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This paper aims to revisit the relationship between sales growth and profitability by exploring the direct and indirect effects of cost stickiness in the growth process. Cost stickiness refers to asymmetric variations of costs associated with increases and decreases in sales. Cost stickiness is analyzed as a strategic liability that negatively affects profitability because it contributes to organizational rigidity that causes opportunity costs.

The empirical design is based on a large sample of 65,599 French firms drawn from the Amadeus database and it covers the period 2010 to 2019. The authors take advantage of the presentation of expenses made by nature in Amadeus to calculate cost stickiness in a more direct way than what is commonly done in the literature. The authors use various regression models to test the hypotheses.

For firms that experience rapid growth in sales, cost stickiness has a positive moderating effect on the relation between sales growth and profitability because of a higher asset turnover efficiency. However, for firms that experience slow growth, no growth or a decrease in sales, cost stickiness plays a negative moderating effect on the relation between sales and profitability.

This work contributes to the discussion about the conditions under which high growth is associated with greater profitability and conceptualizes cost stickiness as a strategic liability. The empirical context, privately held firms, has been overlooked by previous research.

The cost-to-asset ratio is a vital efficiency ratio for any financial institution, as it measures its operating expenses to its asset base. This study uses this ratio to evaluate the efficiency of defined benefit pension plans (DBPPs) in the Republic of Congo using financial and macroeconomic indicators.

Under the financial indicator, the authors apply vector autoregression (VAR) to a dataset covering 120 months from 2011 to 2020. In addition, the authors use 12 years of data from 2009 to 2020 and the random effects model under macroeconomic indicators.

Assets and costs together Granger cause the efficiency of the DBPP. However, there is no Granger causality from the combination of assets and costs on the DB public and industry PP efficiencies. The random effects model results show that macroconnect level variables significantly lower the cost-to-asset ratio, thereby improving the PP's efficiency. Macrodisconnect level variables significantly increase the cost-to-asset ratio, thereby deteriorating PP efficiency.

The study is limited to a developing economy in sub-Saharan Africa, which may hinder the generalization of the results. Future studies could use panel samples from sub-Saharan Africa so that inferences could be drawn for the continent and comparisons made with others.

To the best of the authors knowledge, this study is the first in sub-Saharan Africa to assess the efficiency of DBPPs using financial and macroeconomic indicators.

This paper aims to explore the promotion decisions of heterogeneous sellers on a decentralized platform under competitive conditions and analyze how seller behaviors impact platform profit, seller revenue, buyer surplus and social welfare.

This paper considers a Cournot model consisting of a platform charging a commission rate and two sellers with different conversion rates and browsing costs. Promotion efforts by sellers can increase traffic, but they also incur promotion costs for sellers. The sellers decide on promotion effort by weighing these two effects. The authors also explore the equilibrium when the platform charges a fixed usage fee.

The seller’s profit improves as its conversion rate increases and worsens as browsing costs increase. Also, increasing the commission rate charged by the platform makes the seller invest less in promotional efforts. Therefore, the platform must consider this trade-off to determine an optimal rate. The analysis shows that the seller with a high conversion rate and high browsing cost plays a greater role in generating more overall revenue. When the market favors such a seller, the platform tends to charge less in order not to impair its profitability.

This paper incorporates conversion rate, buyer’s browsing cost, unit promotion cost and the fee charged by the platform into the model to study sellers’ promotion decisions on decentralized platforms.

Presently, existing electric car sharing platforms are based on a centralized architecture which are faced with inadequate trust and pricing issues as these platforms requires an intermediary to maintain users’ data and handle transactions between participants. Therefore, this article aims to develop a decentralized peer-to-peer electric car sharing prototype framework that offers trustable and cost transparency.

This study employs a systematic review and data were collected from the literature and existing technical report documents after which content analysis is carried out to identify current problems and state-of-the-art electric car sharing. A use case scenario was then presented to preliminarily validate and show how the developed prototype framework addresses the trust-lessness in electric car sharing via distributed ledger technologies (DLTs).

Findings from this study present a use case scenario that depicts how businesses can design and implement a distributed peer-to-peer electric car sharing platforms based on IOTA technology, smart contracts and IOTA eWallet. Main findings from this study unlock the tremendous potential of DLT to foster sustainable road transportation. By employing a token-based approach this study enables electric car sharing that promotes sustainable road transportation.

Practically the developed decentralized prototype framework provides improved cost transparency and fairness guarantees as it is not based on a centralized price management system. The DLT based decentralized prototype framework aids to orchestrate the incentivize monetization and rewarding mechanisms among participants that share their electric cars enabling them to collaborate towards lessening CO₂ emissions.

The findings advocate that electric vehicle sharing has become an essential component of sustainable road transportation by increasing electric car utilization and decreasing the number of vehicles on the road.

The key novelty of the article is introducing a decentralized prototype framework to be employed to develop an electric car sharing solution without a central control or governance, which improves cost transparency. As compared to prior centralized platforms, the prototype framework employs IOTA technology smart contracts and IOTA eWallet to improve mobility related services.

The e-commerce boom presents new challenges for last-mile delivery (LMD), which may be mitigated by new delivery technologies. This paper evaluates the impact of mobile parcel lockers (MPL) on costs and CO₂ equivalent (CO₂e) emissions in existing LMD networks, which include home delivery and shipments to stationary parcel lockers.

To describe customers’ preferences, we design a multinomial logit model based on recipients’ travel distance to pick-up locations and availability at home. Based on route cost estimation, we define the operating costs for MPLs. We devise a mathematical model with binary decision variables to optimize the location of MPLs.

Our study demonstrates that integrating MPLs leads to additional cost savings of 8.7% and extra CO₂e emissions savings of up to 5.4%. Our analysis of several regional clusters suggests that MPLs yield benefits in highly populous cities but may result in additional emissions in more rural areas where recipients drive longer distances to pick-ups.

This paper designs a suitable operating model for MPLs and demonstrates environmental and economic savings. Moreover, it adds recipients’ availability at home to receive parcels improving the accuracy of stochastic demand. In addition, MPLs are evaluated in the context of several regional clusters ranging from large cities to rural areas. Thus, we provide managerial guidance to logistics service providers how and where to deploy MPLs.

The purpose of studying digitization transformation of the supply chain is to understand how digital technologies and processes are changing the way supply chains operate and to identify the opportunities and challenges associated with this transformation. Studying digitization transformation of the supply chain is important because it can help global businesses in identifying the best practices in supply chain management (SCM) systems and enhance supply chain performance. Hence, this research study is contributing in revealing the outcomes of digital inclusiveness in overall SCM for the growth of retail and e-commerce based platforms.

This research is using both descriptive and explanatory research designs to provide a comprehensive understanding of the problems in SCM. Descriptive research provides a detailed description of the characteristics of the population under study, while explanatory research identifies the causal relationships between the variables. Descriptive research has helped us to develop hypotheses about the relationships between variables that can be tested using explanatory research. Explanatory research has been used to validate the findings of descriptive research. By using both descriptive and explanatory research designs, our research design has increased the generalizability of our findings.

According to this study, businesses intend to change their supply chain strategies after the wake of competitive era to make them more robust, sustainable and collaborative with suppliers, customers and stakeholders by investing more in SCM technology like Blockchain, AI, analytics, robotic process automation and data control centers. This study evaluates the impact of digitization on supply chain systems. This includes assessing the benefits of digitization and identifying the factors that contribute to successful implementation. This research is studying the role of data analytics in SCM and how it can be leveraged to improve efficiency, reduce costs and increase transparency.

The study highlights the importance of adopting digitization in supply chain systems to improve supply chain robustness, sustainability and collaboration with stakeholders. This study's emphasis on data analytics in SCM presents an opportunity for businesses to gain insights into their supply chain systems and make data-driven decisions. This can enhance efficiency, reduce costs and improve overall supply chain performance. The study's focus on SCM technology and data analytics may overlook other factors that contribute to successful SCM, such as organizational culture, human resources and supply chain governance.

This study will complement to the existing body of information, management theory and practice and will benefit all. The research work is original and can be implemented worldwide to promote digitization in SCM for smooth transactions in the entire chain of wholesalers, retail distributors and customers.

This study aims to identify the determinants of housing affordability in an effort to inform policy.

The authors use econometric analysis to determine variables that impact housing affordability in the USA.

The authors find that affordability depends on a number of demographic factors as well as physical characteristics of properties, including average age of homeowner, family size and average dwelling square footage. The authors also find that vacancy rates, increase in house price and median family income also have a significant impact on housing affordability. Additionally, the authors find that households with high-cost burdens are more vulnerable to mortgage rates and property taxes than those with moderate-cost burdens. As a result, changes in economic or policy variables tend to have a disproportionate impact on high-cost-burdened households, and they are more vulnerable to economic and policy shocks.

To date, the literature has not done a systematic investigation of housing affordability using detailed census data.

This study aims to investigate the impact of cash holding (CH) on bankruptcy (BR) risk. This study also examines the moderating effect of corporate social responsibility (CSR) practices on this relationship.

The data were extracted from firms' annual reports. The panel data were used for 68 firms listed at the Egyptian Stock Exchange (EGX) with a total of 340 observations from 2015 to 2019. The research hypotheses were tested using the panel corrected standards errors (PCSE) method and the feasible generalized least squares (FGLS) method.

The results reveal that (1) CH has a positive effect on the Z-score (decreasing bankruptcy risk) of the Egyptian listed firms. (2) Egyptian firms that practice CSR have a low level of bankruptcy risk. (3) CSR practices in Egyptian listed firms support the positive relationship between CH and Z-score (declining bankruptcy risk).

The limitations of this study include a relatively small sample size. In addition, the analysis doesn't include other measures of bankruptcy risk due to a lack of data.

The findings of this study will help investors and creditors to evaluate and predict the firms' bankruptcy risk. This study highlights the importance of cash holding for firms in emerging economies. Firms may hold cash to support liquidity, overcome financial distress risk, lower the cost of capital, increase future investment opportunities and reduce uncertainty. Additionally, the results would also help the policymakers, regulators at the EGX and Financial Regulatory Authority and stakeholders to realize the importance of cash holding, evaluate the cash liquidity in Egyptian listed firms, predict the firms' financial distress and consider the consequences of the CSR practices in accordance with Egypt's vision 2030.

Consistent with liquidity preference theory and trade-off theory, this study adds evidence to the literature on bankruptcy risk by investigating the effect of cash holding on bankruptcy risk in emerging economies. According to Egypt's vision 2030, the empirical findings in this study extend previous findings by providing strong additional evidence in emerging economies regarding the moderating effect of CSR practices on the association between cash holding and bankruptcy risk. To the best of our knowledge, this study is the first to investigate the relationship between CSR, CH and BR risk in Egypt.

The success of sharing economy (SE) platforms has made it attractive for many firms to adopt this business model. However, the inherent weaknesses of these platforms, such as their unstandardized service quality, the burden of maintenance on resource owners and the threat of multi-homing, have become increasingly apparent. Previous prescriptions for addressing these weaknesses, however, are limited because they do not account for factors such as compliance costs and information asymmetry, and tend to solve the problem on only one side of the platform at the expense of the others. By exploring the strategies deployed and actions undertaken across the development of Xbed, a successful accommodation-sharing platform in China, this study aims to explore an alternative solution that would overcome the aforementioned weaknesses without the corresponding compromises.

The authors conducted a case study consisting of secondary data and interviews with 15 informants who were representatives of Xbed's top management, organizational IT functions and its various business units.

The authors identified three inherent weaknesses that may be found in SE business models and how these weaknesses can be overcome without compromising other stakeholders through an auxiliary platform. The authors also discuss the advantages, characteristics, deployment and nature of auxiliary platforms.

This model contributes an in-depth view of establishing and nurturing auxiliary platforms to complement a primary SE platform. Owners and managers of SE platforms may use our model as the basis of guidelines for optimizing their platforms' development, thereby extending the benefits of SE to more stakeholders.

Improving productivity and efficiency has always been crucial for industrial companies to remain competitive. In recent years, the topic of environmental impact has become increasingly important. Published research indicates that environmental and economic goals can enforce or rival each other. However, few papers have been published that address the interaction and integration of these two goals.

In this paper, we identify both, synergies and trade-offs based on a systematic review incorporating 66 publications issued between 1992 and 2021. We analyze, quantify and cluster examples of conjunctions of ecological and economic measures and thereby develop a framework for the combined improvement of performance and environmental compatibility.

Our findings indicate an increased significance of a combined consideration of these two dimensions of sustainability. We found that cases where enforcing synergies between economic and ecological effects were identified are by far more frequent than reports on trade-offs. For the individual categories, cost savings are uniformly considered as the most important economic aspect while, energy savings appear to be marginally more relevant than waste reduction in terms of environmental aspects.

No previous literature review provides a comparable graphical treatment of synergies and trade-offs between cost savings and ecological effects. For the first time, identified measures were classified in a 3 × 3 table considering type and principle.