Influential factors of loyalty and disloyalty of travellers towards traditional-resorts

With emergence of digital travel platforms, traveler online reviews have become a source of rich information which has a significant role in their perception of the services that influences consumer’s demand for resorts. This study aims to identify and rank influential factors of loyalty and disloyalty of travelers through customer online reviews in traditional resorts using Latent Sentiment Analysis (LSA). Our results indicate factors that creating loyalty and disloyalty toward traditional resorts are different and some of these factors are more significant and different from previous studies in the context of other types of hotels. This study signifies the importance of travellers’ online reviews to the resorts managers and contributes to them to improve loyalty factors and alleviate disloyalty factors

Certify or not? An analysis of organic food supply chain with competing suppliers

Customers expect companies to provide clear health-related information for the products they purchase in a big data environment. Organic food is data-enabled with the organic label, but the certification cost discourages small-scale suppliers from certifying their product. This lack of a label means that product that satisfies the organic standard is regarded as conventional product. By considering the trade-off between the profit gained from organic label and additional costs of certification, this paper investigates an organic food supply chain where a leading retailer procures from two suppliers with different brands. Customers care about both the brand-value and quality (more specifically, if food is organic or not) when purchasing the product. We explore the organic certification and wholesale pricing strategies for suppliers, and the supplier selection and retail pricing strategies for the retailer. We find that when two suppliers adopt asymmetric certification strategy, the retailer tends to procure the product with organic label. The supplier without a brand name can compensate with organic certification, which leads to more profits than the branded rival. As the risk of being abandoned by the retailer increases, the supplier without a brand name is more eager than the rival to obtain the organic label. If both suppliers certify the product, however, they will fall into a prisoner’s dilemma under situation with low health utility from organic label and high certification cost

The Competition Effects of Lookalike Private Label Products

This paper considers the competition effects of lookalike products, which seek to mimic the packaging, design and appearance of leading brands. Such products, most notable in the fast-moving-consumer-goods (FMCG) sector, are particularly associated with items promoted by retail organizations as part of their private-label programmes. The market power and control over the supply chain which the major retailers now enjoy means that by developing lookalike products they may have the opportunity to exploit unfairly and anti-competitively the image and goodwill that brand manufacturers have developed through careful and continual product and marketing investment. This, in turn, could distort the way and the extent to which manufacturers compete, enhance retailer control over the supply chain. In the process, this could undermine manufacturer branded goods which smaller retailers traditionally rely on, thus weakening their competitive position and resulting in further concentration of retail markets and less choice of store types and product varieties for consumers. The continuing absence of a rapid and effective legal remedy to prevent the rewards from brand investment being misappropriated by imitators means that such action will likely continue, with the upshot that manufacturer and retailer competition may be distorted to the detriment of consumer welfare and the public interest