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Assessing the impact of big data analytics on decision-making processes, forecasting, and performance of a firmThere are various kinds of applications of BDA in the firms. Not many studies are there which deal with the impact of BDA towards issues like forecasting, decision-making, as well as performance of the firms simultaneously. So, there exists a gap in the research. In such a background, this study aims at examining the impacts of BDA on the process of decision-making, forecasting, as well as firm performance. Using resource-based view (RBV) as well as dynamic capability view (DCV) and related research studies, a research model was proposed conceptually. This conceptual model was validated taking help of PLS-SEM approach considering 366 respondents from Indian firms. This study has highlighted that smart decision making and accurate forecasting process can be achieved by using BDA. This research has demonstrated that there is a considerable influence of adoption of BDA on decision making process, forecasting process, as well as overall firm performance. However, the present study suffers from the fact that the study results depend on the cross-sectional data which could invite defects of causality and endogeneity bias. The present research work also found that there is no impact of different control variables on the firm's performance.
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Which product description phrases affect sales forecasting? An explainable AI framework by integrating WaveNet neural network models with multiple regressionThe rapid rise of many e-commerce platforms for individual consumers has generated a large amount of text-based data, and thus researchers have begun to experiment with text mining techniques to extract information from the large amount of textual data to assist in sales forecasting. The existing literature focuses textual data on product reviews; however, consumer reviews are not something that companies can directly control, here we argue that textual product descriptions are also important determinants of consumer choice. We construct an artificial intelligence (AI) framework that combines text mining, WaveNet neural networks, multiple regression, and SHAP model to explain the impact of product descriptions on sales forecasting. Using data from nearly 200,000 sales records obtained from a cross-border e-commerce firm, an empirical study showed that the product description presented to customers can influence sales forecasting, and about 44% of the key phrases greatly affect sales forecasting results, the sales forecasting models that added key product description phrases had improved forecasting accuracy. This paper provides explainable results of sales forecasting, which can provide guidance for firms to design product descriptions with reference to the market demand reflected by these phrases, and adding these phrases to product descriptions can help win more customers.
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Perfection, hybridity or shutting up? A cross-country study of how language ideologies shape participation in international businessEmployees’ participation in professional international business (IB) communication has important consequences for knowledge transfer and processing, a crucial function for multinational enterprises (MNEs). Research suggests that participation is shaped by language, but prior research has focused on firm-internal language dynamics, meaning that less is known about the influence of external context. We help redress this balance by drawing on the sociolinguistic concept of “language ideologies”. Language ideologies, or shared sets of beliefs about language(s) amongst social groups, are societal-level phenomena that employees bring with them to work. As such, they are part of the external social, political and historical context of IB activities. Our analysis of 82 interviews in three countries indicates that some language ideologies block participation and create friction, while others support participation. Implications for the conceptual understanding of language in IB and the management of internationally active firms are discussed.
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The impacts of innovation and trade openness on bank market power: the proposal of a minimum distance cost function approach and a causal structure analysisThis study estimates output market power in the Chinese banking industry using the multi-output Lerner index. We propose a minimum distance cost function approach, which allows us to determine not only the level of market power but also the non-profit maximizers and efficiency level of Chinese banks. Following the first-stage analysis, we employ the generalized method of moment system estimator to evaluate the impacts of bank innovation and trade openness on market power in a multi-output banking context. In particular, we innovatively propose a causal structure analysis based on Wang and Blei (2019) to validate and verify the robustness of our results. We also assess this relationship for different types of bank ownership in China. The findings suggest that Chinese banks exhibit high market power in loans. Furthermore, the results show that bank innovation and trade openness have a significant negative impact on market power in loans, but a significant positive impact on market power in securities. The results also indicate a significantly negative impact of trade openness on overall market power. We find that higher levels of innovation among state-owned and joint-stock commercial banks improve the overall level of market power. The results suggest that, for all bank ownership types, trade openness has a significant negative impact on market power in loans but a significant positive impact on market power in securities. The impact on the overall level of market power is consistently significant and negative.
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Board diversity and corporate propensity to R&D spendingDrawing on collective contributions and group performance perspectives, this paper examines the role of board diversity in firms’ R&D investment decisions. Building on a fault-line argument about a team’s demographic attributes, this study also decomposes the impact of demographic and cognitive diversity on R&D spending. The study sample contains UK data of non-financial companies covering the period between 2005 and 2018. We employ panel data analysis techniques and control for potential endogeneity issues through the application of the two-step system Generalised Method of Moments (GMM) estimations. The findings demonstrate a positive and significant relationship between board diversity and level of corporate R&D spending. The findings also show cognitive diversity as significantly positively associated with corporate R&D investments. Demographic diversity, however, has an insignificant relationship with corporate spending on R&D. The results further show that demographic diversity negatively moderates the relationship between cognitive diversity and spending on R&D. Our main findings document that the board’s attributes as a group significantly influence decisions of strategic importance such as, investment in R&D projects. The findings on sub-dimensions of board diversity imply that as compared to demographic diversity, functional/cognitive diversity is more relevant to strategic decisions and related outcomes. The study has practical implications for shareholders in documenting the importance of board diversity, and policy implications for regulators in highlighting the separate roles of behavioural and cognitive diversity in shaping firms’ strategic investment decisions.
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How can value co-creation be integrated into a customer experience evaluation?With the arrival of the service economy, businesses across different sectors have to rely increasingly on service design, with its focus on the viewpoints of customers and their experiences. Existing frameworks for evaluating customer experience tend to neglect the connection between customer experience and value co-creation, which is critical for enhancing the performance of service design. The aim of this conceptual paper is, therefore, to develop a customer experience evaluation framework that is coherently integrated with the value co-creation construct. It is achieved by intersecting the most relevant insights from prior approaches to evaluating customer experiences with a theoretical interpretation of service value as value in the experience that is always co-created and uniquely determined by the customer's personal lived and imagined experiences. The proposed framework is original in its theorizing of the evaluation process as a transformation from a customer experience evaluation to a synchronized evaluation of value in the experience and value co-creation throughout and beyond the service process. The framework proposes to utilize it in both major service redesign and on-the-spot service improvements, which are extremely relevant to businesses operating in highly competitive environments. The proposed framework is designed to guide future empirical evaluations, accommodate new theoretical extensions, and inform practical applications to design service offerings as unique and preferred experiences for customers.
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A multi-objective sustainable financial portfolio selection approach under an intuitionistic fuzzy frameworkIn recent decades, sustainable investing has caught on with investors, and it has now become the norm. In the age of start-ups, with scant information on the sustainability aspects of an asset, it becomes harder to pursue sustainable investing. To this end, this paper proposes a sustainable financial portfolio selection approach in an intuitionistic fuzzy framework. We present a comprehensive three-stage methodology in which the assets under consideration are ethically screened in Stage-I. Stage-II is concerned with cal- culating the sustainability scores, based on various social, environmental, and economic (SEE) criteria and an evaluation of the return and risk of the ethical assets. Intuitionistic fuzzy set theory is used to gauge the linguistic assessment of the assets on several SEE criteria from multiple decision-makers. A novel intuitionistic fuzzy multi-criteria group decision-making technique is applied to calculate the sustainability score of each asset. Finally, in Stage-III, an intuitionistic fuzzy multi-objective financial portfolio selection model is developed with maximization of the satisfaction degrees of the sustainabil- ity score, return, and risk of the portfolio, subject to several constraints. The ε-constraint method is used to solve this model, which yields various efficient, sustainable financial portfolios. Subsequently, investors can choose the portfolio best suited to their preferences from this pool of efficient, sustainable financial portfolios. A detailed empirical illustration and a comparison with existing works are given to substantiate and validate the proposed approach.
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Owner-managers failure experience and business model innovations in B2B firms: The roles of coopetition, managerial persistence, and financial resource slackThis study proposes and tests a model of how and when previous failure experience can impact on subsequent business model innovation of business-to-business (B2B) SMEs. Analysis of survey data from a sample of 182 B2B SMEs in Ghana indicates that failure experience is positively related to business model innovation – and that coopetition capability mediates this failure experience. Further analysis of boundary condition effects reveals that high levels of financial resource slack strengthen the positive relationship between coopetition and business model innovation, while the level of managerial persistence has no effect on failure experience and coopetition relationship. We discuss the theoretical and managerial implications of these findings.
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Non-Governmental Organizations’ approaches to women’s empowerment amid the COVID-19 Pandemic: Towards decolonizing development praxis in northern GhanaThis article examines local non-governmental organizations (LNGOs) approaches to women's empowerment amid crisis and the implications for decolonizing women's empowerment praxis. The article draws on lessons from the Covid-19 pandemic and decolonial critique of development praxis to analyse LNGOs approach to women's empowerment. The study relied on snowballing to select twenty-six LNGOs operating in northern Ghana for in-depth interviews. Our study found that LNGOs deploy local and international frameworks on women's rights and combine these with indigenous knowledge principles and economic empowerment. Yet there are tensions between negotiating culturally appropriate approaches and meeting the interests of philanthro-capitalist donor agencies. The LNGOs are dependent on Western donors for financial resources and have become more vulnerable due to Covid-19 pandemic and its aftermath as funding for women's empowerment work continues to dwindle. LNGOs have modified their interventions to address specific needs of beneficiaries arising from the consequences of the crises. This study enriches understandings of the specific vulnerabilities of LNGOs in northern Ghana, resource-scarce and semi-arid settings across the global South. For women's empowerment to achieve meaningful results, especially during and after crisis, activism needs to be centred on indigenous knowledge. This is central to building the resilience of LNGOs and women beneficiaries to effectively position themselves to absorb the shocks that attend crisis and to cope more effectively with it.
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COVID-19 crisis and the efficiency of Indian banks: Have they weathered the storm?The purpose of this study is to determine whether Indian banks were able to weather the COVID-19 storm. We estimate banks’ deposits-generating and operating efficiencies using a two-stage directional distance function-based network data envelopment analysis (DDF- NDEA) approach and seek to capture the immediate impact of COVID-19 on these efficiency measures by comparing their magnitudes in the pre-pandemic (2014/15-2019/20), just 1-year prior to the pandemic (2019/20), and during the pandemic year (2020/21) periods. The study looks at whether the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic was uniform across ownership types and size classes. The empirical findings suggest that the Indian banking system was resilient and withstood the immediate impact of the COVID-19 pandemic. During the study period, however, the large and medium-sized banks experienced some effi ciency losses. By and large, regardless of bank group, banks have shown resilience to the shock of the global health pandemic and improvements in efficiency.
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Evolution of the rare earth trade network: from the perspective of dependency and competitionAs a global strategic reserve resource, rare earth has been widely used in important industries, such as military equipment and biomedicine. However, through existing analyses based on the total volume of rare earth trade, the competition and dependency behind the trade cannot be revealed. In this paper, based on the principle of trade preference and import similarity, we construct dependency and competition networks and use complex network analysis to study the evolution of the global rare earth trade network from 2002 to 2018. The main conclusions are as follows: the global rare earth trade follows the Pareto principle, and the trade network shows a scale-free distribution. China has become the largest country in both import and export of rare earth trade in the world since 2017. In the dependency network, China has become the most dependent country since 2006. The result of community division shows that China has separated from the American community and formed new communities with the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) countries. The United States of America has formed a super-strong community with European and Asian countries. In the competition network, the distribution of competition intensity follows a scale-free distribution. Most countries are faced with low-intensity competition, but competing countries are relatively numerous. The competition related to China has increased significantly. The competition source of the United States of America has shifted from Mexico to China. China, the USA, and Japan have been the cores of the competition network.
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The AU and Issues of Institutional Capacity and EnforcementIn light of the emerging African Union (AU) legal order, this chapter examines AU’s institutions and courts to situate AU law in the wider context of AU’s enforcement mechanisms. In the nearly two decades of the operational phase of the AU, several institutions and courts have arguably ensured enforcements of its laws, policies, and decisions. Added to its judicial, human rights, and legal organs, the African Court of Human Rights has been at the disposal of the AU in the fight against human rights abuses and implementation of regional and international instruments in environmental and criminal law matters. What could potentially be the impact of these institutions on AU law? Also, will the evolving AU law require a separate enforcement mechanism, or could it rely on pre-existing institutions and courts? These issues become necessary in view of the AU’s commitment to implement Aspiration 3 of Agenda 2063, which amongst other things, envisions respect for human rights, justice, and the rule of law within the region. The chapter argues that the challenges of weak institutions, corruption, and internal conflicts are endemic within the continent. Therefore, it takes the view that a system of normative, cultural, and cognitive institutional reforms and transformation will be valuable.
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Application of the People, Context, Deal and Opportunity (PCDO) for Entrepreneurship Advancement in AfricaThis chapter proposes the application of the people, context, deal and opportunities (PCDO) model to support entrepreneurship advancement in Africa. This proposal recognises patterns of conflicts and crises fuelled by both internal and external forces in some African countries, and that this pattern inhibits entrepreneurship advancement. However, undaunted by the seemingly unfavourable conditions, in 2013, African leaders set Africa on a 50-year journey towards an integrated, peaceful, progressive and prosperous Africa of the future in what is known as Agenda 2063. The proposal is anchored by Aspirations 4 and 6 of Agenda 2063, which propose that people, peaceful and secured environment are necessary for the achievement of the ‘Africa we want’, which arguably, will in turn promote entrepreneurship advancement in Africa. The chapter argues that reforms in the legal and institutional framework of the Africa Union (AU) should consider the application of the PCDO model to maximise opportunities for entrepreneurship development in Africa.
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Revitalizing Sustainable Reshoring Brands: Understanding the Customer Perspective on the Roles of Motivation Attributions and the Institutionalization ProcessReshoring can be theorized as a brand revitalizing process for fostering companies’ ability to create value in the home country. The question of how to maintain sustainable reshoring implementation strategies by developing favorable brand responses is an important but underexplored field. Given that reshoring brand meanings are socially constructed and causally inferenced by consumers, we advocate that a reshoring brand revitalization should begin by understanding what constitutes customers’ attributions to reshoring motives. We identify values-driven, stakeholder-driven, and strategic-driven attributions as determinants of the sense of the institutionalization process (brand authenticity, legitimacy, and sustainability). These institutional logics comprise drivers that influence brand love and brand advocacy. We conduct an empirical study (n=1043) in China. The findings indicate that institutionalized reshoring branding activity is significantly influenced by customers’ attributions to underlying reshoring decisions. Reshoring brands that achieve institutional recognition are more likely to generate brand love and advocacy. In addition, our study provides empirical evidence that nostalgia (1) strengthens the influences of stakeholder-driven attributions on brand authenticity and sustainability, (2) inhibits the influence of values-driven attributions on brand authenticity, and (3) inhibits the influence of strategic-driven attributions on brand authenticity, legitimacy, and sustainability. Reshoring brand managers should consider these connections when designing their reshoring implementation strategies in the home country.
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Navigating COVID-19: Unraveling Supply Chain Disruptions through Best-Worst Method and Fuzzy TOPSISPurpose - The COVID-19 pandemic has caused significant disruptions to global supply chains (SCs), affecting the production, distribution, and transportation of goods and ser- vices. To mitigate these disruptions, it is essential to identify the barriers that have im- peded the seamless operation of SCs. This study identifies these barriers and assesses their impact on supply chain network (SCN). Design/methodology/approach - To determine the relative importance of different bar- riers and rank the affected industries, a hybrid approach was employed, combining the best-worst method (BWM) and the technique for order preference by similarity to an ideal solution (TOPSIS). To accommodate the inherent uncertainties associated with the pan- demic, a triangular fuzzy TOPSIS was used to represent the linguistic variable ratings provided by decision-makers. Findings - The study found that the airlines and hospitality industry was the most affected by the barriers, accounting for 46% of the total, followed by the healthcare industry (23%), the manufacturing industry (19%), and finally the consumer and retail industry (17%). Research limitation/implications - This study is limited to the four critical industries and nine identified barriers. Other industries and barriers may have different weights and rankings. Nevertheless, the findings offer valuable insights for decision-makers in SC management, aiding them in mitigating the impact of COVID-19 on their operations and enhancing their resilience against future disruptions. Originality/value - This study enhances our understanding of COVID-19’s impact on SCN and provides a framework for assessing disruptions using multi-criteria decision-making processes. The hybrid approach of BWM and TOPSIS in a fuzzy environment is unique and offers potential applicability in various evaluation contexts.
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The effect of mob justice on the rule of law and democratisation in Africa: a case study of GhanaThe emergence of globalisation has promoted human rights education, the media and scholarly works have drawn attention to the issue of the rule of law and mob justice activities constantly recurring in developing countries. The paper examines the effects of mob justice on the rule of law and democratisation in Africa using Ghana as a case study. The paper is of the view that mob justice has both negative and positive effects on the rule of law and democratisation in Ghana. This is because the legal and criminal justice systems in some societies are seen by citizens as illegitimate as they fail to punish suspected criminals appropriately; thus, negatively destroying democracy and the image of the State. Positively, mob justice serves as a wake-up call for the State to take its responsibility to protect the rights of its citizens seriously. The paper draws on international human rights law in the light of international legal instruments, such as the UDHR, ICCPR, and African Charter, as well as the 1992 Constitution of Ghana and employs mainly the Tylerian procedural justice perspective, as well as Liberal democratic theory. It uses theoretical, critically analytical and qualitative empirical evidence (based on semi-structured interviews from purposive sampling of 15 expert opinions and relevant organisations with a keen interest in the subject matter) for the analysis.
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International Law and Sustainable Development: Grounds for Cancellation of Africa DebtsAs of April 2020, the IMF categorised seven African countries as being in debt distress, whilst identifying twelve more that were at high risk of becoming distress. It is no longer a secret that considered immutable and eternally binding, debt by the global south (i.e., poor developing African countries) has become a tool for imperial powers in the post-colonial world to enforce and perpetuate their dominance over the global south. This is despite serious global crises that emerge from, and/or were caused by the rich countries of the global north; specifically, the negative effects of the global financial crisis of 2008, devastating impact of Covid-19 pandemic, and impact of Russia-Ukraine war on the African economies and contribution to these debt vulnerabilities. Yet, the rich countries of the global north have insisted on these poor countries to continue financing their debts. The paper considers how African countries could legally cancel the repayment of the debts by relying on the principles of international law (such as pacta sunt servanda, limit to legal obligation to pay, force majeure, State of Necessity or rebus sic stantibus) and States’ declarations to commitment to sustainable development agenda (such as the European Union’s response to the adoption of the 2030 Agenda featured in its Commission’s 2016 Communication) could be used as justifying grounds for cancellation of Africa debts. The paper draws on international law and development in the light of dependency and postcolonial theories and employs the human rights-based approach, interdisciplinary and critical-analytical perspective and using qualitative empirical evidence from rich countries and institutions of the global north and poor developing countries of the global south for analysis.
