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This chapter provides an overview of the status of applied econometric research in hospitality and tourism management and outlines the econometric toolsets available for quantitative researchers using empirical data from the field. Basic econometric models, cross-sectional models, time-series models, and panel data models are reviewed first, followed by an evaluation of relevant applications. Next, econometric modeling topics that are germane to hospitality and tourism research are discussed, including endogeneity, multi-equation modeling, causal inference modeling, and spatial econometrics. Furthermore, major feasibility issues for applied researchers are examined based on the literature. Lastly, recommendations are offered to promote applied econometric research in hospitality and tourism management.

The purpose of this paper is to offer novel insights into: knowledge of proto-feminism through description and analysis of the rule of the seventh century female Emperor Wu Zetian; postcolonial theory by revealing the existence and proto-feminist activities of a non-western female leader; and the literature on gender and invisibility through a study of a leading figure that is relatively unknown to western feminists and is even, in feminist terms, something of a neglected figure.

In order to examine Wu’s proto-feminist practices as recorded in historical materials, we use critical hermeneutics as a tool for textual interpretation, through the following four stages: choosing texts from historical records and writings of Wu; analyzing the historical sociocultural context; analyzing the relationship between the text and the context; and offering a conceptual framework as a richer explanation.

Wu’s life activities demonstrate proto-feminism in late seventh century China in at least four aspects: gender equality in sexuality, in social status, in politics, and women’s pursuit of power and leadership.

Future research may dig into the paradox of Wu’s proto-feminist practices, the relationship between organizational power and feminism/proto-feminism, and the ways in which Wu’s activities differ from other powerful women across cultures, etc.

The study encourages a rethink of women and leadership style in non-western thought.

The study supports Calás and Smircich’s 2005 call for greater understanding of feminist thought outside of western thought and a move to transglobal feminism.

This study recovers long lost stories of women leadership that are “invisible” in many ways in the historical narratives, and contributes to postcolonial feminism by revealing the existence of indigenous proto-feminist practice in China long before western-based feminism and postcolonial feminism emerged.

Drawing on person–environment fit theory, this study aims to investigate how the relationships between service task types (i.e. utilitarian and hedonic service tasks) and perceived authenticity (i.e. service and brand authenticity) differ under different conditions of service providers (human employee vs service robot). This study further examines whether customers’ stereotypes toward service robots (competence vs warmth) moderate the relationship between service types and perceived authenticity.

Using a 2 × 2 between-subjects experimental design, Study 1 examines a casual restaurant, whereas Study 2 assesses a theme park restaurant. Analysis of covariance and PROCESS are used to analyze the data.

Both studies reveal that human service providers in hedonic services positively affect service and brand authenticity more than robotic employees. Additionally, the robot competence stereotype moderates the relationship between hedonic services, service and brand authenticity, whereas the robot warmth stereotype moderates the relationship between hedonic services and brand authenticity in Study 2.

Restaurant managers need to understand which functions and types of service outlets are best suited for service robots in different service contexts. Robot–environment fit should be considered when developers design and managers select robots for their restaurants.

This study blazes a new theoretical trail of service robot research to systematically propose customer experiences with different service types by drawing upon person–environment fit theory and examining the moderating role of customers’ stereotypes toward service robots.

The objective of this paper is twofold: first, to model the value of the firm in the presence of contingent capital and multiple growth options over its life cycle in a stochastic universe to ensure financial stability and recover losses in case of default and second, to clarify how contingent convertible (CoCo) bonds as financial instruments impact the leverage-ratio policies, inefficiencies generated by debt overhang and asset substitution for a firm that has multiple growth options. Additionally, what is its impact on investment timing, capital structure and asset volatility?

The current paper elaborates the modeling of a dynamic problem with respect to the interaction between funding and investment policies during multiple sequential investment cycles simultaneously with dynamic funding. The authors model the value of the firm in the presence of contingent capital that provides flexibility in dealing with default risks as well as growth options in a stochastic universe. The authors examine the firm's closed-form solutions at each stage of its decision-making process before and after the exercise of the growth options (with and without conversion of CoCo) through applying the backward indication method and the risk-neutral pricing theory.

The numerical results show that inefficiencies related to debt overhang and asset substitution can go down with a higher conversion ratio and a larger number of growth options. Additionally, the authors’ analysis reveals that the firm systematically opts for conservative leverage to minimize the effect of debt overhang on decisions so as to exercise growth options in the future. However, the capital structure of the firm has a substantial effect on the leverage ratio and the asset substitution. In fact, the effect of the leverage ratio and the risk-shifting incentive will be greater when the capital structure changes during the firm's decision-making process. Contrarily to traditional corporate finance theory, the study displays that the value of the firm before the investment expansion decreases and then increases with asset volatility, instead of decreasing overall with asset volatility.

The study’s findings reveal that funding, default and conversion decisions have crucial implications on growth option exercise decisions and leverage ratio policy. The model also shows that the firm consistently chooses conservative leverage to reduce the effect of debt overhang on decisions to exercise growth options in the future. The risk-shifting incentive and the debt overhang inefficiency basically decrease with a higher conversion ratio and multiple growth options. However, the effect of the leverage ratio and the risk-shifting incentive will be greater when the capital structure changes during the firm's decision-making process.

The firm's composition between assets in place and growth options evolves endogenously with its investment opportunity and growth option financing, as well as its default decision. In contrast to the standard capital structure models of Leland (1994), the model reveals that both exogenous conversion decisions and endogenous default decisions have significant implications for firms' growth option exercise decisions and debt policies. The model induces some predictions about the dynamics of the firm's choice of leverage as well as the link between the dynamics of leverage and the firm's life cycle.

This study aims to identify key factors influencing Chinese domestic travelers’ behaviors in hotel selection from a pool of budget hotel attribute-based factors and customer personal characteristics and determine the extent to which these factors impact on domestic Chinese travelers’ hotel selection preferences.

This study uses a discrete choice experimental design and a multinomial logit model to examine the key influential factors contributing to Chinese domestic travelers’ choice behavior to budget hotels. Both hotel attribute-based and personal trait factors were tested.

Results indicate that location, price and business functions were factors influencing guest choice behavior. For budget hotels, being located in the traditional central business districts and having a restaurant would leverage guest preference to stay. Among consumers’ personal characteristics, income, occupation, purpose of travel, personal attitude and past experience were found to be determinants of guest choice behavior.

This study contributes to the understanding of Chinese domestic travelers’ choice behaviors toward budget hotels and offers insights for industry practitioners to better design budget hotel products and service.

This research is the first that integrates hotel attributes with travelers’ characteristics and quantitatively evaluate the determinants affecting hotel choice behavior in China. The insights are of value academically to our understanding of cognitive mechanism underlying choice behavior.

Previous literature reviews mainly focus on green supply chain, however, there is surprisingly little effort made in the systematic literature review to focus on a specific function of green supply chain, i.e. green procurement (GP). Regarding research methodology, most reviews are qualitative and inductive generalizations. Quantitative methods such as bibliometrics have started to be applied in recent years. This paper responds to this trend by counting the largest amount of literature with 238 articles in the last 24 years from 2000 to 2023 to visually analyze different theoretical perspectives and research topics into a comprehensive framework and identify future research directions and opportunities in the GP field.

Based on CiteSpace and in-depth content analysis, this paper attempts to visually analyze 238 valid papers to identify key literature and analyze the evolution of research hot spots and frontier development trends.

Combined with the visualization results and the content analysis of key references, we identify key literature and examine the evolution of research hotspots and frontier development trends. The bibliometric analysis mainly includes knowledge mapping to identify key themes, co-occurrence and clustering analysis of keywords, cooperation networks in researchers' countries. An overall GP research model is presented and our research suggests future avenues for GP research, such as low carbon, digitalization, servitization and ecosystem perspectives.

Firstly, in terms of time and volume of literature, we have counted the most comprehensive and up-to-date literature in the field of GP research, which is conducive to further expanding and enriching GP research. Secondly, this study clearly describes the theoretical evolution of GP research from bilateral and multilateral to ecosystem perspectives, and constructs a new and comprehensive research framework of “driver-practice-outcome”. Thirdly, based on the bibliometric analysis results, our research suggests future avenues for GP research, such as low-carbon, digitalization, servitization, and ecosystem perspectives, which can contribute to expanding our understanding of GP development.

As a standard source of capital for entrepreneurs, crowdfunding has recently gained wide attention in business and academia. With scientific endorsement, some research is conducted to explore the antecedents of online crowdfunding success. The factors that can influence the backers’ investment which is the key to success are information from prior backers’ and creators’ behaviors. Based on the signaling theory, the purpose of this paper is to systematically investigate the dynamic influences and interaction effects of signals with different forms (action-based or opinion-based signals) and sources (creator-sourced or backer-sourced signals) on backers’ investment behaviors over a project-funding cycle.

A panel data set of 3,010 projects with 640,625 transaction records from April 28, 2013 to September 31, 2017 is collected from a famous online crowdfunding platform – Zhongchou.cn in China and the negative binomial panel data model with fixed effect is used to obtain our empirical results.

The findings demonstrate that the work of different signals is significantly effective at the early stage of a project and decreases with time. Furthermore, our results show that there are both synergistic effect and substitution effect among different signals. Specifically, the direction of interaction effect depends on the forms of signals and the backers’ sensitivity toward that signal, and the interaction effects are also dynamic.

This paper has shed light on the roles of different signal types and their interactions in influencing funding behavior over a project-funding cycle, enriched the literature on crowdfunding and provided both theoretical and practical implications.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the effects of servant leadership on employees' promotive voice behavior and prohibitive voice behavior by focusing on the mediating role of job engagement and the moderating role of proactive personality.

Time-lagged data were collected using a field survey research design. The participants included 216 employees and 23 supervisors in two commercial banks in China.

Perceived servant leadership was positively related to employees' promotive and prohibitive voice behavior, and these relationships were mediated by enhanced job engagement. In addition, employees' proactive personality amplified the relationship between perceived servant leadership and job engagement, and the mediating effect of job engagement on the relationship between perceived servant leadership and voice behavior.

This study enhances understanding of the mechanisms underlying the servant leadership – voice model by identifying the mediating role of job engagement. The results also demonstrate the moderating role of proactive personality in enhancing the effects of servant leadership. However, the survey design was not longitudinal, which limits the study's ability to confirm causality.

The findings reveal that servant leadership, employees' job engagement, and proactive personality can facilitate employees' promotive and prohibitive voice behavior.

This study addresses the unexplored mediating mechanism of the relationship between servant leadership and voice behavior, and offers new directions for servant leadership and voice research.

This study aims to investigate the impact of environmental, social and governance (ESG) performance on financial capabilities and strategic decision-making within enterprises. It seeks to provide clarity on how fulfilling ESG responsibilities influences financial performance, while examining differential effects across firm types.

This study analyzes the relationship between ESG performance and financial metrics using data from Chinese listed companies (2013–2022) and DuPont’s analytical framework.

First, while ESG practices enhance financial stability and market appeal, they also incur additional operating costs. Second, companies tend to increase their investments in innovation and capital expenditure as a result of better ESG performance. While capital expenditure boosts financial performance significantly, innovation investment, though promising, yields uncertain outcomes and has less influence compared to capital expenditure. Furthermore, the financial performance of nonstate-owned and nonpolluting firms is more susceptible to fluctuations in ESG performance.

The findings are context-specific and may not universally apply to all industries and regions. Further research is needed to validate the study’s propositions in diverse economic environments.

Policymakers should consider incentivizing ESG compliance to bolster market competitiveness. Enterprises are advised to optimize internal processes to balance ESG practices with operational efficiency and innovation for sustainable growth.

This paper introduces an innovative use of DuPont analysis in economics to explore how ESG affects financial and operational performance, showing it can boost corporate results and prompt ESG responsibility. It also distinguishes innovation outcomes with “Innovation Investment” and “Capital Expenditure,” offering enhanced investment guidance.

Low-fit brand extensions offer several potential benefits, yet their success is challenging. Building on construal level theory, this study aims to investigate how different advertising appeals can improve the evaluations of low-fit brand extensions through two different processes (cognitive and affective).

Two experiments were conducted with US consumers. Study 1 used a 2 (extension fit: high, low) × 2 (ad appeal: abstract, concrete) between-subjects design. Study 2 applied a 2 (brand associations: promotion, prevention) × 2 (ad appeal: promotion, prevention) between-subjects design. Multivariate analyses and follow-up means comparisons were used to analyse data.

Study 1 found that an abstract ad appeal is more effective for promoting low-fit brand extension because it improves the perception of fit. Study 2 showed promotion vs prevention ad appeals lead to better evaluation of low-fit brand extensions when matched with parent brand associations (promotion vs prevention) in terms of construal level. This matching effect is underpinned by processing fluency.

Ad appeals can influence low-fit brand extension evaluation by influencing the perception of fit (cognitive process) or processing fluency (affective process). Future research could consider different ad appeals and other construal related factors to generalise these findings.

Marketers can design different ad appeals to effectively advertise low-fit brand extensions. These findings can guide managers in the development of effective advertising strategies.

This research offers a new perspective on how ad appeals can enhance low-fit brand extension evaluation.