Study of country-of-origin image from legitimacy theory perspective: Evidence from the USA and India

This study explored country-of-origin image (CoI) based on legitimacy theory. The comments and discussions about Chinese products' CoI from both Indian and American customers on public websites were collected and analyzed. The findings show that CoI is essentially a kind of recognition and judgment of a product's legitimacy. Customers judge a Chinese product's pragmatic legitimacy and social legitimacy through both a performance image and institution image aspect of the CoI, respectively. The findings can advance our understanding of CoI phenomena and provide guidance for international marketers in developing countries to manage country-related information more effectively.     

Privacy in AI and the IoT: The privacy concerns of smart speaker users and the Personal Information Protection Law in China

In recent years, the development of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and the Internet of things (IoT) has attracted a lot of attention. One IoT device is the smart speaker that is equipped with an integrated assistant controlled by spoken commands. In the global smart speaker market, Chinese brands account for a significant share. Since smart speakers have a natural advantage when collecting user data in diverse scenarios, privacy and personal information protection have become crucial issues for both smart speaker manufacturers and users in China. This paper applies the socio-technical system (STS) framework to portray the technology subsystem, the industry/market subsystem and the regulators, law/regulation subsystem that are related to smart speakers in China, and how they interact with each other. It also uses focus group discussions to understand the smart speaker users' privacy concerns and the smart speaker industry's implementation of personal information protection. By employing the document analysis method, this study analyzes the laws and regulations related to privacy and personal information protection in the context of AI and the IoT. In particular, the potential impacts of the Personal Information Protection Law (PIPL) on smart speakers are discussed in detail. With its goal of balancing personal information protection and technological development, this paper provides recommendations for the regulatory bodies and the smart speaker industry players in China that can shed light on other countries and regions.     

Research trends of digital platforms: A survey of the literature from 2018 to 2021

In recent years, there has been a vigorous discussion about digital platforms due to their emerging significance in the digital ecosystem. However, despite common interests in the digital platform, comprehensive literature reviews on the topic are still limited. Therefore, this study offers a systematic and interdisciplinary review of the literature on digital platforms by collecting and analyzing a sample of 1,224 articles published from January 2018 to December 2021. In particular, this study focuses on which country leads platform research. By interpreting the concentration of research fields that study platforms and financial funding for platform research, this article provides a new perspective on the countries leading academic platform research. Our findings show that those holding platform hegemony in the real world are also active leaders in platform research. Amid fierce competition among major countries and continents surrounding the platform industry, this paper aims to provide an understanding of the ongoing research trend regarding platforms and be a guideline for future research.     

Relevance of organizational capabilities and its dynamics: what to learn from entrants' product portfolios about the determinants of entry timing

The resource‐based view of the firm suggests that the timing of market entry by a firm depends on its resources and capabilities, but several important questions remain. First, in a high‐velocity market where capabilities change quickly, how does entry timing depend on the capabilities at varying points in time? Second, how much flexibility does a firm have in altering its capabilities to achieve desirable entry timing? To answer these questions, this study sets out to develop a dynamic, refined version of the resource‐based view that parameterizes a firm by its time‐varying capability relevance with respect to a focal market, and makes predictions on entry timing and future growth of capability relevance. The study develops a novel approach that uses the entrants' product portfolios to infer a potential entrant's capability relevance. The results based on a panel of potential entrants show that the initial and current capability relevance each affect entry timing alone, revealing the persistent effect of the initial condition. However, given the knowledge of the current capability relevance, the initial relevance has no effect on entry timing, suggesting that the initial relevance affects entry timing through its influence on the current relevance. Firms that are in an initially unfavorable position can still achieve early entry, provided that they improve their capability relevance over time. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Internet of things and the economics of 5G-based local industrial networks

Fifth generation (5G) networks raise governance and management challenges that did not exist in 3G and 4G wireless technologies. Advanced wireless functionality enables new applications and services based on smart, physical, network infrastructures, many of them expected to be localized. As a general-purpose technology, 5G can be configured in numerous ways to support innovative applications across many sectors. Smart network applications and services must integrate physical and virtual components in innovative ways. In addition, general capabilities of 5G must be combined with complementary technologies, such as big data analytics and edge cloud services, to create services for specific use cases. Varying throughput and latency requirements of distinct use cases require differentiated technical solutions. Appropriate frequencies must be aligned efficiently with other features within the footprint of particular, local industrial networks. National policy makers, suppliers, and users are responding differently to these governance and management challenges. These approaches balance differently the trade-offs between experimentation, differentiation, and harmonization. Comparative analysis can inform gradual improvements of the governance of 5G-based, local industrial networks.     

Impacts of mobile Internet use intensity on the demand for SMS and voice services of mobile network operators: An empirical multi-method study of German mobile Internet customers

Scholarly and business publications alike convey the message that past and future strong growth in mobile Internet (MI) access and service demand has solely positive commercial implications for mobile network operators (MNOs). This position neglects the possibility that increasing MI use intensity may lead to demand decreases for the highly profitable short messaging service (SMS) and mobile voice telephony. The extant literature provides few insights on relations between MI use intensity, on the one hand, and SMS as well as mobile voice call use intensities, on the other hand. This study developed hypotheses concerning the presence or absence of impacts of MI use intensity and circumstances of MI use (e.g., device type, tariff scheme) on the demand for SMS and mobile voice telephony at the individual customer level. The hypotheses were tested by analyzing actual use behaviors of 304 MI adopters in Germany, for whom objective use intensity data were extracted from the billing system of an MNO. These non-reactive measures were combined with responses collected from the adopters through a telephone survey. Multivariate regression results suggest that though MI use intensity significantly negatively affected both number of SMS sent and received, these effects were so small that their practical relevance is highly doubtful. Further, customers who used MI more intensively did not generate lower volumes of outgoing or incoming mobile voice connection minutes. Conclusions are drawn for MNO, telecommunications sector regulators and scholarly researchers seeking to explain the acceptance of mobile communications services.     

Technology‐push,market‐demand and the missing safety‐pull: a case study of American Airlines Flight 587

Through a critical case study of the crash of American Airlines Flight 587, this paper draws upon ‘the Social Shaping of Technology’ (SST) approach to offer a reconceptualisation of the technology‐push and market‐demand model for High‐Reliably Organisations (HROs), providing support for a third factor, called here a ‘safety‐pull’. A safety‐pull is defined as organisationally supported reflexivity in which technology innovators and frontline operators collaborate to consider the potential implications of adopting new technologies in HROs and the complex ways this change may impact human operators' work performance, often in risky and unanticipated ways. In contrast to accidents occurring solely as the result of individual operator error, analysing the safety‐pull provides a way to tease out the wide range of factors that can contribute to HRO failures and offers a new SST perspective through which to examine high‐risk operations.