International Tourism Potential in Inner Mongolia: A Marketing Appraisal

This report focuses on the likely tourism potential Inner Mongolia possesses for international visitors to the area. Visitors to any area or region can be divided into domestic visitors who originate from within the same country and international visitors who have crossed an international border to reach their destination. In this sense Inner Mongolia is no different from anywhere else but for the purposes of this report it is useful to divide international visitors into those who originate from within Asia and those who originate from outside Asia (the majority of whom come from either Europe, North America or Australia and New Zealand). The reason for doing this is not to draw any artificial divisions between visitors of European decent and those from the rest of the world but as the majority or world travellers outside China today are of European decent it is prudent to pay particular attention to the behaviour and characteristics of this segment. Furthermore, the authors of this report are more qualified to provide expert advice and opinion on the characteristics and behaviour of "Western Travellers" than they are on the likes and dislikes of the Asian segment of the market

Using means-end chain theory to explore travel motivation: an examination of Chinese outbound tourists

This study examines the travel motivation of Chinese outbound tourists at the levels of attribute, consequence and values based on means-end chain (MEC) theory and its associated laddering technique. In-depth interviews with respondents were analysed to identify six key MECs. The two major travel motivation chains are (1) respondents visit destinations that are ‘famous’ or have a ‘good environment’ because they value ‘the beauty of nature’ and ‘pleasure’ and (2) respondents want to visit ‘different’ destinations, because they value experiences and knowledge. These results illustrate the use of MEC theory in understanding travel markets and demonstrate the use of motivation chains as the basis for segmenting the Chinese market. The research findings contribute to the travel motivation literature by identifying directed, hierarchically organized motivation structures with interconnected levels of attributes, consequences and values. Further marketing and product development implications are provided to help attract this emerging market

Integrated natural disasters risk management in tourism destination - A case study of 5.12 WenChuan Earthquake

The paper found some problems by research of tourism administration in Si Chuan when dealing with 512 WenChuan Earthquake, which include both confused management system and misunderstanding of disaster risk management concept. It showed that earthquake forecasting or prediction is essentially a misconception in earthquake disaster reduction by extensive analyzing both from the theory and the practice. It can hardly give a definite forecasting according to the current technology and it's no use of reducing the impacts of disasters. The paper emphasized it is necessary to change ideas for government and stokeholds on natural disaster and implement risk management of disasters. It's impossible to avoid a natural disaster but could reduce the impacts with maximum from a disaster by risk management. It's an effective approach to enhance the vulnerability and minimize the losses. It will become a better methodology to confront the natural disaster in the future

Bank performance and executive pay: tournament or teamwork

We investigate the relationship between the dispersion of executive pay and bank performance/valuation by examining two competing theories, the tournament theory (hierarchical wage structure) and the equity fairness theory (compressed wage structure). The key variable of executive pay dispersion is measured using a hand-collected dataset composed of 63 banks from OECD countries and 29 banks from developing countries. The dataset covers the period 2004 to 2012. By combining and modifying a translog profit function and a pay-dispersion model, we are able to address the potential problems of relying on reduced-form estimation. In our subsample of developed and civil law countries, where bank performance is measured by either Tobin’s Q or by the price-to-book ratio, the overall impact of executive pay dispersion is mostly negative, and we find supporting evidence for the equity fairness theory, except for very high levels of dispersion. There is a non-linear effect, as banks perform best when there is either very low or very high executive pay dispersion. For developing country sample banks, greater executive pay dispersion has a negative impact on bank profit. In our subsample of common law countries, however, we find no evidence of a significant impact of executive pay dispersion on bank performance. We conclude that lower executive pay dispersion, a proxy for teamwork, is mostly effective in enhancing bank performance in a significant section of sample banks, i.e., civil law and developing countries

DeepSeek LLM: Scaling Open-Source Language Models with Longtermism

The rapid development of open-source large language models (LLMs) has been truly remarkable. However, the scaling law described in previous literature presents varying conclusions, which casts a dark cloud over scaling LLMs. We delve into the study of scaling laws and present our distinctive findings that facilitate scaling of large scale models in two commonly used open-source configurations, 7B and 67B. Guided by the scaling laws, we introduce DeepSeek LLM, a project dedicated to advancing open-source language models with a long-term perspective. To support the pre-training phase, we have developed a dataset that currently consists of 2 trillion tokens and is continuously expanding. We further conduct supervised fine-tuning (SFT) and Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) on DeepSeek LLM Base models, resulting in the creation of DeepSeek Chat models. Our evaluation results demonstrate that DeepSeek LLM 67B surpasses LLaMA-2 70B on various benchmarks, particularly in the domains of code, mathematics, and reasoning. Furthermore, open-ended evaluations reveal that DeepSeek LLM 67B Chat exhibits superior performance compared to GPT-3.5

Residents’ attitudes toward the 2010 World Expo in Shanghai prior to and during the event

This paper examines residents’ attitudes to a major non-sport-related mega event, the 2010 Shanghai Expo. Resident attitudes research can ascertain how best to accommodate host community views, a key issue in developing sustainable tourism strategies. The paper breaks new ground by examining attitudes both before and during the event, revealing considerable fluidity in attitudes, and it examines residents’ attitudes in China, reflecting the importance of non-western cultural and political systems on attitude development. The paper contributes to longitudinal research, an area where little research is available. Two studies were conducted before and during the 2010 Shanghai World Expo using the same survey instrument. It is based on a representative sample of residents of Shanghai who were asked about their attitudes to Expo 2010. Results indicate that residents on the whole strongly supported (77.9%) or supported (12.7%) the event with all the average scores of the attitude items higher than 5 (on a 1–7 scale). Some negative impacts were identified such as increased prices, traffic problems, crowding and congestion. Residents were classified into three groups in the pre-event survey (whole embracer, ambivalent embracer and neutralist), according to their level of support, and two groups for the survey during the event

Environmental Auditing for Sustainable Tourism Development in Australia

Tourism, in Australia and globally, is a growth industry. With this growth has come concern about its environmental implications. As a result, the tourism industry has experienced increased scrutiny in regard to environmental management, and efforts are being made to achieve more sustainable forms of tourism development. The case for the tourism industry in Australia to develop an effective approach to improve its environmental performance is compelling. The industry depends primarily on conserving and improving the environment which is its main resource. For this reason, the improvement of environmental performance is likely to grow in importance. This study examined the principle of sustainable tourism development and analysed the current environmental impact assessment process in Australia, The study argued that the current EIA process has shortcomings. It cannot provide sufficient information for effective environmental management, and cannot meet the requirement of sustainable tourism development. Given these shortcomings, it appears that improved and effective environmental impact assessment relevant to tourism development must extend beyond impact statements to include continual monitoring and evaluation of objectives, and operational procedures and performance. To this end, it is further argued that a new approach which provides a continuing management tool that can play a key role in the environmental management for tourism is needed ... With current tourism development trends in Australia, the study selected beach resort as a case study. The result of case studies demonstrated that the EMPA tends to be well understood and supported by resort management. Improving environmental management performance of resorts does not have to increase costs or reduce comfort and convenience of guests. As better environmental practices are being sought, more solutions which enable environmental, commercial and guests service goals to be met simultaneously are being found. It further showed that improving environmental performance enhances the resorts' reputation, and responsible actions of management are positive marketable commodities. As such, environmental auditing has great potential to make a valuable contribution to improvement of the environment