Agro-Tourism Customer Satisfaction Analysis Based on the Theory of Attractive Quality

Customer satisfaction measurement is an important and critical issue of all businesses in the tourism sector, since it gives a better understanding of the needs and requirements of tourists. The Kano model is one of the most widely used approaches in analyzing customer satisfaction, aiming to categorize the quality attributes of products/services in different quality dimensions. The main aim of this chapter is to analyze customer satisfaction from an agro-tourism farm and prioritize potential improvement actions. The preliminary analysis has identified a large set of customer satisfaction criteria that refer to the location, the personnel, the activities, the cost, and the “green” aspects of the agro-tourism farm. The MUSA method has been applied in the context of Kano's theory of attractive quality. The main results show which satisfaction criteria mostly affect satisfaction and/or dissatisfaction, identifying the strong and the weak points of the farm. Finally, combining the previous results, it is possible to prioritize improvement actions.

SERVQUAL-Based Evaluation of Service Quality in Turkish Health Industry With Fuzzy Logic

The aim of this study is to analyze the service quality in the Turkish health sector. In this context, a literature review is conducted, and 16 different criteria based on SERVQUAL are determined. Fuzzy DEMATEL method is used to determine which of these criteria are more important. The findings indicate that operating hours and quality of equipment have the highest weights. In addition to these items, experience of personnel and individual attention to patient are other important factors with respect to the service quality in Turkish health industry. Hence, it is strongly recommended that hospitals in Turkey should operate in an extended time because Turkish people prefer to go to the hospitals after working hours. It is also obvious that Turkish hospitals should make investment to quality equipment. Finally, it is a good idea for new hospitals to have qualified employee. This situation has a positive contribution to the service quality of these hospitals.

Quality Management in Primary Dental Care

In dental care services, quality is an important factor that affects decision making, the planning of health strategies and policies, the cost of health services, and the evaluation of them. The evaluation of quality in dental services using the assessment methods that are used in other services of primary healthcare is difficult due to the special characteristics of dentistry. However, the improvement and the evaluation of primary oral healthcare services is a complicated issue because it involves many factors that affect it. Therefore, the purpose of this chapter is to provide a complete overview of the literature using Webster and Watson's methodology. Fifty peer-reviewed papers were analyzed and the results of this review revealed that the number of publications in this domain has increased in the last decade, and there is a need to foster research (especially empirical) in this field.

“My Regular Pharmacy”

The objectives of this chapter are (1) to develop an instrument that incorporates the core attributes of evaluative criteria that are used by patients/customers in selecting and repeatedly visiting a community pharmacy, (2) to analyze the proposed attributes in order to put forward valid dimensions of evaluative criteria, and (3) to assess the reliability of this instrument. The selection criteria incorporated in the final list were selected based on an extensive literature review and on experts' and customers' opinions. To collect the data, a survey was conducted in the area of Macedonia, Greece. In total, 223 questionnaires were collected. Confirmatory factor analyses revealed a four-factor structure of the proposed instrument namely: price, availability of products, staff competence, and pharmaceutical care services. Moreover, reliability was assessed through Cronbach's alpha coefficient and average variance extracted. The current study outcomes can guide pharmacists' strategic actions in boosting customer patronage behavior in the highly competitive pharmaceutical sector.

Analyzing the Efficiency of Renewable Energy Sources in Terms of Electricity Generation

Electricity generation, one of the renewable energy sources (RES), delivers a solution for various problems such as energy efficiency, energy supply security, reducing foreign dependency, and especially, environmental concerns. However, the solutions provided for these problems bring along the question of which RESs are produced more effectively. Therefore, in this research, RESs used for electricity generation in Turkey were analyzed by using generation data to show which one is more effective. Bi-objective multiple-criteria data envelopment analysis (BiO-MCDEA) method, a goal programming-based efficiency determination method, was used for the efficiency analysis conducted for five years between the years of 2014 and 2018. As a result of the analysis, geothermal energy came into prominence as the most effective RES for all of the years included in the solution. Geothermal energy was followed by biomass energy, wind energy, hydroelectric, and solar energy, respectively.

Trigonometric Grey Prediction Method for Turkey's Electricity Consumption Prediction

Industry and technology continue to develop rapidly in today's world. The indisputable most important source of this development, energy is among the indispensables of daily life. Since it is one of the determining factors for the country's economy, the future forecast of electricity demand means calculating the future steps. Based on this, to forecast Turkey's electricity demand, it was benefited from grey model (GM) and trigonometric GM (TGM) techniques. The data set includes annual electricity consumption for the period 1970-2018. The performances of the methods determined were compared based on the forecast evaluation criteria (MSE, MAD, MAPE, and RMSE). Short-term forecasting analysis was carried out by determining the method that gives these values to a minimum. In the future forecast, it has been determined that electricity consumption will increase continuously.

No One Left Behind?

Asylum seekers, refugees, and migrants, who are living in RICs, are faced with multiple challenges and vulnerabilities that must be taken into consideration when responding to the COVID-19 pandemic. The chapter focuses on the COVID-19 pandemic concerns over increasing cases recorded in the RICs in Greece. The impact of migration on public health is of particular concern to Greek migration policy, as migrants in the country have a completely different epidemiological profile and higher risks to public health due to the poor living conditions in their countries of origin and during their stay. They live mostly in overcrowded reception and identification centers and accommodation centers under deplorable conditions, lack of proper shelter, extremely unhygienic living conditions. The urgent decongestion of the overcrowded RICs and accommodation centers is required to avoid the risk of rapid spread of the infection.

Multi-Attribute Decision Making Using Interval Type-2 Fuzzy AHP and Its Application on Borsa Istanbul (BIST)

Analytic hierarchy process (AHP) is a widely used multi-attribute decision-making (MADM) approach. Due to the complexity and uncertainty involved in real world problems, decision makers might be prefer to make fuzzy judgments instead of crisp ones. Furthermore, even when people use the same words, individual judgments of events are invariably subjective, and the interpretations that they attach to the same words may differ. This is why fuzzy numbers has been introduced to characterize linguistic variables. Fuzzy AHP methods have recently been extended by using type-2 fuzzy sets. Type-2 fuzzy set theory incorporates the uncertainty of membership functions into the fuzzy set theory. In this chapter, the authors firstly provide a short review on applications of interval type-2 fuzzy AHP on MADM problems. Then, they present a very efficient MADM technique, interval type-2 fuzzy AHP, to solve the portfolio selection problem that is to decide which stocks are to be chosen for investment and in what proportions they will be bought. And finally, they provided a case study on BIST.

Assessing the Impact of Cigarette Taxation on the Supply Chain Stakeholders' Revenue Shares in Greece

The chapter aims to analyze the impact of cigarette taxes evolution over the period 1992-2017 on the revenue share of the main tobacco supply chain stakeholders in Greece. This empirical analysis uses a pooled time series from 1992 through 2017 including a data set of retail prices, three tax groups levied on cigarettes (specific tax, ad valorem tax, and V.A.T.), and revenue shares for three categories of stakeholders. The results indicate that the revenue share of the stakeholders is decreasing over the whole period, and specifically, their shares drop by half in the last 15 years. The regression results show that the revenue shares of tobacco companies are most affected by both excise taxes in a negative way, and similarly, both price and the excises affect significantly the revenue share of retailers, whereas the findings regarding distributors' revenues are insignificant. This knowledge is likely to be useful for policymakers in the development of effective tobacco control policies.

Routing Searching Algorithm for Combined Freight Transport Trips in South East Europe Region

In this chapter, the authors propose a mixed integer linear programming model (MILP) to address the shortest path problem when trans-shipments exist on combined freight transport operations. The objective is to minimize trip duration, cost, and CO2 emissions. For solving this problem, we propose an extension of Dijkstra's algorithm that identifies the optimal way of cargo movement with trans-shipment. We applied the proposed algorithm in real-life data by embracing three different types of transportation modes, namely road, rail, and inland waterways (IWW), and by testing it in three different cases where (1) goods should cross 2 or 3 South East Europe (SEE) countries, (2) goods should cover a distance more or less than 500 km, and (3) goods with origin the Port of Piraeus and destination four capital cities of SEE. The results show that the use of road transport is the most favorable solution if trip duration is the main criterion, whereas combined transport is selected when minimization of cost and CO2 emissions is the objective.