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The share of international tourists visiting Israel independently is continuously increasing, and is expected to blossom when the depressed COVID-19 air travel picks up as it enables people to avoid exposure to large groups. This article explores the patterns and characteristics of independent tourism in Israel with a focus on the method and timing of the various services purchased and the level of satisfaction derived from the purchase processes. By way of doing so, it uses a holistic approach that combines questionnaire with interviews – a unique method in the study of independent international tourism. [ FROM AUTHOR] Copyright of Israel Affairs is the property of Routledge and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full . (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The development of a vaccine for COVID-19 presented hope for a way out of the global crisis caused by the virus. However, a potential barrier may be vaccine hesitancy, and identifying the factors that affect it is critical, especially concerning a new vaccine technology. The purpose of this research is to identify the factors that effects vaccine hesitancy by using a holistic view. The data were collected from 504 people in December 2020, 3 days before the vaccine operation started in Israel. The analysis included three categories of determinants: (1) contextual influences; (2) health records; and (3) perceived health attitudes. The results indicate that different sets of variables affect willingness to accept the vaccine among the whole spectrum of the vaccine-hesitant and the undecided subsample. In the full sample, gender, age, income, influenza vaccine, perceived trust, perceived susceptibility, perceived benefits, and perceived barriers affected vaccine acceptance. The perceived level of suffering from COVID-19 was associated with willingness to vaccinate, and when religious beliefs increased, the intention to vaccinate decreased. For the undecided subsample, the factors included gender, influenza vaccine, trust in the vaccine company, and perceived vaccine benefits and barriers. The results suggest that efforts of governments and health institutions should focus on women and highlight the vaccine as an opportunity to "go back to normal" without worries. Those results will help implement vaccine strategy in the following cases: if infant vaccination is pursued and if emergency vaccines or new vaccine technologies emerge for another pandemic as well.

Tourism is a major industry with a growing share in most countries economics. A growing part of the tourism industry is the urban tourism. UNWTO describes urban tourism as trips to cities or places with high population density. Several researchers have tried to develop a framework for understanding urban tourism, which is highly important to cities' economies but also requires significant urban infrastructures. In Europe, urban tourism increased by 4.3% representing over 65% of total bedights (235.1 million in 2014).The current research focuses on testing the effect of residence on the number of domestic vacations and on vacations abroad and on the selected type of vacation (nature or urban). The dependent variable is preferences for nature vs. urban destination, measured on a Likert scale. The independent variables include socio-demographic variables, type of residential setting?city or other type of setting. The data were collected using questionnaires distributed between March and June 2018 in different locations in Israel. 46 percent of the respondent were male, the average age was 28 and 75 percent leave in cities.The results indicate that there is no significant correlation between the type of residence and the number of vacations abroad, however those who do not live in a city take significantly more domestic vacations. The regression results indicate that when traveling abroad: Urban tourism is more preferred by those that live in cities and by younger tourists. Similar results are obtained for domestic tourism.The results can help policymakers adapt their marketing efforts to the right tourist. For example, if they want to market urban tourism to international tourists they should address their marketing efforts to those who live in cities and to younger people. Further research should consider the effects of factors such as length of stay, potential travel companions, and other characteristics of the destination (modern or developed country) on destination preferences.

Human judgments are systematically affected by various biases and distortions. The main goal of our study is to analyze the effects of five well-documented behavioral biases — namely, the disposition effect, herd behavior, availability heuristic, gambler’s fallacy and hot hand fallacy — on the mechanisms of stock market decision making and, in particular, the correlations between the magnitudes of the biases in the cross-section of market investors. Employing an extensive online survey, we demonstrate that, on average, active capital market investors exhibit moderate degrees of behavioral biases. We then calculate the cross-sectional correlation coefficients between the biases and find that all of them are positive and highly significant for both professional and non-professional investors and for all categories of investors, as classified by their experience levels, genders, and ages. This finding suggests that an investor who is more inclined to employ a certain intuitive decision-making technique will most likely accept other techniques as well. Furthermore, we determine that the correlation coefficients between the biases are higher for more experienced investors and male investors, indicating that these categories of investors are likely to behave more consistently, or, in other words, are more likely to decide for themselves whether to rely on simplifying decision-making techniques in general or to reject all of them. Alternatively, this finding may suggest that these investors develop more sophisticated “adaptive toolboxes,” or collections of heuristics, and apply them more systematically.

This paper extends results on information advantage in Cournot oligopoly to a public good economy with uncertainty and private information where the state-dependent utilities have a multiplicative structure. We show that in a Bayesian–Nash equilibrium where consumers’ contributions are positive in all states of nature, a consumer with superior information is rewarded with a higher ex ante expected utility. Our counter example shows that in the case where one consumer does not contribute, information disadvantage might emerge. Thus, the interiority assumption is essential to obtain our results.

This paper studies the provision of a public good via voluntary contributions in an economy with uncertainty and differential information. Consumers differ in their private information regarding their future endowment as well as in their preferences. Each consumer selects her consumption exante, i.e., before knowing the state of nature. Contributions to the provision of the public good are determined ex-post, i.e., when the state of nature is realized. Assuming that some normality conditions hold, a Bayesian equilibrium exists. Further, equilibrium is unique, regardless of the number of consumers, when either (a) the information partitions of consumers can be ranked from the finnest to the coarsest, or (b) there are only two types of consumers.

We focus on a class of linear Cournot duopolies with differentiated products and prove that whether there is an information advantage or disadvantage depends on firms' information setup. Specifically, we show that when the cross-effects are common value, the uninformed firm that commits to quantity will not have lower ex ante profits than a firm that has complete information about its cross-effects. This result contrasts to the information advantage that holds in the same duopolies with independent cross-effects.

We analyze a repeated first-price auction in which the types of the players are determined before the first round. It is proved that if every player is using either a belief-based learning scheme with bounded recall or a generalized fictitious play learning scheme, then for sufficiently large time, the players' bids are in equilibrium in the one-shot auction in which the types are commonly known.

Contemporary research documents various psychological aspects of economic and financial thought and decision-making. The main goal of our study is to analyze the effects of five well-documented behavioral biases, namely, disposition effect, herd behavior, availability heuristic, gambler's fallacy and hot hand fallacy, on the mechanism of stock market decision-making, and, in particular, the individual differences in the degrees of these effects. Employing an extensive online survey, we document that on average, active stock market investors exhibit moderate degrees of behavioral biases. Furthermore, we find that, on the one hand, more experienced investors are less affected by behavioral patterns, yet, on the other hand, professional portfolio managers do not behave, in this respect, differently (more rationally) from non-professional investors. We, therefore, infer that investor's experience in stock market matters, but not the "status" itself of being a professional, may decrease the effect of behavioral biases on her. In addition, we detect that the major "rationalizing" effect of experience is already accumulated in the first years of investors' stock market activity. Finally, we document that female investors are more strongly affected by all the five behavioral biases.

Auctions are considered with a (non-symmetric) independent-private-value model of valuations. It shall be demonstrated that a utility equivalence principle holds for an agent if and only if she has constant absolute risk aversion.