Despite growing evidence about differences in the attitudes and behaviors of consumers in emerging and developed markets, there is little research on the differences in country of origin (COO) ...effects on their evaluation, behavioral intentions (BIs), and actual purchase of imported products. This paper introduces a new conceptual framework incorporating consumer ethnocentrism (CET), materialism (MAT), and value consciousness (VC) to hypothesize several differences in the influence of COO effects on consumers from developed and emerging markets. A web-based study with 1752 consumers in four countries representing two developed markets (the UK and the USA) and two emerging markets (China and India) shows significant differences in the moderating influence of CET, MAT, and VC on the effects of COO on the evaluations and BIs for a fictitious passenger car brand, and on the actual choice of car brands owned by them. The findings highlight the importance of looking beyond CET at other relevant psychographic variables to understand the differences in motivations underlying consumer perceptions and behavior towards imported products.
Cross-cultural studies using Hofstede’s national scores to operationalize his five cultural factors at an individual level suffer from ecological fallacy, and those using self-report scales treat ...cultural factors as unidimensional constructs and provide little or no evidence of the construct validity and measurement equivalence of these scales. This paper reconceptualizes Hofstede’s five cultural factors as ten personal cultural orientations and develops a new 40-item scale to measure them. It also establishes the validity, reliability, and cross-cultural measurement equivalence of the new scale, and discusses its advantages over other scales.
The availability of large-scale image captioning and visual question answering datasets has contributed significantly to recent successes in vision-and-language pretraining. However, these datasets ...are often collected with overrestrictive requirements inherited from their original target tasks (e.g., image caption generation), which limit the resulting dataset scale and diversity. We take a step further in pushing the limits of vision-and-language pretraining data by relaxing the data collection pipeline used in Conceptual Captions 3M (CC3M) 54 and introduce the Conceptual 12M (CC12M), a dataset with 12 million image-text pairs specifically meant to be used for visionand-language pre-training. We perform an analysis of this dataset and benchmark its effectiveness against CC3M on multiple downstream tasks with an emphasis on long-tail visual recognition. Our results clearly illustrate the benefit of scaling up pre-training data for vision-and-language tasks, as indicated by the new state-of-the-art results on both the nocaps and Conceptual Captions benchmarks. 1
Interconnected transmission and distribution systems operation is inherently hierarchical. Hence, strategic interaction between Transmission System Operator (TSO) and Distribution System Operators ...(DSOs) is inevitable. Based on the scheduling hierarchy and despatch, such interactions are modeled as Bilevel Optimal Power Flow (BOPF). However, the direct solution of BOPF for AC networks is challenging due to the leader-follower structure. Hence, previous works have often used DC and linearized AC networks for the follower's OPF, which are often infeasible for AC networks. Also, BOPF is stated as a Mathematical Program with Complementary Constraints (MPCC) by replacing the follower's OPF with associated optimality conditions. However, the related justification (constraint qualification satisfaction in ACOPF) is missing in previous works. We provide such a justification in this article and propose a novel mixed interior-exterior penalty-based approach for the solution of KKT-reformulated TSO-DSO-based BOPF as MPCC. The proposed method has superior convergence and is robust to the choice of penalty parameter when tested on five test systems compared to Sequential Linear Programming (SLP) and two other methods. BOPF's solution gives Stackelberg equilibrium-based schedules for TSO and DSOs in respective markets with high supplier profits in the Wholesale Electricity Market (WEM) compared to the distributed OPF's solution.
This critical review describes a class of polymers prepared by electrochemical polymerization that employs the concept of molecular imprinting for chemical sensing. The principal focus is on both ...conducting and nonconducting polymers prepared by electropolymerization of electroactive functional monomers, such as pristine and derivatized pyrrole, aminophenylboronic acid, thiophene, porphyrin, aniline, phenylenediamine, phenol, and thiophenol. A critical evaluation of the literature on electrosynthesized molecularly imprinted polymers (MIPs) applied as recognition elements of chemical sensors is presented. The aim of this review is to highlight recent achievements in analytical applications of these MIPs, including present strategies of determination of different analytes as well as identification and solutions for problems encountered.
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DOBA, EMUNI, FIS, FZAB, GEOZS, GIS, IJS, IMTLJ, IZUM, KILJ, KISLJ, MFDPS, NLZOH, NUK, OILJ, PILJ, PNG, SAZU, SBCE, SBJE, SBMB, SBNM, UILJ, UKNU, UL, UM, UPUK, VKSCE, ZAGLJ
This paper aims to reconcile the inconsistent findings about the effects of CEO transformational leadership (CTL) on firm performance by using upper echelon theory to hypothesize and empirically ...demonstrate that CTL triggers exploratory innovation in a firm, which in turn has an inverted U-shaped effect on firm performance. In other words, CTL may only lead to better firm performance at moderate levels of exploratory innovation through optimal utilization of a firm's scarce resources and may actually hurt firm performance at higher levels of exploratory innovation because of suboptimal resource utilization. We also show that CTL's most detrimental effect on firm performance occurs when the contingencies of high technology uncertainty and low demand uncertainty are combined. Data from multiple sources within 288 Chinese firms support most of our hypotheses and provide insights into the complex mechanism by which CTL affects firm performance, especially in an increasingly uncertain global economic environment.
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GEOZS, IJS, IMTLJ, KILJ, KISLJ, NLZOH, NUK, OILJ, PNG, SAZU, SBCE, SBJE, UILJ, UL, UM, UPCLJ, UPUK, ZAGLJ, ZRSKP
Recent progress in derivatized polythiophenes (PTs) and polymerized thiophene derivatives is reviewed, with emphasis on applications that involve devising and fabricating selective and sensitive ...chemo- and biosensors. The literature results summarized show that appreciable selectivity is attained if derivatized polythiophene films are used as recognition units. Illustrative examples include determination of polyatomic anions and metal cations, volatile organic compounds, and biocompounds including glucose and nucleic acids. Moreover, progress is presented in the use of derivatized thiophenes as functional monomers for preparation of molecularly imprinted polymers (MIPs) for chemosensing. Thanks to the range of synthetic procedures developed for preparation of derivatized PTs, these electronically conducting polymers have served as excellent recognition units for fabricating highly sensitive and selective chemosensors for target analytes.
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GEOZS, IJS, IMTLJ, KILJ, KISLJ, NUK, OILJ, PNG, SAZU, SBCE, SBJE, UL, UM, UPCLJ, UPUK
Purpose
– This paper aims to explore the process by which four store environment (music, light, employee, and layout) and two individual characteristics (shopping enjoyment tendency (SET) and impulse ...buying tendency (IBT)) influence impulse buying behavior through positive and negative affect, and urge to buy impulsively.
Design/methodology/approach
– The data were obtained using a structured questionnaire from 733 respondents in a mall survey conducted in Chennai, South India.
Findings
– In the structural model tested with AMOS, the authors found that store environment drove impulse buying (IB) through positive affect and urge. Results also showed that the personality variables (SET and IBT) influenced IB through positive affect and urge. This paper did not find support for the relationship between negative affect and urge.
Research limitations/implications
– Theoretically, the authors add to the list of antecedents of impulse buying, and to the outcomes of store environment. From a managerial viewpoint, the authors suggest that retail managers invest in improving the store environment to increase the level of impulse buying in their stores. Specifically, they need to focus on enhancing friendliness of store employees, playing appropriate music, designing proper layouts and having well-lit stores to encourage impulse buying.
Originality/value
– Prior research studied the elements of the store independently and also its long-term impact. To the best of the authors' knowledge, their research is the first to study the impact of store environment (in conjunction with trait variables) on impulse buying.
This paper extends the growing research on the impact of gender equity on public health outcomes using the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic as its research setting. Specifically, it introduces a conceptual ...model incorporating the impact of gender equity and human development on women’s representation in legislature and public health expenditure, and their combined impact with human environment (population density, aging population and urban population) on important public health outcomes in the Covid-19 context, including the total number of tests, diagnosed, active and critical cases, and deaths. Data from 210 countries shows support for many of the hypothesized relationships in the conceptual model. The results provide useful insights about the factors that influence the representation of women in political systems around the world and its impact on public health outcomes. The authors also discuss implications for public health policy-makers to ensure efficient and effective delivery of public health services in future.
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GEOZS, IJS, IMTLJ, KILJ, KISLJ, NLZOH, NUK, OILJ, PNG, SAZU, SBCE, SBJE, UILJ, UL, UM, UPCLJ, UPUK, ZAGLJ, ZRSKP
Abstract
Carbon coated nano molybdenum carbide (Mo
2
C) has been synthesized at 800 °C through single step reduction route using molybdenum trioxide (MoO
3
) as a precursor, polypropylene (P.P) as a ...carbon source and magnesium (Mg) as a catalyst in an autoclave. The synthesized samples were characterized by X-ray diffraction (XRD), thermal analysis techniques (TG/DTA/DTG), field emission scanning electron microscopy (FESEM) and transmission electron microscopy (TEM). Williamson- Hall (W-H) analysis has been done to estimate various parameters like strain, stress and strain energy density. Multi-stage kinetic analysis of the product phase has been studied to establish the nature of the thermal decomposition. Coats-Redfern method applied to determine the mechanism involved in the decomposition of the product phase shows that initial and final stage follow F1 mechanism whereas middle stage follow F3 mechanism. The activation energy (
E
a
) and pre-exponential factor (
A
) has also been determined. The morphological studies show
s
that the particles have partially spherical/faceted shape, with carbon coated having wide particle size distribution. The surface chemistry and surface area analysis were studied by X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS) and Brunauer-Emmet-Teller (BET), respectively. The formation mechanism of carbon coated Mo
2
C nano particles has been predicted based on the XRD, TG/DTA & DTG and microstructural results.
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IZUM, KILJ, NUK, PILJ, PNG, SAZU, UL, UM, UPUK
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