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Materialism has become a topic of increasing interest to researchers and policymakers because it can influence consumer behavior. However, a clear picture of how this phenomenon impacts consumers has proven to be elusive. Using an integrated framework, this paper aims to derive hypotheses from theoretical concepts of materialism and consumer decision-making styles and uses a survey of 1,216 respondents in India to test the hypotheses.

The present study is the first of its kind to test the impact of materialist values on consumer decision-making styles among a sample of 13-18 years old school children. The constructs are validated through a first- and second-order confirmatory factor analysis and an integrated second-order structural model is developed.

This study finds that materialism is a positive predictor of “recreation/ hedonistic”,; “confused by over-choice”; “brand consciousness”; “perfectionistic high-quality consciousness”; and “habitual brand loyal” style of consumers. Further, materialism has a negative impact on “price value consciousness” of consumers. These findings have important implications for theory and practice.

This study is restricted to school children in the National Capital Region and hence cannot be generalized to the whole young population in India.

Conceptualizing both materialism and consumer decision-making styles as second-order constructs, this is a maiden study that examines the impact of materialistic values on the consumer decision-making styles of young consumers.

The role of logistics service provider (LSP) is essential for efficient logistics service quality (LSQ) and supply chain management, especially in multimodal transport. Multimodal transport routes that use the Trans-Siberian Railway (TSR) play an important role in the supply chains of Northeast Asia. This paper aims to identify current conditions of TSR LSQ and propose improvements to enhance the competitiveness of traditional routes. Therefore, this study sheds light on and provides recommendations for various managerial strategies to LSPs in the context of the TSR. This study utilizes Importance-Performance Analysis (IPA) to measure levels of importance and performance of the logistics service of LSPs that provide multimodal transport services via the TSR from South Korea to Europe. This study identifies capabilities on the basis of five criteria (price, timeliness, reliability, equipment systems, and customer service) from a customers’ perspective. The results of the research indicate that operational improvements should be considered to activate TSR multimodal transport for northern logistics routes from the perspective of Korean shippers. Specific findings show that balanced development strategies are needed for logistics routes that have not yet been significantly activated, while implying that logistics costs could be reduced initially to satisfy shippers. This study presents an operational strategy for LSPs using the TSR in northern logistics through IPA methods. Furthermore, this research can help policymakers propose specific policies to revitalize the northern logistics of Korean logistics companies and to provide incentive supports for shippers.

Gives a bibliographical review of the finite element methods (FEMs) applied for the linear and nonlinear, static and dynamic analyses of basic structural elements from the theoretical as well as practical points of view. The range of applications of FEMs in this area is wide and cannot be presented in a single paper; therefore aims to give the reader an encyclopaedic view on the subject. The bibliography at the end of the paper contains 2,025 references to papers, conference proceedings and theses/dissertations dealing with the analysis of beams, columns, rods, bars, cables, discs, blades, shafts, membranes, plates and shells that were published in 1992‐1995.

International marketing/export marketing.

This case is appropriate for discussion in courses such as international marketing and export marketing of post graduate studies in management. The case can also be used for management development programmes concerning practising managers.

The case is based on export marketing strategy with special focus on developing strong buyer (customer) relationships and the associated challenges of a trading company, The Handicrafts and Handlooms Exports Corporation of India Ltd (HHEC). The corporation primarily engages in export of handlooms and handicraft products from India. Since 2005-06 the corporation has been incurring losses and it was only in 2010-11 that the corporation has registered a positive net profit.

To understand the appropriate strategies for buyer retention; to understand appropriate promotion strategies of non-essential items like handicraft, handloom and carpets; and to help students in making decisions for export marketing like understanding product characteristic, development of samples, procurement of products, vendor management, and pricing decisions.

Teaching notes.

Despite the recognized importance of transactive memory systems (TMS) for firm performance, this relationship remains misconstrued for entrepreneurial firms. Some researchers argue that entrepreneurial firms benefit from effective knowledge management systems, whereas others contend that such systems may prove expensive for resource-scarce entrepreneurial firms. Accordingly, the purpose of this paper is to explore this relationship in the context of Indian entrepreneurial firms. Furthermore, the authors argue that relationship conflict among organizational members impacts the TMS–performance link for entrepreneurial firms.

Data were collected from 127 entrepreneurial hotels in the Uttarakhand state of India and analyzed using multiple linear regression.

The findings of this study establish a positive relationship between TMS and firm performance for entrepreneurial firms. Also, it is found that TMS becomes more nuanced and beneficial in the presence of relationship conflict between organizational sub-units and is a unique finding that can be potentially helpful to entrepreneurs bestowed with the task of knowledge management in their organizations.

This study offers at least two insights to entrepreneurs. First, establishing TMS – i.e. managing knowledge in such a way that specialization units are created, credibility is established among the knowledge units, and there is scope for sufficient communication – leads to enhanced performance in entrepreneurial organizations. Second, as the level of relationship conflict within the entrepreneurial firm increases, it becomes all the more crucial to emphasize TMS.

Although researchers in the literature of knowledge management have emphasized a lot on its performance outcomes, relatively little research effort has been placed on understanding this link for entrepreneurial firms. The current study filled this void in the literature and offered crucial implications for entrepreneurial firms operating in dynamic environments such as hotels. Additionally, the data collected from a relatively unexplored context of Indian hospitality industry offer a valuable addition to the entrepreneurship literature.

Introduction Corrosion inhibitors are used during pickling, oil‐well acidification and in other process industries to control corrosion and hydrogen absorption by steels. The suitability of an inhibitor is judged by measuring the corrosion rate and by the hydrogen absorbed by the material during the operation in the presence of inhibitors. It is generally believed that the efficacy of an inhibitor in controlling hydrogen absorption increases with its increase in corrosion mitigatory properties. This principle is true for the inhibitors which function by uniform film formation but fails in the case of poisons such as compounds of As, S, P and Sb, which strongly polarize the recombination step of the hydrogen evolution reaction on metal surfaces:

Radio-frequency identification (RFID) systems are transforming hospital operations by improving care and reducing costs. However, hospital managers have some concerns about adopting RFID technologies. These are cost, return on investment, privacy and other technology issues. This study examines RFID adoption in health-care industry based on the Technology-Organization-Environment framework. This paper aims to demonstrate how US hospitals are adopting RFID technologies and make recommendations, using empirical data.

An online survey was sent to Chief Information Officers and the top information technology (IT) executives of US acute care hospitals to determine the extent to which hospitals have implemented RFID technologies including the reasons, concerns and applications of RFID technologies, and the antecedents of RFID adoption in hospitals.

The study found that a high percentage of respondents have adopted or are considering adopting RFID technology as a new management tool. Organizational and technological factors have strong positive influence on adoption, whereas environmental factors do not significantly affect the adoption decisions. The main reasons for implementing RFID technology are improved hospital operations, including inventory management, asset control, workflow and patient flow. Some of the concerns are cost of RFID tags and cost associated with implementation.

This study is limited to a small sample (n = 86) of US hospitals. This study should continue to be replicated in the future, as adoption of RFID technologies matures in the health-care sector.

This study informs health-care managers on the challenges and opportunities of RFID by identifying motivations, barriers and issues related to RFID adoption. The findings of this study will expand the emerging literature and provide direction to academicians for further research in technology adoption.

Since the hospitality industry is driven by people, effective utilization of knowledge among various organizational units is required to ensure guest satisfaction and in turn superior performance. Research trying to find the implications of transactive memory systems (TMSs), an integrative mechanism for knowledge management in organizations, has yielded ambiguous and mixed results, leading the researchers to believe that the linkages may not be as straightforward as previously imagined. In this study, the authors theoretically build their arguments based on the knowledge-based view of the firm and empirically test these linkages using data collected from the small hotels of India.

Data were collected from the owner-managers or senior executives of small hotels operating in the Uttarakhand state of India, and analysed using structural equation modelling (SEM) and Hayes process macro.

It was found that for the hospitality firms, the TMS is an enabler for performance only when the focus of knowledge creation and utilization is on building effective strategic orientations. Further, the technology orientation (TO) and learning orientation (LO) of the hotel mediate the relationship between the TMS and firm performance.

Effective knowledge sharing among employees helps availability of credible and crucial information about customers, which eventually helps in long-term mutually beneficial relationships with the customers, leading to greater economic value creation for the hotel.

By establishing theoretical links between knowledge creation and utilization, and validating these linkages using data collected from the hotel industry in India, this study offers unique and useful insights for the theoretical advancement of the hospitality literature. This study also makes a case that small hotels investing their energy and resources into the creation of a transactive memory systems could reap benefits through appropriate strategic postures.

Context‐awareness is an essential property of any pervasive system perceiving its environment. Such a system captures and processes context, i.e. the features describing the relevant aspects of environment state and user behaviour. However, development of these systems still requires solving a number of research and engineering challenges. The purpose of this paper is to propose perception framework, a RESTful middleware which simplifies and accelerates the development of pervasive systems. Perception framework allows constructing services' application logic using rules and context. Moreover, it collects sensor data and produces the context information that is required for the rules. The authors present the architecture, design, complete implementation, and prototype‐based verification of perception framework.

Development of context‐aware services is achieved with a novel architecture supporting building of the logic of web services using rules which directly manipulate the available elementary context represented with the Web Ontology Language (OWL) ontology. These rules are described using the Rule Interchange Format (RIF) with support for different rule languages. The implementation of this framework is aligned with RESTful principles, providing a lightweight and flexible solution for large‐scale context‐aware systems.

The fully implemented prototype verifies the feasibility of constructing the logic of context‐aware web services with the rules supported by perception framework.

The contributions of this paper include: the requirement specification for a generic context‐aware pervasive middleware; and the design and implementation of the framework (i.e. perception framework) supporting the development of context‐aware web services. The perception framework includes a generic rule‐based reasoner allowing developers to use several RIF‐compliant rule description languages.

This study aims to propose a unique algorithm-based hysteresis current control technique (HCCT) for induction motor using a single-phase voltage source inverter (SPVSI) to eliminate both sub and inter harmonics (SIH) and electromagnetic interference (EMI). The total harmonic distortion (THD) of the load current also reduces in comparison to standard HCCT and modified technique-based existing HCCT.

Matlab simulation has been carried out to develop an SPVSI model and the unique algorithm-based HCCT. The same platform has also been used to develop a few existing HCCTs such as standard, dual-band and modified. The switching frequency and harmonic analysis of load currents for all the HCCTs have been compared in the paper. The hardware implementation of the proposed algorithm-based HCCT was also verified and compared with the simulation results.

The proposed unique algorithm-based HCCT provides the benefits of both unipolar and bipolar switching techniques. It reduces the switching frequency as unipolar switching scheme and eliminates the EMI. It also reduces THD and nullifies SIH of the load current. This enables an improvement in the overall performance and efficiency of the motor.

This proposed HCCT eliminates the SIH and improves the overall efficiency of the motor, hence can prevent overheating, vibration, acoustic noise, pulsating torque and braking of the rotor shaft of the motor and increasing the reliability of the system.

It can be implemented for the motors that are used in household applications and electric vehicles through one-phase inverter.

This proposed HCCT has detected the zero crossing point of reference current, allowed samples and shifted the necessary amount of hysteresis band at zero crossing region to eliminate SIH and THD.