Miloš Marjanović
In a time of fierce competition in the tourist services market, it is very important to pay attention to businesses’ service orientation towards end users. Service orientation can be considered as a competitive advantage on the demanding tourism market. In this study, the relationship between service orientation, job satisfaction and empowerment among the employees of Serbian travel agencies is examined. A survey was conducted through an online questionnaire. The survey included a total of 94 respondents. The study is aimed at investigating the connection between employee service orientation, job satisfaction and empowerment. The paper also investigates whether there are significant differences between the measured variables among the employees with and without tourism education. The results showed that job satisfaction had a significant impact on service orientation. The impact of empowerment on service orientation proved to be a less significant statistical variable. According to the research study, job satisfaction occurs as a mediator between empowerment and service orientation. Also, there is no statistically significant relationship between the measured variables and tourism-related education.
Vojislav Babić1 and Siniša Zarić2
The study measures and analyzes the influence of knowledge management on average wages in Serbian construction companies. For the purpose of this research, of Knowledge Management (KM) dataset with 11 variables was created. The main goal of the research was to examine the influence of the dataset on the average wages in medium-sized and large construction companies. At the basic sample level, through factor analysis, a total of four factor scores were isolated, representing the strategies that the companies combine in KM. Using a regression analysis, it was found that the set of the four independent variables explained 84.5% of the average wage variability in the medium-sized and large construction companies. Two of the four strategies were statistically significant. According to the first strategy, the management insisted on a larger share of experts with the master’s and bachelor degrees, while the second strategy was based on the introduction of the formal, legal protection and registration of innovative solutions, as well as a larger number of employees with a PhD degree.
Aleksandra Zečević1, Jelena Radović Stojanović2 and Aleksandar Čudan2
The paper analyzes the use of information and communication technologies (ICT) in enterprises in the European Union member states. The objectives of the analysis were to examine the level reached in the application of ICT in European enterprises and explore the differences in ICT usage that exist between the EU member states. The analysis is based on the Eurostat data on ICT usage in enterprises in the European Union countries (EU-28) for the years 2018 and 2017. The following indicators of ICT usage were analyzed: fixed broadband access, the speed of the internet connections, the presence of the Internet (enterprises having a website), the use of social media, the use of cloud computing services, e-commerce indicators (the share of the enterprises making e-sales and the share of e-commerce in the total turnover) and the indicators of e-business integration – the share of the enterprises using enterprise resource planning (ERP), customer relationship management (CRM) and the supply chain management (SCM) software applications. A comparative analysis of the EU countries by the value of these indicators was carried out. The main focus in the analysis was to identify the factors that influence the difference in the value of the ICT indicators between the countries. The analysis has shown that the regional position, the geographic characteristics, the size of the country and the level of its economic development are the factors that influence these differences.
Miljan Leković
The growing gap between standard finance theory and practice has made way for the emergence of new theories and the development of new asset-pricing models. Behavioral economists have seized this opportunity to promote their ideas and thus develop behavioral finance theory, as an antithesis to standard finance theory; behavioral portfolio theory, as an antithesis to modern portfolio theory, and a behavioral asset-pricing model, as an antithesis to standard financial asset-pricing models. The paper aims to illustrate these new theoretical frameworks, given the absence of research at the national level relating to behavioral portfolio theory and the behavioral asset-pricing model. The objective is to explain the key features of behavioral portfolio theory and the behavioral asset-pricing model by means of conducting a comparative analysis of the mentioned theory and its model and standard financial concepts and models. By using a qualitative research methodology, the author concludes that, by incorporating psychological factors, behavioral portfolio theory and the behavioral asset-pricing model complement conventional financial concepts and bring finance theory closer to reality. It is, however, still too early and exaggerated to a certain extent to speak about the superiority of these new theoretical frameworks in relation to modern portfolio theory and conventional asset-pricing models, which is also the main finding of the research study.
Zita Bošnjak, Olivera Grlјević and Saša Bošnjak
Much of one’s online behavior, including browsing, shopping, posting, is recorded in databases on companies’ computers on a daily basis. Those data sets are referred to as web data. The patterns which are the indicators of one’s interests, habits, preferences or behaviors are stored within those data. More useful than an individual indicator is when a company records data on all its users and when it gains an insight into their habits and tendencies. Detecting and interpreting such patterns can help managers to make informed decisions and serve their customers better. Utilizing data mining with respect to web data is said to turn them into web knowledge. The research study conducted in this paper demonstrates how data mining methods and models can be applied to the web-based forms of data, on the one hand, and what the implications of uncovering patterns in web content, the structure and their usage are for management.
Vesna Martin
The aim of this paper is to present the costs and benefits of applying dollarization. The most common reason for accepting, in whole or in part, a foreign currency is the presence of a high and volatile inflation rate, which is followed by the significant volatility of the exchange rate, as well as a distorted confidence in its own currency. Likewise, highly dollarized countries most often characterized by a lower level of the development of the financial market. Dollarization contributes to lowering the costs of transactions in international trade and to achieving the price and financial stability, as import inflation is lower than domestic. On the other hand, the presence of full dollarization means a loss of seigniorage as the monetary authorities’ revenue from the printing of money, as well as the limitation of the implementation of the lender’s function in the last instance. The results of the analysis indicate that, in the dollarized countries, there was a decrease in the inflation rate, macroeconomic stability was established, and financial integration was present as well. The analysis also showed that the loss of income from seigniorage, measured as a share in the gross domestic product, is not negligible, while the lender’s function in the latter instance can be compensated through the formation of stabilization funds and the conclusion of contracts with financial institutions.
Milica Ristić, Radenko Milojević and Marija Radosavljević
Modern business conditions have decisively been indicating that quality is the basis of the competitiveness of a company. A lack of quality creates dissatisfaction and affects customer loyalty. Lately, there has been a tendency of the growth of non-quality costs, which is a consequence of a lack of the quality of the products delivered. Although numerous studies suggest models for calculating non-qualitative costs, no relevant mechanism has been found yet to manage these costs. In this study, the authors attempted to find a link between long-term provisions and the external failure cost since this relation has not received other researchers’ attention so far, as it deserves. The aim of the research is to point out the importance of long-term provisions as relevant instruments to control external failure costs. Different surveys have confirmed the initial assumption and showed that long-term provisions are effective instruments for managing the costs of external failure. A positive, statistically significant correlation between long-term provisions and the net profit of a company was also identified among the first 100 enterprises from the list of the most successful enterprises in the Republic of Serbia in 2017.
Lela Ristić, Nikola Bošković and Danijela Despotović
Sustainable development is one of global imperatives and it involves the harmonization of economic, environmental, and social development goals, with an appropriate institutional support. There are plenty of resources pertaining to the sustainable development of agriculture and tourism, as numerous studies and practical examples worldwide confirm. The paper highlights the example of the Republic of Serbia and can be of use for other countries with similar resource potentials and developmental constraints. Namely, agriculture and tourism in the Republic of Serbia are distinguished by abundant natural and cultural-historical resources, but what mostly lacks are funds for serious investment, as well as a modern and holistic approach to development, so the available resources are insufficiently used. Accordingly, the research aims to point to the necessity of a more creative use of agro-tourism resources, i.e. to the more promising directions of the integral development of agriculture and tourism on sustainable grounds. The paper results highlight the extreme importance of institutional support to agriculture and tourism networking within the concept of sustainable development.
Marin Peko1, Nikola Komatina2, Nikola Banduka1,2 and Marina Crnjac2
In the course of global trends, the development and application of information technologies have emerged as a valuable source of the economy at both the micro and the macro levels. According to the results of the best practice, the application of a piece of software with failures is known to possibly to serious consequences. The analysis and elimination of potential failures in commercial software is the problem that represents one of engineers’ most important tasks. In this paper, a new integrated model for the evaluation and ranking of software failures is proposed. The cost aspect is integrated into the traditional severity index. The assessment of the severity indices, as well as a possibility of detection, is based on the Failure Mode and Effects Analysis – FMEA framework. The weights of the overall severity index, the occurrence of failures, and the possibilities of detection are calculated by applying the best-worst method. The determination of the rank of the identified failures is given by applying conventional Technique for Order of Preference by Similarity to Ideal Solution – TOPSIS. The priority of the activities that are undertaken in order to eliminate the identified failures corresponds to the obtained rank of the failures. The proposed model is illustrated by real-life data.
Milјan Leković
Investment diversification is a widely accepted investment strategy, aimed at reducing investment uncertainty, while simultaneously keeping the expected return on investment unaltered. The development of investment diversification coincided with the development of portfolio theory. At the time when traditional portfolio theory was recognized as the leading portfolio management practice, the simple diversification of investments was the most commonly used strategy; however, due to its inability to recognize the importance of the correlation between returns on different investments, simple diversification was later rejected in modern portfolio theory and replaced with efficient diversification. The research study is aimed at conducting a comparative analysis between the simple and efficient diversifications of investments, together with the inevitable analysis of the optimal number of securities in a portfolio and the testing of the validity of the international diversification of investments. By applying a qualitative research methodology, it is concluded that the benefits of the international diversification of investments are still substantial, and as such outweigh specific limitations, and that the number of securities in a portfolio should be increased as long as its marginal benefits, in the form of reduced investment risk, exceed its marginal costs – in terms of increased portfolio management costs, which also represents the main result of the research.