The pulp and paper industry is critical to global industrial and economic development. Recently, India's pulp and paper industries have been facing severe competitive challenges. The challenges have impaired the environmental performance and resulted in the closure of several operations. Assessment and prediction of the performance of the Indian pulp and paper industry using various parameters is a critical task for researchers. This study proposes a framework for performance assessment and prediction based on Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA), Artificial Neural Networks, and Deep Learning (DL) to assist industry administration and decision-making. We presented a case study based on eight industries to demonstrate the methodology's applicability. This study analyses and predicts industry performance based on sample data observations over 30 years. The result suggests the DEA-DL-based efficiency prediction has an overall MSE of 0.08 compared with the actual efficiency. Furthermore, the efficiency rankings are compared between the three techniques. The results suggest that the integrated DEA-DL method is primarily accurate in most scenarios with the actual values. The findings of this study provide a comprehensive analysis of environmental performance for policymakers. © 2022, The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature.

How employees think and relate to their jobs is a significant area of interest to scholars and practitioners in the organizational change management domain. The current study examines the role of leader–member exchange (LMX) quality on individual resistance to change (RTC) in the context of mergers and acquisitions. Specifically, we put forward a moderated-mediation model wherein LMX quality predicts RTC through possible mediation of organizational dissent under the boundary setting conditions of employee’s perception of politics. Results drawn from a sample of 260 employees from the banking sector in India support our hypotheses. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed. © The Author(s) 2021.

In this paper, an evolutionary game was developed and used to simulate interactions among the key stakeholders associated with the monitoring and control of environmental impact of the projects. The system dynamics simulation of the evolutionary game indicated problems in sustaining desired behaviour from the concerned stakeholders. Based on the observations from the simulation of the evolutionary game, a penalty–reward system was proposed to deal with these problems and to ensure that execution of projects is pro-environmental with minimum monitoring from the senior management. © 2021 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.

Purpose: The behaviour of audience, consuming video entertainment, has changed intensely over the years. Lately, the consumers have increasingly preferred to watch video programs, through video-on-demand services through over-the-top medium. The service is novel and the consumer’s perception of the service quality is not well explored. As extant literature considers service quality as the construct to determine the sustained growth of a service, the present study has attempted to explore the dimensions to measure service quality of video-on-demand services. Design/methodology/approach: The authors conducted qualitative, semi-structured interviews and focus group discussions amongst the user of the video-on-demand service. The qualitative data was content analysed to furnish thematic dimensions. Findings: The study reveals thematic attributes perceived as dimensions to measure service quality of video-on-demand services. Research limitations/implications: Considering the exploratory nature of the study, the themes proposed might seem nascent. Hence, it was the authors’ discretion to stop expanding the respondent sample to avoid data saturation. A quantitative establishment of the service quality dimensions was beyond the scope of the current research and would follow in a different study. Originality/value: The objective of the study is to qualitatively explore service quality dimensions of video-on-demand services. In pursuit of that, the current study explored the consumers’ excerpts, content analysed the data and furnished several themes perceived as service quality dimensions in this context. Such a detailed approach is uncommon in this context. © 2022, Emerald Publishing Limited.

Human-wildlife conflict (HWC) is a major concern for protected area management. Managing HWC around protected areas requires structured and replicable processes to reduce subjectivity and promote adherence to good governance principles. The Cross-Industry Standard Process for Data Mining (CRISP-DM) is a widely-used process model for structured decision-making. This study demonstrates the novel application of CRISP-DM to HWC related decision-making. We apply CRISP-DM and conduct hotspot and temporal (monthly) analysis of HWC data from Ramnagar Forest Division, India. Based on the patterns of crop loss, livestock loss, and human loss, we propose conflict-type and species-specific preventive strategies. A qualitative assessment of the initial outcomes of the ongoing implementation finds the preventive strategies to be effective. We suggest a participatory approach, localization of strategy, and need for data management as opportunities for improvement. © 2022 Newcastle University.

Participative pricing demonstrates the basic idea of allowing customer participation in price-setting process. Nottingham Playhouse, IBIS Singapore, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Wiener Deewan, Girl Talk, 8k, Zest consulting, Radiohead band and many more have successfully implemented pay-what-you-want (PWYW), the most innovative form of participative pricing. Based on the degree of participation, PWYW is the highest form that allows buyers to select any price they want to pay for a product/service, including zero. The present study examines how customers lower their motivation to pay more for products offered under PWYW by morally disengaging themselves from reciprocity concerns. It focuses on one mechanism of moral disengagement—displacement of responsibility and tests the proposed hypotheses in PWYW context. 284 responses were gathered using structured questionnaires at a reputed public university. Data were analysed using partial least-squares structural equation modelling. Findings indicate that customers’ moral disengagement via displacement of responsibility towards reciprocity concerns is negatively associated with willingness-to-pay more (WTPM). Results corroborate the attenuating role of perceived control on the negative association between displacement of responsibility towards reciprocity concerns and WTPM. However, relaxation from monetary commitments does not have a significant moderating effect on the negative relationship between moral disengagement and WTPM. This study is possibly the first to empirically investigate the interplay among individuals’ cognitive mechanisms, moral disengagement from reciprocity concerns and socio-demographic variables under participative pricing. Findings empirically substantiate the theory of moral disengagement, moral self-regulation and social cognitive theory. Practitioners should actively engage customers’ moral self-regulation process and provide more sense of perceived control while designing participative pricing offerings. © 2021, The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature B.V.

Purpose: This study aims to provide a comprehensive overview of asset pricing research and identifies the general research trends in the area. The study also aims to provide future direction to the researchers in the area of asset pricing. Design/methodology/approach: The study uses bibliometric analysis techniques to achieve the stated purpose. The study covers 3,007 articles published in the top 50 finance and economics journals, accessed from the Scopus database for a period of 47 years (1973–2020). After initial searching for “asset pricing” as the main keyword in “title, abstract, keywords”, the database yields 6,583 articles. This number further reduces to 3,007 articles when the search is restricted to research and review articles published in the top 50 peer-reviewed journals. Findings: The tabular and pictorial representation obtained from the analysis exhibit that asset pricing is an extensively researched area; however, a sudden rise in the number of publications (242) observed for 2019 demonstrates a growing interest amongst researchers. Further, affiliation statistics indicate that the volume of research is mainly concentrated in the USA and other developed nations; hence it opens vistas for the exploration of risk-return dynamics in the context of emerging markets. Originality/value: The work presents an exhaustive and comprehensive review along with potential research implications. The present study reconciles various contradictory views of the prior studies under asset pricing such as risk-return trade-off, low-risk anomaly and provides the researchers with potential research gaps. © 2021, Emerald Publishing Limited.

With the upsurge in academia’s interest in understanding the feeling of hatred toward brands in recent years, there is a need to consolidate the relevant literature. Through this study, the authors provide a systematic review of the extant literature on brand hate and shed light upon future research directions. The comprehensive review subsumes a rigorous analysis of peer-reviewed articles using the stimulus-organism-response model to delineate the extant literature. This study also advances a conceptual framework to facilitate the understanding of consumers’ hatred for brands. Finally, the study utilizes theory, context, characteristics, method framework to outline future research agenda and offers valuable implications for practitioners. © 2022 John Wiley & Sons Ltd

Purpose: This study aims to investigate the impact of business strategy on the classification shifting practices of Indian firms. Design/methodology/approach: The study considered cost leadership and differentiation strategy. Two forms of classification shifting, namely, expense misclassification and revenue misclassification have been examined in this study. Panel data regression models are used to analyze the data for this study. Findings: The results show that managers of cost leadership strategy firms are more likely to be engaged in expense misclassification, whereas firms following differentiation strategy are likely to be engaged in revenue misclassification. Subsequent tests of this study suggest that firms following a hybrid strategy (mix of cost leadership and differentiation) prefer revenue misclassification over expense misclassification for reporting inflated operating performance. These results imply that firms prefer the shifting tool based on the ease and need of each shifting strategy. These results are consistent with several robustness measures. Practical implications: The results suggest that investors should understand business strategy before developing insights about the accounting quality of firms. Investors should conduct a comprehensive review of income statement items before using items for portfolio evaluation. Originality/value: To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study to examine the association between business strategy and classification shifting. © 2022, Emerald Publishing Limited.

The ultimate goal of any brand is to get positive responses from customers both emotionally and behaviorally for its marketing activities. This study examined how gamified interactions on health and fitness applications impacted consumers’ purchase intentions and assessed the role of positive emotions and brand engagement in developing this relationship. Data were collected from users of health and fitness apps through a self-administered questionnaire and analyzed using partial least square structural equation modeling technique. The findings suggest a strong indirect relationship between gamification and purchase intention. The study also found positive emotions and brand engagement to be significant sequential mediators of the gamification-purchase intention relationship. © 2022, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd.

This is a case of organizational development at Coastal Gujarat Power Ltd. (CGPL), Mundra in Gujarat, India. CGPL was formed as 100% subsidiary of Tata Power in April 2007. CGPL is India's first Ultra Mega Power Plant of 4000 MW capacity. CGPL has put India into global power map by utilizing the best technology & operating at benchmark levels of lowest cost of power generation. This paper focus on the management and development of employee engagement, which was at an all-time low. This level of engagement has been attributed to a diverse workforce, inadequate leadership communication, ambiguity is people policies, uncertainties on the financial health of the plant, remote location and lack of individual career plan at the time of project demobilization. This case addresses the use of an engagement model and was customized holistically through active participation of employees and all stakeholders to address the issues and enhancing engagement level of employees to 71%. This case reinforces various literature that employee engagement has positive impact on business results. The case provides possibilities and questions regarding what and how an organizational development initiative facilitates the change within the organization despite various challenges. © 2019 International Management Institute, New Delhi.

The cryptocurrency markets are perceived as being dominated by Bitcoin leading the overall system dynamics. Although the previous empirical evidence points towards strong connections among selected cryptocurrencies or, from the other side, weak dependence between Bitcoin and traditional financial assets, a focused study on the dynamics of return and volatility connectedness among a wider range of cryptocurrencies is lacking, and more so, one directed towards the very first actual critical period of the global economy coinciding with relevant crypto-markets. Using data for the 10 most capitalized cryptocurrencies between 1st October 2017 and 5th January 2021, we examine how cryptocurrencies interact and whether they have a clear leader, with a special focus on differences with respect to investment horizons and how the relationship structure evolves in time. We uncover a structural change in the connectedness evolving in 2020 as the market restructures in reaction to the unprecedented monetary injections as a counter to the COVID-19-induced economic standstill. The structural change is shown not only for cryptocurrencies considered separately but also when we jointly examine them with traditional assets. © 2022 Elsevier B.V.

The authors regret not citing Swamy and Dharani (2019). Swamy, Vighneswara, and Munusamy Dharani, (2019), “Investor attention using the Google search volume index–impact on stock returns”, Review of Behavioral Finance 11(1): 56–70. Which is closely related to our article. The authors clarify the importance of this article on Page 2. We insert that “Another contemporary work of Swamy and Dharani (2019) also examines the relationship between the GSVI and stock returns of the Indian firms using smaller sample and OLS regression.” The authors also clarify our contribution beyond Swamy and Dharani (2019) in Line 2 on Page 4 as “The exception is another contemporary work of Swamy and Dharani (2019). While they also investigate the relationship between the GSVI and stock returns of the Indian firms, we provide more rigorous analyses than their study in the following three ways. First, our sample size is almost ten times larger than their sample size. Second, this study employs more sophisticated methodologies than their study. In partiicular, our use of panel quantile regression reveals the heterogeneity of the investor attention effect. We also perform two cointengration tests that are not conducted in their study. Third, we verify the robustness of our model using a trading strategy based on the Fama-French four-factor model.” © 2019 Elsevier B.V.

At the beginning of 2020, the World Health Organization (WHO) identified an unusual coronavirus and declared the associated COVID-19 disease as a global pandemic. We proposed a novel hybrid fuzzy decision-making framework to identify and analyze these transmission factors and conduct proactive decision-making in this context. We identified thirty factors from the extant literature and classified them into six major clusters (climate, hygiene and safety, responsiveness to decision-making, social and demographic, economic, and psychological) with the help of domain experts. We chose the most relevant twenty-five factors using the Fuzzy Delphi Method (FDM) screening from the initial thirty. We computed the weights of those clusters and their constituting factors and ranked them based on their criticality, applying the Fuzzy Analytic Hierarchy Process (FAHP). We found that the top five factors were global travel, delay in travel restriction, close contact, social cohesiveness, and asymptomatic. To evaluate our framework, we chose ten different geographically located cities and analyzed their exposure to COVID-19 pandemic by ranking them based on their vulnerability of transmission using Fuzzy Technique for Order of Preference by Similarity To Ideal Solution (FTOPSIS). Our study contributes to the disciplines of decision analytics and healthcare risk management during a pandemic through these novel findings. Policymakers and healthcare officials will benefit from our study by formulating and improving existing preventive measures to mitigate future global pandemics. Finally, we performed a sequence of sensitivity analyses to check for the robustness and generalizability of our proposed hybrid decision-making framework. © 2022 Elsevier Ltd

Regardless of increased attention in electric vehicles (EV) market expansion, the actual penetration of EVs remains low globally. Almost all major OEMs have announced investment plans to ensure that EVs constitute a major, if not complete, chunk of their product portfolios. On their part, governments worldwide (e.g., China, Poland, India, USA, etc.) have used various policy measures to facilitate EV adoption. In this paper, we study how incentives offered in terms of subsidy and differential taxation schemes could increase the market penetration of EVs. We analyze different models under uniform and differential taxation policies with and without subsidy, using a non-cooperative game-theoretic approach. Our analysis reveals that the government can follow any of the three tax-subsidy mixes that could maximize social welfare, i.e., differential taxation with and without subsidy, and identical tax with a subsidy. Surprisingly, the manufacturer's profit, the government's income, and consumer surplus for these three models are also the same and are better than the other two models depending on the consumer's green sensitivity, i.e., for higher green sensitivity, these three models can provide a win–win outcome. From an environmental perspective, levying tax on gasoline vehicles (GV) without subsidy to the manufacturer minimizes the overall environmental impact. In contrast, levying the same tax for both types of vehicles without subsidy to the manufacturer generates the maximum overall environmental impact. Furthermore, an increase in the unit environmental impact of vehicles attracts higher taxes. We portray that the increase in the cost-difference between EV and GV increases GV demand and is detrimental for EV acceptance. In addition, multifaceted insights are drawn for manufacturers and policymakers to envisage electric mobility. We extend our models and show that our main results hold under the implementation of mandate on EV manufacturers under subsidy and non-subsidy model, and inclusion of hassle cost for consumers due to lack of infrastructure in terms of charging facilities and maintenance. © 2022 Elsevier Ltd

Emerging markets with their imperfections, low liquidity, and dominance of naive retail investors are likely to provide attractive profit-making opportunities for sophisticated and resourceful institutional investors. The institutional investors traditionally had low participation in these markets, but it has grown tremendously during recent years. Therefore, these markets provide a natural experimental setting to understand the implications of their activities on asset pricing and to evaluate their market timing and stock-picking skills. In this study, we compare the performance of foreign institutional investors (FIIs) and domestic institutional investors (DIIs) in one of the important Asian emerging markets. We observe that the institutional investors (FIIs and DIIs) prefer to invest in low-risk (low beta, low book-to-market ratio, and high market capitalization) stocks. The portfolios of the stocks with higher FII holdings have lower returns than those with lower FII holdings, particularly after risk adjustments. Similarly, the portfolio of the stocks bought in a quarter by FIIs offers inferior returns in the next quarter compared to the portfolio of the stocks sold by them. Institutional investors are momentum traders. Their trading activities are negatively autocorrelated, indicating short-termism and cyclicality in their trading behavior. We do not observe any superior market-timing and security picking skills among them. © 2022 Elsevier Inc.

Employing asset-pricing models over the period 2012 to 2017, this study examines whether a search attention index (SAI) explains the variation in the weekly excess return of stocks. The study finds that the estimated abnormal return of a portfolio based on search intensity is significantly high for stocks with higher search intensity and low for stocks with lower search intensity. Further, the study observes that, when the SAI is high, the excess returns are high for stocks with a high value, high volatility, and high sensitivity. Interestingly, the study documents that in the Indian market investor attention is irrelevant for stocks with extremely high risk. This study finds that the SAI in India explains the variation in the excess return of stocks as well as the market, size, value, and momentum factors. © 2021 The Authors

In this paper, we aim to investigate the influence of the Covid-19 on the behavior of the S&P 1200 Shariah and non-Shariah sectoral indices over the period from 1st October 2010 to 29th October 2020. We contribute to the global literature by examining the financial impact of the Covid-19 on the Shariah and non-Shariah sectoral indices. We find that the S&P 1200 Shariah Communication, consumer staples, financials, healthcare, industrials, IT, materials, and utility sectors earn higher average returns than their counterpart sectoral indices during the Covid-19 period. The study reports that on average, the volatility of the Shariah indices is less than their counterpart indices. Moreover, we further document that on average the S&P Shariah sectoral indices offer a higher return with low risk even during the Covid-19 global pandemic. We suggest that ethical investments are the best alternatives to retail, institutional, and foreign investors. © 2021 Elsevier B.V.

The present study examines the relationship between Indian economic policy uncertainty (IEPU) and the different sector volatilities (SVs) of the Indian economy over the period 2006–2021. The relationship is studied using a multi-scale correlation framework, combining wavelet coherence analysis with the Granger causality test. The findings indicate a stronger relationship between the IEPU and SV for all sectors during COVID-19, primarily in the medium term. While IEPU led to SV during the global financial crisis (GFC), the SVs led to the IEPU during the COVID-19. However, the Granger causality test provides evidence that, in the long term, the SVs cause the IEPU while the IEPU leads to SV in the short term. The IT sector is crucial as its volatility leads to IEPU across all scales. These results have substantial implications for policymakers and portfolio managers. JEL Codes: G10, G17, G32 © 2022 Institute of Financial Management and Research.

Purpose: While prior research has theorized the relevance of adaptive capability (AC) to firm performance, skepticism remains regarding boundary conditions of the AC – performance relationship. This study aims to attempt to understand the intervening effect of entrepreneurial orientation (EO) impacting strategic business unit (SBU) performance. The authors further explore the moderating influence of the success trap on the AC – EO relationship. Design/methodology/approach: Data from a sample of 293 SBU heads in an Indian information technology (IT) firm is analyzed using ordinary least squares regression. The authors performed a mediation and moderation test on the data using the Hayes PROCESS SPSS macro. Specifically, this study used Model 4 and Model 7 of the PROCESS macro to test the mediation and moderated–mediation models. Findings: The results reveal that EO positively mediates the relationship between AC and SBU performance and the success trap negatively moderates the AC – EO relationship. Research limitations/implications: The paper refers to empirical research of strategic business units of an IT services firm in India. Further research in other cultures and industry settings is required to generalize the findings. Practical implications: The findings suggest that to improve performance, managers in entrepreneurial software firms should develop an adaptive and innovative culture to avoid success traps. Originality/value: The study establishes the crucial role of a firm’s AC as the driver of improved performance in a turbulent environment. This study complements the literature concerning the AC-performance relationship with the introduction of EO as mediating variable. © 2021, Emerald Publishing Limited.