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Today, a firm’s major concern is to know the way in which an innovation is adopted in the marketplace. The purpose of this paper is to focus on the two-stage nature of diffusion process in which the time lag between people being informed and their act of making final purchase is considered.

The paper discusses an approach based on the time lag for modeling awareness and adoption process as two separate and yet connected processes. Varying forms of time lag (constant, deterministic or random) have been considered while modeling the required framework. Furthermore, an equivalence approach has been shown between the present framework and the two well-known and established approaches of infinite queuing theory and hazard rate function.

The results are verified on sales data of two different consumer durables and it show good prediction capability of proposed models in capturing the real-life scenario. Further, the equivalence approach helps us to quantify such scenarios which were difficult to be modeled with any one particular approach. Further, the possibility of capturing different market scenarios by studying various distribution functions has been identified.

The proposed methodology is based on a two-stage adoption process. The same can be extended to a multi-stage adoption process as in today’s competitive environment. “Motivation” is one such factor that is highly important which can be considered in some later studies. In future, the authors wish to study the multi-stage adoption process considering the different forms of time lag function.

The equivalence approach discussed in the paper can help to cater the possibility of capturing different market scenarios by studying various distribution functions.

The proposed approach helps to cater the time lag between awareness and adoption process and develop different mean value functions to account for the manner in which sales are happening under different circumstances. The proposed methodical approach can also help decision makers in managing their available resources in a prudent manner.

The quality and reliability of medical communication for branded drug adoption is extremely critical, not only for safeguarding patient interests but also for ensuring successful investments by multinational pharmaceutical firms. This paper predicts doctors’ prescribing intentions based on communication relationship among factors for late entrant branded drugs, compared with pioneering brand choice, for treating chronic diseases such as hypertension.

The constructs were validated with structural equation model for a sample set of 151 doctors from private hospitals in the National Capital Region of India.

This research reveals communication drivers and draws on theory to suggest that the doctor’s behavioural prescription intentions, subject to social influence from their colleagues, leads to lower adoption responses.

Given that limitations on sample size are often unavoidable, this study reveals that, due to the availability of substituting brands, alternate therapeutic routes and lack of availability of a practical guide for prescription, a communication model needs to be developed and validated.

Furthermore, managers of pharmaceutical firms should differentiate between the effects of direct and indirect communication–integration efforts for minimizing uncertainty in drug adoption in the context of the fragmented and unpredictable Indian market.

A late entrant may lose its dominant market share to alternate brands from other suppliers due to communication gaps in an unstructured market, leading to low adoption intentions. The study provides business theorists, drug marketers and health-care professionals with unique insights into specific communication drivers of prescribing decisions, aimed at ensuring reliable and appropriate drug adoption in Indian markets.

The complications caused by metallic orthopaedic bone screws like stress-shielding effect, screw loosening, screw migration, higher density difference, painful reoperation and revision surgery for screw extraction can be overcome with the bioabsorbable bone screws. This study aims to use additive manufacturing (AM) technology to fabricate orthopaedic biodegradable cortical screws to reduce the bone-screw-related-complications.

The fused filament fabrication technology (FFFT)-based AM technique is used to fabricate orthopaedic cortical screws. The influence of various process parameters like infill pattern, infill percentage, layer height, wall thickness and different biological solutions were observed on the compressive strength and degradation behaviour of cortical screws.

The porous lattice structures in cortical screws using the rapid prototyping technique were found to be better as porous screws can enhance bone growth and accelerate the osseointegration process with sufficient mechanical strength. The compressive strength and degradation rate of the screw is highly dependent on process parameters used during the fabrication of the screw. The compressive strength of screw is inversely proportional to the degradation rate of the cortical screw.

The present study is focused on cortical screws. Further different orthopaedic screws can be modified with the use of different rapid prototyping techniques.

The use of rapid prototyping techniques for patient-specific bone screw designs is scantly reported. This study uses FFFT-based AM technique to fabricate various infill patterns and porosity of cortical screws to enhance the design of orthopaedic cortical screws.

In multihop wireless networks, the number of neighbors has an important role in the network performance since links are dynamically formed between a node and its neighbors. This paper aims to investigate this issue.

The paper quantitatively studies the effects of the average number of neighbors in multihop wireless networks on the network connectivity, the number of hops needed to traverse a certain distance, which can be used to determine the hop diameter of a network, and the total energy consumed by packet transmission, which can be used to choose an optimum average number of neighbors that minimizes the energy consumption. This paper also presents an analysis of the energy consumption that can be applied to a wide range of access protocols and show the effect of a variety of factors.

Results show that the minimum average number of neighbors to guarantee the overall network connectivity depends on the size of a network coverage. There is a sharp knee in the network connectivity with decrease of the average number of neighbors, N. If the distance between a source and destination, d, is known, the number of hops needed to reach the destination is usually between d/R∼2d/R, where R is the transmission range. A larger average number of neighbors N leads to a smaller number of hops to traverse a certain distance, which in turn results in a smaller traffic load caused by relaying packets. However, a bigger N also causes more collisions when a contention medium access scheme is used, which leads to more energy consumed by packet transmission. The results show that the optimum N which minimizes the energy is obtained by balancing several factors affecting the energy.

The paper provides a useful study on the effects of the number of neighbors in multihop wireless networks.

This paper aims to describe the design, implementation, and evaluation of a novel file and application sharing system that enables a group of mobile stations that do not have any prior security association and infrastructure support, to form a secure collaboration workspace, and share files and application content instantly with minimal human intervention.

The paper looks at the system implementation and experimentation.

WShare can automatically establish a peer‐to‐peer network among the participating mobile stations, and provides a transparent shared file repository through which the mobile stations can securely exchange files with simple drag‐and‐drop operations. This file sharing application can also be specialized to support the same file beaming service over wireless LAN as that provided by Palm PDAs over infrared links. On the application sharing front, WShare supports a general remote execution mechanism that can synchronize the state of multiple instances of a standard productivity application, such as PowerPoint, Excel, and Word, across different machines. Finally for sharing generic applications, WShare also integrates virtual network computing with reliable wireless broadcast to provide a user‐interface level sharing mechanism. Performance measurement on the fully operational WShare prototype shows that a collaboration workspace among five mobile nodes can be set up within 3.5 seconds.

This paper proposes a new communication paradigm and presents the design, implementation, and evaluation of a fully‐working prototype.

The first major nickel alloy introduced to the industry, about 100 years ago, was a Ni‐Cu alloy 400. This alloy is still widely used in a variety of industries and will continue to be used in this current century. Over the past 100 years, especially in the last 50 years, improvements in alloy metallurgy, melting technology, and thermo‐mechanical processing, along with a better fundamental understanding of the role of various alloying elements has led to new nickel alloys. These have not only extended the range of usefulness of existing alloys by overcoming their limitations, but are reliable and cost‐effective and have opened new areas of applications. This paper briefly describes the various nickel alloy systems developed during the last 100 years and comments on what the future holds for the newer alloys developed in the last 20 years and on the competition faced by these alloys in the new millennium. High‐temperature alloys are not discussed in this paper.

Using bibliometric techniques, the author analyzes a dataset of 276 articles on cross-border mergers and acquisitions (CBMAs) published in 13 management and international business journals. The author assesses the scientific impact and visualizes the intellectual landscape of research on CBMAs by analyzing publication and citation data and interconnections between publications. First, the author assesses annual publication trends and identifies highly cited articles and productive journals in the dataset that have significantly contributed to our understanding of CBMAs. Second, the author identifies main themes in recent research on CBMAs by focusing on frequently used keywords in publications. Third, the author identifies clusters of related research and explores their interrelationships to outline emerging trends, new perspectives, and directions for future research on CBMAs. Overall, this chapter contributes to the understanding of CBMAs by documenting the progress made to date and providing important insights for future research.

The purpose of this paper is to find a practical method to minimize unnecessary rebroadcasts for ad hoc networks in a remote area.

The authors design a theoretical coverage estimation model for autonomous broadcast pruning. To verify the effect of the model, simulations are performed to evaluate the effect of confidence level and the actual performance by using ns2 network simulator.

The algorithm used to predict the coverage area of broadcasts can minimize unnecessary rebroadcasts.

Autonomous broadcast pruning scheme based on the local prediction of a remained coverage area in the on‐going broadcast process brings us beneficial results in terms of energy savings and limited bandwidth preservation.

Purpose – this chapter contrasts the ethical climates in government and nonprofit organizations (npos) in japan, a setting where the relationship between these two sectors has been recognized as close and long-lasting (estevez-abe, 2003; hirata, 2002; ritu, 2008). Yet, there has been little comparison of the value difference (or congruence) or discussion of how this may influence their interaction over time. This chapter explains why nonprofit partners may be more attractive partners for governmental contracts, notwithstanding the dangers of “mission drift” (young & denize, 2008) and/or high monitoring costs (malloy & agarwal, 2008).

Design/methodology/approach – Using survey data from matched samples of nonprofits (441, 86% response rate) and governmental organizations (321, 64%), the factor structure equivalence and measurement invariance of ethical climates in these two sectors were rigorously tested.

Findings – The findings extend prior typologies of ethical climate from for-profit and nonprofit organizations to governmental organizations. The chapter revisits the notion of opportunism, which continues to be pervasive and problematic in third-sector studies (Hawkins, Gravier, & Powley, 2011) to suggest that significant overlap in ethical climates between nonprofit and governmental organizations rules out value differences as a possible source of opportunism.

Originality/value – This study contributes a deeper awareness of the similarities and differences in ethical perceptions between nonprofit and governmental organizations that can inform policy makers in government to better understand the implications of using nonprofit partners to deliver services.

Group communication has become increasing important in mobile ad hoc networks (MANET). Current multicast routing protocols in MANET have been shown to incur large overheads due to dynamic network topology. To this end, this paper proposes an overlay multicast scheme in MANET that is more efficient.

The approach is to construct an overlay multicast tree based on the locations of the group nodes. The paper proposes several tree construction algorithms, namely, location‐guided k‐ary (LGK) tree, location‐guided directional (LGD) tree and location‐guided Steiner (LGS) tree. All of them rely on the geometric locations of the nodes as heuristics to construct the tree. The paper also introduces several mechanisms to enhance the proposed algorithms.

The simulation results show that the location‐guided heuristics is very effective in constructing low bandwidth cost overlay multicast trees in MANET. When location information is up‐to‐date, the bandwidth cost of a LGS tree is similar to that of an optimal router‐assisted Steiner multicast tree. When location information is out‐dated, LGD tree has the lowest cost.

This paper demonstrates the effectiveness of location‐guided heuristics in constructing overlay multicast trees in MANET. This study strongly suggests that location‐guided heuristics can be used to design many other algorithms in a mobile network.