While there is much emphasis on authentic green practices, there is rising concern about the common practice of ''greenwashing'' or unsubstantiated claims about good environmental policies. Consequently, tourism businesses need to provide tangible evidences to create trust in their green claims. This paper, building on a sequential mixed method approach of data collection, proposes a potential green service encounter (GSE) framework by which hotel management can reassure customers and secure long-term patronage. Moderating role to two key contextual variables, travel purpose and environmental values of travelers, is investigated. Practical implications indicate that hotels should offer guests opportunities for enhanced involvement in GSE that help build consumer trust. The trust building process is dependent on a traveler's environmental values but independent of trip purpose. The GSE framework conceptualization included interviews with 25 green hotel guests and a panel of experts while empirical validation involved a sample of over 500 respondents.

In this paper, we propose a Generalised-Fuzzy-TOPSIS method as a versatile evaluation model. The model is suitable for different types of fuzzy or interval-valued numbers, with or without subjective weights of criteria being defined by evaluators. Additionally, we extend the final ranking step of the TOPSIS method, which is the calculation of closeness coefficient based on the separation from Negative Ideal Solution (NIS) and proximity to Positive Ideal Solution (PIS). Experiments show that with the same focus on PIS and NIS distances, our proposed ranking is identical to TOPSIS, and also performs very well when varying the distance weights. The applicability of the proposed method is demonstrated with relevant examples of technology and material selection in the context of additive manufacturing. Sensitivity analyses, based on subjective weights of criteria, degree of optimism, evaluators weights in group decision making, and distance weights, are presented to assist managers in making more informed decisions.

Ant colony optimization (ACO) algorithms have been used successfully to solve a wide variety of combinatorial optimization problems. In the recent past many modifications have been proposed in ACO algorithms to solve continuous optimization problems. However, most of the ACO variants to solve continuous optimization problems lack ability of efficient exploration of the search space and suffer from the problem of premature convergence. In this work a new ACO algorithm (ACO-LD) is proposed that incorporates Laplace distribution based interaction scheme among the ants. Also, in order to avoid the problem of stagnation, an additional diversification mechanism is introduced. The proposed ACO-LD is tested on benchmark test functions taken from Congress on Evolutionary Computation 2014 (CEC2014) and the results are compared with four state-of-the-art algorithms reported in CEC2014. ACO-LD is also applied to solve six real life problems and the results are compared with the results of six other algorithms reported in the literature. The analysis of the results shows that the overall performance of ACO-LD is found to be better than the other algorithms included in the present study.

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to examine the factors associated with three modes of firms exit (voluntary liquidation, involuntary liquidation and acquisition) in a mutually exclusive environment. In particular, three modes of exit are treated as independent events given that different causes and consequences exist for each exit mode. The data set is a panel of 4,408 US manufacturing firms spanning over the period 1976-1995. Design/methodology/approach: The discrete choice model is used to establish a relationship between modes of exit and a set of explanatory variables, which are specific to the firm, industry and macroeconomic conditions. Use of panel data encourages us to estimate a random effects multinomial logistic regression model, which allows exit modes as mutually exclusive events and at the same time controls the firm-specific unobserved heterogeneity in the sample. Findings: The analysis suggests that the determinants of voluntary liquidation are age, size, profitability, technology intensity and inflation level. The determinants of involuntary liquidation are size, leverage, profitability and inflation level. For acquisition, determinants are age, size, advertising intensity, Tobin's q, GDP growth, inflation level and interest rate. The findings suggest that exit modes have a different set of determinants and the scale of effects of some common determinants such as age, size and profitability differs between exit modes. Research limitations/implications: The analysis presented in this study relies on data from US manufacturing firms only. Thus, there is a need to explore the determinants of exit modes in other countries as well using the proposed econometric model. Practical implications: The findings presented in this paper are useful for managers and policymakers to design strategies/actions for avoiding particular mode of exit. Originality/value: This study provides empirical evidence on the differences in factors associated with exit modes and confirms the existence of mutually exclusive nature of exit modes. Findings suggest that for future empirical studies on firm exit, the exit modes must be treated as a heterogeneous event.

Interdependencies among healthcare providers result in complex healthcare supply chains with fragmented healthcare processes characterized by coordination failure and incentive misalignment. In developing countries where resources are scarce such coordination failures can have a severe impact on patient health. However, limited knowledge exists about how coordination takes place across and within the different healthcare service providers and how this influences hospital transfer time and length of stay. This article research this gap by studying trauma care delivery in India using a patient survey (n = 104). The Indian healthcare system is insightful because India has to provide low-cost care to large populations living in geographically big areas and the healthcare infrastructure struggles to meet increasing demands. The findings suggest mechanisms to better integrate the processes from the accident site to the hospital which include setting up referral processes, 24-hour ambulance services, using third-party coordinators and process improvement within the hospital following lean principles.

Teenagers are major contributors of online content because of continuous communication and sharing with peers using social media or instant messaging apps. They like to immediately tell the world about their purchases and consumption experiences, which leads to the generation and transmission of electronic word-of-mouth (eWOM). This study uses consumer socialization perspective to examine how age, peers and Internet usage influence teenagers eWOM intentions. The findings suggest that normative and informative influence of peers and the Internet have significant positive association with eWOM. Moreover, these influences also mediate the direct influence of age and Internet usage on eWOM. Further, the potential eWOM behavior of male teenagers is influenced by the existing peer norms, whereas for females, their reliance and belief in the credibility of online information is more critical. The insights are valuable for marketers interested in the powerful and growing teenage consumer segment, especially in the new emerging markets.

With industrialization and growth of population, implementation of sustainable technologies and environment protection has received a lot of attention. Remanufacturing is one of the sustainable technologies that provide environmental, economic and social benefits. Remanufacturing is a comprehensive and rigorous industrial process by which a previously sold, worn, or non-functional product or component is returned to a "like-new" or "better-than-new condition and warranted in performance level and quality" (RIC, 2013). This research study aims to identify and evaluate external barriers to remanufacturing in Indian electronic waste (e-waste) sector. We applied grey-DEMATEL (Decision Making Trial and Evaluation Laboratory) approach to analyze external barriers to remanufacturing. The results indicate lack of channels to collect used products and customer unwillingness to return the products to be the most prominent barriers. Further, the results also depict uncertainty in quantity and timing of returned products to be the major causal barriers. The findings provide insights and recommendations for policy planners involved in policy making to boost remanufacturing in India. Primarily, government needs to bring awareness to customers regarding benefits of returning the used products and benefits of using remanufactured products through awareness campaigns, so that consumers also take initiative to protect environment. Channels to collects used products from customers also need to be developed.

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to examine the relationship between implementation of quality management systems (QMS) and business performance, through mediating factors (operating performance, information quality, product quality, design performance, environmental performance and competitive priorities). Most of the published literature examines the direct impact of implementation of QMS on business performance, and on some of the above stated factors. However, the impact of implementation of QMS on business performance, through these mediating factors has not received much attention. Accordingly, the authors develop a theoretical framework depicting impact of implementation of QMS on business performance through the above stated factors. Design/methodology/approach: The paper proposes several hypotheses linking implementation of QMS, mediating factors and business performance. The hypothesized model is empirically tested using data collected from 120 professionals working in quality engineering/management in India and North America. The collected data are analyzed with the aid of structural equation modeling (SEM) technique. Findings: Information quality and design performance have emerged as the important factors in the research. Information quality directly effects design performance, operating performance and environmental performance. The model indicates that besides a well-designed product, managers need to focus on the operating performance to improve overall product quality. Empirical evidence is found regarding direct and indirect effect of implementation of QMS on above stated mediating factors and on business performance. Originality/value: The research fills a gap in the literature by considering several mediating factors that aid in improving business performance with implementation of QMS.

Purpose: Emotions in business-to-business (B2B) interactions are relatively unexplored when compared with business-to customer (B2C) industry wherein sufficient evidence implicating the role of emotions in decision-making is available. This study aims to explore the role of emotions in B2B decision-making, and a customer experience model is suggested for the B2B industry. Design/methodology/approach: The qualitative research methodology using structured and semi-structured interviews along with a repertory grid technique was followed during the study. Purposive sampling was done to identify respondents who were involved in the vendor choice process either as a buyer or a seller in their respective organizations. Findings: Exploratory research conducted during this study supports the presence of five dimensions of customer experience - sensory, emotional, relational, behavioural and intellectual - in a B2B context. The study further indicates that the experiential value for B2B decision-making is derived from functional, symbolic, emotional and cost values which are assessed by the buyer during their interaction with the product or the service ecosystem and has an impact on the purchase intentions of an industrial buyer. Originality/value: This paper identifies the role of specific customer experience dimensions in a B2B environment and proposes the role and mechanism of emotional factors affecting the decision-making process in B2B exchange. copyright @ 2018, Emerald Publishing Limited.

We test if seven commonly used asset-pricing factors predict future growth in GDP and industrial production. There is minimal evidence that asset-pricing factors other than the market factor predict future economic growth. Predictive power of these factors reported in earlier literature seems to have attenuated. copyright @ 2018 Elsevier B.V.

This study used a quantile autoregressive distributed lag (QARDL) model to capture asymmetric impact of rainfall on food production in India. It was found that the coefficient corresponding to the rainfall in the QARDL increased till the 75th quantile and started decreasing thereafter, though it remained in the positive territory. Another interesting finding is that at the 90th quantile and above the coefficients of rainfall though remained positive was not statistically significant and therefore, the benefit of high rainfall on crop production was not conclusive. However, the impact of other determinants, such as fertilizer and pesticide consumption, is quite uniform over the whole range of the distribution of food grain production. copyright @ 2016, Springer-Verlag Wien.

Purpose: From last few decades, logistics management (LM) constitutes a global concern among organization's supply chain (SC) to improve their business effectiveness. The purpose of this paper is to uncover and analyze the critical factors (CFs) related to the implementation of effective LM concept and benchmark the SC performance. Design/methodology/approach: The most common (16) CFs were identified and selected through literature and use of the Delphi method. Subsequently, the selected most common CFs were analyzed to distinguish their causal relations using the fuzzy Decision Making Trial and Evaluation Laboratory (DEMATEL) technique under unclear surroundings. A case example of Indian Logistics Company is also discussed to reveal the practical applicability of the research. Findings: Provision of the effective information communication and technological developments in the system and Management dedication, support and involvement CFs are found to have the top most influences in the effective implementation of LM. This paper also groups the CFs into cause and effect relationship which provides valuable insights for analyzing the factors in successful implementation of LM. Practical implications: This work attempts to understand the different CFs, their relative position and the importance rating in the system, due to which, managers can differentiate the factor which greatly affects the concepts of implementing LM, and thus, improvements can be made accordingly. Originality/value: First, this work offers 16 CFs to LM implementation from a SC scenario. Second, in the context of contributing to the theory, the combined Delphi and fuzzy DEMATEL-based model is provided that helps in managing the logistic related issues effectively. copyright @ 2018, Emerald Publishing Limited.

This paper introduces a bi-criteria transportation problem with multiple parameters which brings together the concept of price discrimination from the area of marketing management to the world of multi objective transportation problems. The problem deals with two objectives, the overall shipment cost and the bottleneck time of shipment. Both the objectives are of minimization type and have multi-choice coefficients pertaining to differential marketing strategies or different modes of transportation available. First, the problem with minimum availability and demand of goods is solved and then the problem is extended to the case of interval demand and supply. By iteratively solving multi-choice variants of a cost minimizing transportation problem/minimum cost flow problem, all Pareto optimal time-cost pairs are obtained. The proposed algorithm for both the variants is successfully implemented and solved using the CPLEX optimization package. copyright @ 2018 Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature

The scope of healthcare information systems (HIS) is immense. It can not only help in providing easy access to data and taking decisions, but also ensure following standard procedures and improve quality. Prior literature have discussed on technology impact while controlling for the organizational and economic factors. However, there is a dearth of research on the effect of their interaction with technology. Moreover, overall technology impact misses the depth of application-level impact. Our work discusses the application-level impact and also empirically shows the effect of its interaction with other external factors. Our finding for 2010 show that use of HIS in nursing activities was significant in improving care quality. Disease-specific applications also have a positive effect under the influence of organizational factors. In 2013, per-capita income has significant effect on the impact of technology. Moreover our results show a considerable increase in the significance of technology and the interplay between technology and external factors in 2013 from that in 2010. Thus, our work motivates researchers to explore factors influencing the effect of technology. It directs managers to prioritize their investment on applications based on their impact on healthcare quality. copyright @ 2018 Association for Computing Machinery.

The Occupational Information Network (O*NET) is the primary source of occupational information in the United States (US). In this study, I review O*NET's usage for career guidance in India and conceive a career intervention based on it. In an empirical evaluation adopting a posttest-only experimental design with post-graduate management students (N = 220), effectiveness of the career intervention in reducing career decision-making difficulties is presented. An important cultural insight the study offers regarding occurrence of career decision-making difficulties, are the differences due to vertical-horizontal characteristics, apart from the more researched individualism-collectivism characteristics. copyright @ 2017, Springer Science+Business Media B.V.

Identifying software defects has always been one of the major concerns of software designers and developers across the entire software industry. The intend of particular software that leads to produce some faults which is not determined previously during testing phase can lead to complete failure of the software and definitely incurred unnecessary cost and time inclusion. Thus the requirement of predicting faults at an earlier stage of its development has become necessity of today's software development trend as the software becomes more distributed, complex and heavily cost infusive in nature. In this research work authors have proposed and implemented the idea of Discretization of metric values in order to get better classification results. Authors have generated Boolean functions based on project metrics values, so that these values could be confined in the domain of classifying and predicting software faults. In this work authors have checked the performance of their proposed model by considering seventeen different software project and their version data taken from promise repository of NASA namely: Jedit, lucene, tomcat, velocity, xerces andxalan. The results gained after applying the proposed Boolean classifier are better and more promising in terms of its accuracy and precision, compared with available literature. The study claim visible increase in accuracy, as compared to other classifiers considered in the study like: Naïve Bayes, Random Forest, Perceptron, KNN and SOM. copyright @ 2006-2018 Asian Research Publishing Network (ARPN).

The level of uncertainty, unpredictability and complexity is magnified in a food supply chain as compared to the conventional supply chains such as automobile and FMCG. This is mainly because of the short product shelf life and the need of high variety. This necessitates the food industry to adopt various quick response systems to achieve effective supply chain management. The situation becomes even more critical when dealing with humanitarian relief operations where time window is very short (usually 24 hours). One of the solutions which are adopted in modern food supply chains is to locate cross-docking centre (CDC). Cross-docking is used to reduce the turnaround time of the food products. The practical situation is complex as it caters to multiple customers. The number of suppliers, in such cases, plays a significant role. Selection of a right CDC is, therefore, a crucial task. It is a strategic decision and needs to be taken by considering the relationships between each stakeholder present in the supply chain. In this article, we present an approach to select one (or few) CDC/s facilities among n CDCs. The method is based on the relationship between each actor (actors are the stakeholders in the supply chain). The relationship is in terms of the physical flow of materials or information flow or another kind of flows or relationships that connects them to form a network. These network characteristics are required to find out key stakeholders. The present article proposes the application of social network analysis (SNA) to analyse the characteristics of the network, thus helping supply chain managers to locate strategic CDCs considering both qualitative and quantitative aspects. The proposed methodology can be easily extended to locate temporary warehouse site in the context of humanitarian relief operations. copyright @ 2018, copyright @ 2018 International Management Institute, New Delhi.

The importance of sustainable operations in supply chains has been widely recognised in practice and the extant literature. In this paper, we study coordination issues of a sustainable supply chain that arise due to simultaneous consideration of greening and corporate social responsibility (CSR) initiatives undertaken by supply chain agents. We specifically consider the scenario where the supplier is responsible for greening and the buyer is accountable for social responsibility. We analyse our model using two-stage Stackelberg game-theoretic approach where the supplier acts as a Stackelberg leader. In this context, we analyse the decentralised supply chain setting using five different contract types, namely wholesale price, linear two-part tariff (LTT), greening-cost sharing, revenue sharing, and revenue and greening-cost sharing contracts (RGCS). We demonstrate how optimal greening level, CSR level, retail price and profits of supply chain agents are influenced by different contract types. Our analytical results show that greening and social efforts undertaken by supply chain agents are beneficial for the overall supply chain as long as consumer awareness towards greening and CSR exists. Our results show that channel coordinating mechanisms between supplier and buyer is conducive to improve greening and CSR level. LTT perfectly coordinates the supply chain. Through a numerical example with several key parameters we present the effectiveness of different contracts. The results reveal that as a profit maximising agent the supplier prefers LTT contract and the buyer prefers RGCS contract. This paper extends the understanding of supply chain coordination in the context of sustainability. copyright @ 2018 Elsevier Ltd

Payment of bribes, eviction and confiscation of goods are critical issues faced by the street vendors in Indian cities. In this context, this study attempts to empirically outline the determinants of bribe payment in this sector by drawing upon traditional literature on corruption. We conduct a primary survey in an industrial town in India. To empirically analyse the bribery models for the informal enterprises, we utilize several alternative specifications for a robustness check purpose. We also test a range of important factors that may cause bribery. Our analysis has offered some important results. First, we find that street vendors with higher business size are more likely to pay bribe and also likely to pay higher amount of bribe. Second, it is found that business-specific laws and regulations reduce the bargaining power of the street vendor. Vendors dealing in more regulated businesses like eateries, tobacco products are more likely to pay bribe. Third, it is found that vendors originating from distant places are likely to pay more bribe, and thus, the study support the proposition that corruption may create inequality, from which some groups can be more disadvantageous than others. Finally, contrary to the findings of traditional literature, the study finds that in the specific context, business age is positively related with bribe payment. copyright @ 2018, International Management Institute, New Delhi.

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to critically examine sustainability reporting (SR) practices of top 10 Indian banks, on parameters derived from a Global Reporting Initiative (GRI)-G4-based persuasive communication framework. Design/methodology/approach: SR metrics from GRI-G4 guidelines were mapped to persuasive communication parameters to develop a blended analytical framework. Content analysis (CA) technique was used to assess SR of top 10 banks on this framework. Findings: The study has three key findings. First, most of the top 10 Indian banks are yet to adopt adequate disclosure and transparency practices in SR. Second, even though environmental and social goals are broadly reported, there are glaring omissions on metrics like equal remuneration, occupational health and safety and customer privacy. Third, stakeholder engagement focus is weak as reflected in low persuasive appeal of SR content of most banks. Research limitations/implications: The blended framework provides a theoretical and analytical pathway for operationalizing the sustainability context principle, which has been inadequately addressed even within the GRI framework implementation. Practical implications: The paper provides a health check and identifies red flags in SR of top 10 Indian banks, enabling them to undertake a critical review of their sustainability metrics and reporting practices. Social implications: The paper establishes the significance of evaluating non-financial reporting practices addressing broader sustainability metrics in the banking sector, in an emerging economy context. Originality/value: This paper develops a GRI-G4-based persuasive communication framework for SR assessment, and conducts an evaluation of top 10 Indian banks using CA technique.