Biofuels share a meagre fraction in the total fuel consumption, and their usage is speculated to upsurge steadily in the years to come. One of the key drivers for the development of biofuel production industries and simultaneous dilution of biofuels in the energy market is the country's policy. Hence, this critical review focuses on the evolution of biofuel policies in the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa) nations and successful implementation of the policies by the respective countries. In detail, this paper provides legal framework and policies prompted the expansion of biofuel research and industries across the BRICS nations. It extensively presents key laws, blending targets, current regulation, national action plan, government support mechanism (subsidies), output targets, and major hurdles and scope in biofuel policies of BRICS nations for efficient penetration of biofuel to the energy market. © 2020 Elsevier Ltd

Extant research is vertically divided on the question whether exploration and exploitation constitute two ends of a continuum or whether they are orthogonal activities. We suggest that both characterizations are admissible, albeit under different sets of assumptions. Using March’s iconic model, we demonstrate that the continuum conception concerns leveraging an organization’s internal knowledge heterogeneity where managers use their prior knowledge and experiences to formulate actions to attain the maximum possible extent of organizational knowledge at equilibrium. In contrast, the orthogonal conception mainly concerns assimilating heterogeneous knowledge from sources outside the organization through risky experimentation, leading to order-creation in systems operating in far-from-equilibrium conditions. We further demonstrate that the change in outcome obtained by switching from low to high rate of exploitation is larger—and therefore easier to detect—for the continuum conception. We speculate that many managers and researchers favor conceptualizing exploration–exploitation in the continuum sense, for this reason. Moreover, companies obtain far higher organizational knowledge by functioning in the orthogonal mode, than what is attainable by functioning in the continuum mode. Organizations should, therefore, strive to create conditions that foster cultivation of outside knowledge through autonomous actions of employees. © 2020, Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature.

This study conceptualizes and tests a framework to understand consumers’ intention to use environment-friendly ethical transportation medium. It primarily uses ethical decision-making model and extends it under the purview of self-consistency theory. Based on the survey of 158 respondents and analysis of the framework using structural equation modeling and process macro, this study establishes the mediating role of moral judgement, self-accountability and perceived consumer effectiveness in forming moral intention to use ethical transportation medium. It is one of the first studies to provide insights on consumers’ intention to use environment-friendly ethical transportation medium using the ethical decision-making process. It also contributes to the literature on ethical decision-making in view of additional factors like self-accountability and perceived consumer effectiveness. The overall findings suggest new perspectives on consumers’ ethical decision-making process in the context of choice of transportation medium. The study provides some valuable guidance to the service providers and policymakers dealing with environment-friendly ethical transportation mediums. © 2020 Elsevier Ltd

Does the evolution of distinct practices influence the sectoral dominance of nations? In this review paper, we take an in-depth look at the convergence and divergence debate about HR practices in Asia. We extend the conversation to address specific competitive advantage of nations, such as China, in manufacturing and India, in information technology (IT) sectors. Drawing on the relevant literature and utilizing the lens of firm specificity, HR value creation, and competitive uncertainty, we try to explore the collective implementation of a bundle of HRM (human resource management) and IR (industrial relations) practices that have converged or diverged from western practices leading to such dominance. © 2020 Elsevier Inc.

This study selects the context of emerging markets to examine the role of ad creativity dimensions (divergence and relevance) in shaping the attitude of consumers. Most of the existing studies exploring consumer perceived creativity and its dimensions are based on inputs from consumers in developed markets. Using an experimental design, we test the differential effect of divergence and relevance for Indian consumers. The results indicate that for consumers from emerging markets, the role of relevance, which is mostly undermined, is as effective as divergence. The mediating role of attitude toward advertisement was established in the relationship between consumer perceived creativity and brand attitude. The main effects of divergence and interaction effects of divergence and relevance were found to be significant in influencing the consumers’ ad and brand attitude as well as motivation to process information. Ads high in creativity were found to result in a higher unaided product and brand recall. Ads high on divergence also resulted in increased consumers’ intentions to share the ad, which may be considered as a higher potential of becoming viral. The overall findings suggest that standardized advertising in global markets may have limited effectiveness. © 2020, © 2020 Taylor & Francis Group, LLC.

This paper examines the co-movements between Bitcoin (BTC) and the Dow Jones World Stock Market Index, regional Islamic stock markets, and Sukuk markets. We apply cross wavelet transform and wavelet coherence analysis with a wavelet-based measure of value at risk. The co-movement is stronger and in the same direction at lower frequencies, suggesting the benefits from diversification with BTC are relatively less for long-term investors compared to short-term investors. Co-movement in the opposite direction at high frequencies implies better benefits of hedging in the short run through diversification in BTC and Islamic equity markets. Robustness tests show that the correlations increase as we increase from an investment horizon of two days to one of 64 days. The frequency-domain causality test shows significant causality flow from BTC to the Islamic market of Asia-Pacific, Japan, and Sukuk markets in the short term. Additionally, BTC is found to lead Asia-Pacific Islamic stock markets in the long term. Finally, we note that the benefits of portfolio diversification with BTC and Islamic assets vary across time and frequencies. © 2020 Elsevier B.V.

Purpose: Consumers have increasingly become more concerned about environmental degradation, wastage of critical resources and safety. Therefore, firms are adopting sustainability management practices to attract these conscious consumers. Product responsibility (PR) is an important indicator of corporate social responsibility (CSR) and sustainability management. This study examines the relationship between the board- and firm-level characteristics and the PR ratings of firms. Design/methodology/approach: A temporal design with a lag of one year for a sample of 403 firms from the global emerging economies is analyzed for this purpose. Findings: Hierarchical regression analysis shows that total revenue, board size, and board diversity have a positive effect on PR ratings. Research limitations/implications: These findings have implications for policy-level decisions on the composition of boards for the sustainable future of firms. Originality/value: The study is one of the few studies that have looked into the factors affecting the PR ratings, which are an important indicator of the sustainable practices of an organization. © 2019, Emerald Publishing Limited.

Purpose: The purpose of this paper was to provide a framework of methods and skills for employer-oriented personal branding among business school students to create an effective digital curriculum vitae for employment and to test the students' awareness of personal branding techniques. Design/methodology/approach: This was a mixed methods study which followed an exploratory model, where the findings of the qualitative first stage helped develop the hypotheses for the second (quantitative) stage of the study. The rich detailed data collected from the qualitative phase were used to develop the instrument for stage 2. Responses based on Likert scale were used in stage 2 to test the hypotheses. Findings: The study tested hypotheses relating to personal branding, demonstrating that most of the skills and methods studied are held in high esteem by business school students. The study clearly establishes that these students possess a high degree of awareness about the need for employer-oriented personal branding and use various methods and skills to build their brand, validating our hypotheses. Research limitations/implications: This study focused only on two top-tier Indian business school students. A larger and more inclusive study in other emerging market nations may validate its findings. Students from non-business disciplines could be studied to find out differences in approaches to employer-oriented self-branding. Practical implications: Students may be able to brand themselves better through the use of the methods and skills tested in this study. Within the business schools, faculty mentors can use this methodology to support students in further consolidation of their brand with the help of social media profiles such as LinkedIn, Facebook and others. The skills learnt in the business school will stand the student in good stead, and the company will benefit from their personal branding efforts translating into commercial benefits for the firm. Originality/value: This paper provides a structured approach towards employer-oriented personal branding of students, missing in earlier studies. © 2020, Emerald Publishing Limited.

This paper advances our understanding of consumer behavior by examining the influence of autobiographical memory perspective on consumer's self-congruence. While extant research has primarily restricted itself to the consequences of self-congruence, this work focuses on an antecedent, by examining the psychological processes associated with the consumer's autobiographical memory perspective and the resulting impact on self-congruence. Through three experiments, we demonstrate that visualizing autobiographical memories from a first-person versus a third-person perspective impacts consumers' self-brand congruence differently under varied circumstances. Specifically, differing degrees of self-brand congruence are experienced when consumers focus on differences (vs. similarities) between their present and recalled selves, combined with distinct autobiographical memory perspectives. The autobiographical memory perspective is identified as a key determinant of consumers' perceived change in self-image, which, in turn, has a cascading effect on their self-brand congruence. Thus, consumers' perceived change in self-image is identified as the mechanism underlying the main effect. Furthermore, as an important component of self-image, this research determines and examines a moderating influence of self-esteem in the relationship between autobiographical memory perspective and self-congruence. Collectively, these results facilitate our understanding of the autobiographical memory perspective as an antecedent of consumer's self-congruence, with implications for nostalgia advertising and retro branding. © 2020 John Wiley & Sons Ltd

New media has brought customers closer, they extensively indulge in eWOM. Unlike face to face WOM, which originates from known sources, eWOM on social media may originate from lesser known/unknown sources. Drawing on source credibility theory and persuasion research, aim of this study is to understand the interactive and distinct role of source and message credibility of eWOM towards consumer's brand attitude. Brand attitude may be influenced differently by different levels and combinations of source and content (message) credibility. Using the Facebook interface 246 between subject factorial design experiments are conducted. Two-way interaction effect of source and message credibility over consumer's brand attitude is tested; further one-way analysis of variance is tested to examine the varying influence of different levels and combinations of source and message credibility. A significant two-way interaction of source and message credibility moderate brand attitude. Results suggest that different levels and combinations of perceived source and message credibility, on social networking site influence consumer's brand attitude inconsistently. Study recommends caution to marketers while selecting online influencers for 'induced eWOM' campaign as believability may be moderated by all the different cues of credibility differently. Copyright © 2020 Inderscience Enterprises Ltd.

In this article, we consider a simple step-stress model for exponentially distributed lifetime units. As failure rate is lower at the initial stress level, therefore, it is important to pay more attention to the stress changing time. Here, we consider a simple step-stress model where the stress level changes either after a prefixed time or after a prefixed number of failures, whichever occurs later. It ensures a prefixed minimum number of failures at the first stress level and also sets up a control on the expected experimental time. We have obtained the maximum likelihood estimators of the model parameters along with their exact distributions. The monotonicity properties of the maximum likelihood estimators have been established here, and it can be used to construct the exact confidence intervals of the unknown parameters. We provide approximate and bias-corrected accelerated bootstrap confidence intervals of the model parameters. We also define an optimality criteria and based on that obtain an optimal stress changing time for a given sample size. Finally, an extensive simulation study has been performed to asses the performance of the proposed methods and provide the analyses of two data sets for illustrative purpose. © 2019, Grace Scientific Publishing.

Learning outcomes: The learning outcomes are as follows: to understand the cultural and ethical dimensions revolving around the issue of female feticide; to apply the lens of institutional theory with respective change management measures; and to analyze and evaluate the impact of such intervention programs such as Beti Bachao Beti Padhao in the context of emerging economies such as India. Case overview/synopsis: This case attempts to highlight the innovative and effective governance approach by the Government of Rajasthan (India) and, in particular, the State Health Assurance Agency to curb the menace of female feticide and the rising cases of abortion and sex determination in an attempt to favor a male child. The case concentrates on mainly three dimensions of Indian societal ecosystem, namely, the grave concern of preference of male child over female child leading to widespread cases of female feticide in different states in India with specific focus on the state of Rajasthan; the role of cultural dimension which primarily drives such preferential treatment in rural and urban areas in India; and the importance of using effective policy measures in monitoring various activities, introduction of incentive schemes to patients for preventing sex determination and promoting the birth of female child. Complexity academic level: This case can be used as a teaching material in the Public Policy course – Social Welfare and Health Policy, Policy interventions, organization theory and change management at the Graduate/MBA level. Supplementary materials: Teaching notes are available for educators only. Subject code: CSS 10: Public Sector Management. © 2020, Emerald Publishing Limited.

Computer simulators are widely used to understand complex physical systems in many areas such as aerospace, renewable energy, climate modelling, and manufacturing. One fundamental aspect of the study of computer simulators is known as experimental design, that is, how to select the input settings where the computer simulator is run and the corresponding response is collected. Extra care should be taken in the selection process because computer simulators can be computationally expensive to run. The selection should acknowledge and achieve the goal of the analysis. This article focuses on the goal of producing more accurate prediction which is important for risk assessment and decision making. We propose two new methods of design approaches that sequentially select input settings to achieve this goal. The approaches make novel applications of simultaneous and sequential contour estimations. Numerical examples are employed to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approaches. © 2019, Grace Scientific Publishing.

This study examines the dynamic relationship between precious metals and stock markets of major developed (G7) and emerging (BRICS) nations. We use a hybrid wavelet-based Dynamic Conditional Correlation (DCC) approach, which allows us to investigate the dynamic relationship between precious metals and stock markets in time and frequency domain. Our results suggest that DCC between the return series of precious metals and stock market varies with timescales in terms of dynamicity, persistence and strength of relationship. G7 and BRICS nations exhibit different dynamicity with precious metals over the study period (2000 to 2017). The dynamics between precious metals and G7 stock markets show similar patterns, which depicts a clustering behaviour, however, same is not true for BRICS nations. In contrast to existing literature, this study found that silver offers better hedging capability than other precious metals for both short and long-run. To construct a two-asset optimal portfolio of precious metal and stock index, palladium emerges as the most favourable option for both short and long-run. © 2019 Elsevier B.V.

Purpose: Organizations worldwide are adopting software as a service (SaaS) applications, where they pay a subscription fee to gain access rather than buying the software. The extant models on software acquisition processes, several of which are based on organizational buying behavior, do not sufficiently explain how SaaS application acquisition decisions are made. This study aims to investigate the acquisition process organizations follow for SaaS software, the changes to the roles of the Chief Information Officer (CIO) and the business user and also looks at the impact of SaaS on the proliferation of unauthorized software systems. Design/methodology/approach: The authors used exploratory research using the grounded theory approach based on 18 in-depth interviews conducted with respondents who have studied with enterprise software delivered on-premise and as SaaS in different roles such as sales, consulting, CIO, information technology (IT) management and product development. Findings: The authors identified a need to classify the SaaS software and developed a framework that uses software specificity and its strategic importance to the organization to classify SaaS applications. The aforementioned framework is used to explain how software evaluation processes have changed for different kinds of SaaS applications. The authors also found that the CIO’s and the business users’ have changed substantially in SaaS application evaluations and found evidence to show that shadow IT will be restricted to some classes of SaaS applications. Originality/value: By focusing on the changes to the roles and responsibilities of the members of the buying center, this paper provides unique insights into how the acquisition process of SaaS is different from the extant models used to explain enterprise software acquisitions. An understanding of how information search is conducted by the business users will help software vendors to target business users better. © 2020, Emerald Publishing Limited.

Currently, there is a mismatch between the potential and the reality of capturing value from the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT). Furthermore, the lack of empirical guidance on appropriate IIoT business models isn't helping to address this mismatch. Based on a content analysis of IIoT projects from entrepreneurial firms and incumbents, which we collected from 1,043 publications in industry trade magazines and newspapers over a six-year period (2011-2017), this article identifies IIoT-specific business model elements and archetypes. Our study provides two main contributions. First, our analysis enables a broad understanding of IIoT business models in practice by taking into account different perspectives. Our findings reveal different business model archetypes in the context of IIoT, namely: IIoT digical, IIoT service-centered, IIoT data-driven, and IIoT platform. Second, we derive specific management implications for capturing value from IIoT business models based on our exploration of IIoT business model elements. © 40th International Conference on Information Systems, ICIS 2019. All rights reserved.

Since the inception of Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), the Next 11 (N11) countries are facing difficulties in attaining the SDG objectives, as maintaining the environmental quality has been a challenge for them. In this study, we have revisited the technology policies of these countries, and in doing so, we have tried to address the problem of environmental degradation, while addressing the issues of sustained economic growth, clean and affordable energy, and quality education. In this pursuit, we have designed two indices for environmental degradation and technological advancement, and then analyzed the association between them following the Environmental Kuznets Curve (EKC) hypothesis. The empirical analysis has been done by IPAT framework, and by using bootstrapped quantile regression and rolling window heterogeneous panel casualty tests, over a period of 1990–2017. Following the results obtained from the analysis, we have tried to address the objectives of SDG 13, SDG 4, SDG 8, SDG 9, SDG 7, and SDG 10. © 2019 Elsevier Ltd

This study examines how different types of organizational culture moderate the effect of customer incivility on frontline employee (FLE) response. We propose that FLE forgiveness determines their customer-oriented behavior following customer incivility; FLE vengeance mediates the effect of customer incivility on dysfunctional behavior. We further posit that the effects of customer incivility on FLE forgiveness and vengeance would vary depending on the organizational culture (i.e., clan, adhocracy, market, and hierarchy). We test the research hypotheses by conducting a survey, followed by a scenario-based experiment. Our findings show that forgiveness of customer incivility determines FLEs’ customer-oriented behavior; whereas vengeance influences FLEs’ dysfunctional behavior following customer incivility. Furthermore, organizational culture moderates the effects of customer incivility on FLE responses such that clan culture and adhocracy culture positively moderate the effect of customer incivility on forgiveness, while market culture positively moderates the effect of customer incivility on vengeance. © 2020

The real value added in the Indian manufacturing sector for the period 2011-12 to 2016-17 is measured using the double deflation approach. It is found that the official figures understate manufacturing real value added during the period 2011-12 to 2013-14, and overstate it thereafter, as well as miss an apparent manufacturing contraction that occurred in 2014-15. The results are corroborated by the movement of high frequency indicators that are correlated with manufacturing activity. © 2020 Economic and Political Weekly. All rights reserved.

The exploratory research uses the framework of Communication Studies and Sociology to demonstrate how restructuring of social hierarchies impacts language use in the Business Communication class of an Indian management institute. The study examines how dominant communication practices are being subverted by issues of identity, power, privilege, sociopolitical forces and technological transformation. It suggests that instructors teaching Business Communication may benefit by aligning their pedagogy to the sensibilities of the present generation of management students. The paper is premised on the interpretivist belief that meanings and identities are socially constructed through respondents’ engagement with everyday realities. Twenty-two in-depth personal interviews were conducted with participants of the postgraduate programme in management and instructors of Business Communication. Further, a questionnaire was administered to 51 participants of an executive management programme to understand attitudes towards language use at the workplace. The responses indicate that a variant of indigenised English appears to be acquiring legitimacy amongst young professionals, while instructors continue to emphasise grammatical accuracy, blindsided by their training in language and literature. Therefore, to cater to the next generation of managers, instructors may have to shed their bias against non-formal expressions in English, and consider focusing on the functional aspects more important for intra-national purposes. © 2020 Mudra Institute of Communications, Ahmedabad, India.