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Residential owned solar panels mounted on roof-tops generated 1.4% of the U.S. electricity supply in 2022. Utilities compensate residential customers using a net metering system by which each kilowatt-hour generated by the customer reduces the customer's bill by the amount the utility charges for one kilowatt. Despite the small impact of roof-top solar on the total market, in 2022, thirty-two states conducted ninety-four proceedings investigating whether to change the net metering system. In these proceedings, utilities advocated changing the rates to discourage residential investment in solar panels. Utilities argue that net metering provides a subsidy to solar customers because the rate the utility pays is greater than the avoided cost of energy. That excess payment allows solar customers to avoid paying for the distribution network. The cost of the distribution network is shifted to non-solar customers. This article will evaluate these claims. It will show that if the social cost of carbon were in the calculation, it would generate a Kapp cost shift from solar customers to non-solar customers. The size of the Kapp cost shift is greater than the cost of distribution networks, reversing any private cost shift that utilities have estimated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article offers information on a special issue of Brontë Studies that focuses on the Brontës and material culture, inspired by the exhibition "Defying Expectations: Inside Charlotte Brontë's Wardrobe." It invites articles that explore various aspects of material culture related to the Brontës, including women as consumers, the Victorian home, archiving, representation of objects in literature, and items owned by the Brontës.

Disposable plastic packaging has been conceptualised as a market device that has effects on the functioning of economic markets. It is particularly influential in food retail environments but also has significant environmental consequences. Consumers are aware of these issues, and this paper addresses their questions and objections to the packaging market device for fresh food. Drawing on empirical insights from 28 interviews and 25 completed research diaries conducted as part of the 'Reducing plastic packaging and food waste through product innovation simulation' project, these contestations are explored in a number of ways. Firstly, it explores how such objections become possible and the role of unintended consequences of marketing arrangements. Secondly, conflicting ontologies of freshness are examined, as they also create the potential for objections. Thirdly, the paper engages with the role of responsibility, looking at how municipal recycling systems and packaging design enable contestations. Exploring these contestations contributes to an understanding of how we can address non-market effects of market devices, once they have left the physical spaces associated with market activity and moved into other spheres of activity. It also holds several contributions for debates concerning consumer engagement and acceptance of plastic packaging and plastics policy discourses more broadly. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses a method for determining the optimal characteristics for a machine which fabricates two-dimensional products. The machine is a high-speed, high-cost, continuous processing facility. The end products of this continuous operation, called intermediate inventory, are stored and then used as input for a low-speed, low-cost, job-shop operation which finishes them to customers' dimensional specifications.
The study is based on a specific problem in the paper industry but problems of the same basic type are encountered in the manufacture of special products of steel, aluminium, plastics, textiles and so forth. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the recent years, there has been a steady increase in the number of customers in luxury market. Such a substantial rise has gained much attention from both academics and industry experts seeking to better understand the meanings and factors involved in luxury consumption. Therefore, this special section aims to enrich and update the existing body of knowledge on luxury product and brand purchasing behaviour. We have encouraged the contributors to forward both conceptual and empirical papers reflecting current concerns in the field of luxury shopping, more specifically in luxury product and brand purchasing behaviour. In the end, this special section includes three papers on external store environment, meaning of luxury, and luxury brand fashion. Certainly, additional references are necessary for better understanding the meaning and contents of luxury consumption and main drivers behind it. The special section introduces the reader to some of these important references but also notes that there is still avenue for more studies in the future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Humanitarian logics enable the unfree labour of racialized capitalism by making visible the beneficence of those who profit. Understanding the structure of feelings undergirding these imaginaries will help us to recognize why capitalism feels so right. This paper theorizes from the case of the Made in Prison company selling luxury clothing under the brand, Carcel, to explain how linking consumption with 'helping' remakes exploitation into gendered solidarity. Combining ethnography in Peru, political economy and narrative analysis, the paper explores how prison-produced fashion is made 'ethical' through intimization of the relationship between feminine labourers and their 'sister' consumers. The paper does two things: (1) it charts how the imaginary of commodifying compassion works through three movements around the company, products and workers of Carcel and (2) it argues that love and sisterly solidarity connect the company, workers and products in ways that are then commodified for profit. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Activities and pursuits in leisure worlds often occur within subcultural contexts. Subcultural studies, however, have often premised the formation and existence of subcultures on the local. Wider local cultures have often been thought to have an impact on these subcultures. Even where subcultures have been 'imported' into a particular locality from another local setting, the focus has often been on how the subculture has been 'localized' by the 'importing' locality. This study offers an alternative perspective on leisure subcultures, with reference to the advent of the Internet as a new Information and Communication Technology (ICT). The Internet will be shown here to allow subcultural identities to be made flexible, where various local subcultural identities are able to fuse into a global subcultural identity, or retain their local flavours, as the situation permits. The case study of hip-hop music consumers in Singapore and their involvement in virtual communities on the Internet will be used to show the fluidity in identity formation and maintenance brought about by this new ICT. It will be shown here that local cultures and the globalized hip-hop culture which is associated with African American culture is evoked variably according to the specifics of the interactions of these hip-hop consumers in virtual communities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Customers are looking for suppliers to deliver complex systems at faster rates, targeting three year cycle. This timeframe is challenging for low Technology Readiness Level (TRL) developments, increasing requirements engineering effort, leaving engineers little time and scope for innovation. Test and Evaluation (T&E) activities are often performed in Australia near the end of the process diminishing their value , compensating for a lack of modelling and simulation in early stages. Waterfall Project Management dominates where capability is hardware focused, leading to overruns and deliver capability that falls short of customer expectations in some areas. The Agile approach has been successfully used in software-focused developments. Project managers have been slow to adopt Agile for developments in areas like Defence where the safety is hardware dominant claiming the Agile process lacks necessary governance , increasing risk in the development. This paper examines the extant developmental process in a Defence context and proposes a Minimal Viable Product (MVP)-based framework using Agile to accelerate the development and mitigate risk escalation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While prior research has highlighted the use of product purchases to build one's self-confidence or has highlighted the ability of a celebrity endorsement to increase consumers' confidence in their purchase of the product or the quality of the endorsed product, work that delineates the specific types of confidence that celebrity endorsement may provide consumers is scant. Leveraging the meaning transfer theory, this paper employs qualitative research design and draws on grounded theory methodology to examine consumers' use of celebrity meanings through the consumption of celebrity-endorsed products to build confidence. The paper provides new insight into consumers' use of celebrity meanings in constructing the self. Three forms of celebrity-evoked self-confidence emerged: validation, performance ability, and social insurance. While the first two are used to strengthen self-confidence, the third confidence is a form of feeling protected or safe. These findings add novel insight into consumers' uses of celebrity-endorsed products. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Retailers have been identified as important actors in driving sustainable change, due to their vital role in connecting production and consumption. In this paper, we explore what retailers do to enable consumers to act more sustainable. Whereas there is ample research focusing either on sustainability on the production and sourcing side or on sustainable consumer behaviors, we bridge the two by focusing specifically on consumer-facing sustainability work in grocery retail organizations. Through workshops, interviews, and secondary data, we find a clear ambition among retailers to help consumers behave sustainably. However, our findings also point to several barriers to sustainability work within the organization. The paper concludes by outlining a model of different sustainability ambition-action gaps within retail organizations and possible solutions for closing them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Rapport and rapport-building are fundamental building blocks of the sales process. As part of the approach in personal selling, as well as a relationship-building mechanism, rapport allows salespeople to facilitate customer engagement. This paper reviews and synthesizes articles over four decades of research on rapport and rapport-building within buyer-seller relationships to provide insight into the gaps in the current literature and provide an overarching conceptual model of where rapport research stands. This analysis of the research from theoretical and methodological perspectives identifies three major themes in the existing literature and offers five gaps where the literature should grow going forward. Building on these gaps, we identify an agenda for future research that extends knowledge in this domain, particularly as salespeople grapple with changing digital communications and relationship-building in virtual spaces with customers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In technology-infused frontline service encounters, human-based service represents a high degree of uncertainty. However, understanding how technology can meet customer demands without undermining the importance of human interaction is crucial for retailers to remain competitive. However, empirical evidence comparing different types of service encounters (technology-facilitated vs. technology-assisted vs. technology-free) is lacking. Building on existing approaches to technology-enabled services, this study aims to extend the understanding of the optimal type of technology infusion and human interaction in the context of customer trust and willingness to pay. Drawing on social interaction theory, emphasizing that technology can influence the nature and quality of interactions between customers and frontline employees, this paper empirically examines different types of service encounters. A quasi-experimental online study (N = 944) was conducted.General results show that technology infusion within the service encounter has a negative impact on customers' trust in the frontline employee, but a positive impact on customers' willingness to pay. Furthermore, a mediating influence of customers' perceptions of the competence of frontline employees can be demonstrated. The results show that customers place more value on a technology-facilitated encounter than on a technology-assisted service. Based on the findings, this paper derives implications for retail managers at various levels. Since the customer's perception of the competence of front-line employees in using a technology is of high relevance to the customer, the retailer should pay more attention to training employees in the use of these technologies in their interactions with customers because of the perception of service competence and other relationship-building criteria such as trust. In addition, the competent use of these technologies and the customer's perception of them can also affect the customer's willingness to pay and thus the success of the business. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In March 2020, the Reserve Bank of India's guidelines on Payment Aggregators and Payment Gateways prohibited merchants from storing data on cards used by customers. This paper argues that such a prohibition on card data storage impacts upon the ease of transactions for consumers, and effectively tilts consumer preference towards other payment instruments. This runs the risk of technological choices in the industry being made or substantially shaped by the regulator. The documents released lack a costbenefit analysis of this prohibition and do not demonstrate that the chosen intervention is the best one. This raises concerns in the light of emerging Indian jurisprudence on the standards of regulatory governance to be met by statutory regulatory agencies. We show alternative approaches to address concerns relating to breaches of card information stored by consumers on the internet. These include better security standards and liability frameworks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Changing customer requirements and turbulent markets require suitably adapted capabilities to proactively cope with rapid changes. Agile manufacturing emerged in the late 1990s as a competitive concept to respond to these business challenges. While several seminal research works address agility in terms of concept definition, drivers and strategic capabilities, there is a lack of implementation frameworks of agile manufacturing. The current paper is concerned with the question of how to improve the agility of manufacturing companies. To address this question, a framework is iteratively developed with the aim of supporting decision makers in planning and implementing agility improvement projects. To this end, Design Science Research (DSR) methodology is used in conjunction with CIMO-logic (Context, Intervention, Mechanism, Outcome). The iterative development of the framework relies heavily on insights from case studies and from practitioners in the broad manufacturing sector. The paper provides evidence of the validity of the framework as well as outlining further research perspectives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While recent technological advancements have enabled improved performance in warehouse operations, companies still struggle with eliminating errors such as incorrect/damaged items or the wrong quantity sent to customers. Such errors result in inefficient resource use, costly returns handling, and customer dissatisfaction. Despite the importance of errors, current knowledge of the underlying causes is limited. This paper addresses the gap by investigating error causes through a relatively new technology - intelligent video analysis (IVA), an additional tool for analysing warehouse operations. A multiple case study involving companies that have implemented IVA in their outbound warehouse operations (i.e. order picking, packing, and sorting) was conducted. This study is the first to investigate implementations of IVA, offering novel empirical insights into error root causes. It shows how many errors reported by customers are actually not made by humans in outbound warehouse operations but are attributable to faulty customer claims, inbound warehouse operation errors, and malfunctioning technology. This study offers interesting insights into the interaction of various technical, organisational, and human factors, thereby contributing to the literature on sociotechnical systems and the human-centric Industry 5.0. Finally, the study outlines a way forward for managers to address and further reduce errors occurring in warehouse operations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Pick-Up Points (PUPs) represent an alternative delivery option for online purchases. Parcels are delivered at a reduced cost to PUPs and wait until being picked up by customers or returned to the original warehouse if their sojourn time is over. When the chosen PUP is overloaded, the parcel may be refused and delivered to the next available PUP on the carrier tour. This paper presents and compares forecasting approaches for the load of a PUP to help PUP management companies balance delivery flows and reduce PUP overload. The parcel life-cycle has been taken into account in the forecasting process via models of the flow of parcel orders, the parcel delivery delays, and the pick-up process. Model-driven and data-driven approaches are compared in terms of load-prediction accuracy. For the considered example, the best approach (which makes use of the relationship of the load with the delivery and pick-up processes) is able to predict the load up to 4 days ahead with mean absolute errors ranging from 3.16 parcels (1 day ahead) to 8.51 parcels (4 days ahead) for a PUP with an average load of 45 parcels. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is born of the joy and pain of institutional life. It responds to recent work by Craig Thompson and is a response to an invitation to participate from the Editor of the JMM (Mark Tadajewski). It seeks to take seriously the role of consumer research and consumption within society. It seeks to tell 'better stories' about the past, present and what it sees as a reimagined future for consumer research. To do so, it revisits some of the canonical works of consumer research, such exemplary work it suggests are worthy of revisiting and critiquing if we are to chart a rejuvenated form of consumer research that takes seriously our contemporary predicament and is more critical and incisive in its intent. With renewed purpose it takes on board the insights around Bauman's notion of 'liquid times', offers a range of opportunities, possibilities and dangers around the conflicted consumer self and puts forward an ABC of critical consumer research, where notions of affect, breakdown, contradiction are taken seriously for their theoretical and practical insights. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Within urban studies, the emerging post-network approach explores infrastructure transitions towards hybrid mixing of grid and off-grid technologies, resources, services, and actors. However, scholarship addressing off-grid transitions in the global south focuses almost exclusively on the poor as non-networked infrastructure consumers. This paper adopts a landscape perspective to consider broader processes of technological, institutional and behavioural change. Using a case study of Day Zero in Cape Town (South Africa), the paper draws on existing studies to demonstrate how the off-grid infrastructure transitions of non-poor households and businesses have potentially catastrophic (but largely ignored) consequences for cities in terms of environmental sustainability, urban governance and citizenship, network quality, and municipal finance. The paper concludes that broadening the landscape of infrastructure analysis, to consider the off-grid infrastructure transitions of the non-poor in the global south, is crucial to address contemporary global challenges. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The popularity of the Internet of Things (IoT) devices has been gaining interest amongst consumers. The rise of consumers benefiting from IoT devices has increased the threat of cyber-attacks. The safety, security, and privacy of consumers can be negatively affected if vulnerabilities of IoT devices are exploited. Therefore, there is a need of understanding what within IoT devices is necessary to secure. Further, the implementation of necessary and important requirements is needed to ensure protection against cyber-attacks on IoT devices. The recently published Cyber Security for Consumer Internet of Things (CSCIoT) standard, called ETSI EN 303 645, is a global standard that describes requirements on implementing a minimum level of security for IoT devices. This paper evaluates the sufficiency of cyber security of the consumer IoT standards' requirements and gradation. The evaluation is done by comparing CSCIoT to the international professional IoT standard, called IEC 62443, and with the other related work, such as the Secure by Design report of the UK Department for Digital, Culture Media & Sport. Also, this paper discusses implications regarding consumer responsibility on security. This paper aims to stimulate more precision and extension of requirements for consumer IoT devices to lower the risk of cyber-attacks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A smart bracelet that reacts to a person's heartbeat. A smart bench that invites passers-by to sit close. These and others are smart things, part of the Internet of Things (IoT) and people's lives. However, people are mainly IoT consumers and rarely given the possibility of becoming IoT creators. This paper presents a case study concerning the design of smart things for outdoor environments, with end users as the main creators. Ideas of smart things were collaboratively conceptualised by child end-users with a card-based board game. Their ideas were taken up in the form of inspiration cards within a bachelor's first-year course, by students coming from different high schools. Students started from children's ideas as inspiration triggers and collaboratively evolved some of them into interactive smart-thing prototypes. The paper concludes by reflecting on its results and drawing lessons for future editions of cross-generational workshops related to IoT design with end users. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The boom in online sales has inspired the enthusiasm of manufacturers to include their own online sale channel with the retailer's offline channel. This paper investigates the impact of consumer transfer in a capital-constraint dual-channel supply chain and examines the optimal operational decision by considering a Stackelberg game. We capture the trade credit coordination mechanism of the supply chain facing with stochastic demand. The results show that trade credit contract would alleviate financial pressure of the capital-constraint retailer and achieve coordination in the dual-channel supply chain. Besides, the adoption of trade credit stimulates the ordering behaviour of retailers. However, by using trade credit, the default risk increases for the capital-constraint retailer compared to the retailer with sufficient capital. The manufacturer shares the risk with the retailer by trade credit in dual-channel supply chain. Furthermore, the effects of consumer transfer rates on the setting of the trade credit parameters are also presented in this paper. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We use the proportional hazard model (PHM) to study purchase-timing behavior of households in two product categories: laundry detergents and paper towels. The PHM decomposes a household's instantaneous probability of buying the product at a point of time into two components: the baseline hazard that captures the household's intrinsic purchase pattern over time and the covariate function that captures the effects of marketing variables on the household's purchase timing decision. We compare the continuous-time and discrete-time PHMs, where the latter explicitly accounts for households' shopping trips that do not involve purchase of the product. We find that the discrete-time PHM empirically outperforms the continuous-time PHM in terms of explaining the observed purchase outcomes. We compare five different parametric specifications of the baseline hazard, and find that the three-parameter expo-power specification outperforms the exponential, Erlang-2, Weibull, and log-logistic specifications. We use a cause-specific, competing-risks PHM to distinguish between two types of purchase events that differ in terms of whether or not they were preceded by a shopping trip that involved purchase of the product. Such a cause-specific, competing-risks PHM is shown to outperform the traditional discrete-time PHM. We then estimate a nonparametric version of the PHM and find that it does not offer any additional insights compared to the parsimonious parametric PHM. Finally, we accommodate unobserved heterogeneity across households by allowing all of the parameters of the PHM to follow a discrete distribution across households whose locations and supports are nonparametrically estimated from the data. We find evidence for substantial unobserved heterogeneity in the data, both in the parameters of marketing variables and in the baseline hazards. This study will be a useful reference to researchers hoping to use the PHM to study event times. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Celebrities and brands have been perceived to be more powerful in the consumer-celebrity-brand relationship. Of late, this power balance has been reversed with the presence of social media allowing consumers to wield this tool over celebrities and brands in the wake of a negative episode, such as an objectionable and controversial incident. This causes celebrities and brands, referred to as the influence target, to be cancelled. The power within relationships theory is used to examine the consumer cancel culture framework. A lack in power dimensions such as warmth and competence cause consumers to experience a decline in their attachment, resulting in cancelling the influence targets more so if the attachment style exhibited by the consumer is anxious and avoidant. This is the first paper in consumer-behaviour to explore this phenomenon from an academic perspective and has practical implications for protecting celebrities and brands from cancel episodes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper considers a retail platform selling a product to consumers and voluntarily discloses product quality information by using blockchain technology (BCT). Consumers decide whether to deliberate before making purchase decisions. We develop an analytical model to explore the effects of information disclosure strategies on the retail platform's pricing and consumers' deliberation decisions. Some interesting results are obtained. First, regardless of the information disclosure strategy, consumers' deliberation and purchasing decisions depend on the deliberation cost and product price. Consumers will only deliberate if the price is at the medium level and the deliberation cost is not too high. Second, when the disclosure cost is high, the retail platform either stimulates or prevents consumer deliberation; however, when the disclosure cost is at a medium interval, the retail platform's pricing decision depends on its information disclosure strategy. Specifically, when disclosing quality information, the retail platform will implement the stimulated deliberation (SD) or prevented deliberation (PD) strategy and will never adopt the sold at a low price (SL) strategy; however, when quality information is withheld, the retail platform will only adopt the PD strategy. Third, we identify the conditions under which the retail platform should disclose quality information when facing different disclosure costs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research on the adoption of environmental social governance (ESG) activities from a customer perspective has been rarely conducted in the hospitality literature. Hence, applying learning process theory, this paper aims to examine how customers' subjective knowledge of ESG affects their perceived ESG benefits through awareness, which in turn, influences their visit intention. Through one preliminary study and two studies, this work confirms the mediation of awareness and perceived ESG benefits in the relationship between subjective knowledge and visit intention. The findings highlight the importance of developing marketing strategies to inform and educate customers about ESG better. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Previous studies reveal that the failure rate of innovation in enterprises is higher than expected. The reason for innovation failures is due to not only the customers' resistance towards innovation, subsequent changes and ignored factors that promote customer acceptance, but also the other disregarded factors that motivates the resistance towards innovation adaptation. The literature proved the customers' innovation resistance (CIR) consists of two categories. Passive innovation resistance (PIR) described as initial resistance behavior before evaluating the new product; and active innovation resistance (AIR) introduced as the resistant behavior after evaluating innovative products. However, few studies have investigated the simultaneous influence of both PIR and AIR, especially using the empirical methods. The main purposes of this study are (1) to construct a model that reflects on both PIR and AIR as two categories of CIR; (2) to provide empirical evidences to highlight the influences and correlation of PIR and AIR. The method used in this paper is partial least squares path modeling (PLS-PM) method to test our model and the hypotheses. The results from this research mainly indicate that (1) PIR is negatively influenced AIR; (2) PIR (including both cognitive and situational PIR) has negative effect on customers' innovation adoption intention (IAI) while (3) the correlation between AIR and IAI is opposite; (4) the degree of customers' IAI with high-perceived stimulation group and low-perceived stimulation group will reverse according to the changes of PIR and AIR. This paper is helpful for enterprises to improve their innovation success rate by analyzing users' resistance to innovation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Our research examines the extent to which pretrial advertisements versus trial alone are effective in generating favorable posttrial product evaluations. In an experiment related to utilitarian (paper towels) and hedonic (chocolate) products, we examine the effects of ad messages that provide objective versus subjective claims about search and experience product attributes on consumers' posttrial product evaluations. For utilitarian products, pretrial advertising promoting search attributes with objective claims is more effective than trial alone or promotion of experience attributes in generating favorable posttrial product evaluations. For hedonic products, trial provides the necessary opportunities for experiencing the product; however, if pretrial advertising is deemed appropriate, the focus should be on communicating search attributes with objective claims or experience attributes with subjective claims. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In a competitive multi-purpose (MP) trips model, it is assumed that the proportion of customers that do MP trips is given. In this paper, we investigate a model with a stochastic proportion of MP trips. Five decision analysis criteria are analyzed for finding the best location for a new facility under these circumstances. We first design a general approach that can be applied to many location problems. We then prove that by the optimistic rule, the solution is one of the extreme cases and construct solution algorithms to solve problems based on the other four rules optimally. The approach is demonstrated on the MP trips model. We performed computational experiments on instances between 100 and 20,000 demand points on five different models and two distance decay functions. The largest problem was solved within a given accuracy in about 8 h for the most time-consuming model. Our general approach can be applied to other location models (not necessarily competitive) when a parameter of such models is stochastic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Customer geographical proximity is a factor influencing supplier firms' trade-offs when granting customers trade credits. However, the extant literature offers scant empirical evidence on the effect of customer location on supplier firm's trade credit. This paper investigates the impact of major customers' geographical proximity on a supplier firm's trade credit. Using a sample of 5,587 observations of publicly listed Chinese firms between 2007 and 2017, we document a positive relationship between major customers' geographical distance and the supplier firm's trade credit. Moreover, the main results remain robust when changing samples and considering endogeneity problems. This paper also tests two potential channels and identifies the exploring market channel that exists in our sample. Furthermore, the main relation is more pronounced in supplier firms with low financial risk, operating in areas of high marketization, high product development, strong legal environments, and low economic policy uncertainty. This paper extends the existing literature on the economic consequences of customer characteristics on supplier firms to include customer geographic proximity. In addition, this paper sheds light on supply chain risk management. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper highlights the transformative potential of place-based community organizing as a theory and practice of progressive social change and as a critical approach to the social purpose of community engagement in Higher Education Institutions. The aim is to expose power asymmetries and civic renewal "from below" through a focus on community engaged learning, specifically community organizing on the curriculum for geography undergraduates. The empirical focus is an English university, but the issues and observations are widespread. Around the world, students are coping with disruptions following a global pandemic, austerity, and loss of trust in local democracy – participating in climate emergency and racial justice movements. This paper advances community organising and community engaged learning as a mutually co-constitutive challenge to conventional notions of the student as a passive consumer of recruitment, learning, and individualised notions of civic responsibility. Methods of community organising are based on the theory that if you want change, you need power: change ultimately traces a motivational journey from anger to agitation and action. Empirical vignettes explore the transformative role of emotionally stirring "political theatre" and direct action, while exposing tensions that arise due to the transitory status of students in place and time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As a fledgling marketing strategy that allows consumers to shop and enjoy a random experience at the same time, probabilistic selling has attracted much attention. It can tap into consumers' buying potential and swiftly increase product sales, which is favorable for merchants, particularly in e-commerce. However, little empirical research has looked at consumers' repurchase intentions of probabilistic goods in the context of e-commerce, as well as the underlying mechanism of this marketing strategy. This paper builds on expectation confirmation theory (ECT) to examine the impact of probabilistic goods characteristics (aesthetics and scarcity) and probabilistic selling characteristics (randomness and autonomy) on consumers' repurchase intention. The model was empirically tested through a survey of 182 online consumers. Interestingly, the results reveal that product characteristics plays a more significant role than selling characteristics, and it can positively enhance consumers' two types of repurchase intention (old series repurchase intention and new series repurchase intention) through the mediation mechanism of perceived value and confirmation. This paper empirically examined the consumer's repurchase intention for online probabilistic goods and has practical implications for online retailers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To compete with e-commerce, retailers are increasingly integrating smart technologies into their offline retail environment. This enables retailers to analyze their customers and provide them with a personalized shopping experience. However, research to date has mainly focused on the customer rather than the retailer. Building on a semi-systematic review of 75 studies using sensor technologies in retail environments between 2001 and 2021, this paper facilitates future research on the selection and combination of sensor technologies for in-store customer analysis from a retailer's perspective. The literature was analyzed in terms of the technology used, the raw data collected, and the interpretation of the data. The results show that technologies were primarily used to gain insights into customers' physical behavior, while few studies attempted to identify the customer or examine customers' emotions. The identified studies rarely combined multiple technologies. Based on the analysis, this study provides recommendations for selecting and combining sensor technologies in stores. Current approaches to support technology selection take a broad perspective and compare entire store technology concepts, such as smart shelving or smart shopping carts, rather than basic sensor technologies. The findings are relevant to both research and retail practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cold chain technology and online platform have enabled the rapid development of fresh food e-commerce. However, most fresh product e-retailers are losing money. This paper aims to answer the questions: Can the free shipping strategy, package strategy, and combined package and free shipping strategy (i.e., KF strategy) improve a fresh product e-retailer's performance, and which strategy is the most effective? By deriving the optimal decisions of customers and/or the e-retailer under different strategies, we find that the e-retailer should adopt the free shipping strategy or the KF strategy if the shipping cost is higher than the threshold. Furthermore, some managerial insights are obtained. First, compared with the general strategy, the e-retailer needs to further reduce the price when the shipping cost is lower than the threshold despite bearing the shipping cost under the free shipping strategy or KF strategy. Second, the free shipping strategy or KF strategy is generally used to increase the customer's single order quantity. However, if the shipping cost is higher than the threshold, the e-retailer should use these two strategies to reduce the single order quantity. Lastly, if the e-retailer wants to reduce its average logistics cost, the package strategy is a better choice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Time, price, and servicing are three important factors which affect the demand for any product. In a multi-period inventory model, different pricing in different periods may have a positive impact on demand. Offering discounts to customers during a shortage period is an efficient way to reduce lost sales. To address all these issues, a multi-period inventory model is developed and analyzed in this paper to obtain optimal pricing and replenishment periods where the market demand depends on price, time and service level provided by the retailer. The time horizon is fixed; the replenishment cycles are of equal length, but the shortage period may vary in different cycles. The retailer is allowed to charge different prices in different periods and provide discounts if someone places demand during a shortage period. Learning effects in holding and ordering costs are considered. Under a dynamic pricing framework, this study examines service improvement through learning and price discounts during shortages as an incentive for customers. It demonstrates that discounting indeed helps to produce more revenue when the back-order rate is low, and the service level is critical in generating demand when the stock-out period is lengthy, revealing a critical relationship between shortage periods and service level. A numerical experiment is performed to investigate the optimal policy in different situations and obtain some managerial insights. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Large-scale disasters have exposed vulnerabilities in energy systems and interdependent infrastructure, underscoring the importance of proactively mitigating risks to critical infrastructure. This paper focuses on strengthening power system planning by incorporating the costs associated with prolonged and extensive power interruptions to bolster resilience. To achieve this, duration-dependent customer damage functions are developed, capturing the direct, indirect, and societal impacts of power interruptions, ranging from short, localized events to widespread and long-duration ones. The research methodology is applied to three islanded communities facing substantial resilience challenges with limited data availability. Three customer interruption cost surveys are conducted with local electricity customers, yielding valuable insights into duration-dependent customer damage functions for direct, indirect, and monetizable societal costs. Significantly, the power interruption cost estimates derived from these functions vary considerably from those in the contiguous U.S. and even between the different islanded communities, reflecting their distinct hazard profiles and geographical characteristics. In conclusion, this study demonstrates the potential of duration-dependent customer damage functions to enhance power system resilience. It also identifies several areas for further research, paving the way for a more robust and resilient power infrastructure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The increasing power demand growth and extreme weather conditions push utilities to search for a more sustainable and resilient power distribution infrastructure. Dispatchable distributed generators (DGs) can contribute to achieving the goals. This paper reveals a general framework for allocating dispatchable DGs with their suitable location, capacity, and type in the test distribution networks to bring sustainability and resilient planning synergy. A multiobjective optimization approach has been presented to minimize payback year (PBY) for DGs, enhance the network's operational efficiency, and promote system resiliency by satisfying various operating constraints. The proposed planning model is structured to give the best possible solution in compliance with changes in seasonal peak demands. The efficacy of the proposed scheme has been tested on a 28-bus Indian distribution system and an IEEE 33-bus test system, and results concerning the number of customers served, and priority customers restored are presented. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While digitalisation is a widespread technological, social and economic process, shaping markets and consumers, not all efforts to produce digitalised smart consumers are successful. The aim of this paper is to explore and explain failures in the digital agencing of consumers. Making use of the market studies literature on consumer agencing, and drawing on an ethnographic study of ethical shopping apps, the paper explores how as well as under what conditions efforts to enact smart ethical shoppers fail. Results show that it is the immutability of apps that leads to breakdowns in the process of digital agencing. While these apps were scripted to configure consumers, they can seldom be configured by consumers. Because of this, the apps could not be adjusted to specific situations and consumer-assemblages. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Online reviewers are site users who share their opinion & experience over the internet and influence the perception & purchasing intentions of potential customers. Therefore, considerable attention is needed to identify credible and trustworthy online reviewers. For marketing through electronic-word-of-mouth (eWOM), it is important to find those online reviewers who have the potential to spread the product image efficiently and can positively influence the buying intention of potential customers. In this paper, we develop an innovative model based on data envelopment analysis (DEA) to identify good quality reviewers that have a commendable impact on readers or potential customers, by considering the determinants related to credibility, trustworthiness, expertise, travel experience, and identity disclosure of online reviewers as inputs/outputs in the DEA-based models. We have also ranked the reviewers using the balance index (BI) based technique. The results of this paper will aid the e-marketers to understand the variables related to reviewers which help them in finding the highly influential reviewers available on their website. The managerial and theoretical implications are also discussed for the practitioners, business managers, and researchers in the e-service sector. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Business models play a key role in companies' profit growth and competitiveness. A growing number of companies not only sell products but also provide leasing services. In traditional leasing models, companies usually charge customers for the time they occupy the product, but ignore differences in how long and how often customers actually use the product. In practice, customers have different product usage patterns, which will affect their purchase choice. Considering the pooling effect in the leasing service network, this paper describes customers' usage patterns in two dimensions (product occupancy time and utilisation rate) and determines the optimal pricing under three models (selling, leasing, and their hybrid model) to maximise corporate profits. Through comparative analysis, the optimal business model selection decision is obtained, and its market performance is also analysed. The results show that when the leasing service operational capability is strong, the pure leasing service model is superior; otherwise, the result also depends on the product value creation capability. When this capability is high, the hybrid model will be selected; otherwise, the pure selling model will be better. This result differs from the generally held result in previous studies that the hybrid model is more profitable in most cases. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents novel models for the Integrated Procurement and Lot-Sizing Problem with multiple customers and backlogging. Since allowing backlog in a traditional cost minimisation model involves dealing with intangible costs of not fulfilling the demand on time, we propose optimising service-levels while keeping the costs minimal using a budget constraint. The motivation of this study emanates from a manufacturing company that assembles commercial and industrial refrigeration equipment, using both purchased materials and in-house products. Instead of considering an aggregate demand, we consider the specific demand from various customers. This allows us to incorporate demand fulfilment decisions into the model in case of stock-outs by deciding which customers will have their orders backlogged. The fill-rate, or β service-level, is considered both globally and for customers and products individually. Computational experiments show that the service-level-driven models improve service when compared to the traditional cost model and also end up enforcing service equity among different customers at the expense of a deterioration in the global fill-rate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As manufacturers continue to provide new and unique products and services for their customers, we argue that warranty menus with differentiated options are an often-overlooked unique selling point. Meanwhile, there is a huge swathe of customers who own durable products which are still in use even after the expiration of a warranty. It is in this area that we develop a research perspective which urges customers to consider warranty plans and post-warranty maintenance strategies simultaneously when making a purchasing decision. In this paper, through the lens of a consumer, we propose an integrated model of warranty and post-warranty maintenance under a flexible renewable warranty. This model takes into account repair limits and multiple failure types with time-varying probabilities. As part of this, a new post-warranty maintenance strategy is designed, in which the repair time-based corrective replacement and the age-based preventive replacement are combined. The life cycle cost rate of the product is minimised by a synthetic decision-making about the consumer's warranty purchase and post-warranty maintenance strategy. Numerical studies show that there exists a joint optimal solution, which can help the customer to develop an optimal overall warranty-maintenance strategy under the warranty menu with minimised cost rate. An integrated model of warranty and post-warranty maintenance is developed. The warranty product has minor and catastrophic failures with time-varying probabilities. A flexible renewable warranty is considered for the consumer. A post-warranty maintenance strategy with the repair time limit is proposed. The optimal warranty-maintenance strategy is derived to minimise the Life cycle cost rate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Motivated by the increasing exposition of decision makers to both statistical and judgemental based sources of demand information, we develop in this paper a fuzzy Gaussian Mixture Model (GMM) for the newsvendor permitting to mix probabilistic inputs with a subjective weight modelled as a fuzzy number. The developed framework can model for instance situations where sales are impacted by customers sensitive to online review feedback or expert opinions. It can also model situations where a marketing campaign leads to different stochastic alternatives for the demand with a fuzzy weight. Thanks to a tractable mathematical application of the fuzzy machinery on the newsvendor problem, we derived the optimal ordering strategy taking into account both probabilistic and fuzzy components of the demand. We show that the fuzzy GMM can be rewritten as a classical newsvendor problem with an associated density function involving these stochastic and fuzzy components of the demand. The developed model enables to relax the single modality of the demand distribution usually used in the newsvendor literature and to encode the risk attitude of the decision maker. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Consumer behaviour is changing in the e-commerce age for apparel products. More and more consumers tend to bracket, which means they purchase multiple versions of the same product to try at home and return those that do not meet their requirements. This bracketing behaviour can increase the likelihood that consumers buy the good-fit products. However, the tsunami of returns from bracketing has become challenging for online retailers. In this paper, we analytically address this issue by developing profit-maximising models for retailers facing bracketing customers. Our contribution is to explore whether and under what conditions should retailers encourage or discourage the bracketing purchase behaviour. Whether or not bracketing is profitable for retailers depends on the bracketer proportion and retailer's reverse logistics cost. Further, we also find that while the profit is eroded because of the large number of returns, retailers should order more product to meet bracketers' demand. In addition, we generate managerial insights from the findings that help online apparel retailers convert the seemingly harmful consumer returns from bracketing into an advantage. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we deal with a special type of scheduling problem. There are two classes of jobs to be processed on a single machine. Jobs of class A are directly delivered to the customers and we want to minimise their total flow time. Jobs of class B do not contribute to the objective function but must respect a no-idle constraint (i.e. they are required to keep an external downstream machine busy). This problem arises in some real-world production environments where the downstream process must not be interrupted because of technological constraints, economic viability or because the firm is bound to keep the external process continuously active (e.g. a contract with a downstream firm imposing penalties if the supply is interrupted). We prove that the general problem is NP-Hard. We introduce two mathematical programming-based approaches and some constructive heuristics. The various approaches are compared on the basis of a large computational campaign. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Live streaming, a reciprocal communication technology allowing real-time interactions, is widely embraced by tourists and tourism business operators. Mirroring its prosperity in practice, research about live streaming in tourism and hospitality sprang up since the pandemic. This paper is the first attempt to systematically review live streaming and categorize prior accumulated knowledge, revealing research gaps and providing future research agenda. This review discovered an upward trend of live streaming-related publications since 2019. Findings also unveil a notable imbalance between the research of tourists and business operators. Moreover, existing studies lack diversification in research contexts as well as in theoretical foundation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we investigate a GI X /M/1 queue with the two-stage vacation policy. The system will first enter a working vacation once the system becomes empty in the normal busy period, during which the service rate will be switched to a lower rate. After this working vacation, if the system is nonempty, the service rate will be switched to the normal rate immediately; otherwise, the system will enter multiple vacations during which the service rate reduces to zero until the system is nonempty after one vacation and a new normal busy period starts. The distinguishing feature of this paper is the use of a general algorithm for solving the difference equation based on the right shift operator method to obtain the queue length distribution at pre-arrival time and arbitrary time. Moreover, the sojourn time of arbitrary customer is analyzed. Finally, several typical numerical examples are provided to validate our computational algorithm. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While simplistic arguments portend a possible relationship between consumers' materialistic values and consumption guilt, empirical evidence in this regard, however, remains equivocal at best. In this paper, we address this issue by establishing the effect of materialism on consumption guilt – delimited by regulatory influence (promotion/prevention) – as reflected in consumers' relative preferences for structurally distinct but financially equivalent price alternatives. Specifically, we conduct an experiment with consumers' trait materialistic values, measured as a continuous variable, as an independent variable, with extraneous social influence as a two-level (promotion/prevention) manipulated moderator, consumption guilt as the mediating variable, and consumers' relative price preference (as mentioned above) as the dependent variable of choice. Subsequently, we conduct a regression analysis, followed by a floodlight analysis, and, a series of mediation analyses, including a mediated moderation analysis, in establishing the effect of materialism on consumption guilt. Our results indicate that consumers higher/lower in materialism, both experienced consumption guilt. Subsequently, these consumers mitigated consumption guilt by preferring the price structure that best allowed them to do so in consummating the purchase of a new product – the mediating effect of consumption guilt. Our findings imply indirect price-discrimination opportunities for sellers, wherein demand for products increases as consumers (self) mitigate consumption guilt through price preferences, irrespective of their dominating materialistic tendencies. In summary, herein, we empirically establish the long-conjectured relationship between materialism and consumption guilt, unequivocally, both for consumers high, or low, in materialism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Similar to product design of function and quality, product emotional appeal becomes a more and more important factor influencing consumer purchases. This paper proposes a two-step method for product emotional elements reasoning based on image metaphor. It aims to solve the depth deficits and boundary constraints of traditional methods. Firstly, based on image metaphor and guided interview, the emotional needs of consumers for products are initially extracted. Secondly, tacit emotional needs are transformed into explicit design elements by using a three-level image metaphor decoding method of symbolic-index-perceptual. The effectiveness of the proposed method is implemented and verified by taking the emotional design of electric vehicle as an example. The results could be a reference for electric vehicle development. The findings suggest that image metaphor could be one of the ideal ways to reduce the deviation between designers' goals and users' emotional needs, and the proposed method can provide more innovative support for designers and engineers. Highlights The concept of image metaphor is introduced into the field of product emotion design, and a cross-domain mapping method of emotional needs based on image metaphor is proposed. This method can describe consumers' emotional needs easily and provide the possibility to mine extra-domain elements. A three-level emotional needs decoding method based on image metaphor is proposed, which can convert users' implicit emotional needs into explicit product design elements. The feasibility of the proposed method is verified by a case study of emotional design of electric vehicle. The findings suggest that image metaphor can solve some depth deficits and boundary constraints of traditional methods in emotional design, so as to provide more innovative support for product designers and engineers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study presents an ontology that scopes the digital health ecosystem from a consumer–centered perspective. We used a mixed-method analysis on a set of papers collected for a comprehensive review to identify common themes, components, and patterns that repeatedly emerge within Australian-based digital health studies. Three major and four child themes were identified as the foundational aspects of the proposed ontology. The child themes have more precise concept definitions, inherited and distinguishing attributes. Out of 179 recognized concepts, 33 were related to the Healthcare theme; 23 concepts formed a cluster of employed devices under the Technology theme; 40 concepts were associated with Use and Usability factors. 60 other concepts formed the cluster of the consumer–user theme. The theme of Digital Health was seen as being connected to 2 independent clusters. The main cluster embodied 21 extracted concepts, semantically related to "data, information, and knowledge," whilst the second cluster embodied concepts related to "healthcare." Different stakeholders can utilize this ontology to define their landscape of digitally enabled healthcare. The novelty of this work resides in capturing a consumer–centered perspective and the method we used in deriving the ontology – formalizing the results of a systematic review based on data-driven analysis methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Australian Hayne Royal Commission (2017–2019) inquired into misconduct within the banking, superannuation, and financial service sectors. Existing literature produced mixed results with regards to the effectiveness of the Hayne Royal Commission while focusing on the legislative angle. The first major contribution of this paper is it looks at the Hayne Royal Commission through the lens of a customer by creating indices which include the Retail Banking Perception Index, the Monthly Review Score, the Monthly Growth Score, and the Monthly Headline Score. The second major contribution of this paper is it adds to the field of perception analysis for banks by using novel data instead of point in time survey data. By creating these indices, we conclude that banks have been impacted idiosyncratically by the Hayne Royal Commission in terms of customer perception driven by increased transparency. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]