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Employee‐guided management (EGM) is the process of using information from employees to guide management strategies and incorporates elements of participative management, participative decision making, performance feedback, and survey feedback to outline components for comprehensive programmes of employee involvement in providing information, formulating and carrying out action strategies, and evaluating outcomes. EGM is intended to be an ongoing process. Three case studies show how the EGM guidelines can be applied.

The paper considers the development of the unique fiscal relationship that exists between the government of Fiji and Emperor gold mines. Over a period of 40 years Emperor has not only paid negligible amounts of taxes and royalties it has frequently been directly subsidised by the state. In 1983 the government signed the Vatukoula tax agreement which effectively gave new mines a tax holiday for over 20 years. At the time of writing, Emperor regularly declares a dividend, is profitable in comparison to similar mines and pays no corporate taxes. The tax agreement stands as unique among developing countries in terms of allowing all potential rents from the mine to pass directly to the mine owners and almost nothing to the resource owner.

Recent changes in smoking laws have influenced gambling behaviour at electronic gaming machine (EGM) venues. In this chapter, we review the literature that examines the interrelationship between gambling, problem gambling, and smoking in order to gauge the indirect effects of smoking bans in gaming venues. We then perform an analysis on the consequences of a smoking ban in Victoria, Australia, that was instituted on 1st September 2002. This analysis investigates the nature of the pattern of drops in local EGM revenue and the impact on the state tax revenue.

The purpose of this paper is to improve the forecasting efficiency of a grey model.

The exponentially weighted moving average (EWMA) algorithm is proposed to modify background values for a new grey model optimization.

The experimental results reveal that the proposed models (EGM, REGM) outperform traditional grey models.

A genetic algorithm (GA) optimizer is used to select the optimal weights for the background values of the EGM(1,1) and REGM(1,1) forecast models. The results of the current study are very encouraging, as the empirical results show that the REGM(1,1) and EGM(1,1) models reduce the MAPE rates over the traditional GM(1,1) and RGM(1,1) models.

Tourism industry is a highly complex system surrounded by many uncertainties because of its innumerable connections with other supporting systems. Considering tourism, a grey system, the current study proposes optimistic–pessimistic method (OPM). This technique can aid in improving forecast accuracy of four tourism-related indicators, inbound tourism to China, outbound tourism from China, revenues collected through inbound tourism and expenses incurred on outbound tourism.

The study integrates OPM into EGM and then using the secondary data collected from the World Bank database, predicts the four tourism-related indicators. The mean absolute percentage error steered the performance of the models.

One of the main contributions of the study lies in its overall evaluation of one of the major travel and tourism countries of the world in light of four crucial indicators. The study highlights, four tourism-related indicators' recent information, contains more valuable information about the future.

OPM represents a novel application of concept of whitenization of interval grey number in grey forecasting theory.

In the current study, two grey prediction models, Even GM (1, 1) and Non-homogeneous discrete grey model (NDGM), and ARIMA models are deployed to forecast cocoa bean production of the six major cocoa-producing countries. Furthermore, relying on Relative Growth Rate (RGR) and Doubling Time (D_t), production growth is analyzed.

The secondary data were extracted from the United Nations Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) database. Grey forecasting models are applied using the data covering 2008 to 2017 as their performance on the small sample size is well-recognized. The models' performance was estimated through MAPE, MAE and RMSE.

Results show the two grey models fell below 10% of MAPE confirming their high accuracy and forecasting performance against that of the ARIMA. Therefore, the suitability of grey models for the cocoa production forecast is established. Findings also revealed that cocoa production in Côte d'Ivoire, Cameroon, Ghana and Brazil is likely to experience a rise with a growth rate of 2.52, 2.49, 2.45 and 2.72% by 2030, respectively. However, Nigeria and Indonesia are likely to experience a decrease with a growth rate of 2.25 and 2.21%, respectively.

For a sustainable cocoa industry, stakeholders should investigate the decline in production despite the implementation of advanced agricultural mechanization in cocoa farming, which goes further to put food security at risk.

The study presents a pioneering attempt of using grey forecasting models to predict cocoa production.

This paper is a commentary that aims to address themes arising from the article by Morgan titled “Wales and Autism: The Impact of Philanthropy Matched with Ambition”.

This opinion piece considers the broader impact of stakeholder engagement in the field of autism, including how the dissemination of evidence-based support could be made more accessible for autistic people, their families and carers and philanthropists.

This paper highlights the link between stakeholder engagement and meaningful change in policy and practice in the field of autism. It highlights the need for philanthropists to invest in evidence-based support but highlights the difficulty in identifying and accessing such support. This piece supports the use of evidence and gap maps (EGMs) to increase the accessibility of autism research and evidence.

While stakeholder engagement is encouragingly rising in this field, most of the evidence is held in academic journals, which are behind paywalls and, therefore, inaccessible to many autistic people, their families, carers and associated professionals. Displaying evidence using EGMs provides an accessible way for autistic people and those who support them to identify possible avenues of support quickly and allows philanthropists to direct research funding to areas of high priority.

The aim of this paper is to present the first diffusion analysis of ISO/IEC 27001, the fourth most popular ISO certification at global level and the most important standard for information security.

To achieve the purposes, the authors applied Grey Models (GM) – Even GM (1,1), Even GM (1,1,α,θ), Discrete GM (1,1), Discrete GM (1,1,α) – complemented by the relative growth rate and the doubling time indexes on the six most important countries in terms of issued certificates.

Results show that a growing trend is likely to be expected in the years to come and that China will lead at country level.

The study contributes to the scientific debate by presenting the first diffusive analysis of ISO/IEC 27001 and by proposing a forecasting approach that to date has found little application in the field of international standards.

This study aims to explore the sociocultural appeal of SNS game content from the point of view of the human emotions aroused by the interaction between the players and the games.

The author's research methodology is based on Miryoku Engineering. The author interviewed 11 knowledgeable gamers by the evaluation grid method (EGM) and surveyed 321 players through a questionnaire in order to gather data about their preferences, which were then analysed using quantification theory type I.

The semantic structure of the appeal of the games was determined from interviews with knowledgeable gamers (EGM). This structure represents a hierarchy of the relationship between the types of appeal or appeal factors, the reasons for gamers’ preferences, and the specific characteristics of SNS games. According to the statistical analysis, the most important sociocultural appeal factors of SNS games are “practicable and realizable” and “innovative and unique”, and these are affected in varying degrees by particular reasons and characteristics.

The author has found that sociocultural factors influence the design of SNS games significantly. In addition, the issue of how to integrate the sociocultural factors into the design of games is critical to the success of the marketing strategies of SNS games in different areas or countries.

The author's findings provide important information for designers and researchers of SNS games. The study also contributes to the field of human‐computer interaction in cyberspace.

This paper reviews one of the crucial issues in the recent growth literature concerning the hypothesis of cross country convergence of levels and growth rates of income per capita implied by the neo‐classical growth model, both in the Solow‐Swan and Rampsey‐Cass‐Koopmans versions. The alternative endogenous growth models, consistent with permanent income inequality, are considered. Convergence to a common income level versus divergence is discussed from a theoretical point of view. Then, empirical tests of the convergence property are presented. What emerges is that Barro type regressions and their findings about “conditional” convergence are questionable and cannot be used to give a definitive response on this issue.