Agriculture–nutrition linkages with heterogeneous,unobserved returns and costs: Insights from Tajikistan

Agriculture–nutrition linkages (ANLs) have been increasingly investigated in the literature. However, nutritional returns and costs of household agricultural production practices (APPs) in semisubsistence settings are poorly understood. We fill these knowledge gaps using pooled cross-section data sets in Tajikistan, where semisubsistence farming and undernutrition coexist despite relatively good agricultural infrastructure and education systems. Agricultural diversification, yield enhancement, production expansion are positively associated with various nutritional outcomes, particularly in areas with poor food market access. Decomposition exercises suggest that nutritional returns and costs of these APPs vary across households, and the adoption of APPs is driven by the expected nutritional returns. In Tajikistan, improving nutrition through household ANLs requires growing the smallholder agricultural sector in multiple dimensions, including diversification, intensification, and expansion, while also understanding better the pathways of ANLs and addressing bottlenecks at appropriate stages of such pathways.     

Application of social media analytics in tourism crisis communication

Given the newly established communication environment of social media and highly unpredictable crisis situations, this study questioned how tourists facing an unexpected crisis situation use social media to communicate and search for information. To this end, this study developed a multi-phased social media analytic framework (data crawling, data processing and text mining, social network analysis, semantic network analysis, and network visualization) to assess the structure of information exchanges between the members of a tourism organization’s social network community and identified influential actors and information content within the social network. This study’s findings suggest genuine ways of relating with and utilizing opinion leaders and influencers in social media marketing communication as well as crisis communication. The authors expect this proposed methodological framework of social media analytics to help other scholars scientifically identify and implement the proper methodologies for utilizing social media data.     

Do socially responsible activities help hotels and casinos achieve their financial goals?

While the concept of corporate social responsibility (CSR) has gained much attention and is currently practiced by many companies, it has yet to be empirically examined in the context of hotels and casinos, especially in regard to the potential effects of CSR on firm value and performance. As the findings on the relationship between CSR and financial performance have been inconclusive and this relationship has been found to differ among industries, this study examines the relationship between CSR and firm value and profitability for hotels and casinos. Results of the Durbin–Wu–Hausman (DWH) test and a subsequent two-stage least square (2SLS) method show that hotel companies’ CSR has a simultaneous and positive relationship with financial performance. For casino companies, however, results show that CSR has no simultaneous or particular effect on financial performance. Findings suggest that hotel companies can confidently and strategically increase CSR investment to enhance both short-term (profitability) and long-term performance (firm value). Casino companies need to carefully examine the effects of CSR on financial performance, when making CSR-related decisions.     

International trade of GMO-related agricultural products

This paper examines the international trade of a variety of genetically modified (GM) food products over a 27-year period (1984–2011) with data from the United Nations using the tools of social network analysis. The results indicate that each of the different crops have a distinctive pattern of trade that has changed over time due to a number of different factors. Also, trade in agricultural commodities became more diversified over time, dominated less by the United States and other nations central in the trade networks and trade in the individual GM crops was stable over time. Countries maintained their trading partners for specific crops, despite the adoption of the genetically modified varieties. The economic implications of these results are discussed for specific countries.     

生产性老龄化:理论与应用视角

有关老龄化社会的讨论大多负面地将重点放在这些严重的挑战上,当然形势的确不容乐观。这类讨论一般只考虑老年人给经济、卫生保健、社会福利体系所造成的负担;并未考虑故事的"另一面",即人口结构变化的积极面:老年人寿命延长并且健康。在世界各地的许多发达国家和发展中国家,60岁的成年人仍可预期再拥有20至30年以上的寿命。此外,老年群体的受教育水平越来越高②。     

Collaborative apparel consumption in the digital sharing economy: An agenda for academic inquiry

While apparel businesses leveraging the sharing economy have begun to emerge in recent years, academic research on “sharing” consumption for apparel is extremely limited. To fill this research gap, the researchers analyze current literature to present a conceptual framework that offers a durable theoretical foundation about the concept of collaborative consumption for apparel. Using a metatheory approach, the researchers develop a framework that explores how two major Internet‐supported collaborative consumption modes (utility‐based nonownership and redistributed ownership) manifest in an apparel context. Next, the researchers explore the implications of each consumption mode to understand the consumer's relationship with the product, peers, and businesses involved in these sharing schemes. A series of research propositions are also developed to stimulate discussion and future research about collaborative apparel consumption.     

Effect of exploitation and exploration on the innovative as outcomes in entrepreneurial firms

The main aim of this study is to establish the effect of the Exploitation and Exploration; and the influence of these learning flows on the Innovative Outcome (IO). The Innovative Outcome refers to new products, services, processes (or improvements) that the organization has obtained as a result of an innovative process. For this purpose, a relationship model is defined, which is empirically contrasted, and can explains and predicts the cyclical dynamization of learning flows on innovative outcome in knowledge intensive firms. The quantitative test for this model use the data from entrepreneurial firms biotechnology sector. The statistical analysis applies a method based on variance using Partial Least Squares (PLS). Research results confirm the hypotheses, that is, they show a positive dynamic effect between the Exploration and the Innovative as outcomes. In the same vein, they results confirm the presence of the cyclic movement of innovative outcome with the Exploitation.     

Supply chain integration and operational performance: The contingency effects of production systems

The boundary conditions of supply chain integration (SCI) have been widely studied in order to find out when SCI is applicable and effective. However, prior studies have mainly focused on external contextual factors, such as supply complexity, environmental uncertainty and country-level infrastructure. This study contributes to the SCI literature by examining the contingency effects of internal production systems on the relationship between supplier integration, customer integration and operational performance. Based on organizational information processing theory, we provide evidence to show that the impact of supplier and customer integration on operational performance varies across production systems, such as one-of-a-kind production, batch production and mass production systems. The empirical results also reveal how supplier and customer integration can be matched with different configurations of production systems in order to achieve the desired quality, flexibility, delivery or cost performance.     

CEO career horizon,corporate governance,and real options: The role of economic short‐termism

Research Summary: Combining studies on real options theory and economic short‐termism, we propose that, depending on CEOs’ career horizons, CEOs have heterogeneous interests in strategic flexibility, and thus, have different incentives to make real options investments. We argue that compared to CEOs with longer career horizons, CEOs with shorter career horizons will be less inclined to make real options investments because they may not fully reap the rewards during their tenure. In addition, we argue that long‐term incentives and institutional ownership will mitigate the relationship between CEOs’ career horizons and real options investments. U.S. public firms as an empirical setting produced consistent evidence for our predictions. Our study is the first to theoretically explain and empirically show that a CEO's self‐seeking behavior will impact real options investments. Managerial Summary: This article helps to explain how a CEO's self seeking‐behavior may shape a firm's real option investment, which could result in different level of strategic flexibility. We argue that CEOs with short career horizons have less time to exercise their firms’ real options, which should lower the investments in the firms’ real options portfolios relative to CEOs with long career horizons. We study a sample of U.S. public firms and find strong evidence that a CEO's expected tenure in the firm is positively related to the real options investments at the firm level. We find that this agency issue can be mitigated by adopting appropriate corporate governance mechanisms such as long‐term incentives and institutional investors.