manufacturers we derive the equilibrium for a duopoly competition between the customizing firm and the traditional firm study its characteristics and compare it to a monopoly we characterize conditions that favor customization under competition we find that the customizing firm s profit is not monotone in the market size and its ease of customization similarly a

voluntary eco labeling and the price premium international environmental organizations propose voluntary eco labeling as a market incentive to promote industry to operate in an ecologically sustainable and environmentally friendly manner a microeconomic analysis questions whether voluntary eco labeling will cause producer profits in a competitive industry to decline and whether eco labeling will necessarily generate different prices for labeled and unlabeled product using wood product as an example results identify conditions that may exist when firms lose profits even under a voluntary system and where existing production constraints may lead to a single price regardless of labeling

effects of sourcing structure on performance in a multiple product assemble to order supply chain abstract this paper addresses the strategic pricing decisions of a decentralized assemble to order system and the effects of sourcing structure on system performance we consider an assemble to order system consisting of two substitute products and three components manufactured by different suppliers demand for the products is price sensitive the selling prices for the products are jointly determined by firms in the system we study the system under both centralized and decentralized decision making situations for the centralized system we demonstrate that there exists a unique optimal pricing solution for the decentralized system we show that there exists a unique nash equilibrium in the players pricing game we further analyze the effects of different sourcing structures on the system performance and the assembler s performance we find that reduction of suppliers in the system does not guarantee improvement of system performance different sourcing structures have different impacts on performance when the two dedicated components are sourced from a single supplier and the common component is sourced from another independent supplier the system and the assembler s performance become worse we show that the decentralized system can be effectively coordinated and the system performance can be improved with a simple profit sharing contract finally we provide comprehensive numerical examples to demonstrate some important managerial insights

investment in tourism market a dynamic model of differentiated oligopoly we present a theoretical dynamic model in tourism economics assuming that the market for tourism is an oligopoly with differentiated products destinations can invest in order to improve their stock of physical natural or cultural resources tourism flows yield current revenues but they are usually detrimental for the stock of resources we find the solution of the dynamic model and in particular we find the open loop nash equilibrium of the game among destinations under alternative settings depending on whether the degree of differentiation among destinations is exogenous or endogenous in particular under the latter case an increase of the number of destinations leads to a higher degree of product differentiation in steady state

the role of negotiating tools in the environmental policy mix instruments determinants and effects of the environmental agreement abstract the environmental agreement ea is a policy instruments to address the need to protect and improve environmental quality from a legal point of view the ea represents different types of agreement which are mainly based on a contractual agreement between an individual and a third party to improve environmental performance to contribute to the current debate on this topic our research paper aims through a quantitative analysis to answer the questions on how effective a stringent environmental agreement is in terms of a facility s environmental performance and what the role of stakeholders is on its impact on production activities the econometric analysis shows that the impact of the environmental agreement on production activities significantly improves the facilities environmental performance and that it is influenced by several external influence groups

cleaning house the impact of information technology monitoring on employee theft and productivity this paper examines how firm investments in technology based employee monitoring impact both misconduct and productivity we use unique and detailed theft and sales data from 392 restaurant locations from five firms that adopt a theft monitoring information technology it product we use difference in differences models with staggered adoption dates to estimate the treatment effect of it monitoring on theft and productivity we find significant treatment effects in reduced theft and improved productivity that appear to be primarily driven by changed worker behavior rather than worker turnover we examine four mechanisms that may drive this productivity result economic and cognitive multitasking fairness based motivation and perceived increases of general oversight the observed productivity results represent substantial financial benefits to both firms and the legitimate tip based earnings of workers our results suggest that employee misconduct is not solely a function of individual differences in ethics or morality but can also be influenced by managerial policies that can benefit both firms and employees this paper was accepted by serguei netessine operations management

the evolution of social norms in common property resource use the problem of extracting commonly owned renewable resources is examined within an evolutionary game theoretic framework it is shown that cooperative behavior guided by norms of restraint and punishment may be stable in a well defined sense against invasion by narrowly self interested behavior the resource stock dynamics are integrated with the evolutionary game dynamics effects of changes in prices technology and social cohesion on extraction behavior and the long run stock are analyzed when threshold values of the parameters are crossed social norms can break down leading generally to the lowering of the long run stock and possibly to its extinction copyright 1996 by american economic association

performance of french destinations tourism attraction perspectives in this paper we assess and compare the performance of french tourism destinations using the data envelopment analysis dea two stage procedure where in the first stage the efficiency score are calculated and then followed in the second stage by a bootstrapped truncated regression model in the context of france such analysis takes an additional importance especially as the country is expected to face a decrease in its tourism competitiveness a discussion in terms of d attraction and e attraction is also proposed and policy recommendations are derived

demand side reactive strategies for supply disruptions in a multiple product system abstract this research examines demand side reactive strategies for supply disruption in a multiple assemble to order system we consider an assemble to order system with two substitute products where the demand is price sensitive and disruption sensitive two different supply disruption situations are examined disruption of the low value component and disruption of the high value component we propose and compare the performance of four reactive strategies for managing supply disruptions namely the backordering strategy the upgrading downgrading strategy the compensation strategy and the mixed strategy we find that the compensation strategy and the mixed strategy can keep more customers than the backordering strategy and the upgrading strategy during the supply disruption of the low value product for the disruption of the high value product the total number of customers keeps constant but it does lead to the reallocation of customers among the products we find that the mixed strategy is the best reactive strategy and the backordering strategy is the worst one among the four reactive strategies

voluntary environmental agreements good or bad news for environmental protection abstract there has been growing interest in the use of voluntary agreements vas as an environmental policy tool this article uses a simple model to determine whether vas are likely to lead to efficient environmental protection we consider cases where polluters are induced to participate either by a background threat of mandatory controls the stick approach or by cost sharing subsidies the carrot approach the results suggest that the overall impact on environmental quality could be positive or negative depending on a number of factors including the allocation of bargaining power the magnitude of the background threat and the social cost of funds

non mandatory approaches to environmental protection the approach to environmental protection has been evolving from a regulation driven adversarial government push approach to a more proactive approach involving voluntary and often business led initiatives to self regulate their environmental performance this has been accompanied by increasing provision of environmental information about firms and products to enlist market forces and communities in creating a demand for corporate environmental self regulation by signaling their preferences for environmentally friendly firms this paper provides an overview of the non mandatory approaches being used for environmental protection and surveys the existing theoretical literature analyzing the economic efficiency of such approaches relative to mandatory approaches it also discusses empirical findings on the factors motivating self regulation by firms and its implications for their economic and environmental performance it examines the existing evidence on the extent to which information disclosure is effective in generating pressures from investors and communities on firms to improve their environmental performance