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The purpose of this paper is to review cases of artificial reefs built through additive manufacturing (AM) technologies and analyse their ecological goals, fabrication process, materials, structural design features and implementation location to determine predominant parameters, environmental impacts, advantages, and limitations.

The review analysed 16 cases of artificial reefs from both temperate and tropical regions. These were categorised based on the AM process used, the mortar material used (crucial for biological applications), the structural design features and the location of implementation. These parameters are assessed to determine how effectively the designs meet the stipulated ecological goals, how AM technologies demonstrate their potential in comparison to conventional methods and the preference locations of these implementations.

The overview revealed that the dominant artificial reef implementation occurs in the Mediterranean and Atlantic Seas, both accounting for 24%. The remaining cases were in the Australian Sea (20%), the South Asia Sea (12%), the Persian Gulf and the Pacific Ocean, both with 8%, and the Indian Sea with 4% of all the cases studied. It was concluded that fused filament fabrication, binder jetting and material extrusion represent the main AM processes used to build artificial reefs. Cementitious materials, ceramics, polymers and geopolymer formulations were used, incorporating aggregates from mineral residues, biological wastes and pozzolan materials, to reduce environmental impacts, promote the circular economy and be more beneficial for marine ecosystems. The evaluation ranking assessed how well their design and materials align with their ecological goals, demonstrating that five cases were ranked with high effectiveness, ten projects with moderate effectiveness and one case with low effectiveness.

AM represents an innovative method for marine restoration and management. It offers a rapid prototyping technique for design validation and enables the creation of highly complex shapes for habitat diversification while incorporating a diverse range of materials to benefit environmental and marine species’ habitats.

The transition to omnichannel retail is the recognized future of retail, which uses digital technologies (e.g. augmented reality shopping assistants) to enhance the customer shopping experience. However, retailers struggle with the implementation of such technologies in brick-and-mortar stores. Against this background, the present study investigates the impact of a smartphone-based augmented reality shopping assistant application, which uses personalized recommendations and explainable artificial intelligence features on customer shopping experiences.

The authors follow a design science research approach to develop a shopping assistant application artifact, evaluated by means of an online experiment (n = 252), providing both qualitative and quantitative data.

Results indicate a positive impact of the augmented reality shopping assistant application on customers' perception of brick-and-mortar shopping experiences. Based on the empirical insights this study also identifies possible improvements of the artifact.

This study's assessment is limited to an online evaluation approach. Therefore, future studies should test actual usage of the technology in brick-and-mortar stores. Contrary to the suggestions of established theories (i.e. technology acceptance model, uses and gratification theory), this study shows that an increase of shopping experience does not always convert into an increase in the intention to purchase or to visit a brick-and-mortar store. Additionally, this study provides novel design principles and ideas for crafting augmented reality shopping assistant applications that can be used by future researchers to create advanced versions of such applications.

This paper demonstrates that a shopping assistant artifact provides a good opportunity to enhance users' shopping experience on their path-to-purchase, as it can support customers by providing rich information (e.g. explainable recommendations) for decision-making along the customer shopping journey.

This paper shows that smartphone-based augmented reality shopping assistant applications have the potential to increase the competitive power of brick-and-mortar retailers.

Regarding the retail internal supply chain (SC), both retailers and research are currently focused on reactive food waste reduction options in stores (e.g. discounting or donations). These options reduce waste after a surplus has emerged but do not prevent an emerging surplus in the first place. This paper aims to reveal how retailers can proactively prevent waste along the SC and why the options identified are impactful but, at the same time, often complex to implement.

The authors follow an exploratory approach for a nascent topic to obtain insights into measures taken in practice. Interviews with experts from retail build the main data source.

The authors identify and analyze 21 inbound, warehousing, distribution and store-related options applied in grocery retail. Despite the expected high overall impact on waste, prevention measures in inbound logistics and distribution and warehousing have not been intensively applied to date.

The authors provide a structured approach to mitigate waste within retailers' operations and categorize the types of barriers that need to be addressed.

This research provides a better understanding of prevention options in retail operations, which has not yet been empirically explored. Furthermore, this study conceptualizes prevention and reduction options and reveals implementation patterns.

This study presents the applicability of a model-based approach for loyalty program forecasting using smartphone app in the digital strategy of the retail industry.

The authors develop a dynamic model with the cyclical structure of customer segments through customer experience. They use time-series data on the number of members of the loyalty program, “Seven Mile Program” and confirm the validity of the approximate calculation of customer segment share, customer segment sales share and aggregate sales performance. The authors present three medium-term forecast scenarios after the launch of a smartphone payment service linked with the loyalty program.

The sum of the two customer segment shares for forecasting (the sum of the quasi-excellent and excellent customer ratios) is about 30% in each scenario, consistent with an essential customer loyalty (true loyalty) share obtained in the existing empirical study.

Digital strategy in the retail industry should focus more on estimating and forecasting average amounts of customer segments and the number of aggregated customers through the digitalization on the customer side than on individual customer journeys and responses.

Multi-scenario evaluation through simulation of dynamic models from a systemic view can be used for decision-making in retailing digital strategies.

This study builds a model that integrates the cyclicality of customer segment transition through customer experiences into a loyalty matrix framework, which is a method that has previously been used in the hospitality industry.

This study aims to explore virtual leadership work within educational settings in the light of social disruption. In 2020, a global pandemic changed the way we work. For school leaders, that involved running a virtual school overnight. Although there is a stream of research that explores leadership in solely virtual communities, there is a gap in the literature regarding practices that transition from analog to virtual practices and the changes in leadership in those types of work practices.

The data gathering method constitutes a questionnaire to explore school leaders’ experiences of virtual work and virtual leadership in light of social disruption. One hundred and five Swedish school leaders answered the questionnaire covering both fixed and open questions.

The results show that school leaders’ general experiences of transition to virtual school have worked relatively well. We show how the work changes and shift the focus in the virtual workplace.

The author’s contributions include theorizing about leadership affordances in virtual schools and providing implications for practice. The authors summarize our main contribution in five affordances that characterize virtual leadership, including a focus on core activities, trust-based government, 1:1 communication with staff, structure and clarity and active outreach activities. The results could be interesting for understanding the radical digitalization of leadership in the digital workplace.

The COVID-19 pandemic has disrupted the ‘real’ world and substantially impacted the virtual world and thus the Internet ecosystem. It has caused a significant exogenous shock that offers a wealth of natural experiments and produced new data about broadband, clouds, and the Internet in times of crisis. In this chapter, we characterise and evaluate the evolving impact of the global COVID-19 crisis on traffic patterns and loads and the impact of those on Internet performance from multiple perspectives. While we place a particular focus on deriving insights into how we can better respond to crises and better plan for the post-COVID-19 ‘new normal’, we analyse the impact on and the responses by different actors of the Internet ecosystem across different jurisdictions. With a focus on the USA and Europe, we examine the responses of both public and private actors, with the latter including content and cloud providers, content delivery networks, and Internet service providers (ISPs). This chapter makes two contributions: first, we derive lessons learned for a future post-COVID-19 world to inform non-networking spheres and policy-making; second, the insights gained assist the networking community in better planning for the future.

The pandemic impacted consumers' shopping processes, leading them to approach the online channel for grocery shopping for the first time. The paper contributes to the retailing literature by identifying different grocery shopper segments willing to switch online moved by heterogeneous motivations. Integrating the technology acceptance model 2 (TAM-2) and the protection motivation theory (PMT), this study identifies technology-related and Covid-related motivations jointly impacting channel switching.

A mixture regression model was estimated on the 370 valid questionnaires, filled out by Italian shoppers, delivering four internally consistent segments.

The results reveal the existence of four segments willing to switch towards the online channel for grocery shopping in the aftermath of the pandemic. Utilitarian shoppers would switch online as they consider the online channel useful and easy to use. Responsive shoppers will prefer the online channel driven by the fear of being infected in-store. Novel enthusiasts show interest in the online channel to not catch the virus and cope with emotional fear, although they consider online shopping as an enjoyable and useful activity as well. Smart shoppers consider online shopping as an easy-to-use alternative for their grocery purchases.

This paper identifies technology-related and Covid-related motivations jointly impacting shoppers' channel switching to online and presents a novel method – i.e. mixture regression – allowing for the identification of shopper segments motivated by different reasons, both emotional and utilitarian, to switch towards the online channel for their grocery shopping. Among other motivations, the fear of Covid-19 is identified as a relevant motivation to switch to online.

The purpose of this paper is to achieve intelligent superstore site selection. Yonghui Superstores partnered with Cardinal Operations to incorporate a tremendous amount of site-related information (e.g. points of interest, population density and features, distribution of competitors, transportation, commercial ecosystem, existing own-store network) into its store site optimization.

This paper showcases the integration of regression, optimization and machine learning approaches in site selection, which has proven practical and effective.

The result was the development of the “Yonghui Intelligent Site Selection System” that includes three modules: business district scoring, intelligent site engine and precision sales forecasting. The application of this system helps to significantly reduce the labor force required to visit and investigate all potential sites, circumvent the pitfalls associated with possibly biased experience or intuition-based decision making and achieve the same population coverage as competitors while needing only half the number of stores as its competitors.

To our knowledge, this project is among the first to integrate regression, optimization and machine learning approaches in site selection. There is innovation in optimization techniques.

In this paper the authors aim to argue that the existence of a strong corporate governance mechanism (a formal credibility-enhancing mechanism) and the presence of a more trustworthy-looking CEO (an informal credibility-enhancing mechanism) are substitutes.

By using machine-learning-based facial-feature-point detection technique, the authors construct a proprietary facial-trustworthiness database for a large-scale of CEOs in the US listed companies. First, the authors manually search for qualifying CEO image from websites and annual reports. Second, by following the neuroscience and psychology literature, the authors use the machine-learning-based face detector to identify the facial features in the CEO photos to calculate a rich and reliable set of facial-trustworthiness measures. The authors then construct a composite facial-trustworthiness index for each CEO. After obtaining accounting data, the authors’ final sample comprises 16,201 firm-year observations for 3,186 CEOs in the sample period of 2000-2018.

The results of the authors’ regression analyses show a negative association between board monitoring intensity and CEOs' facial trustworthiness, indicating that board directors may factor CEOs' facial trustworthiness into their monitoring decisions. Moreover, the authors find that these results are mainly driven by CEOs whose tenure is below the third quartile (i.e. eight years). The authors further find stronger results for externally hired CEOs than internally promoted CEOs. Finally, the authors’ results remain robust when using change models or subsample of CEO photos in recent years.

First, to the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study that adopts a large sample to provide systematic evidence on the directors' use of facial trustworthiness. This study extends the literature by documenting the impacts of CEOs' individual characteristics on the board monitoring intensity. Second, the results of this study emphasized the important role of perceptions based on executives' facial appearance in firm valuation, executive compensation and audit fee, and by presenting empirical evidence that CEOs' facial trustworthiness affects board monitoring intensity. Third, this study responds to the call for research on personalized trust by Hsieh et al. (2020).

This paper aims to explore the intellectual structure shaping the circular economy (CE) discourse within the built environment in Africa.

The study adopted a bibliometric analysis approach to explore the intellectual structure of CE in the built environment in Africa. The authors collected 31 papers published between 2005 and 2021 from the Scopus database and used VOSviewer for data analysis.

The findings show that there are six clusters shaping the intellectual structure: demolition, material recovery and reuse; waste as a resource; cellulose and agro-based materials; resilience and low-carbon footprint; recycling materials; and the fourth industrial revolution. The two most cited scholars had three publications each, while the top journal was Resources, Conservation and Recycling. The dominant concepts included CE, sustainability, alternative materials, waste management, lifecycle, demolition and climate change. The study concludes that there is low CE research output in Africa, which implies that the concept is either novel or facing resistance.

The data were drawn from one database, Scopus; hence, adoption of alternative databases such as Web of Science, Google Scholar and Dimensions could potentially have yielded a higher number of articles for analysis which potentially would result in different conclusions on the subject understudy.

This study made a significant contribution by articulating the CE intellectual structure in the built environment, identified prominent scholars and academic platforms responsible for promoting circularity in Africa.