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Despite the recent failures of many e‐businesses, the consensus remains that firms will need to develop e‐commerce strategies if they are to compete in the future. However, there is little by way of empirical research on how firms can successfully do so. We examine a case of a large global Internet start‐up in a heretofore neglected sector, that of adult entertainment. Our findings indicate the difficulties faced by Internet start‐ups, as they seek to build mass‐market penetration while controlling marketing and acquisition costs. The case also demonstrates the role that historical positioning and previous industry associations play in the development of an online brand.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the return performance of a portfolio of US “vice stocks,” firms that manufacture and sell products such as alcohol, tobacco, gaming services, national defense and firearms, adult entertainment, and payday lenders.

Using daily return data from a portfolio of vice stocks over the period 1987-2016, the author computes the Jensen’s α (capital asset pricing model (CAPM)), Fama-French Three-Factor, Carhart Four-Factor, and Fama-French Five-Factor results for the complete portfolio, and each vice industry individually.

The results from the CAPM, Fama-French Three-Factor Model, and the Carhart Four-Factor Model show a positive and significant α for the vice portfolio throughout the sample period. However, the α’s significance disappears with the addition of the explanatory variables from the Fama-French Five-Factor Model.

The author provides academics and practitioners with results from a new model. As of this writing, the author is unaware of any articles published in peer-reviewed academic journals that investigate vice stocks within the framework of the Fama-French Five-Factor Model (2015). First, the existing literature does not shed light on the relationship between “profitability” and “aggressiveness” (the fourth and fifth factors of the Fama-French Model) and vice stock returns. Second, within the framework of the Fama-French Five-Factor Model, the author shows results not only from a portfolio of vice stocks, but from various vice industries as well.

The intricacies of electronic commerce via the Internet and World Wide Web have provided marketers with a host of interesting challenges. From using the Internet and World Wide Web sites as communication and promotional tools to performing distribution functions, marketers are finding an entirely new world of consumer purchasing behavior. Issues such as store layout, traffic patterns, and salesperson interactions within a retail store are vastly different in E‐Business marketing. As in a direct‐marketing exchange, trust becomes a central issue in the negotiation process. Winning the customers' trust, and keeping their trust, is essential to E‐Business.

The study aims to examine the difference of financial-based brand equity of Sharia-compliant and non-Sharia-compliant companies listed in the stock market.

The five-year data were collected from 561 companies listed in the Indonesian stock market (349 Sharia-compliant firms and 212 non-Sharia-compliant firms).

Based on five years of observations, the study shows that Sharia-compliant companies have much higher brand equity than companies that are not Sharia-compliant. However, the study did not find consistent results when the study examined the differences between brand equity in newly listed Sharia-compliant firms in the short run (two-quarters of the observations). In other words, Sharia-compliant status positively impacted a company’s brand equity only in the long run.

The study examines only the brand equity of Sharia- and non-Sharia-compliant companies in the Indonesian stock market.

The study suggests that companies should list their equity in the Islamic stock market as the empirical evidence shows that the companies listed in the Sharia index have much higher brand equity than companies listed in the non-Sharia index, although this impact can only be seen in the long run.

The study integrates finance and marketing perspectives, which are often disconnected in daily business. In addition, the study provides a piece of empirical evidence on the effect of financial decision to be listed in the Islamic stock market on the establishment of brand equity, which represents the long-term intangible assets of the firm in the eyes of the customers.

The purpose of this paper is to throw a new light on the online adult entertainment industry and help remove the stigma associated with it.

An ethnographic approach was taken, with participant observation and in-depth interviews with a number of informants.

This is an environment where female performers can enjoy good income opportunities and work in a safe environment. It also provides a high level of job security for technical support staff.

The study used a sample sample size with no access to clients.

It is important that UK regulation remains light handed to avoid pushing the industry off shore.

The paper provides new data on the working environment in camming studios and positive aspects of job security and the equitable distribution of profits.

Purpose – This chapter examines the role of payment platforms in the United States in sex censorship in which platforms have a pattern of denying financial services to people and businesses involved in publishing legal sexual content. It answers the following questions: what explains payment platforms’ regulation of lawful sexual content and what are the consequences? Methodology/Approach – Drawing from the platform governance literature, this chapter closely examines the corporate policies for PayPal and the credit card companies that prohibit certain types of sexual content and services. Findings – This chapter argues that payment platforms’ censorship of sexual expression is shaped by the distinctive nature of and market concentration within the online payment industry. Payment actors’ systematic campaign of sexual censorship disproportionately affects small businesses and individual operators in the sex and adult entertainment industries and amounts to “digital redlining,” a form of financial discrimination. Originality/Value – Payment providers’ role in regulating sex online has received considerably less scholarly attention than research on social media platforms. This gap in scholarship is notable as big payment actors have systematically denied services for about a decade relating to sexually oriented goods and services (see Blue, 2015a).

The purpose of this study was to discover, qualitatively, periods of involvement in Las Vegas gambling marketing campaigns and analyze success factors that may be useful to other gambling destinations, particularly in the Asian market.

The study was established to allow a two-pronged approach of semi-structured interviews and site analysis coupled with review of planning and marketing documents in Las Vegas, Nevada 1980–2000 era and ending with the 2019 branding approach.

Results revealed degrees of success and rationales for changes in campaigns over a 40-year period. When analyzing market strategies, it became evident that many factors were involved decisions to visit Las Vegas, such as social, safety and security factors, as well as opportunities for recreation.

Gaining access to top level executives proved challenging due to reluctance of subjects wanting to disclose business strategies.

This study was unique in employing qualitative processes to elicit planning and marketing approaches and relative successes or failures from those involved in multi-property management. Further, analysis of documents over a wide time frame provided insight into the pitfalls and strengths associated with various campaigns.

The authors provide evidence for the effects of social norms on corporate governance risk by studying “sin” stocks publicly traded companies involved in producing alcohol, firearms, biotechnology, gambling, military, nuclear power and tobacco. There is a societal norm against funding operations that promote vice and expropriation by controlling shareholders.

The sample is representative of S&P 500 firms in 2014. The authors use Datastream to obtain a sample of sin stocks. The authors’ descriptive analysis is completed by four variations of the basic ordinary least squares regression model according to dependent variable corporate governance risk score.

The authors find that non-financial incentives alone do not explain corporate governance risk. The authors provide strong empirical support for an alignment of financial and non-financial incentives. The authors show that when sin firm’s current performance is good, suggesting that the market holds a positive belief in firm’s future profitability, managers will likely have more incentive to expropriate shareholders.

Belonging of firm to a sin industry does not reflect the acceptance level of social norms. The evolution of social norms towards sin stocks overcomes the drawback of assuming a constant social norms level over time. Therefore, researchers are encouraged to use the changes in consumption of sin products as a proxy for the evolution of social norms and examine does sin matter in corporate governance issue in other countries.

Well-planned and well-managed philanthropy sin industries to creating education programmes for the disadvantaged to protecting the environment, in the name of corporate social responsibility has become a necessary ingredient in virtually every large corporation’s business plan.

This paper fulfils an identified need to study does sin matter issue in corporate governance issue.

This exploratory study tests one of the key assumptions of community policing: that there is a relatively high level of consensus both within and between community groups, or stakeholders, about community problems and potential solutions. Results show that in the target community there is some consensus about social problems and their solutions. However, the study also reveals that the consensus may not be community‐wide, but may exist only among a relatively small group of “active” stakeholders who differ significantly about the seriousness of most of the problems and the utility of some solutions. Implications for community policing are discussed.

Public relations (PR) research has given little space to the opinions, innovations and experiences of those working in marginalised or ‘dirty’ roles or occupations. To ensure that the worlds of these ‘others’ are represented this chapter explores the lives and work of women working in PR and communication roles in the ‘adult’ industry (worth an estimated $15 billion worldwide). Tibbals notes that ‘the voices and experiences of women working in the adult film industry are often overlooked’ (2013, p. 21) and dismissing a highly profitable but ‘dirty’ sector is to overlook and denigrate the people who work in it and the experiences and knowledge created therein. To explore my research questions I gathered informal interview data from women working in PR and combined this with published literature which recorded the lives of women who carried out PR and communications roles in the adult industry. My research demonstrates that high quality PR work is carried out within the adult industry and that the industry attracts women from diverse backgrounds, many of whom progress quickly within a meritorious environment. Nonetheless, these women often feel difficulty in explaining or justifying their work to family and friends and have strategies to avoid discussing their work to those outside the industry. They also have to work within a media environment where adult industry issues are not well or correctly reported.