A Conceptual Framework of Perceived Price Fairness : An Attributional Approach

The purpose of this study was to propose a conceptual framework of perceived price fairness for tourism purchases. The proposed framework is theoretically based on Weiner’s (1980) attribution theory, which has not been largely applied in price literature regardless of its potential theoretical importance. Thus, it is hoped that this framework will contribute to understanding how tourists perceive price increases or extra charges, and help to establish appropriate marketing strategies related to consumers’ perceptions of price (un)fairness. In order to empirically test the propositions formulated by the model, a methodological approach is also suggested. Accordingly, it is anticipated that further empirical research will be able to enhance the theoretical credibility of this conceptual model. It is further believed that understanding how perceived price fairness influences tourists behavior, depending on their inferences, will also provide practical implications. For instance, when suppliers encounter inevitable price increases, they could utilize a marketing strategy based on this theoretical understanding and its empirical results to mitigate consumer’s negative reaction

The Use of Social Network Analysis to Examine the Interactions between Locals and Tourists in an Online Community

Although previous research has examined the social interactions between online travel community users, they did not adequately show the process and pattern of online interactions between locals and tourists due to methodology limitations. Accordingly, this study examined how friendships between locals and travelers are made through online travel communities, and also investigated the role of an offline meeting in building online friendships. Data were collected from CouchSurfing.com, a hospitality exchange network. Consequently, Social Network Analysis (SNA) revealed that locals and tourists build friendships in an online community through offline events. Thus, it can be argued that the online friendships between locals and tourists in an online community are likely to be formed after a face-to-face meeting, not only by online interactions. Thus, by using the nature of online friendships, an online travel community can design a consumer-centric website

The Antecedents and Consequences of Price Fairness in Tourism

Pricing strategies (e.g. yield management) in the tourism industry, known as non-transparent pricing, have raised fairness issues, and more recently, new pricing schemes in the airline industry have been controversial issues in terms of price fairness. Nonetheless, few tourism researchers have studied price fairness from a consumer perspective. Thus, an understanding of the cognitive processes associated with perceived price fairness could have far-reaching implications for tourist behavior research. The purpose of this study was to examine the antecedents and consequences of tourists‟ perceived price fairness of the ancillary revenue (i.e. extra fees of airlines). In particular, a conceptual model was based on Weiner's (1980) attribution theory, which was expected to complement shortcomings of the traditional dual entitlement principle (Kahneman, Knetsch, and Thaler, 1986). Following the study purpose, four objectives of the study were established: (1) to examine the dimensionality of price fairness in a price change context; (2) to examine the antecedents of price fairness; (3) to examine the consequences of price fairness; and (4) to compare differences in the price fairness model between high and low price sensitivity groups. To achieve the study objectives, this study developed a conceptual model of price fairness with three antecedents (price comparison, cognitive attribution, and emotional response) and four consequences (behavioral loyalty, willingness to pay, complaining, and revenge), and determined the model that best predicted the hypothesized model using Structural Equation Modeling. Data were collected from an online survey and the respondents (n=524) were leisure travel passengers in the United States who had taken domestic flights in the past 12 months. The initial model fit the data well from a global perspective, yet, some hypotheses were not supported. Results suggested that price comparison evaluation and cognitive attribution are antecedents to price fairness, but emotional response was found to be influenced by price fairness as opposed to what was hypothesized. It was also revealed that while price fairness directly influenced favorable behavioral intentions (e.g. behavioral loyalty and willingness to pay more), it also influenced unfavorable behavioral intentions (e.g. revenge and complaining behavior), mediated by negative emotional response. The revised model was alternatively proposed. In addition, significant differences in price fairness, emotional response, willingness to pay more, and revenge intention between high and low price sensitivity groups were found. Results of this study provide potentially important direction for the development of a theoretical framework for the conceptualization of antecedents and consequences of price fairness in a tourism context. It is further expected that findings of this study from an attributional perspective provide managerial guidance for the utilization of marketing strategy when a company encounters inevitable price increases or extra fees

Pyridoxine induced neuropathy by subcutaneous administration in dogs

To construct a sensory neuropathy model, excess pyridoxine (150 mg/kg s.i.d.) was injected subcutaneously in dogs over a period of 7 days. During the administrations period, the dogs experienced body weight reduction and proprioceptive loss involving the hindquarters. After pyridoxine administration was completed, electrophysiological recordings showed that the M wave remained at a normal state, but the H-reflex of the treated dogs disappeared at 7 days. The dorsal funiculus of L4 was disrupted irregularly in the axons and myelin with vacuolation. The dorsal root ganglia of L4, and sciatic and tibial nerves showed degenerative changes and vacuolation. However, the lateral and ventral funiculi of L4 showed a normal histopathologic pattern. Although this subcutaneous administration method did not cause systemic toxicity and effectively induced sensory neuropathy, this study confirmed the possibility of producing a pyridoxine-induced sensory neuropathy model in dogs with short-term administration

Three Factors to Improve Out-of-Distribution Detection

In the problem of out-of-distribution (OOD) detection, the usage of auxiliary data as outlier data for fine-tuning has demonstrated encouraging performance. However, previous methods have suffered from a trade-off between classification accuracy (ACC) and OOD detection performance (AUROC, FPR, AUPR). To improve this trade-off, we make three contributions: (i) Incorporating a self-knowledge distillation loss can enhance the accuracy of the network; (ii) Sampling semi-hard outlier data for training can improve OOD detection performance with minimal impact on accuracy; (iii) The introduction of our novel supervised contrastive learning can simultaneously improve OOD detection performance and the accuracy of the network. By incorporating all three factors, our approach enhances both accuracy and OOD detection performance by addressing the trade-off between classification and OOD detection. Our method achieves improvements over previous approaches in both performance metrics.Comment: Under revie