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Although restauranteurs hope to incorporate offal or variety meat, in the menu as an attempt to reduce food waste, adopting these ingredients is still challenging due to customer rejections. This study aims to propose potential persuasive sales strategies based on customers’ different information sources to increase organ meat-based menu sales for restaurateurs.

In this research, a qualitative study was conducted to identify critical factors that show persuasive effects from external, interpersonal and experiential information sources. A total of 20 in-depth expert interviews with professional chefs and restauranteurs were conducted and key persuasive service tactics were analyzed.

From their experience of persuading customers to try unusual foods, insights about how to alleviate unfamiliar food aversion were obtained. The findings of this study showed that different persuasive sales tactics can be implemented to decrease customers’ aversion to offal and offcuts on menus.

The context of offal is meaningful theoretically because it sheds light on the literature gaps related to persuasive sales strategies for food products with a negative social stigma. Practically, the findings of this study explicitly address that offal usage in restaurants can not only encourage the culinary uniqueness of a restaurant but also contribute to the reduction of food waste by foodservice operations.

This research answers the calls for more research on sustainable food sources in hospitality literature by proposing offal as a potential alternative protein source. The findings of this study can further be used to improve customer acceptance of other sustainable but unfamiliar food items.

This chapter aims to introduce luxury brand management strategies applied in the hospitality industry and illustrate how luxury hospitality business operators can create, communicate and sustainably manage luxury brands. This chapter introduces the definitions and dimensions of luxury brands, followed by an exploration of the concept and importance of luxury brand sustainability. This chapter then explores how to maintain long-term luxury hospitality brand sustainability by applying a luxury brand framework. This chapter uses a case study featuring the Four Seasons Hotels and Resorts (FSHR) to understand how a luxury brand communicates and maintains its sustainability through its various dimensions through the process of brand creation, communication and management. The chapter ends by providing practical implications for existing luxury hospitality brand organisations in the arena of customer service.

The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) outbreak in the first quarter of 2020 has caused a severe decline in stock markets worldwide. While prior studies in developed markets found that workplace closure can negatively impact the capital market (e.g. Ozili and Arun, 2020), lesser is known about how it impacts emerging capital markets, which may have different characteristics and behaviour (Harjoto et al., 2021). Hence, this study seeks to uncover stock performance around workplace closure dates of firms incorporated in ASEAN countries and investigates the role of accounting fundamentals in mitigating workplace closure policy's effects on stock performances.

Using an event study methodology, the authors measure the cumulative abnormal returns (CARs) around workplace closure dates. The authors then use cross-sectional analysis to analyse whether the accounting fundamentals, specifically profitability, cash flow, and leverage, are associated with the CAR. This cross-sectional study involves 1,720 firms that are incorporated in the ASEAN countries.

This analysis indicates that, on average, ASEAN capital markets react negatively to workplace closure policies. The authors then find that the CARs around workplace closure dates are positively associated with the current ratios and are negatively associated with long-term debt ratios. This study’s results thus indicate that firms with a higher liquidity and a higher solvency experience a less adverse impact of the COVID-19 pandemic than other firms. The authors also find that the associations are more robust for (1) firms in industries more affected by COVID-19 and (2) firms located in countries with more severe cases. Additionally, contrary to this study’s expectation, the authors do not find meaningful associations between CARs around workplace closure dates and firms' cash flow from operation and profit respectively. This study’s results suggest that investors view prior performances related to firms' ability to generate operating cash flow and profit as less relevant to measure firm performance around the workplace closure event.

This study’s results contribute to studies examining fundamental accounting roles during the COVID-19 era, specifically in emerging economies. The findings are critical for investors in understanding the company fundamentals associated with stock price performance in emerging markets during the recent health-related crisis.

Most studies analysing cross-sectional differences in stock returns during the COVID-19 era focus on industry-level differences and use observations from developed markets (Sinagl, 2020; Ramelli and Wagner, 2020). Studies using firm-level analysis in emerging markets are still limited. The authors expand prior studies by using firm-level analysis that spans six countries in ASEAN.

The purpose of this paper is to study how the target fund in mutual fund mergers performed compared to the acquiring funds had they not been merged but continued on their own as buy-and-hold portfolios.

The authors develop a novel approach to examine post-merger wealth effects. The authors’ study how the target portfolios would have performed compared to the funds acquiring them had they not been merged but continued on their own as passive portfolios. The data set consists of 793 merging US equity funds from January 2003 to December 2014.

The authors find that the target portfolio shareholders would have been better off if the target fund had been converted from an actively managed fund to a passively managed fund that maintained their current holdings.

The findings are the opposite to many previous studies who view target fund shareholders as the major beneficiaries in mutual fund mergers.

Investors receiving notification of their fund merging should reconsider their investment strategy. If they wish to maintain the original strategy of their fund, they should oppose the merger. Alternatively they may withdraw their money from the (soon-to-be) merged fund, replicate the latest portfolio of their fund, and buy-and-hold that portfolio.

The authors develop a novel approach to examine post-merger wealth effects.

This chapter focused on presenting the result of the Delphi study from the questionnaire distributed to the experts. The Delphi technique was used for modelling the construction supply chain management (CSCM) practice in the fourth industrial revolution (4IR) era. The technique was also used to predict the supply chain management's (SCM) possible trends in the construction industry. A total of 15 experts were selected for this study based on their working experience. The Delphi study also validated the gaps (organisational culture and 4IR component) identified from the existing CSCM model. The findings from the Delphi study revealed that organisational culture has a significant impact on the practice of CSCM in the 4IR era. Regarding adopting the 4IR component for the CSCM in Nigeria, the Delphi study revealed that smart management and virtualisation are the most adopted. Unfortunately, the cyber-physical system, the heartbeat of the 4IR, is yet to be fully implemented for CSCM practice in the Nigerian construction industry.

Man has been seeking an ideal existence for a very long time. In this existence, justice, love, and peace are no longer words, but actual experiences. How ever, with the American preemptive invasion and occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq and the subsequent prisoner abuse, such an existence seems to be farther and farther away from reality. The purpose of this work is to stop this dangerous trend by promoting justice, love, and peace through a change of the paradigm that is inconsistent with justice, love, and peace. The strong paradigm that created the strong nation like the U.S. and the strong man like George W. Bush have been the culprit, rather than the contributor, of the above three universal ideals. Thus, rather than justice, love, and peace, the strong paradigm resulted in in justice, hatred, and violence. In order to remove these three and related evils, what the world needs in the beginning of the third millenium is the weak paradigm. Through the acceptance of the latter paradigm, the golden mean or middle paradigm can be formulated, which is a synergy of the weak and the strong paradigm. In order to understand properly the meaning of these paradigms, however, some digression appears necessary.

The purpose of this paper is to determine whether foreign exchange markets in India have become more efficient over time. There were two major developments in India’s foreign exchange market since the 1980s: first, a shift in foreign exchange management regime from a basket peg to a free float; and second, a rapid phase of economic liberalization since the mid-1990s. The paper attempts to find out whether the market efficiency of foreign exchange markets is affected by these developments. The paper mainly uses the well-known Hurst exponent calculated through corrected empirical R over S analysis to determine whether the exchange rates possess long memory. The robustness of the method is tested by calculating the Hurst exponent through two other prevalent methods in the literature.

The authors apply the corrected empirical Hurst exponent which employs the Anis Lloyd correction with the modification suggested by Weron. The sensitivity of the results is then tested by replicating the calculations using the detrended fluctuation analysis and Robinson’s method.

All the methods show that: first, there is no significant change in the overall efficiency of the foreign exchange market vis a vis the US$ for the time period from 1980 to 2017. Second, neither regime shifts nor calculations over sub-time periods is able to identify significant change in the efficiency level of the market for the US$ exchange rate. Third, efficiency of different exchange rate markets are different over the time period 1999–2017. The US$ market has unequivocally more long run memory compared to the GBP, Yen and EURO markets. Fourth, the results are robust to the method used for calculations.

Does the efficiency of asset markets evolve over time? This paper attempts to answer this question. In the process, the paper studies the effect of regime shifts and progressive globalization on the ability of the market to internalize information.

28 August this year is the 20th anniversary (I think!) of the date on which I published the first titles under my newly‐created librarianship imprint of Clive Bingley Ltd. I say ‘I think’ because, although I have a nostalgic taste for anniversaries — they are so happily meaningless in themselves — I recently discovered quite by chance that the date in January on which for many years my wife and I have celebrated with good wine the anniversary of the evening on which we first went out together is wrong by a fortnight! But I am pretty sure my first independent publishing date was at the end of August 1965.