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Acquisitions are complex and ambiguous events fraught with information asymmetries emphasizing market failure before an acquisition or organizational failure during integration. While often treated in isolation, market and organization failure are intertwined in acquisitions as integration planning starts before a deal is closed. Effective integration begins with a deep understanding of the target to be able to share assets and knowledge. However, acquiring firms currently have limited solutions to address information asymmetries. Most remedies primarily aim at market failure using due diligence and external advisors, leaving information asymmetry due to organizational failure primarily unattended. The authors develop a typology that leverages informal and formal social ties to address information asymmetries across the acquisition process that jointly considers market and organizational failure. The typology of this study combines existing research to develop how social ties with stakeholders influence acquisitions and can increase their success.

This study attempts to identify and explicate the unique segmentation of the increasingly growing virtual reality (VR) user market based on the user experience. Consequently, it collects five hundred forty-five online survey questionnaires through the Prolific platform and deploys cluster analysis to identify mutually exclusive groups of VR users. The research variable, user experience, contains 16 indicators explained by four dimensions. As a result, this study is able to unveil three mutually exclusive markets which are labeled as (1) beginner, (2) aficionado, and (3) utilitarian. The unique features of these three groups are further compared based on their VR tour behaviors. In the conclusion section, it offers managerial implications for devising novel marketing strategies.

This study examined the factors influencing willingness-to-repurchase for each class of airline service, and integrate the constructs of service quality, satisfaction and willingness-to-repurchase which were rooted on Engel-Kollat-Blackwell (EKB) model. The study focuses on the domestic and international arrival of passengers at Murtala Muhammed International Airport in Lagos and Nnamdi Azikwe International Airport in Abuja. Information was gathered from domestic and foreign passengers who had post-purchase experience and had used the airline's services more than once. The survey data were obtained concurrently from arrival passengers at two major international airports using an electronic questionnaire through random and purposive sampling techniques. The data was analysed using the ordinal logit model and structural equation model. From the 606 respondents, 524 responses were received but 489 responses were valid for data analysis and reporting and were obtained mostly from economy and business class passengers. The study found that the quality of seat pitch, allowance of 30 kg luggage permission, availability of online check-in 24 hours before the departing flight, quality of space for legroom between seats, and the quality of seats that can be converted into a fully flatbed are the major service factors influencing willingness-to-repurchase economy and business class tickets. Also, it was found that passengers' willingness to repurchase is influenced majorly by service quality, but not necessarily influenced by satisfaction. These results reflect the passengers' consciousness of COVID-19 because the study was conducted during the heat of COVID-19 pandemic. Recommendations were suggested for airline management based on each class.

The institutional context and government policies may encourage or discourage entrepreneurship in a country. The main research question in this study is: how does a national social benefits system influence the entrepreneurial decision-making process to start a new venture across countries? The authors investigate two categories of effects: (1) the direct effects of public and private social expenditure on the entrepreneurial decision to start a new venture and (2) the multilevel interaction effects of social benefits and the individual-level ‘fear of failure to start a business’. The authors find that entrepreneurs in countries with a high level of public social expenditures are less likely to decide to start a new venture. The findings also suggest that private social expenditure weakens the negative effect of the ‘fear of failure’ on the entrepreneurial decision to start a new venture.

This chapter highlights how implementing circular economy principles can help companies working with sustainability to move from a reductionist and waste management approach to marketing competitive circular value propositions that intentionally design out waste (e.g. emissions and pollution) by rethinking, reinventing and redesigning the value chain. Schijvens, a Dutch family-owned corporate fashion textile company, acts as a case for exemplifying successful implementation of circular economy principles as a marketing strategy in a sector that struggles with finding solutions to the ethical challenges of producing and marketing textile fashion. The textile industry has, for many years, been accused of production that is based on environmentally harmful processes and conditions that are not socially fair. Circular economy principles provide a range of suggestions to address the ethical challenges occurring from covering the human needs of having clothes to wear. Yet, implementing circular economy principles is not a panacea. It is not only a question of delivering a technological quick fix but also a question of managing the new processes and human mindset guiding the actions in the value chain. This chapter, therefore, outlines reasons for a different perspective on the traditional linear value chain and related implications managers face when undertaking a journey from sustainability based on a reductionist approach to a closed-loop approach. It is argued that implementing circular economy principles by pro-actively managing the value chain processes based on eco-centric dynamic capabilities can provide even more radical changes than the incremental reductionist approach often associated with being a green sustainable company.

Cultural heritage destruction, acts that are carried out by both state and non-state actors, have accompanied violence towards people in all types of wars throughout human history. Used as a means to cause terror and to directly perpetuate harm on a particular group of people, heritage destruction ultimately erases the history of the people and denies them a future at the same time. Heritage destruction, as such, is a topic that is directly relevant for conflict and peace economics. Yet, economics literature on heritage destruction, especially during epochs of violence is scant at best. Presenting some examples of heritage destruction during mass atrocities, this chapter discusses how heritage destruction is related to causes, conduct, and consequences of violence. Doing so illustrates how heritage destruction could be incorporated in extant conflict and peace economics studies and their relevance for post-conflict reconstruction and violence prevention.

Behavioral economics poses a challenge for the welfare evaluation of choices, particularly those that involve risk. It demands that we recognize that the descriptive account of behavior toward those choices might not be the ones we were all taught, and still teach, and that subjective risk perceptions might not accord with expert assessments of probabilities. In addition to these challenges, we are faced with the need to jettison naive notions of revealed preferences, according to which every choice by a subject expresses her objective function, as behavioral evidence forces us to confront pervasive inconsistencies and noise in a typical individual’s choice data. A principled account of errant choice must be built into models used for identification and estimation. These challenges demand close attention to the methodological claims often used to justify policy interventions. They also require, we argue, closer attention by economists to relevant contributions from cognitive science. We propose that a quantitative application of the “intentional stance” of Dennett provides a coherent, attractive and general approach to behavioral welfare economics.

We take Cumulative Prospect Theory (CPT) seriously by rigorously estimating structural models using the full set of CPT parameters. Much of the literature only estimates a subset of CPT parameters, or more simply assumes CPT parameter values from prior studies. Our data are from laboratory experiments with undergraduate students and MBA students facing substantial real incentives and losses. We also estimate structural models from Expected Utility Theory (EUT), Dual Theory (DT), Rank-Dependent Utility (RDU), and Disappointment Aversion (DA) for comparison. Our major finding is that a majority of individuals in our sample locally asset integrate. That is, they see a loss frame for what it is, a frame, and behave as if they evaluate the net payment rather than the gross loss when one is presented to them. This finding is devastating to the direct application of CPT to these data for those subjects. Support for CPT is greater when losses are covered out of an earned endowment rather than house money, but RDU is still the best single characterization of individual and pooled choices. Defenders of the CPT model claim, correctly, that the CPT model exists “because the data says it should.” In other words, the CPT model was borne from a wide range of stylized facts culled from parts of the cognitive psychology literature. If one is to take the CPT model seriously and rigorously then it needs to do a much better job of explaining the data than we see here.

Purpose: Consumer acceptance is considered the most important factor in functional food success and is given top priority in new product development. This study focussed on finding factors that influence consumer perceptions about active food and the pattern of active food consumption. This chapter aims to provide a deeper understanding of taste trading based on a consumer decision-making framework.

Research Methodology: Cross-sectional consumer data were collected by floating G-Doc containing the questionnaire which was supposed to be answered by people according to their behaviours, preferences, knowledge regarding functional foods etc. It contained questions about their income, gender, preference towards functional foods, factors affecting decision-making while purchasing functional foods etc.

Results of the Study: The findings suggest that the consumers' attitude towards functional foods was mainly influenced by the quality and suitability of the product. Purchase intent was found based on age, literacy of population, income and health benefits of active foods. Awareness of functional foods and their price significantly affected the purchase of functional foods. Most people were willing to spend more on functional foods in the future regardless of the taste and provided high quality and product suitability.