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This study aims to develop and validate an accurate machine learning model to categorize NBA fans into meaningful clusters based on their perceptions of sport sponsorship. Additionally, by predicting the intensity of NBA fans’ attitudes toward sponsors, the authors intend to identify the specific features that influence prediction, discuss these findings and offer implications for academics and practitioners in sport sponsorship.

This study used a sample of 1,142 NBA fans who were recruited through Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk). Fans identification, sponsorship fit, behavioral intentions, sponsor altruistic motive, sponsor normative motive, sponsor egoistic motive were surveyed as predictors, whereas fans’ attitudes toward sponsors was collected as the dependent variable. The LASSO regression, SVM, KNN, RF and XGboost were used to develop and validate the prediction model after verifying the measurement model by the Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA) and Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA).

The RF model had the best accurate in predicting the intensity of fans’ attitudes toward sponsors, achieving an AUC of 0.919 with a sensitivity of 0.872, a specificity of 0.828, a PPV of 0.873, a NPV of 0.828 and an accuracy of 0.848. The most influential feature in the model was “the fit of 0.301”. “Fans’ perceptions of sponsor’s normative motive”, “behavioral intentions supporting sponsors”, “fans’ identification with their favorite team”, “fans’ perceptions of sponsor’s altruistic motive” and “fans’ perceptions of sponsor’s egoistic motive” were exhibited in descending order.

This study is the first in sport sponsorship to accurately classify the intensity of fans’ attitudes toward sponsors as either high or low using machine learning models, and to formulate how fans’ attitudes formed toward sponsors from their perceptions of sponsorship process.

In alignment with the European Union’s Vision Zero initiative to eliminate road fatalities by 2050, leveraging technological advancements becomes crucial for addressing the challenges of vulnerable road users (VRUs), and for mitigating the impact of human error. Despite increasing scholarly interest in applications of extended reality (XR), a research gap persists, particularly in the role of XR in transportation safety. Therefore, the aim of the study was to fill this gap through a systematic literature review to evaluate comprehensively the potential scope and practical applicability of XR technologies in enhancing the safety of VRUs.

A systematic review was undertaken, following PRISMA guidelines meticulously, in which 80 relevant articles from databases, such as Scopus and Science Direct, were identified and analysed.

The results of the analysis revealed the potential of XR beyond pedestrians and cyclists, and highlighted a lack of research about the impact of XR with regard to the personal traits or abilities of VRUs. The results of a thorough analysis confirmed the potential of XR as a promising solution for an approach to collaborative co-creation in addressing the safety challenges of VRUs. In addition, the integration of eye-tracking with virtual reality emerged as a promising innovation for enhancing the safety of vulnerable road users.

Theoretical implications include enhancing the understanding of applications of XR in VRUs’ safety and providing insights into future research possibilities and methodological approaches. Valuable insights into search strategies and inclusion-exclusion criteria can guide future research methodologies.

Practically, the findings from the study offer insights to assist urban planners and transportation authorities in incorporating XR technologies effectively for VRUs safety. Identifying areas for further development of XR technology could inspire innovation and investment in solutions designed to meet the safety needs of VRUs, such as enhanced visualisation tools and immersive training simulations.

The findings of previous research underscore the vast potential of XR technologies within the built environment, yet their utilisation remains limited in the urban transport sector. The intricacies of urban traffic scenarios pose significant challenges for VRUs, making participation in mobility studies hazardous. Hence, it is crucial to explore the scope of emerging technologies in addressing VRUs issues as a pre-requisite for establishing comprehensive safety measures.

This study aims to design and validate a decision support system (DSS), named preliminary risk assessment of brownfield sites (PRABS). It is intended that the proposed DSS will aid the identification of potential hazards and, in doing so, highlight challenges facing those stakeholders dealing with the decision-making on brownfield site redevelopments, where the examples of diverse stakeholders would include, for instance, risk assessors, local planning authorities, regulator, developers, civil engineers, architectures, landowners, investors and alike. Moreover, the DSS will enable them to promote safer redevelopment and minimise the risks to future occupants of brownfield sites and neighbouring lands, on the top of the tool being communal platform of an effective communication between them as it is for both experts and non-experts.

This research employs a comprehensive five-stage process, integrating both quantitative and qualitative methods and utilizing mixed methods for a nuanced exploration of data. The initial stage involves an in-depth examination of contemporary risk assessment tools for contaminated sites, setting the foundation and benchmarks for subsequent stages. Stage two focuses on creating a conceptual framework using insights from existing literature to guide the development of the DSS tool. Stage three introduces a validation mechanism through a questionnaire administered to experts. Stage four involves the active development of the DSS tool, transforming theoretical constructs into a practical application. The final stage, stage five, employs quantitative data analysis and case studies to validate, refine and enhance the DSS tool’s applicability in real-world scenarios, ensuring its approval.

This study presents PRABS, a user-friendly DSS for the PRABS. Validation through a quantitative online survey indicates strong support for PRABS, with around 80% of participants willing to recommend it due to its ease of use and information quality. Qualitative data analysis using real-life case studies further demonstrates the tool’s effectiveness. PRABS proves valuable in identifying hazards during the preliminary stage, accurately predicting potential contaminants despite limited input data in the case studies. The tool’s hazard identification aligns well with expert judgments and case study reports, confirming its practical utility.

This study has several limitations. First, the DSS identifies only hazards associated with one layer of site geology, even though sites may include multiple layers, which limits the comprehensiveness of the hazard identification process. Second, adopting an online survey approach posed challenges in achieving a high response rate and gathering a representative sample, making it uncertain how the results might vary with a higher number of professional participants. This limitation affects the generalisability of the findings. Finally, while this study identified 65 potential hazards associated with brownfield sites, this number could be expanded to include hazards related to plants, animals and air, indicating the need for a more inclusive approach to hazard identification. Given these limitations, future research should focus on addressing these gaps.

The contributions of this study offer practical benefits. Firstly, it enables the initial risk assessment process to be more comprehensive and integrated and reduces complexity in the risk assessment process by ensuring that all probabilities, along with their significance, are identified at the initial stage of the risk assessment. This could be a strong starting point for successfully conducting a more detailed risk assessment and remediation. Secondly, the developed PRABS can promote effective environmental communication among stakeholders, which should speed up the planning process and help develop brownfield sites more efficiently and effectively, while preserving the natural environment.

The Quality Assurance Agency (QAA) for Higher Education in the UK focuses on maintaining, enhancing and standardising the quality of higher education. Of significant impact are the development of subject benchmark statements (SBS) by the QAA, which describe the type and content of study along with the academic standards expected of graduates in specific disciplines. Prior to 2022, the QAA did not have a SBS to which higher education policing programmes could be directly aligned.

Over 12-months, a SBS advisory group with representatives from higher education across England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, The College of Policing, QAA, Police Federation of England and Wales and policing, worked in partnership to harness their collective professional experience and knowledge to create the first UK SBS for policing. Post publication of the SBS, permission was sought and granted from both the College of Policing and QAA for members of the advisory group to reflect in an article on their experiences of collaborating and working in partnership to achieve the SBS.

There is great importance of creating a shared vision and mutual trust, developed through open facilitated discussions, with representatives championing their cause and developing a collaborative and partnership approach to completing the SBS.

A collaborative and partnership approach is essential in developing and recognising the academic discipline of policing. This necessarily requires the joint development of initiatives, one of which is the coming together of higher education institutions, PSRBs and practitioner groups to collaborate and design QAA benchmark statements.

The SBS advisory group has further driven forward the emergence of policing as a recognised academic discipline to benefit multiple stakeholders.

The SBS for policing is the first across the UK. The authors experiences can be used to assist others in their developments of similar subject specific benchmarking or academic quality standards.

This paper aims to analyze the factors that affect the attitudes of Armenian small and medium enterprises (SMEs) regarding digitalization, examining whether they view it as a tool to foster innovation and business growth, while also assessing the extent to which digitalization mitigated the negative impacts of the COVID-19 crisis.

The empirical approach is based on data collected from 452 Armenian SMEs, which were further analyzed using SPSS Statistics 23.0 software. Scales for assessing the COVID-19 impact, innovation and digitalization were constructed and validated. To test five hypotheses, binomial logistic regression was conducted to appraise the importance of digitalization for Armenian SMEs, including the ability to mitigate the consequences of the recent COVID-19 pandemic.

The results of the analysis showed that the economic sector plays a significant role in forming the expectations of firms on the positive impact of digitalization, while the company size does not affect them. This paper found that the provision of online services before the pandemic did not help Armenian SMEs to be less affected by the crisis. Furthermore, the perception of whether digitalization facilitated innovative processes, products and services did not depend on the degree of being affected by COVID-19. Finally, the findings indicate that the more agile companies which had the ability to convert their business model into an e-business model were less affected by the crisis.

This paper contributes to the literature by studying the effect of digitalization on SMEs, as well as how SMEs in small developing countries like Armenia mitigated the negative effects of the COVID-19 pandemic. The current work is unique as, to the best of the authors’ knowledge, there are no prior empirical studies focusing on impact of digitalization and innovation induced by exogenous shocks in an under-researched country like Armenia.

Crime increased in Spain during the period of 2017–2019 after a decade of decline. This coincides with severe housing deprivation multiplying by three in just four years, affecting 3.4% of the population in 2020. However, no research has been found that analyzes whether this deterioration of the physical conditions of housing and its environmental elements has impacted the level of crime in Spain. This study aims to analyze how housing deprivation affects crime in the Spanish context.

For this purpose, different items that are considered by Eurostat as elements of housing deprivation are used. The difference generalized method of moments estimator is used for 16 Spanish regions that comprises the period from 2013 to 2019.

The results suggest that certain structural and environmental elements of housing are positively associated with crime: space (0.5% and 0.4%) and high housing expenditure (0.4% and 0.5%) are positively correlated with the two dependent variables; the lack of light and overcrowding stand out as they establish a positive and statistically significant association with four out of the six analyzed crime categories; the absence of lighting effect reaches up to 1.8% and 1.7% in the case of violent robberies and vehicle theft, respectively. Finally, pollution is negatively associated with robbery with violence (−1.9%), theft (−0.7%) and robbery with force (−0.5%).

To the best of the author’s knowledge, this is the first study that examines whether this deterioration of the physical conditions of housing has impacted the level of crime in Spain. It is also pioneering at the European level by using nonmonetary dimensions of inequality such as housing.

This study aims to investigate the impact of message framing (emotional vs rational) on social media users' ability to accurately detect information and their intention to share messages about the COVID-19 vaccine.

Using an experimental design approach, the authors recruited 600 adult participants via a crowdsourcing platform. Participants were randomly assigned to receive emotional or rational messages and their ability to accurately detect information and intention to share messages were assessed.

The results showed a significant multivariate effect of message framing on both the detection of accurate information and intention to share (p < 0.001). Participants who received emotional messages demonstrated better performance in the detection and sharing task than those who received rational messages. Gender and age also had significant main effects on the outcomes, with women performing better than men and younger participants performing better than older participants in detecting the accuracy of information. The interaction effects of the independent variables were not statistically significant (p = 0.098).

The findings highlight the importance of considering emotional factors in combating the spread of messages about the COVID-19 vaccine on social media. Practitioners responsible for social media content should strengthen the content review mechanism, with an emphasis on screening content with high emotional arousal.

The phenomenon of global brands taking a stance on crucial, yet polarizing, socio-political issues, namely global brand activism, is rising. However, how consumer views on this practice are shaped when global branding elements are factored in remains unclear. Drawing from the functional theory of attitude formation, this study investigates the relationships of consumer characteristics (political ideology, consumer ethnocentrism) and brand factors (global brand attitudes and perceived motivation of global brand activists) with attitudes toward global brand activists.

Using a survey of a UK nationally representative sample (n = 439), we test our hypothesized model via structural equation modeling and mediation analysis.

Our findings reveal direct and indirect effects of political ideology on attitudes toward global brand activists (AttGBACTIVs). While consumer ethnocentrism and global brand attitudes do not directly drive AttGBACTIVs, they do influence them indirectly. Perceived motivation of global brand activists emerges as a key mechanism activating these effects and affecting AttGBACTIVs.

First, this study constitutes a novel examination of consumer views of brand activism through a global branding lens. Second, our investigation uniquely combines important determinants of brand activism outcomes with key international marketing factors (namely consumer ethnocentrism and global brand attitudes). Third, the concurrent exploration of individual and brand factors in our mediated model reveals the complex mechanisms through which attitudes toward global brand activists are formed.

This research aims to examine the US–China policy shift from Obama to Biden emphasizing the centrality of Taiwan question in the geostrategic competition with Beijing and its prospect if the US strategy remains unchanged.

A conceptual framework is outlined, illustrating how the US grand strategy is driven by the ideological foundation of Exceptionalism. The paper highlights the associated US policy changes that evolved from Obama to Trump and then Biden to advance Washington's strategic interests in its rivalry with China over Taiwan.

Biden's policy led to an escalating geopolitical competition with Beijing over Taiwan to maintain US supremacy. The Biden administration is more stringent than the previous administrations on the Taiwan question and there is the conviction that the USA must not back down on Taiwan because the alternative will be a retraction of US world primacy to Beijing. With Washington's persistent hegemonic strategy, the US–China confrontation over Taiwan seems inevitable.

The research highlights how the Biden administration managed a perpetuated Ukraine crisis and forged unprecedented high-level ties with Taiwan, indicating the administration's determination to exacerbate contentions with Beijing over Taiwan rather than de-escalate.

Research done to date has produced a wide range of perspectives that center on the junction between the specific function and responsibility of the entrepreneur when applying ethical dimensions to the field of entrepreneurship. By combining a bibliometric analysis with the literature review, the purpose of this paper is to provide an overview of entrepreneurship ethics and its contribution to sustainable development goals, along with future research directions on the topic of entrepreneurship and ethics.

The research looked for literature based on entrepreneurship ethics from the Dimension database. The authors accumulated 2,279 articles for the period of 2002–2022 for analysis. The authors used bibliometric analysis for analyzing the topic with the use of VosViewer and Excel.

By combining a bibliometric analysis with a literature review, this study aimed to provide an overview of the ethics and entrepreneurship and contribution to sustainable development goals. The most influential author and journal are Vanessa Ratten and the Journal of Business Ethics, respectively. The top sustainable development goals (SDGs) being contributed by entrepreneurship ethics are SDG4, SDG8, SDG16, SDG11 and SDG3. By contrasting these two interpretations, the authors have demonstrated that the entrepreneurship environment involves various ethical issues connected to personal, organizational and societal sectors.

The current study may serve as a general guideline for future investigation into this topic.

Regarding the practical ramifications, the findings can help entrepreneurs who are preparing to launch a business or are already doing so. The findings provide a comprehensive framework of success variables that must be considered to improve the venture’s performance.

This study’s originality is from presenting a structured and in-depth literature review that describes the current state of entrepreneurship ethics and its contribution to sustainable development goals. A complete analysis of the data gathered on entrepreneurship ethics is offered to establish that it is sustainable.