Festival Spaces and the Visitor Experience

A festival implies a special use of space for both the organiser and the visitor. On the practical level of events management, it is a series of temporary per - formance venues presenting special organisational problems. For the festivalgoers, it is a space set apart to which they come seeking an extraordinary experience. This experience can have an emotional and symbolic significance, which they then come to associate with the place itself. For this reason, festivals and special events are increasingly used as part of strategies to regenerate or reposition urban areas or coastal resorts. Events attract additional visitors, creating economic benefits for retail, leisure and other businesses. The publicity can be used for place marketing aimed not only at attracting visitors but also new businesses and investment to the area (Jago et al., 2003; Morgan et al, 2002). They can also give a boost to the cultural or sporting life of the residents and increase local pride and selfesteem. Festivals are part of the area’s ‘experience economy’ to use Pine and Gilmore’s (1999) term, creating a temporary ‘creative space’ which can attract visitors (Richards and Wilson, 2006). But how should that space be designed to optimise the experience of the festival-goers and contribute to the success of the event? Answering this question requires an awareness of how festival-goers perceive the impact of the location and its layout on their enjoyment of the event. The role of space can best be explored within a wider conceptual framework that maps the visitor experience of the event. This chapter is based on research into the 2005 Sidmouth Folk Festival, a long-established event which saw a significant change in ownership and organisation from previous years. This sparked a lengthy discussion on an enthusiasts’ internet message board about how successful it had been. One aspect of this was the rival merits of a festival based in a showground and one spread over existing venues around the town. An analysis of these discussions was used to explore the elements of the event experience and the ways in which festival-goers evaluate i

Non-adiabatic transitions in multi-level systems

In a quantum system with a smoothly and slowly varying Hamiltonian, which approaches a constant operator at times $t\to \pm \infty$, the transition probabilities between adiabatic states are exponentially small. They are characterized by an exponent that depends on a phase integral along a path around a set of branch points connecting the energy level surfaces in complex time. Only certain sequences of branch points contribute. We propose that these sequences are determined by a topological rule involving the Stokes lines attached to the branch points. Our hypothesis is supported by theoretical arguments and results of numerical experiments.Comment: 25 pages RevTeX, 9 figures and 4 tables as Postscipt file

Red Queen Pricing Effects in E-Retail Markets

A standard “solution” offered to the deleterious effects of all-out price competition is for firms to engage in differentiation strategies. This solution, however, depends critically on the inability of rivals to imitate a successful differentiation strategy. With imitation, we show how “Red Queen” pricing effects can arise: All firms have an incentive to vertically differentiate and increase markups, yet imitation by rivals drives prices down toward pre-differentiation levels. Thus, the price premia arising from differentiation strategies in eretailing critically depend on the number of other firms that imitate the strategies. Based on data from Shopper.com, we find that an online firm that unilaterally differentiates itself from its rivals by participating in CNet’s Certified Merchant program enjoys a 5 to 17 percent price premium. However, when other firms also follow this strategy, the price premium vanishes.Pricing, Product Differentiation, Red Queen Effect, Internet, Reputation

Texture control in a pseudospin Bose-Einstein condensate

We describe a wavefunction engineering approach to the formation of textures in a two-component nonrotated Bose-Einstein condensate. By controlling the phases of wavepackets that combine in a three-wave interference process, a ballistically-expanding regular lattice-texture is generated, in which the phases determine the component textures. A particular example is presented of a lattice-texture composed of half-quantum vortices and spin-2 textures. We demonstrate the lattice formation with numerical simulations of a viable experiment, identifying the textures and relating their locations to a linear theory of wavepacket interference.Comment: 4 pages, 5 figures, REVTeX4-