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The purpose of this paper is to examine the relationships between specific supply chain practices and organizational performance and whether this relationship is moderated by the role that a company assumes in its respective supply chain.

This paper uses regression analysis and the relative weights method to analyze a set of survey data from respondents within the non‐academic, North American membership of the Institute of Supply Management.

The results show that the supply chain role for a company makes a difference in terms of the specific supply chain practices that lead to better performance. Further, there is a clear indication that the relative importance of a specific practice varies across the supply chain roles thereby indicating that a general link between practice and performance may be erroneous without considering the specific context of the company concerned.

Supply chain practices are complex constructs. While this study shows the effect of broadly‐accepted supply chain practices on performance, not all possible practices are covered in the study. Additional practices not considered may have an effect on company performance and future research may improve upon the findings by extending the analysis to include an expanded segmentation of supply chain role.

The results of the study serve as a practical guideline for managers that not all practices would be effective for all companies. Managers must look at the role‐specific context of their organization in the supply chain before deciding which practices are likely to be appropriate.

This paper expands the current body of research in the supply chain area by examining the supply chain roles of manufacturer, distributor, retailer and service provider. This is a much broader construct than the more common dyadic treatment of a supply chain consisting only of a customer and supplier, and adds a new contextual dimension to supply chain research. In addition, service provider as a supply chain role has been hardly researched before.

The purpose of this paper was to analyze the level of innovation and entrepreneurial culture among Asian multinationals, especially as they face intense competition from large global companies. Past practices and the sense that Asian companies are followers rather than innovators have resulted in the persistent belief that these companies are not sufficiently innovative and do not support or promote an entrepreneurial culture. However, given the rapid development in Asian economies in recent years, it is useful to analyze whether such traditional views and practices are changing and whether employees in these organizations view innovation as a necessary tool.

The data for this study came from a survey of 193 executives (32.2 per cent response rate). The statements in the survey instrument were designed to measure aspects of three factors, namely, organizational philosophy, corporate support and human capital, for the practice of entrepreneurship and innovation in their companies. The results were analyzed through standard statistical techniques such as factor loadings, correlation analysis, analysis of variance and post hoc tests.

While Asian companies traditionally are viewed as followers rather than innovators in entrepreneurship and innovation, it is clear from this study that this perception is changing at least for the three countries in this study with the prevalence and continued growth of the globalized economy. While the main results show an overall trend of increasing innovation and entrepreneurship culture, there are some major differences among specific factors. Specifically, the three countries are not the same across all the factors. This could be partly attributed to the cultural differences among these countries. In conclusion, the implications of the results from this study add to the extant research in this area.

One of the limitations of this paper is the sample, which is obviously restricted to three countries. In addition, some of the factors need further examination for a more complete understanding of their relationship to entrepreneurship and innovation. In addition, longitudinal analysis can examine the patterns in time-based trends for these companies.

The paper includes implications for Asian multinationals to achieve growth in a highly competitive global environment where their traditional “followers” mentality limits them from competing with global competitors who are practicing entrepreneurship and innovation.

For the first time, this study has shown that Asian multinationals are attempting to be innovative and use the corporate entrepreneurship as a means to compete with global companies.

Blockchain is an emerging technology that started in the cryptocurrency sphere with bitcoin but expanded to include numerous applications. This chapter provides an overview of the book. It begins by identifying the three main components of a blockchain. Next, it discusses the book's purpose, distinguishing features, and its intended audience. The chapter then outlines the book's structure, consisting of 22 chapters divided into four main parts. It offers a brief synopsis of each section and chapter. Finally, it ends with a summary and conclusions.

Questionnaire studies of knowledge, attitude and practice (KAP) are effective research in the field of health, which have many shortcomings. The purpose of this research is to propose an automatic questionnaire-free method based on deep learning techniques to address the shortcomings of common methods. Next, the aim of this research is to use the proposed method with public comments on Twitter to get the gaps in KAP of people regarding COVID-19.

In this paper, two models are proposed to achieve the mentioned purposes, the first one for attitude and the other for people’s knowledge and practice. First, the authors collect some tweets from Twitter and label them. After that, the authors preprocess the collected textual data. Then, the text representation vector for each tweet is extracted using BERT-BiGRU or XLNet-GRU. Finally, for the knowledge and practice problem, a multi-label classifier with 16 classes representing health guidelines is proposed. Also, for the attitude problem, a multi-class classifier with three classes (positive, negative and neutral) is proposed.

Labeling quality has a direct relationship with the performance of the final model, the authors calculated the inter-rater reliability using the Krippendorf alpha coefficient, which shows the reliability of the assessment in both problems. In the problem of knowledge and practice, 87% and in the problem of people’s attitude, 95% agreement was reached. The high agreement obtained indicates the reliability of the dataset and warrants the assessment. The proposed models in both problems were evaluated with some metrics, which shows that both proposed models perform better than the common methods. Our analyses for KAP are more efficient than questionnaire methods. Our method has solved many shortcomings of questionnaires, the most important of which is increasing the speed of evaluation, increasing the studied population and receiving reliable opinions to get accurate results.

Our research is based on social network datasets. This data cannot provide the possibility to discover the public information of users definitively. Addressing this limitation can have a lot of complexity and little certainty, so in this research, the authors presented our final analysis independent of the public information of users.

Combining recurrent neural networks with methods based on the attention mechanism improves the performance of the model and solves the need for large training data. Also, using these methods is effective in the process of improving the implementation of KAP research and eliminating its shortcomings. These results can be used in other text processing tasks and cause their improvement. The results of the analysis on the attitude, practice and knowledge of people regarding the health guidelines lead to the effective planning and implementation of health decisions and interventions and required training by health institutions. The results of this research show the effective relationship between attitude, practice and knowledge. People are better at following health guidelines than being aware of COVID-19. Despite many tensions during the epidemic, most people still discuss the issue with a positive attitude.

To the best of our knowledge, so far, no text processing-based method has been proposed to perform KAP research. Also, our method benefits from the most valuable data of today’s era (i.e. social networks), which is the expression of people’s experiences, facts and free opinions. Therefore, our final analysis provides more realistic results.

Financial systemic risk is often assessed by the interconnectedness of financial institutes (FI) in terms of cross-ownership, overlapping investment portfolios, interbank credit exposures, etc. Less is known about the interconnectedness between FIs through the lens of consumer credits. Using detailed consumer credit data in Canada, this chapter constructs a novel banking network to measure FIs’ interconnectedness in the consumer credit markets. Results show that FIs on average are more connected to each other over the sample period, with the interconnectedness measure increases by 19% from 2013 Q4 to 2019 Q4. FIs with more diversified portfolios are more connected in the network. Among various types of FIs, secondary FIs have the notable increase in interconnectedness. Domestic Systemically Important Banks and secondary FIs offering a broad range of loan products are more connected to large FIs, while those specialized in single loan types are more connected to their industry peers. FI connectedness is also significantly related to their participation in the mortgage markets.

The rapid increase in analytics is playing an essential role in enlarging various practices related to the health sector. Big Data Analytics (BDA) provides multiple tools to store, maintain, and analyze large sets of data provided by different systems of health. It is essential to manage and analyze these data to get meaningful information. Pharmaceutical companies are accumulating their data in the medical databases, whereas the payers are digitalizing the records of patients. Biomedical research generates a significant amount of data. There has been a continuous improvement in the health sector for past decades. They have become more advanced by recording the patient’s data on the Internet of Things devices, Electronic Health Records efficiently. BD is undoubtedly going to enhance the productivity and performance of organizations in various fields. Still, there are several challenges associated with BD, such as storing, capturing, and analyzing data, and their subsequent application to a practical health sector.

This paper analyses the stalling of the Doha Development Agenda (DDA) and its systemic and institutional consequences through a geopolitical economy approach that integrates the French school of international economic relations and Régulation Theory. These approaches put states and their economic roles at the fore, correcting dominant free trade approaches to world trade. The paper also avoids monocausal explanations for trade talk deadlocks and aims to provide a comprehensive approach on the co-evolution of world trade patterns and its institutions. In this approach, the DDA stalemate is traced to an institution-structure mismatch in how states articulate their accumulation strategies and institutions (competition, state regulation, adhesion to international regime) to the World Trade Organization (WTO) regime occasioned by the emergence of new trade powers. This has given rise to three distinct conflicts in how member states navigate between the main parameters of the multilateral trading system (non-discrimination, reciprocity and balance of power) and their national accumulation strategies: the erosion of non-discrimination and reciprocity; the failure to build an operational compromise between development and ‘globalization’, that is, between multilateral openness and new trade and power balances; and the difficulty in reaching a compromise between historical and emerging capitalisms. The outcome of these conflicts will determine the institutional configuration of the post-Doha WTO agenda.

Marketing, Pricing, Strategic marketing.

The case is developed for an MBA-level program.

In May 2017, the telecom industry in India witnessed an intense price war over 4G (fourth generation) data prices. Gopal Vittal, CEO of Bharti Airtel was exploring various options on how best to respond to the situation. He had to take a final call regarding Bharti Airtel’s marketing team’s counter move to tackle this price war by Jio – should Bharti Airtel ignore it, accommodate it or retaliate with even lower prices? Bharti Airtel strongly believed that Jio pricing structure had violated “fair pricing” norms, and its pricing was anti-competitive. It had filed a case with the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) and the Competition Commission of India (CCI) to restrain Jio from further giving “free” promotional offers and penalize it for it. Could the legal recourse by Bharti Airtel dampen Jio’s consistent subscriber growth rate?

The case provides the students with an insight into how the competition focused on pricing happens in the telecom industry. The pricing war affects the profit margin of all competing companies. It changes the customer reference point for evaluating the competing products and services. The students would also learn practical applications of positive-sum pricing, pricing war, fair pricing and legal aspects of pricing. This case provides the students with an opportunity to understand the pricing war and how to respond to it in a particular situation; understand positive-sum pricing and negative-sum pricing in telecom industry context; understand legal aspects of pricing; and how to leverage data for gaining newer customer insights.

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CSS 8: Marketing.