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The purpose of this paper is to examine the relevance of information, transparency and information efficiency in short-run performance of new issues. The current research evaluates the short-run performance of IPOs during 2005-2012, which even includes the recessionary period. The present study evaluates the impact of informational variables on first-day returns.

The short-run performance of the IPOs is measured through market adjusted excess return. A structural equation model (SEM) has been designed to identify how information influences the short-run performance of IPOs.

The results of structural model reveal that the sale of promoters’ stake and underwriters’ reputation are the major contributors towards information and are found to be highly significant statistically. The model also shows that the issue size (a component of information) is statistically insignificant at 5 per cent. The model suggests that the availability of information has negative impact on the first day returns indicating that the issuer which disclose maximum information to the public get lower returns on the listing day and hence, their issues are less underpriced.

The present study has a contribution in investment decisions for global investors, as the participation of international investors is common in IPOs of emerging markets. The findings of the study are expected to be useful to the practitioners in predicting the pricing of IPOs based on the informational variables influencing their performance.

The purpose of this paper is to focus on examining the first day returns of initial public offerings (IPOs) and the role of information on their performance. The study tries to optimize the returns of the new issues during 2005-2012 with risk as a constraint.

The initial returns are measured through the market-adjusted excess return and the risk associated with the new issue is measured through underwriters’ reputation. The returns have been optimized through a mixed integer linear problem using the Maple software.

The previous studies show that various informational variables affect the listing day returns significantly. The results of the present study indicate that the mean of initial returns for IPOs during 2005-2012 is 18.03 and the mean risk for these issues is 0.46. The findings also suggest that the optimal returns are obtained in the pre-recession era (2005-2008) and the value for the same is 50.02 percent.

The current study contributes in the investment decisions for global investors as every investor wants to maximize his/her returns. The optimal returns with risk as a constraint will help the investors in improving their investment decision as a prudent investor does not aim solely at maximizing the expected return of an investment but is also interested in optimizing with the minimization of risk.

This study aims to identify and analyse the key determinants influencing customer satisfaction towards online shopping in India.

The literature concerning major attributes of website functionality, perceived usability, perceived usefulness and customer satisfaction in online retailing were reviewed. Data were collected from 365 respondents active in online shopping for examining the constructs. The model was empirically tested using structural equation modelling.

The findings of the study reveal that perceived usefulness and website functionality have a positive impact on customer satisfaction, whereas perceived usability had a significant but negative impact on customer satisfaction.

This research will help online retailers to attract and motivate new customers for online shopping and existing customers to extend it in their daily purchase. Online retailers can improve post purchase satisfaction and eventually increase online customers.

This is one of the preliminary study dealing with customer satisfaction towards online retailing in India. The scale has been extended to include items like satisfaction with cash on delivery mode of payment not included in previous scales. The scale of perceived usefulness has also been deepened by adding time performance, product performance and promotional performance.

Investigates urban bias in state policy making in Mexico. Refers to literature claiming that rural poverty in developing nations is a major problem because capitalism reflects an urban bias. Examines social security coverage for the rural poor in Mexico and notes that there are great variations depending on area, suggesting that social security coverage is politically negotiable. Outlines briefly the historical development of Mexico’s welfare state and uses a power resource model to demonstrate how groups with competing interests go about securing benefits from the state. Cites literature on dependency theory, indicating that rural groups have failed to mobilize politically and have therefore not secured the same state resources (such as social security benefits and housing) as urban groups, yet argues that this does not always apply in Mexico, partially due to party politics and bureaucratic paternalism. Explains how data was collected to examine regional variations in social security coverage among the rural poor and how the data was analysed. Reveal that workers in important international export markets (such as cotton and sugar) have greater political leverage in obtaining better social security benefits. Notes also that areas supporting the political party in power obtain better benefits. Concludes, therefore, that rural workers are not powerless in the face of urban capitalism and that urban bias and dependency theories do not reflect the situation in Mexico – rather social security benefits are politically negotiable.

The purpose of this paper is to ascertain the monthly seasonality in the Indian stock market after taking into consideration the market features of leptokurtosis, volatility clustering and the leverage effect.

Augmented Dickey-Fuller, Phillips-Perron and Kwaitkowski-Phillips-Schmidt-Shin tests are deployed to check stationarity of the series. Autocorrelation function, partial autocorrelation function and Ljung-Box statistics are employed to check the applicability of volatility models. An exponential generalized auto regressive conditionally heteroskedastic model is deployed to test the seasonality, where the conditional mean equation is a switching model with dummy variables for each month of the year.

Though the financial year in India stretches from April to March, the stock market exhibits a November effect (returns in November are the highest). Cultural factors, misattribution bias and liquidity hypothesis seem to explain the phenomenon.

The paper endeavors to provide a review of possible explanations behind month-of-the-year effect documented in literature in the past four decades. Further, the unique evidence from the Indian stock market supports the argument in the literature that monthly seasonality, by nature, may not be a consistent/robust phenomenon. Therefore, it needs to be examined from time to time.

As the seasonality in the stock market and resultant anomalies are dynamic phenomena, the paper reports the current seasonality/anomalies prevalent in the Indian market. This would aid investors in designing short-term investment portfolios (based on anomalies present) in order to earn abnormal returns.

This study aims to examine the research pattern and growth trends of published research on a unified theory of acceptance and use of technology 2 (UTAUT2) from 2012 to 2019. The study also examines the research scope of UTAUT2 for future researchers.

This study has adopted a bibliometric approach followed by a structured literature review analysis to synthesize the research on UTAUT2 since 2012. In total, 163 documents were analyzed for type of studies, theories and frameworks, methodologies, author wise collaboration, organizations that contributed to the body of knowledge in the UTAUT2 research and journals that published studies in this domain. VOSviewer and Tableau were used for the data visualization, whereas TCCM, which means theory (T), context (C), characteristics (C) and methodology (M) framework is used to propose the future research directions.

The findings reveal research on UTAUT2 is growing. The structured literature analysis of the top 15 cited articles further analyzed the parsimony of new models in detail. In addition, the study highlights the inception by and promoters of UTAUT2 in a separate section. The data for this study was collected by searching the title, abstract and keywords of documents in the Scopus database.

This study is based on research papers, published in the UTAUT2 research area, that have been extracted from the Scopus database by keywords only. Future studies can also perform a meta-analysis of various clusters generated by bibliometric analysis.

This study is useful for practitioners to devise strategies for increasing technology acceptance, adoption and utilization in the times to come.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study is one of the very few and early studies, which examined patterns and growth trends of the UTAUT2 studies with the TCCM framework, to suggest scope for future research studies.

Solar energy applications are limited because of its intermittent and discontinuous availability with respect to time. Hence, solar energy thermal conversion systems need integration with thermal storage units (TSUs) to use solar energy in off sunshine hours. This paper aims to perform thermal analysis of a solar air heater (SAH) integrated with a phase change material (PCM)-based TSU to supply hot air during night period.

An experimental setup with TSU as main component was prepared with SAH at its upward side, food chamber at its downward side as subcomponents. In TSU, paraffin wax was used as thermal energy storage material. Mass flow rate of air considered as an input parameter in the experiment. Two different absorber plates, namely, plane and ribbed absorber plates were used for the experimentation. Each day for a fixed mass flow of air, observations were made during charging and discharging of PCM.

Nusselt number and convection heat transfer coefficients were analytically calculated by considering flow through TSU as external flow over bank of tubes in a rectangular duct. A temperature drop of around 7-8°C during charging of PCM and temperature rise of around 4-5°C during discharging of PCM was observed from the experimental results. The average practical efficiency of TSU with ribbed absorber plate SAH during charging and discharging of PCM was 22 and 6 per cent, respectively, higher than that of TSU with plane absorber plate SAH.

There are no limitations for research on SAH integrated with TSU. Different PCM including paraffin wax, Glauber’s salt, salt hydrates and water are used for thermal storage. Only limitation is lower efficiency of SAH integrated with TSU because of lower heat transfer coefficients with air as working medium. If it can improve heat transfer coefficients of air then heat transfer rates with these units will be higher.

There are no practical limitations for research on SAH integrated with TSU. Sophisticated instrumentation is needed to measure flow rates, temperatures and pressure variations of air.

In poultry farms during night, chicks cannot survive at cold climatic conditions. Hence, hot air should be supplied to poultry farms whenever the atmospheric temperature drops. It is proposed that, in combination with TSUs, heat produced by SAH is stored in day time in the form of either sensible or latent heat and is retrieved to provide hot air in the night times. This will reduce total operating costs in poultry farms.

Conventionally, people are producing hot air by combusting coal in poultry forms. This cost around Rs. 75,000 per month for a batch of 225 to 250 chicks in a poultry form. Hot air could be produced economically during off sunshine hours from SAH integrated with TSU compared to the conventional method of coal burning. Present experimental investigations conducted to fill the literature gap in this area of research and to design a SAH integrated with TSU to produce hot air for poultry forms.

The purpose of this paper is to study the real role of historical satisfaction (HSat), i.e., satisfaction only deriving from past experiences, excluding the most recent, in B2C service contexts when services are experienced offline, while the actual services are purchased online through the service providers’ website.

The proposed conceptual framework was tested by focusing on a particular travel industry firm which is responsible for providing travel services as well as managing the website where these services are purchased. The study population included customers who had purchased at least two travel tickets during the last 12 months online. In order to reduce possible self-selection bias and to improve the generalizability of the web survey findings, post-stratification was applied. The measurement model was evaluated by using confirmatory factor analyses. The direct and indirect effects of HSat on encounter overall satisfaction (EOS) were analyzed using structural equation modeling.

The direct effect of HSat on EOS was observed to be higher than its indirect effect through offline service dimensions and website dimensions. It was also observed that offline service dimensions have a direct impact on EOS, while they do not have an indirect impact since the website dimensions do not have a direct effect on EOS.

Historical satisfaction is really important in building EOS for services purchased previously online but experienced offline.

The results could provide managers with useful tools for allocating resources and also build an even higher level of EOS. They also shed light on how HSat molds offline service perception for services sold online.

To the authors’s knowledge, only one empirical paper focused on “historical satisfaction,” while no studies have taken into consideration the fact that service offline dimensions and e-customer satisfaction could be indirectly linked by website quality dimensions, the issue studied in this paper.

Customers are increasingly using mobile applications (apps) to compare prices of travel and hospitality services and to purchase their itineraries, tours and stays. This study aims to explore key factors affecting the individuals’ perceptions on the usefulness of travel apps and sheds light on the causal paths predicting the individuals’ dispositions to use them.

Quantitative data was gathered from 1,320 research participants, who were members of popular social media groups. They were analyzed through a composite-based partial least squares approach.

The results confirm that information quality, source credibility and the functionality of travel apps are significantly affecting the individuals’ perceptions about their usefulness as well as their intentions to continue using them in future. They also indicate that there are highly significant indirect effects within the information technology adoption model.

This study integrates the information quality and source credibility factors from the information adoption model (IAM) with a functionality construct that was drawn from electronic service quality. This study examines their effects on the technology acceptance model (TAM)’s perceived usefulness and behavioral intentions.

This research implies that there is scope for the travel service providers to enhance the quality and functionality of their mobile apps to improve their consumers’ perceptions about the utilitarian value of these ubiquitous technologies.

This contribution raises awareness on the importance of incorporating a functionality construct in addition to IAM and/or TAM “usability” factors to better understand the individuals’ dispositions to avail themselves of online content and/or to adopt interactive innovations. In this case, it implies that certain functionality features of travel apps, including their responsiveness and technical capabilities, can trigger users to increase their engagement with these mobile technologies on a habitual basis.

客户越来越多地使用移动应用程序 (apps) 来比较旅行和酒店服务的价格, 并购买他们的行程、旅游和住宿。 本研究探讨了影响个人对旅行应用程序有用性看法的关键因素, 并阐明了预测个人使用这些应用程序的倾向的因果路径。

本研究从 1,320 名流行社交媒体团体的成员作为研究参与者收集了定量数据。 通过基于复合材料的偏最小二乘法 (PLS) 方法对它们进行了分析。

结果证实, 信息质量、来源可信度和旅游应用程序的功能显着影响个人对其有用性的看法以及他们未来继续使用它们的意图。 它们还表明, 信息技术采用模型 (ITAM) 中存在非常显着的间接影响。

这项研究表明, 旅游服务提供商可以提高其移动应用程序的质量和功能, 以提高消费者对这些无处不在的技术的实用价值的看法。

本研究将来自信息采用模型 (IAM) 的信息质量和来源可信度因素与从电子服务质量 (eSERVQUAL) 中提取的功能结构相结合。 本研究检查了它们对技术接受模型 (TAM) 的感知有用性和行为意图的影响。

这一贡献提高了人们对在 IAM 和/或 TAM“可用性”因素之外加入功能结构的重要性的认识, 以更好地了解个人利用在线内容和/或采用交互式创新的倾向。 在这种情况下, 这意味着旅游应用程序的某些功能特性（包括响应能力和技术能力）可以触发用户习惯性地增加对这些移动技术的参与。

The purpose of this paper is to explore the dimensions of online customer experience (OCE) and their impact on satisfaction and loyalty in the clothing e-retail context. Furthermore, it explores the influence of gender on the OCE-satisfaction-loyalty chain.

OCE dimensions were drawn from the literature and then adapted and validated using two samples (217 – exploratory factor analysis, 651 – confirmatory factor analysis) of experienced online clothing shoppers in India. An analysis was done using structured equation modelling.

Six OCE psychological factors and four OCE functionality factors were revealed. Both OCE dimensions impact loyalty either directly or indirectly through satisfaction. Gender is observed to moderate the relationship among three OCE factors (e-distrust, e-negative beliefs and website interactivity) and satisfaction.

The research results are limited to the factors related to each of the two OCE dimensions explored within the clothing e-retail context in India.

Clothing e-retailers need to focus on both the OCE dimensions to drive business sustenance. Furthermore, their OCE strategies should be in line with the gender-based differences highlighted by the study.

The study facilitates in the adaptation and validation of the OCE dimensions in the clothing e-retail category in an emerging market. While all factors associated with both OCE dimensions are important for driving satisfaction and loyalty, the study underscores the need for a higher focus on visual engagement by e-retailers in the given context. Gender moderates the OCE-satisfaction paths, but does not moderate the OCE-loyalty paths.