Purpose: The purpose of this study is to analyze the effect of low carbon product design on firm's competitiveness and economic performance. It also examines the mediating role of the proactive environmental strategy and eco-innovation on low carbon product design, competitiveness and economic performance. Design/methodology/approach: Through a questionnaire-based survey, the data were collected from 69 Indian manufacturing firms and analyzed using a variance-based structural equation modeling (SEM) technique to test the proposed hypotheses. Findings: The results show that the low carbon product design significantly improves firm's competitiveness and economic performance, and proactive environmental strategy significantly mediates the relationship between low carbon product design and firm's competitiveness. Practical implications: This study provides a framework for the adoption of low carbon product design. It demonstrates how manufacturing firms can implement environmental friendly product design. It also analyses the contextual factors that ensure a successful low carbon product design. Originality/value: This article investigates the economic benefit of low carbon product design, thus filling lacuna in existing research. © 2021, Emerald Publishing Limited.

The emerging Information and Communication Technology play a vital role in electronic agriculture. The application of such technologies as blockchain, Internet-of-Things, wireless sensor networks, cloud computing, and machine learning can improve the agri-food supply chain efficiency and quality management. However, there is little evidence on the determinants of blockchain integrated ICTs adoption for the supply chain actors and their propensity to embrace and use such technologies. To bridge this research gap in the literature, we identify a few potential drivers of blockchain technology adoption, considering the grape wine supply chain and employing a rating-based conjoint analysis. The study finds that dis-intermediation, traceability, price, trust, compliance, and coordination and control in order of their relative importance and utilities can influence the supply chain actors’ adoption-intention decision processes. The adoption factors further rationalize the design for a modular, scalable, interoperable, and cost-effective architecture for supply chain integration and sustainability. © 2020 Elsevier Ltd

Earlier researchers have observed that an individual consumer's mood plays a significant role in increasing the impulsiveness, which leads to impulsive buying. The literature on shoppers' motivational traits has profoundly acknowledged the impact of these traits and mood regulation constructs on individual shopping values. The present study is a pioneer attempt proposing a comprehensive model, which incorporates three main antecedents (motivation, mood and value) of buying behaviour that influence the consumer purchasing decision. The paper empirically explores the liaison between the regulatory focus (promotion-focused and prevention-focused motivations), mood regulation (mood monitoring, mood clarity and mood repair), shopping values (hedonic and utilitarian), and impulsive buying behaviour. The outcomes suggest that two regulatory focus motives influence mood clarity. Mood repairing and mood monitoring impact hedonic shopping values, which has a substantial impact on consumers' impulsive buying tendency. The paper closes with theoretical and practical inferences, limitations, and discussion on the potential scope for future research. © 2021 Elsevier Ltd

This empirical study leverages the theoretical underpinnings of regulatory focus theory, an influential theory of self-regulation, to investigate the impact of CEOs' dispositional prevention focus on firms' deal structuring choices in mergers and acquisitions. We build on the argument that the dispositional prevention focus of individuals is associated with a higher perception of risk and a preference for non-losses. Accordingly, this study suggests a positive relationship between the intensity of an acquiring firm CEO's dispositional prevention focus and the firm's propensity to use earnouts as a post-closing risk-mitigating instrument in the deal consideration structure. Furthermore, this study accounts for the important role of contextual cues in priming dispositional prevention focus through the concepts of regulatory fit and misfit and examines the moderating impact of M&A deals involving foreign targets and the acquiring firm's acquisition experience on the baseline relationship. We test our predictions on a dataset comprising 217 deals from 2006 to 2011 in the United Kingdom. Building on the micro-foundations of strategy, these findings contribute to the literature on deal structuring choices in mergers and acquisitions. © 2021 Elsevier Inc.

Purpose: The purpose of this study is to explore the impact of empowering leadership (EL) on work attitudes [job satisfaction (JS) and organizational commitment (OCOM)]. The effects of EL on these work attitudes were also analysed in terms of the mediating effects of psychological empowerment (PE). Design/methodology/approach: A survey research methodology was adopted where responses were collected on relevant measures of the constructs from 431 middle-level executives from 12 Indian organizations. Findings: Results implied that EL enhanced the levels of JS and OCOM of employees. The results further indicated that EL was positively related to PE at the workplace. The findings also revealed that PE was positively related to these positive work attitudes. Moreover, strong indirect effects of EL were observed on these work attitudes through PE, implying that PE partially mediated the impact of between EL on JS and OCOM. Originality/value: The findings of this study affirm the efficacy of EL and PE in predicting positive work attitudes in a different cultural milieu than the West –the Indian work context. Especially, by establishing a strong positive relationship between empowerment and JS, it contributes to the existing literature underlining inconsistent findings with regard to this relationship. © 2020, Emerald Publishing Limited.

Purpose: Brand managers frequently use well-known celebrities to position their brands and capture consumers’ attention to improve the brand’s market share. The attachment of a celebrity with a brand creates a human image for a brand and helps in personifying its image. The consumer perceives the brand as an individual and relates his personality, as well as the personality of the celebrity with that of the brand. It becomes pertinent for marketers to understand how brand-celebrity personality congruence and brand-consumer personality congruence affect the brand reputation, uniqueness and purchase intentions. Thus, the purpose of this study is to understand the relationship between the two personality congruence aspects – brand & celebrity personalities and brand & consumer personalities, and their impact on the reputation of the brand and its uniqueness. Further, the paper aims to examine the impact of the brand reputation and brand uniqueness on purchase intentions. Design/methodology/approach: The present study uses Aaker’s five-factor personality scale to study the personality congruence effects on brand reputation, brand uniqueness and purchase intentions. The literature review was carried out to categorize factors related to celebrity personality, brand personality and consumer personality. The data for this study was collected through questionnaires from 1,235 respondents. In the first step, congruencies between celebrity, brand and consumer personality were determined. This was followed by a two-stage structural equation modelling for assessing the model fit and testing the hypotheses. Findings: From the study results, it is observed that brand-celebrity congruency influences brand reputation and brand uniqueness. However, brand-consumer congruency had an effect only on brand reputation and not on brand uniqueness. Both brand reputation and uniqueness have favourable impact on consumers purchase intentions. Originality/value: This study contributes to the existing literature on celebrity endorsement by extending the discussion with personality-based congruence. The research deciphered two aspects of identification, i.e. consumer-brand personality congruence and brand-celebrity congruence. The paper hypothesized the favourable association between brand personality and consumer personality congruence and brand uniqueness. However, it was observed that brand personality-consumer personality identification had an insignificant influence on brand uniqueness. This is contrary to the findings of some studies in the literature. Further investigation of this relationship in the future may add a new dimension to the identification context. © 2021, Emerald Publishing Limited.

End-of-life vehicle (ELV) recycling markets in emerging economies are characterized by the existence of plenty of informal dismantlers and a few formal dismantlers. The nature of these markets can be characterized as oligopsony markets, where few buyers (dismantlers) compete to purchase ELVs from a large number of sellers (ELV owners). High initial investment creates a barrier to entry and exit for formal dismantlers, whereas the perfectly competitive nature of the informal dismantling market enables free entry and exit of informal dismantlers. In this paper, we consider a market with one formal dismantler and few homogeneous informal dismantlers, and the dismantlers compete by offering a higher price for ELVs. We develop a system dynamics model to capture the feedback effects of competition in the ELV recycling market where the increase in the price of ELV reduces the profitability of dismantlers, which affects the future price increase of ELV and leads to the exit of informal dismantlers. This, in turn, creates fluctuations in dismantling quantities and scrap supplies leading to fluctuations in scrap prices. Using Indian data, the simulation results show that the competition leads to the higher market price for ELV, but a lower profit for dismantlers and reduced aggregate dismantling capacity due to the exit of informal dismantlers. The market price of ELV will rise by more than 200% in 10 years, whereas the existing informal dismantling capacity reduces to less than 50% during the same period. The higher capacities of the formal dismantler lead to the rapid exit of informal dismantlers thereby diminishing the effects of competition resulting in the lower market price for ELV. From our analysis, we recommend that establishing formal dismantling units with high capacities and vertical integration of vehicle manufacturers and end-of-life management systems aligned with suitable policy instruments will ensure more environmentally sound recycling. © 2020 Institution of Chemical Engineers

With high speed internet, the retailers are continually engaged in upgrading mobile apps that facilitate shoppers in shopping anywhere-anytime and arousing their sudden urges to buy impulsively. The present study endeavors to decipher the antecedents of mobile app-based impulsive buying behavior and determining their relative significance in triggering impulsive urges. Using structural equation modeling, causal analysis was undertaken to identify the role of effort expectancy, price and discounts, atmosphere and layout of app, and user experience and satisfaction in creating impulsive buying intentions. It was observed that price and discounts and user experience didn’t have any influence in stirring the consumer for impulsive buying. To determine the relative significance of remaining four, artificial neural network modeling was undertaken. Effort expectancy was noted to have highest influence in creating impulsive urges, followed by atmosphere and layout of an app. User satisfaction had minimum impact. The paper concludes with practical implications for m-commerce players. Copyright © 2021, IGI Global.

Purpose: Recent decade has witnessed exponential growth in e-commerce segment, leading to emergence of various online selling platforms catering to diverse product requirements of customers. Such a development has provided impetus to both existing businesses and newly established ventures to make available their offerings through online selling platforms with a view to improve the reach of their products. This study is an attempt to identify the experience of registered vendors with the online marketplaces. It aims to develop and validate a scale to measure vendor's experience with e-commerce platforms. Design/methodology/approach: As a part of the scale development process, relevant literature sources were scanned to spot the precise knowledge gap and to put in place a sound theoretical background for the study. Thereafter, a scientific approach was adopted for scale creation. First, the scale items were identified through interviews of vendors registered with major online selling platforms and other academic experts pertaining to the marketing domain. Subsequently, major dimensions of seller experience were identified through exploratory factor analysis (EFA) applied on data collected from active vendors by the means of a structured survey instrument. The final data set was subjected to confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) in a bid to validate the scale. Findings: The study’s outcomes reveal that seller experience in an online marketplace can be best captured by a multidimensional scale characterized by six major dimensions. These are “Registration,”; “Product Listing”; “Pricing Autonomy”; “Ease of Pick-up and Delivery”; “Credit of Receivables” and “Vendor Assistance.” A proper emphasis to continually improve upon these dimensions by the e-commerce platforms is expected to enhance the utility and overall experience of vendors from such platforms. Existence of a mutually beneficial relationship between vendors and online marketplaces will help marketplaces to mitigate concerns like nonfulfillment of orders and dispatch of substandard products. Originality/value: Sustainable long-term relations between vendors and online marketplaces hold the key for such marketplaces to render error-free and delightful service on each individual order received. Seller experience of registering and operating on such e-marketplaces inspite of playing a defining role in vendor–marketplace relations has received scant attention of researchers, both in academia and industry till date. The present research is a seminal attempt to address this gap in marketing literature and offer additional know-how. © 2021, Emerald Publishing Limited.

[No abstract available]

The proven benefits of limited-stop services have captured the attention of researchers, especially during the last decade. However, to solve the limited-stop service design problem many existing works directly impose a capacity constraint to a total social cost objective function. This “naïve approach” implicitly assumes that passengers behave altruistically, basing their decisions on what is best for the whole system. Although this issue has been identified in earlier works, the magnitude of the error induced by this simplification has not been studied yet. The objective of this work is to measure this error and to understand how it misrepresents passenger flows and bus occupation rates. To measure this error gap, we optimize a set of test scenarios by applying a naïve approach, and then take the resulting design and obtain a benchmark passenger assignment using a simple behavioral model. We propose two main indicators to compare both passenger assignment: the total passenger deviation, and the total capacity deficit. This comparison reveals that the assignment of the naïve approach may indeed be unrealistic, and raises concerns that a network design based on the naïve approach might have severe problems when implemented. Thus, the work highlights the importance of taking the results of the naïve approach with caution and verify them with a passenger assignment model before their implementation. © 2021 Elsevier Ltd

Generation of healthcare waste from different patient care activities in hospitals, pathology labs and research centres has been a matter of great concern for environmental and social bodies across the world. This concern comes from its infectious and hazardous nature which brings life taking disease such as human immunodeficiency virus and Hepatitis-B. Moreover, with the outbreak of corona virus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic across the world, healthcare waste has become even more infectious like never before and showing its potential for claiming lives if not disposed properly. Additionally, the COVID-19 has put up another challenge in terms of exponentially increasing demand for personal protective equipments for healthcare workers such as doctors, nurses, ward boys, and sanitation workers. In this paper, seven criteria related to smart healthcare waste disposal system infused by circular economy aspects to recover value from disposables are identified and analysed using a decision making trial and evaluation laboratory (DEMATEL) method. The criteria have been prioritized by its importance and net cause and effect relationship through a causal diagram. Two criteria, (i) digitally connected healthcare centres, waste disposal firms and pollution control board, and (ii) providing a pollution control board's feedback app to public and other stakeholders, feature as strong reasons for a smart healthcare waste disposal system. Conclusively, this study provides a causal relationship model among the intertwined drivers of industry 4.0 and circular economy for developing a smart healthcare waste disposal system enriched with the benefits of circular economy. © 2020 Elsevier Ltd

The CEO is the chief decision-maker with regard to corporate strategy, and extant literature highlights how CEOs’ psychological characteristics inform firms’ risky strategic choices. In this article, we focus instead on how CEOs’ psychological characteristics might lead to risk-mitigation actions. Building on the regulatory focus theory, we investigate the impact of CEO’s prevention focus on the due diligence process in merger and acquisition (M&A) deals. Using a sample of 339 majority-stake completed M&A deals by public firms from the United Kingdom, we find that CEOs having a stronger prevention focus increases the time these firms take to complete their M&A deals. We also find that this effect is mitigated when firms acquire target firms in related industries. © 2021 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.

Literature on online reviews has largely deliberated on factors that influence shoppers' behaviour. Few studies have examined the reasons that motivate shoppers to write online reviews and not much attention has been given to understand the differences among shoppers who provide online reviews. Despite the exponential growth of e-commerce and that of the impact of online reviews, very little is known about the segments of review providers. This paper addresses the gap by developing and profiling shoppers based on their motivations to write online reviews. The objective is to identify profiles of shoppers who intend to write online reviews based on the factors identified as important in the process of writing reviews. Cluster analysis was used to profile the customers in various segments. The findings indicated three distinct segments. The results of this research are pertinent to online and offline retailers to comprehend shoppers' motivations to write online reviews, which would help them to develop marketing strategies as per the profile of each segment. Copyright © 2021, IGI Global.