The Product-quality Decisions Of Tourism Enterprises Based On Negative Information And Market Demands

With the entrance of national tourism ages,a large of tourism product-quality problems arise in China.The improvement of information technology promotes the dissemination of negative quality information,which has a great impact on the consumption behavior/market demand(of tourism enterprise’s product).Meanwhile,online channel is widely applied in tourism industry,which leads to a horizontal competition between upstream and downstream tourism enterprises.The market is riddled with low-quality and low-price tourism products for the severe situation.And the negative quality information further increases.It is pressing to guide tourism enterprises adjust the product-quality decisions.In this context,identifying the impacts of negative information on the market demands of tourism enterprise’s product,and studying the product-quality decisions are helpful in clarifying the problems of tourism product-quality.This thesis also provides theoretical basis for the healthy and sustainable development of tourism industry.Based on the perspective of consumption behavior,this thesis measures the spatial correlation of tourism demand on tourism enterprise’s product with the tourism intention firstly,which also provides the spatial weight of the following study.Then,the impacts of negative information on market demands of tourism enterprise’s product are discussed with the panel data of 31 provinces,autonomous regions and municipalities of China from 2011 to 2016.Secondly,by comparing the tourists’ utility of different channels,this thesis analyzes tourists’ demands of online channel and tour retail channel with the factors such as pricing,negative information,tourism product-quality and tourists’ acceptance of online channel.The Stackelberg game model between the upstream tour operator,which opens an online channel as a complementary of traditional tour retail channel,and downstream tour retailer is also constructed.Under the condition that the tour operator owns the dominant power,the impacts of product-quality control on the pricing and differentiation strategies of tourism enterprises,equilibrium quality and the optimization strategy are analyzed.Based on two different methods of disclosure,this thesis further discusses the conditions of quality disclosure and misreporting of both tour operator and tour retailer,as well as the optimal regulatory strategy of tourism government under different objectives.The main conclusions are as follows:(1)Negative information is one of the important factors affecting the market demands of tourism enterprise’s product.In terms of market size,it has a significant inhibitory effect on the market demands of tourism products provided by tourism enterprises of both local and its related provinces.Specifically,Media’s attention on negative information decreases the market demands of local tour operator’s product.The tourists’ attention on negative information reduces the market demand of tourism product providing by tour retailer and tour operator of both local and its related provinces.In addition,media further improves the negative effect of tourists’ attention on negative information by improving the degree of negative information disclosure,leading to a lower market demand on local tourism products providing by tour operator.In terms of economic scale,the negative information improves tourists’ consumption on local tourism product.(2)The impacts of tourism product-quality control on the pricing,differentiation strategy and profits of tourism enterprises with centralized decision-making and decentralized decision-making are significantly different.In centralized system,quality control improves price and differentiation level of tourism products,which is conductive to the tourism enterprises.While it is beneficial to online channel and harmful to tour retail channel in decentralized system.As more profits can be gained in decentralized system,decentralized strategy is the dominant strategy of tourism enterprises.And the centralized strategy,which achieves higher product-quality,may be expelled from the market.Negative information can’t force tourism enterprises improve tourism quality,and an optimization strategy is necessary for the decentralized system.The two-step pricing contract is proposed to improve the product-quality of decentralized system.It is also helpful in improving the profits of both tour operator and tour retailer,which lead to a win-win situation.The disclosure of tourism product-quality information has a positive impact on the improvement of product-quality and tourism enterprise’s profits under certain conditions.(3)Tourism enterprises have the willingness to disclose product-quality information only if the product-quality is higher than a certain level.The quantities of product-quality information,which are disclosed to tourists,are different with different methods of disclosure.It is related to the disclosure cost if the tour operator discloses the product-quality information through tour retailer.While it is further affected by the acceptance degree of online channel,product-quality differentiation and free-riding effect if tour operator chooses to disclose the product-quality information through online channel.When the free-riding effect is high enough or low enough,more product-quality information is disclosed through online channel.For tourism enterprises,the choice of disclosure methods depends on their product-quality.And if their product-quality meets the conditions of both methods above,tourism enterprises prefer the one with higher profits.(4)The product-quality of tourism enterprises which have the willingness to misreport product-quality are different in different methods of misreporting.Both of the tourism enterprises with high product-quality and low product-quality are prefer to misreport the product-quality if the tour operator misreports the product-quality information through tour retailer.Only if tour retailers have no willingness to misreport product-quality,there is no misreporting in the market.Otherwise,no matter how many compensation responsibilities there are,some tour operators always prefer to misreport the product-quality.If the tour operator misreports the product-quality information through online channel,only the tourism enterprises with high product-quality prefer to misreport product-quality.With the improvement of compensation responsibility,tour operators do not have the intention to misreport product-quality.The optimal compensation responsibility given by tourism government depends on the regulatory objectives.However,tourism enterprises should be regulated more tightly,which is helpful in stamping out the product-quality misreporting in the market under certain conditions.The main contributions of this thesis are as follows:(1)Based on the perspective of consumer behavior,the negative information and the tourism product-quality are included in the decision variables of tourists.As a part of service industry,the products of tourism industry are services and can’t be returned or exchanged.How well the actual product conforms to the contract becomes one of the important factors of tourists’ utility(Salimian et al.,2017),i.e.,tourists make the consumption decisions based on tourism product-quality.Therefore,the negative information may be destructive to the market demand and tourism enterprises.The existing literatures mainly focus on the impacts of economic factors on market demand,such as price and income.Some studies analyze the positive publicity information or are done from the perspective of post purchase to explore tourists’ perception of tourism products(Hyoungeun and Heesup,2018),satisfaction(Dong and Zhang,2019;Ma,2019)and its determinants(Liu,2016),and the impacts of above factors on the consumption intention of next stage(Cao,2020).Little attention is paid on the negative information.From the perspective of consumer behavior,the negative information disclosure and the tourism product-quality are introduced to the research framework.The impacts of negative information on the market demand of tourism enterprise’s products are discussed as well as the utility and demand function of tourists,which provides a new direction for the study of tourism product-quality.(2)The tourism intention is used to construct the spatial weight matrix,which provides a new measures of the spatial correlation of market demand on tourism enterprise’s products.Various factors are considered in the process of tourists’ decision-making,including but not limited to the distance between regions,the uniqueness of tourism resources,climate and environment,traffic conditions,etc.With the development of transportation,the tourism consumptions get rid of the restriction o f spatial distance in some extent.The efficient dissemination of Internet information further improves the symmetry of tourism information and increases options of consumption for tourists.The spatial correlation of market demand on tourism enterprise’s products becomes more complex.A single index is used to measure the spatial weight in most studies,such as adjacent geographic location or geographical distance(Wu and Song,2018;Li et al.,2016;Joao and Peter,2018),spatial coordinates of cities(Majewska,2017),and satellite positioning of scenic spots(Wu et al.,2016),which only shows one of the factors affecting tourists’ consumption behavior and lacks the general analysis of various factors.This thesis holds that tourism intention is the comprehensive result of above factors,which is more appropriate in measuring the spatial correlation of market demand on tourism enterprise’s products.By estimating the Granger causality of tourism intention between two regions,the spatial correlation and spatial weight matrix of market demand on tourism enterprise’s products are obtained.This index is helpful in laying a solid foundation for the empirical analysis of spatial effects of negative information on market demand of tourism enterprise’s products.(3)This thesis analyzes the product-quality decisions of tourism enterprises under the impacts of negative information and market demand with a Stackelberg game model between tour operator and tour retailer.There is a product-quality information asymmetry in the market for the feature of the simultaneity of production and consumption.Tourists estimate the product-quality of tourism according to the public information(such as word-of-mouth,reputation,evaluation,negative events,etc.),and make a purchase decision based on their utility.In conclusion,the product-quality decisions of tourism enterprises include both of quality control and quality information disclosure.Most of the studies focus on the supervision of tourism product-quality,lacking of theoretical analysis of quality problems.Based on the perspective of consumer behavior,this thesis analyzes the product-quality control,quality information disclosure and misreporting strategies of tourism enterprises with the Stackelberg game between tour operator and tour retailer,as well as the optimal regulatory strategy of the government.The study enriches the theoretical research on product-quality problems.