Smart technologies for personalized experiences: a case study in the hospitality domain

Recent advances in the field of technology have led to the emergence of innovative technological smart solutions providing unprecedented opportunities for application in the tourism and hospitality industry.With intensified competition in the tourism market place, it has become paramount for businesses to explore the potential of technologies, not only to optimize existing processes but facilitate the creation of more meaningful and personalized services and experiences. This study aims to bridge the current knowledge gap between smart technologies and experience personalization to understand how smart mobile technologies can facilitate personalized experiences in the context of the hospitality industry. By adopting a qualitative case study approach, this paper makes a two-fold contribution; it a) identifies the requirements of smart technologies for experience creation, including information aggregation, ubiquitous mobile connectedness and real time synchronization and b) highlights how smart technology integration can lead to two distinct levels of personalized tourism experiences. The paper concludes with the development of a model depicting the dynamic process of experience personalization and a discussion of the strategic implications for tourism and hospitality management and research

Wealth, Health, and Child Development: Evidence from Administrative Data on Swedish Lottery Players

We use administrative data on Swedish lottery players to estimate the causal impact of wealth on players' own health and their children's health and developmental outcomes. Our estimation sample is large, virtually free of attrition, and allows us to control for the factors such as the number of lottery tickets conditional on which the prizes were randomly assigned. In adults, we find no evidence that wealth impacts mortality or health care utilization, with the possible exception of a small reduction in the consumption of mental health drugs. Our estimates allow us to rule out effects on 10-year mortality one sixth as large the cross-sectional gradient. In our intergenerational analyses, we find that wealth increases children's health care utilization in the years following the lottery and may also reduce obesity risk. The effects on most other child outcomes, which include drug consumption, scholastic performance, and skills, can usually be bounded to a tight interval around zero. Overall, our findings suggest that correlations observed in affluent, developed countries between (i) wealth and health or (ii) parental income and children's outcomes do not reflect a causal effect of wealth

Risk-adjusted long term social rates of discount for transportation infrastructure investment

We modify a method recently suggested by Martin Weitzman (2012) for determining a risk-adjusted social discount rate (SDR) term structure consistent with both the (augmented) Ramsey rule and the consumption-based CAPM. Using this approach we estimate SDR for transportation infrastructure investments based on an analysis of correlations between transportation work, split on road and rail, and passenger travel and freight transport, and GDP in Sweden 1950-2011. We show that this can be estimated from two time-series following a random walk with drift, even if they are not co-integrated. Based on current estimates of the risk-free rate and the equity risk premium, we estimate the relevant SDR to be 5-6 percent, possibly somewhat lower for investment in railroads for passenger travel, and only slowly declining within the investment horizon. This is higher than the current rates used in, for instance, Sweden, Germany and the UK