Based on the polluter pays principle, construction waste disposal charging schemes (CWDCS) have been deployed by various economies as one of the most effective ways of managing construction waste. ...Nevertheless, a means of rationalizing these schemes has not been well documented. Using the economic technique of contingent valuation method (CVM), this study aims to investigate stakeholders’ willingness to pay (WTP) for enhanced construction waste management (CWM) with a view to providing a scientific foundation for CWDCS rationalisation. In considering this WTP in light of repeated exhortations that all stakeholders play a role in the management of construction waste, the study is unique. To ascertain stakeholders’ WTP, a payment card-style questionnaire survey was designed and administered to Hong Kong’s major CWM stakeholders in February 2014. Interestingly, the results show that there is no statistically significant variation in the WTP expressed by different stakeholder groups. The average maximum WTP is around HK$232/t for landfill disposal of construction and demolition (C&D) waste, HK$186/t for off-site sorting facility (OSF) disposal, and HK$120/t for public fill reception facility (PFRF) disposal. These values are higher than the existing CWDCS charges (HK$125/t for land filling, HK$100/t for OSF disposal, and HK$27/t for PFRF disposal) but much lower than the charges proposed to the government. This research provides not only a scientific foundation for the ongoing debate on changes to Hong Kong’s CWDCS, but also a valuable reference for other economies facing the challenge of developing charging schemes to deal with construction waste.
Distribution channel in hospitality and tourism Law, Rob; Leung, Rosanna; Lo, Ada ...
International journal of contemporary hospitality management,
04/2015, Volume:
27, Issue:
3
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Purpose
– The purpose of this paper is to reexamine several issues about disintermediation from the perspectives of tourism product/service suppliers (hotels) and traditional intermediaries (travel ...agencies), considering the move of the current distribution landscape toward disintermediation. Internet and mobile technologies offer various tools for consumers to search and purchase products/services from suppliers directly. Consequently, the necessity and role of traditional intermediaries in the industry become questionable.
Design/methodology/approach
– In all, six focus group interviews were conducted to collect primary data from ten managers of three traditional travel agencies and 11 managers from three business hotels in Hong Kong, which is a major travel destination in Asia with many world-class hotels and tourism facilities.
Findings
– Despite their different business backgrounds, the interviewees agreed on the increasing importance of Internet technology in the distribution of tourism products. The interviewees also posited that traditional travel agencies are still needed to serve certain customer groups, albeit their role may have little importance.
Practical implications
– Practitioners should adapt to technologically induced changes to remain competitive in the e-business era.
Originality/value
– This paper provides several original contributions. First, this paper supplements the extant literature by revealing how modern practitioners perceive disintermediation in the tourism and hospitality industry. Second, this paper is the first to investigate the disintermediation issue from the perspectives of tourism product/service suppliers and intermediaries. Finally, this paper provides a reference for industry practitioners to establish adequate strategies that take advantage of Internet technology.
Market sentiments influence the dynamics of Hong Kong’s macro‐critical property market, but the unobservable nature of market sentiments makes it difficult to systemically assess this sentiment ...channel. Using text mining techniques, this paper sets up a news‐based property market sentiment index and a Google Trends‐based buyer incentive index for Hong Kong and studies the sentiment channel of transmission in the Hong Kong property market. The news‐based property market sentiment index can reflect the change in sentiments in past key events, with the sentiments in the primary market tending to lead that of the secondary market during the low housing supply period. For the Google Buyer Incentive Index, we find that it has value‐added in forecasting (or nowcasting) the official property price index. In mapping out the sentiment channel using a structural vector‐autoregressive model, we find that an improvement in market sentiments could stimulate buyers’ incentives, which then together would affect property prices and transaction volumes.
We conduct a bank efficiency comparison among three Chinese regions: Mainland China (CN), Hong Kong (HK), and Macao (MO). Specifically, we investigate the reasons for efficiency differences observed ...in the three regions from within‐region and cross‐region perspectives. We show that HK and MO maintain stable bank performance over time that lies within the developed‐economy range of efficiency levels. CN used to be well below this range but has been catching up so quickly that efficiency convergence in the three regions seems to be underway. We find that the determinants of bank efficiencies in the three Chinese jurisdictions are similar in some aspects but different in others. Most significant are their similarities in the effects of interest rate differentials, forex reserve accumulations, bank capital positions, interbank financing opportunities, and liquidity mismatch problems. Also important are their differences in the effects of bank size, revenue diversification, government ownership, property, and stock market development.
•Demolition is far more wasteful than any other C&D works.•New building, and maintenance and renovation (M&R) works individually produce the least waste amount but accumulatively they make a ...significant impact.•Benchmarks (WGRs) of CWM performance are established for different categories of projects.•Big data is helpful in deriving a set of more robust benchmarks.
The waste generation rate (WGR) is usually used as a key performance indicator (KPI) to benchmark construction waste management (CWM) performance, with a view to improving the performance continuously. However, existing researches, for different reasons, only investigated a relatively small amount of construction projects, whose WGRs cannot be confidently accepted as KPIs. This study develops a set of more reliable KPIs/WGRs using an available big dataset on CWM in Hong Kong. By mining the 2,212,026 waste disposal records generated from 5764 projects in two consecutive years of 2011 and 2012, the WGRs/KPIs are revisited and refined. Demolition is found the most wasteful works. New building, and maintenance and renovation (M&R) works individually produce the least waste amount but by accumulating all M&R works, their contribution to the total amount of construction waste could be phenomenal. Based on the more reliable WGRs from the big data, CWM performance benchmarks for different categories of projects are set up. A contractor can benchmark its CWM performance against its counterparts or its past performance as ‘Good’, ‘Average’, and ‘Not-so-good’, and thus identify better CWM practices that induce superior performance. Based on the benchmarks, the government may consider setting up a WGR-step toll system to encourage those ‘Not-so-good’ contractors to perform well in the future, and initiate incentives to the companies conducting ‘Good’ projects to spur better CWM performance. Overall, the WGRs derived from the big data and more robust analyses provide a very powerful and handy tool for CWM.
In this study, we examine when creativity is positively or negatively related to firm performance. Building on the creation–implementation tension theorized in the literature and the attention ...capacity perspective, we argue that the relationship between creativity and firm performance is contingent on riskiness orientation, firm size, and realized absorptive capacity. Data were collected from 761 core knowledge employees, 148 CEOs, and 148 HR executives from 148 high‐technology firms. The results indicated that core knowledge employee creativity was negatively related to firm performance when riskiness orientation was high. The relationship was positive when realized absorptive capacity was high. Finally, the relationship was more positive in small firms than in large firms. We discuss the implications of our findings for creativity research and managerial practices.
Display omitted
•A multi-criteria framework was proposed with consideration of spatial concordance of multiple ecosystem services.•A case study examined that there is a feasible design based on ...InVEST model, K-means clustering algorithm and correlation analysis method.•The framework could distinguish the spatiotemporal heterogeneity on the trade-offs and synergies relationship of multiple ecosystem services.
The interaction relationship of ecosystem services (ESs) is among the most critical objective in natural resource management. However, a complexity of the spatial heterogeneity of delivering multiple ESs from social-ecological system was seldomly considered. To enhance the linkage between the spatial concordance and interaction relationship of ESs, we presented a multi-criteria framework for identifying the trade-offs and synergies relationship of ESs. The conceptual steps were to i) divide the ES groups based on different ES bundles, ii) select appropriate methods for each ES bundle based on the number of dominant ESs and iii) determine the trade-offs and synergies relationship of pair-wise ESs among ES bundles. The framework was tested in the Guangdong- Hong Kong- Macao Greater Bay Area (GBA) in the period of 2000 to 2015, which can be implemented by using InVEST model, K-means clustering algorithm and correlation analysis method. The results show that 4 different ES bundles had been identified, which exhibits the spatial distribution of Bundle 1 to Bundle 4 had an extensive trend from central regions to fringe regions in the GBA. Partial correlation analysis and spearman correlation analysis were selected to quantify the trade-off and synergies relationship of ESs for each ES bundle. Meanwhile, the trade-offs and synergies relationship of ESs among each bundle was compared with the total areas of GBA, which exhibits a proportion of conspicuous differences. It indicated the framework could distinguish the spatiotemporal heterogeneity on the trade-offs and synergies relationship of ESs. A favorable application on the GBA underscored the interrelationship of multiple ESs should consider a spatiotemporal variation of the stability and ability to deliver multiple ESs from a social-ecological system. The framework for understanding the interaction relationship presented here offers a feasible workflow to evaluate trade-off strategies and policies of ecosystem management.
Display omitted
•A comprehensive ecosystem service index (CESI) by the multiplicative method had been proposed.•The CESI was built to assess multiple ecosystem services delivering based on carbon ...storage service, water supply service and soil conservation service.•The CESI had been tested in the Guangdong-Hongkong-Macao Greater Bay Areas (GBA) and compared with the performance of previous methods.•The results showed that the CESI was well applied in GBA and got rid of the limitation of single ES.
A comprehensive understanding of multiple ecosystem services (ES) across the landscape is a key highlight of ecosystem management. There still remain a weakness to integrate multiple ESs for mirroring the capability of the ecosystems to deliver services in a broad perspective. Here, we proposed a comprehensive ecosystem services index (CESI) for integrating multiple ESs based on multiplicative method. Water supply service, carbon storage service and soil conservation service were assessed using multi-sources remote sensing datasets and InVEST models to build CESI. To examine the suitability and performance of CESI, we took the Guangdong-Hongkong-Macao Greater Bay Areas (GBA) as a test region. Meanwhile, we applied two previous methods used commonly for assessing multiple ESs: i) cumulative method and ii) maximum value composite method to construct comparative indexes for evaluating the performance of CESI with the help of spatial autocorrelation method and regression analysis method from the spatial pattern and numerical distribution perspective. The results showed that the CESI was well applied in GBA and got rid of the limitation of single ES. The spatial pattern of CESI was observed a high-value clustering in central areas and a low-value clustering in outer regions. A comparison of CESI and comparative indexes were illustrated on the results of linear regression and spatial autocorrelation, which showed a good linear correlation between each method and a similar spatial pattern in a high-value clustering, but had subtle different in low-value clustering. Specifically, the performance of CESI in expressing the low-value clustering was better than other indexes which could indicate the multiplicative method benefits to manifest the lagging in the provision of ESs better than cumulative method and maximum value composite method. This study could pave a way for a new approach to evaluate the provision of multiple ESs from the socio-ecological systems with a comprehensive perspective.
Transient acceptable temperature range (ATR) is the temperature range that is acceptable by over 80% of the respondents in an outdoor thermal comfort survey. The determination of this range requires ...the respondents to state whether the thermal environment is acceptable at the time of the interview. However, it takes time for thermal strains to develop in the human body and the assessment of transient acceptability may overestimate thermal comfort. Transient ATR can be very wide (>40 °C), carrying limited value to landscape design and urban planning. An improved thermal acceptability assessment should account for a possible exposure time of outdoor activities. This study proposes a novel assessment of outdoor thermal acceptability: 1-hour thermal acceptability. It requires the respondents to state whether it is acceptable to stay at the interview site for one hour. This predictive assessment was tested against the transient assessment in Hong Kong by a whole-year questionnaire survey with 830 respondents. The 80% 1-hour ATR were 22.6–25.4 °C air temperature, 17.0–31.9 °C PET (70% acceptability) and 19.0–33.0 °C UTCI. They were more reasonable and realistic than transient ATR: 7.4–34.9 °C air temperature, −5.8–45.7 °C PET (70% acceptability) and 4.4–42.4 °C UTCI. The 1-hour ATR has the potential to be adopted as an outdoor thermal comfort standard.
•Transient acceptability overestimates comfort due to short exposure time.•A novel thermal comfort assessment is proposed – 1-hour thermal acceptability.•1-hour acceptability was much lower (69.0%) than transient acceptability (94.6%).•Effects of personal variables on thermal acceptability were investigated.•1-hour thermal acceptable temperature range has potential to be a thermal standard.
Every country is dealing with its own housing problems; however, none compares with Hong Kong where housing has always been a major concern as a result of low supply over the past decades. Against ...the constraints in delivering sufficient houses, prefabrication as a sustainable solution for housing has been increasingly advocated for its potential merits of better quality, construction safety and cleaner built environment. However, schedule delay caused by various risks affected the prefabrication housing production (PHP) in Hong Kong. This problem can be further worsened when the manufacturing sector of PHP has entirely moved to offshore areas in the Pearl River Delta region. This study applies system dynamics to recognize and investigate the potential effect of various risks on the scheduling of prefabrication housing construction projects through the employment of Vensim software package. The simulation results show that schedule risks, namely low information interoperability between different enterprise resource planning systems (LIIBDERPS), logistics information inconsistency due to human errors probability (LIIHEP), Delay of delivery of precast element to site (DDPES), and Design information gap between designer and manufacturer (DIGDM) significantly contribute to the schedule delay in PHP. However, schedule is more sensitive toward LIIBDERPS than for the other three risks, indicating that LIIBDERPS should be monitored and given priority. The system dynamic model serves as an effective tool for quantitatively evaluating the effect of various risks on the schedule of PHP, offering valuable references for managers though comparing simulation results under different risk scenarios, so that potential risks that might lead to schedule delay could be identified and handled in advance.
PDF
