Entry into force of the UN Watercourses Convention: why should it matter?

The United Nations Watercourses Convention entered into force on 17 August 2014, following a long and complex journey that dates back to 1970 when the UN referred the matter to its legal arm, the International Law Commission. This article follows the Convention through that long and turbulent road, examines its main provisions and analyses the reasons for the delay of its entry into force. It concludes by answering the question of why entry into force of the Convention should indeed matter.     

Macroeconomic consequences of state fragility in sub‐Saharan Africa

Are poor macroeconomic outcomes primarily the result of economic policies, or of deeper underlying state fragility problems in sub‐Saharan Africa? We attempt to answer this question by using carefully specified dynamic panel regression techniques to show how state fragility conditions help to explain the differences in the macroeconomic performance of sub‐Saharan African economies, and to identify the most plausible mechanisms of transmission. We find that countries with greater fragility suffer higher macroeconomic volatility and crisis; they also experience weaker growth. When we disaggregate state fragility into its various components, we find that it is the security and social components that have the strongest causal impact on macroeconomic outcomes, while the political component is, at best, weak. Therefore, we conclude that it is state fragility conditions, and not necessarily macroeconomic policies, that are of first‐order importance in explaining the differences in macroeconomic performance for African countries. The knock‐on effects are mostly mediated through the fiscal channel, the aid channel, and the finance channel. Accordingly, we recommend that interventions in fragile states should best focus on exploiting the potential for using fiscal policy, aid, and finance as instruments to improve macroeconomic outcomes in sub‐Saharan Africa.     

Is the system reliability profitable for retailing and consumer service of a dynamical system under cross-price elasticity of demand?

Retailing strategy is one of the most crucial factors for industries. A proper retailing strategy can help to enhance consumer service and increase the industry's profit. An improved approach to retailing is suggested in this research to deliver superior customer service while maximizing profits in a dynamic system. The study analyzes a retailing strategy for a demand with cross-price elasticity upon the retail price. A product's cross-price elasticity and the system reliability are critical factors in retailing. Understanding the cross-price elasticity of demand between products helps retailers to make pricing decisions that maximize profits by maintaining demand. Imperfect products are produced due to an imperfect production system. The imperfect ones must be adjusted with some costs to make them perfect for better retailing. The system failure rate is crucial for retailing under cross-price elasticity of demand patterns. Production system reliability, cross-price elasticity of demand, and consumer service are all essential factors that can impact a company's success in the market. The production rate is considered time- and system failure rate-dependent. Contradictory to the literature, a dynamical system is proposed for improved retail management, which is solved using the Euler-Lagrange theory. Finally, one can achieve the expected maximum profit for this retail system with optimum selling prices for different products by reducing the system failure rate. Some numerical illustrations with graphical representations are provided to validate the current study. Numerical examples show that applying cross-price elasticity of demand for more than two identical products provides 35% more profit for the retail industry than a single type of product.     

MODELING SOVEREIGN RISKS: FROM A HYBRID MODEL TO THE GENERALIZED DENSITY APPROACH

Motivated by the European sovereign debt crisis, we propose a hybrid sovereign default model that combines an accessible part taking into account the evolution of the sovereign solvency and the impact of critical political events, and a totally inaccessible part for the idiosyncratic credit risk. We obtain closed‐form formulas for the probability that the default occurs at critical political dates in a Markovian setting. Moreover, we introduce a generalized density framework for the hybrid default time and deduce the compensator process of default. Finally, we apply the hybrid model and the generalized density to the valuation of sovereign bonds and explain the significant jumps in long‐term government bond yields during the sovereign crisis.     

Analytical approximations of local‐Heston volatility model and error analysis

This paper studies the expansion of an option price (with bounded Lipschitz payoff) in a stochastic volatility model including a local volatility component. The stochastic volatility is a square root process, which is widely used for modeling the behavior of the variance process (Heston model). The local volatility part is of general form, requiring only appropriate growth and boundedness assumptions. We rigorously establish tight error estimates of our expansions, using Malliavin calculus. The error analysis, which requires a careful treatment because of the lack of weak differentiability of the model, is interesting on its own. Moreover, in the particular case of call–put options, we also provide expansions of the Black–Scholes implied volatility that allow to obtain very simple formulas that are fast to compute compared to the Monte Carlo approach and maintain a very competitive accuracy.     

Sensory Aspects of Retailing: Theoretical and Practical Implications

Sensory elements are an important aspect of both offline and online retail stores and can non-consciously influence consumer judgments and purchase behavior. In offline settings, ambient factors like scent, lighting, and music have been shown to influence customers’ shopping experiences and their buying behaviors. For online retail outlets, sensory factors related to color, display patterns, and layouts can have significant effects on consumer behavior. Sensory elements have strong managerial relevance since they can non-consciously influence behaviors and because they are relatively easy to change; for example, it requires minimal effort to change the lighting or the music at a physical retail store or the display pattern for an online store. The eight papers in this special issue address theoretical and practical issues related to how different sensory elements can strongly influence retail practices. These papers focus on underexplored topic areas and also on emerging technologies, which stimulate thoughts for further research in these areas.     

智慧居家养老服务协同供给的优化路径研究——以广西钦州市智慧居家养老项目的实践经验为例

智慧居家养老服务的协同供给可以形成社会联动效应，降低公共服务成本。运用公共服务协同供给分析框架，通过交叉分类方法从协同主体的利益与目标两个变量的耦合性出发分析广西钦州市智慧居家养老项目中养老服务主体间不同种类的协同关系，可以从加强政府领导、形成合作联盟、建立市场标准、创新扶持政策4个方面完善政府、企业、社会组织之间不同类型的协同供给，实现社会资源的高效利用以及向智慧居家养老服务的发展和转变。     

Examining artificial intelligence (AI) technologies in marketing via a global lens: Current trends and future research opportunities

Artificial intelligence (AI) has captured substantial interest from a wide array of marketing scholars in recent years. Our research contributes to this emerging domain by examining AI technologies in marketing via a global lens. Specifically, our lens focuses on three levels of analysis: country, company, and consumer. Our country-level analysis emphasizes the heterogeneity in economic inequality across countries due to the considerable economic resources necessary for AI adoption. Our company-level analysis focuses on glocalization because while the hardware that underlies these technologies may be global in nature, their application necessitates adaptation to local cultures. Our consumer-level analysis examines consumer ethics and privacy concerns, as AI technologies often collect, store and process a cornucopia of personal data across our globe. Through the prism of these three lenses, we focus on two important dimensions of AI technologies in marketing: (1) human–machine interaction and (2) automated analysis of text, audio, images, and video. We then explore the interaction between these two key dimensions of AI across our three-part global lens to develop a set of research questions for future marketing scholarship in this increasingly important domain.     

External pressure or internal culture? An innovation diffusion theory account of small retail businesses’ social media use

COVID-19 put unprecedented external pressure on small businesses to adopt or increase use of social media while not all small businesses are internally ready for this rapid change. This study investigated the roles of external pressures and organizational culture of openness and learning in driving small retail business owners'/managers' social media use decisions by impacting their perceived usefulness and barriers, based on the innovation-decision process model from the diffusion of innovations theory and the theory of reasoned action. An online survey with structured measurements was administered to 411 U.S. small retail business owners/managers. Results from structural equation modeling revealed that external pressures positively influenced small business owners'/managers’ perceived usefulness and barriers and social media use intention. In addition, the culture of openness and learning positively influenced the perceived usefulness while mitigating the perceived barriers, thereby directly and indirectly influencing the social media use intention. Theoretical and managerial implications are discussed.     

Cross-national differences in stakeholder management: Applying institutional theory and comparative capitalism framework

Drawing upon the research in institutional theory and comparative capitalism, the present study investigates how cross-national differences in the political, business, and economic institutional contexts of the United States, Italy, and Japan are associated with the ways in which companies in each of these countries prioritize and engage in their stakeholder engagement activities (SEAs). Using Porter and Kramer's framework, which classifies corporate social responsibility (CSR) activities as falling into four categories (good citizenship, mitigating harm from value chain, transforming value chain activities, and strategic philanthropy), we investigate how companies in the United States, Japan, and Italy prioritize and engage in these four SEAs. An analysis of data collected from 340 companies across these countries reveals that while companies in each of these three countries undertake the four types of SEAs, the prioritization and prevalence of the four types of SEAs vary from one country to the other, in ways that align with the prevailing institutional contexts of each country. The results contribute to a more nuanced understanding of why and how companies' approaches to CSR differ across countries. From a practitioner's perspective, the findings highlight the cultural specificity of CSR, implying that despite the global nature of CSR, the implementation of CSR needs to be tailored to a country's context.