An assessment on the opportunities to develop ecotourism in Hong Kong

Congress Theme: Hospitality: The Interaction with LandHong Kong is famous for its dense, highrise-populated urban fabric. When tourists consider visiting Hong Kong, most would think of Hong Kong as a “city-break” destination rather than a place to explore the natural and cultural landscapes. Nevertheless, little that people may know of, Hong Kong’s urban area only covers about 30% of its land area, the rest of the 70% is in fact covered with various types of landscapes. Therefore, this paper aims at exploring the tremendous opportunities for Hong Kong to develop its ecotourism in its rural areas– an alternative operation of tourism that encourages more “interaction with the land” to induce a deeper understanding of Hong Kong’s local traditional culture and its strategic ecological networks. The “interaction with the land” via the operation of ecotourism in Hong Kong can be explored in two spectrums. First, assessment will be made to a few case studies of Hong Kong’s rural landscapes, evaluating whether these areas have the varieties of landscapes and ecology types for travellers to explore. The choices of case studies are mostly the working landscapes in Hong Kong - traditionally there are a lot of agricultural and aquacultural activities in the rural areas, together with the village settlements, creating a lot of interesting cultural landscapes. Second, evaluations will be made in discussing whether the tourism and land development policies in Hong Kong are helpful in guiding and nurturing the growth of ecotourism here at all. “Interaction with the land” incorporates more than just interacting with the physicality of the landscape. It induces a “refreshment” or an evaluation on the mindset, triggering new perspectives of seeing things, or even a new interpretation of man’s relationship with nature. Not only it benefits the tourists that come to visit the various types of landscapes, but it also benefits the local residents who host the guests. The operation process of ecotourism also helps educate the locals on environmental awareness. Therefore, it is an industry worth investigating.postprin

Sustainable urban and/or rural planning and management - Brownfield Redevelopment

Online Conference Proceedings - http://www.kadinst.hku.hk/sdconf10/proceedings.htmlModern land development has been more associated with sprawl than sustainability. The continuous expansion of cities into the rural area seems to address the problem with the growing population as well as the desire for better living, yet, this is far from being sustainable. Land supply will one day exhaust, and the continuous encroachment and destruction of natural habitats for human settlement also tilt the balance of the natural environment, partly contributing to the climatic changes that we face today. In the field of the contemporary landscape architecture practice, many advocate a sustainable urban development and sustainable rural expansion by re-looking into the ‘brownfield’ sites in the heart of the cities for redevelopment. Those derelict and contaminated post-industrial sites have become the target redevelopment areas in major developed cities. However, ‘brownfield’ is not only the issue for the developed world. With the rapid economic developments and urban city growths in various developing countries, the abandoned and undeveloped brownfield sites and urban sprawl issues in the developing world also need immediate attention. This paper is trying to take the brownfield redevelopment strategies in the developed world as inspirations, and to examine why brownfield redevelopment is a sustainable land planning strategy for the developing world to take on, and how the developing world can adopt the methodology of brownfield redevelopment in dealing with its urban sprawl and other land development issues, so that they can plan ahead and avoid the land planning problem that the developed world is facing now. The redevelopment of urban brownfields not only can solve the problem of land shortages, it can also provide temporal open areas for recreation (while the land is going through phytoremediation) as well as curbing the rapid expansion of settlements into the rural landscape. It is a topic worth investigating.published_or_final_versionThe 16th Annual International Sustainable Development Research Conference, Hong Kong, 30 May-1 June 2010. In Proceedings of the 16th Annual International Sustainable Development Research Conference, 201

Route vs. segment: an experiment on real-time travel information in congestible networks

We report the results of an experimental study of route choice in congestible networks with a common origin and common destination. In one condition, in each round of play network users independently committed themselves at the origin to a three-segment route; in the other condition, they chose route segments sequentially at each network junction upon receiving en route information. At the end of each round, players received ex-post complete information about the distribution of the route choices. Although the complexity of the network defies analysis by common users, traffic patterns in both conditions converged rapidly to the equilibrium solution. We account for the observed results by a Markov adaptive learning model postulating regret minimization and inertia. We find that subjects' learning behavior was similar across conditions, except that they exhibited more inertia in the condition with en route information

Dynamic pricing decisions and seller-buyer interactions under capacity constraints

Focusing on sellers’ pricing decisions and the ensuing seller-buyer interactions, we report an experiment on dynamic pricing with scarcity in the form of capacity constraints. Rational expectations equilibrium solutions are constructed and then tested experimentally with subjects assigned the roles of sellers and buyers. We investigate behavior in two between-subject conditions with high and moderate levels of capacity. Our laboratory market exhibits strategic sophistication: the price offers of sellers and the buyers’ aggregate responses largely approximate equilibrium predictions. We also observe systematic deviations from equilibrium benchmarks on both sides of the market. Specifically, in our experiment the sellers are boundedly strategic: their prices often exhibit strategic adjustments to profit from buyers with limited strategic sophistication, but they are also often biased towards equilibrium pricing even when that would not be ex-post optimal

The influence of a competition on noncompetitors

We report a series of experimental studies that investigate the influence of a competition on noncompetitors who do not participate in it but are aware of it. Our work is highly relevant across many domains of social life where competitions are prevalent, as it is typical in a competition that the competitors are far outnumbered by these noncompetitors. In our field experiment involving pay-what-you-want entrance at a German zoo (n = 22,886), customers who were aware of a competition over entrance payments, but did not participate in it, paid more than customers who were unaware of the competition. Further experiments provide confirmatory and process evidence for this contagion effect, showing that it is driven by heightened social comparison motivation due to mere awareness of the competition. Moreover, we find evidence that the reward level for the competitors could moderate the contagion effect on the noncompetitors. Even if an individual does not participate in a competition, their behavior can still be influenced by it, and this influence can change with the characteristics of the competition in an intriguing way

Optical studies of ZnS:Mn films grown by pulsed laser deposition

Author name used in this publication: C. L. MakAuthor name used in this publication: K. H. Wong2002-2003 > Academic research: refereed > Publication in refereed journalVersion of RecordPublishe

The use of Stunkard’s figure rating scale to identify underweight and overweight in Chinese adolescents

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Pain-related beliefs among Chinese patients with chronic pain: The construct and concurrent predictive validity of the Chinese version of the survey of pain attitudes-14 (ChSOPA-14)

Context: Pain beliefs as indexed by the Survey of Pain Attitudes (SOPA) have been consistently shown to predict pain adjustment outcomes in Western populations. However, its utility in non-Western populations is unclear. Objectives: We evaluated the construct and predictive validity of the Chinese version of the 14-item SOPA (ChSOPA-14) in a sample of Chinese patients with chronic pain. Methods: A total of 208 Chinese patients with chronic musculoskeletal pain completed the ChSOPA-14, the Chronic Pain Grade questionnaire, the Pain Catastrophizing Scale, the Center for Epidemiological Studies-Depression Scale, and measures of sociodemographic characteristics. Results: Except Medical Cure, all ChSOPA-14 scales were significantly correlated with validity criterion measures (all P < 0.05) in expected directions. The present Chinese sample scored the highest on the Medical Cure scale (mean = 2.98, standard deviation [SD] = 1.05) but the lowest on the Disability scale (mean = 1.75, SD = 1.67). Results of hierarchical multiple regression analyses showed that the ChSOPA-14 scales predicted concurrent depression (F(7,177) = 14.51, P < 0.001) and pain disability (F(7,180) = 8.77, P < 0.001). Pain Control (stdβ [standardized beta coefficient] = -0.13; 95% confidence interval [CI]: -3.41, -0.13; P < 0.05) and Emotion (stdβ = 29; 95% CI: 1.76, 5.02; P < 0.001) emerged as significant independent predictors of concurrent depression whereas Disability (stdβ = 0.19; 95% CI: 1.33, 7.88; P < 0.01), Emotion (stdβ = 16; 95% CI: 0.08, 7.59; P < 0.05), and Solicitude (stdβ = -0.14; 95% CI: -7.05, -0.04; P < 0.05) significantly associated with concurrent disability. Conclusion: The findings offer preliminary evidence for the construct and concurrent predictive validity of the ChSOPA-14. This makes available a suitable instrument for chronic pain in the Chinese population and will facilitate future cross-cultural research on pain beliefs. © 2011 U.S. Cancer Pain Relief Committee Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.postprin

“Pay what you want” as threshold public good provision

Prevailing wisdom on “pay what you want” (PWYW) pricing focuses on the influence of altruism or fairness on consumers’ payments. In this paper, we offer a different perspective by demonstrating that, if the seller and consumers interact repeatedly, and future provision of PWYW depends on whether current revenue under PWYW is sufficient for the seller to achieve financial goals, then paying under PWYW can be likened to paying for a threshold public good. Our model implies that continuous provision of PWYW can be profitable even when all consumers are self-interested. We find in two experiments that if there is pre-payment online chat-room-style communication among consumers, then efficient tacit coordination at the payment stage can be accomplished to achieve continuous PWYW provision. We also show experimentally that pre-payment communication can sustain PWYW provision even when consumers have limited feedback about each other’s payments, or limited information about the market

Voting rules in sequential search by committees: theory and experiments

We propose a committee extension of the individual sequential search model called the “secretary problem,” where collective decisions on when to stop the search are reached via a pre-specified voting rule. We offer a game-theoretic analysis of our model, and then report two experiments on three-person committees with either uncorrelated or perfectly correlated preferences under three different voting rules, followed by a third experiment on single decision makers. Relative to equilibrium predictions, committees with uncorrelated preferences over-searched under minority and majority voting rules, but otherwise under-searched or approximated equilibrium play. Individually, committee members were often less strategic when their preferences were uncorrelated than when they were perfectly correlated. Collectively, committees’ decisions were more strategic than single decision makers’ only under the unanimity rule, though still not significantly better in terms of the decision makers’ welfare. Finally, across our experiments that involved committee search, the unanimity rule always optimized committee welfare