Is online-to-offline customer care support essential for consumer service?

Customer satisfaction is the main pillar for convenient and profitable retailing. The retail sector continuously tried to develop new strategies to improve consumer satisfaction. It is impossible to provide each service directly to the consumer by the retailer. In this direction, the retailer establishes customer care to provide the best service to consumers. Consumer care can provide promotional or prevention services, increasing the consumer's satisfaction level. This study is developed to show the impact of retailers' customer care service for an offline-to-online retailing strategy. The demand is consumer support, advertisement, and selling price dependent. For maintaining consumer service, some free home delivery policies are offered, when consumers ordered more than a certain percentage of the amount. Finally, the total profit of this O2O retailing system is calculated by the classical optimization technique. Some special cases are discussed in the numerical section to prove the impact of customer care services. Numerical results prove that customer care support enhances the profit by 48.20%, whereas investment in the advertisement and home delivery strategy helps the retail industry to earn 44.80% and 16.74% more profit, respectively. Finally, from this study, it is clear that customer care activities are essential to increase the profit of the retailing sector.     

Promoting remote workers' psychological health: Effective management practices during the COVID-19 crisis

The aim of this study was to identify specific management practices that promote the psychological health of remote workers in the context of the COVID-19 crisis. A two-round Delphi study was conducted among 28 teleworkers and 22 managers. A list of 60 specific management practices was presented and participants had to identify whether each one could be used in the current remote working context and, if so, how useful it was to promote psychological health at work. Results indicate that most specific management practices usually used in a face-to-face setting can also be used in a remote context (85%). Practices that show consideration, establishing work structure, and allowing flexibility were also identified as the most useful to promote remote workers' psychological health during the pandemic. This study contributes to the advancement of knowledge about specific management practices, remote working, and crisis management. It also suggests specific practices that managers can adopt to promote the psychological health of their employees during a period of crisis, even while managing from a distance.     

Climate change shocks and socially responsible investments

Climate change's impact on investor behavior is a scantly investigated area in finance. This paper examines the performance of socially responsible exchange trade funds (ETFs) concerning conventional ETFs, in response to climate change events. We proxy climate change signals with a list of natural disaster events that NASA scientists relate to climate change. We contribute to existing literature, by using a very extensive information set of ETF strategies, not influenced by rating agencies' subjective evaluation policies, and covering almost 90% of the universe of worldwide sustainability thematic-oriented ETFs. This sample allows us to identify the socially responsible investment behavior in response to unpredictable climate change shocks. Our identification strategy accounts for endogeneity concerns and relies on two-stage least square (2SLS) approach finding that responsible investors react to climate change events by purchasing socially responsible investments. The relationship between climate change signals and return of investment in themes linked to the development of sustainability is positive. Interestingly enough, the sign of this relationship is different, when we disentangle the empirical results according to the asset type, confirming that investors shift their investments from equity funds to bond funds when market sentiment worsens. Our results indicate that policymakers should increase the support of firms adopting environmentally conscious business practices, while managers should boost a sustainable business strategy.     

Social responsibility,moral hazard,and collateral requirement: Evidence from a quasi-natural experiment in India

The stakeholder theory predicts that corporate social responsibility (CSR) activities reduce the morale hazard problem between creditors and corporate firms and decrease the requirement of collaterals in debt transactions. Consistent with this theory, our analysis shows that there is a negative relationship between CSR and secured debt in a cross-section of firms. Further, by using the mandatory CSR regulation implemented in India as a quasi-natural experiment setting, we observe the same negative relationship across periods in firms that were impacted by the regulation. These results suggest that CSR activities may substitute collaterals for obtaining debt from financial institutions, especially banks.     

Data-driven business and data privacy: Challenges and measures for product-based companies

To leverage the opportunities provided by the Internet of Things (IoT), product-based companies are exploring new data-driven business opportunities. They may miss these same opportunities, however, owing to data-privacy challenges. These challenges start with the customers of product-based companies, extend to the wider business ecosystem, and continue with the companies themselves. This article identifies 12 data-privacy challenges and introduces 12 measures to address them. These include intuitive recommendations, such as enabling cross-product consent collection, as well as less intuitive measures, such as fostering a can-do attitude in legal units, closing the gap between legal and business initiatives, or implementing a clear process for well-reasoned risk-taking. The following four principles were found to support companies in implementing these measures: (1) letting privacy and data-driven business go hand in hand, (2) putting customers first and turning their privacy preferences into opportunities, (3) aligning risk-management activities with the process of digital service development, and (4) using technology to professionalize legal processes.     

Falling from media grace: Telling lessons for leaders in modern times

Executives and organizations seeking to portray an image of competence and integrity should be careful what they wish for, given the state of modern media. Rather than being a passive conduit for one’s image, today’s media is much more activist and exerts substantial influence over the construction, reconstruction, and destruction of image. In studying the media’s rapid transformation of one such glowing image in the wake of a scandal, we identified three key processes by which the media transforms image. These processes are relevant to a wide range of contexts. Perhaps most intriguing is the discovery that the media can leverage an existing, recessive narrative and convert it into a dominant one. This intriguing finding suggests that the pursuit of a glowing image might inadvertently sow the seeds of future destruction. In the heat of a scandal, executives and organizations are likely to struggle with countering the media’s image-altering processes. Our findings imply a need for more careful, nuanced, and engaged image management both during a scandal and before scandal hits.     

Financial literacy in the digital age—A research agenda

Digital innovations are transforming financial services and resulting changes in consumer behavior and personal money management. Diffusion of pervasive digital technologies offers individuals quick and easy access to various digital services bringing opportunities and challenges into their personal money management. The study aimed to explore how digitalization affects individuals' financial literacy and financial capability. As a result, we identified three main themes in the intersection of finance and digitalization: Fintech, Financial behavior in digital environments, and Behavioral interventions. We propose directions for measuring digital financial literacy, updates to the financial literacy curriculum, and developments of digital learning tools. Further, we highlight collaboration between the public and private sectors to create a fairer and more inclusive economic landscape. Our study contributes to existing research by proposing a framework for digital financial literacy and financial capability and a research agenda for future studies.     

How to identify the canaries that might save the organizations: Mapping the most curiosity-oriented in Brazil

This study explores the effectiveness of international instruments for identifying the curious and alerts us to the relative ineffectiveness of foreign instruments to map the curious in Brazil. We used indirect questions to better map the most curious collaborators at Brazilian organizations. We believe our instrument eludes the Brazilian bias for impression management. Our sample covered 384 respondents in Brazil and identified that there are more curious professionals in small and medium-sized enterprises than in large and multinational companies, and that team members are more curious than those in managerial positions. Furthermore, our study reveals that the most curious perceive to be penalized when offering their perceptions regarding weak signals. This study points the need to invest in developing and protecting a more curiosity-oriented staff. In addition to contributing to the literature on curiosity at work, this study provides insights for companies that want to develop their teams to perceive business weak signals.     

An emerging market multinational Company's internationalization: From original equipment manufacturer to global brand leader

We examine an emerging market multinational company's (EMNC's) transformation from an original equipment manufacturer (OEM) to an original brand manufacturer (OBM) and global leader. Our longitudinal study of Hisense—China's largest TV company (and the world's third largest) spans three decades and involves detailed interviews with over 50 executives. We study how the company's global value chain network evolved, how it reconfigured its organization, upgraded its capabilities, and enhanced its brand reputation. We develop propositions that may contribute to improved explanations for an EMNC's internationalization sequence, development of competitive advantages, overseas management practices, and brand building.     

从发票管理角度看我国当前税收流失状况及改善措施

目前,全球金融危机对我国的影响还未见底。实施积极财政政策扩大内需,增强经济抵抗力和竞争力,确保持续增长是未来的艰巨任务。作为一系列重大举措的支撑力量,税收成为财政工作的关键一环。全面加强征收管理,减少税收流失是确保积极财政政策顺利推行的前提之一。本文围绕我国税收征管工作中的发票管理环节展开,分析了发票管理漏洞使税收流失加剧的现状,并提出了改善发票管理的若干措施。