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Companies understand the potential to use gamification marketing to facilitate a better connection. However, most endeavours in gamification fail. This study aims to identify the design factors that drive the marketing effectiveness of branded applications (apps) with gamification features.

This study investigates branded apps covering various industries such as hospitality, retail and financial services. A total of 296 respondents were recruited from an online questionnaire platform.

The results show that playability, design aesthetics, goal clarity, incentive provision and symbolic benefits were drivers of consumer–brand engagement, which in turn generated purchase intention, app continuance intention and brand loyalty.

Based on the elemental tetrad model, this study specified relevant factors identified in the literature to represent the technology, aesthetic, mechanical and story elements. The authors contribute to the literature by identifying design factors as drivers of consumer–brand engagement in the branded app context.

This study conducts a systematic literature review (SLR) on serious games in the BPM domain, in order to answer: RQ1 – what are BPM games' learning objectives and design characteristics? RQ2 – How rigorously each BPM game was evaluated in terms of their effectiveness and entertainment?.

We followed the PRISMA statement method and systematic literature review standards. Selected studies were analyzed using qualitative evidence synthesis.

We found 37 references that describe 15 serious games within the BPM domain. Games are diverse, ranging from analog games that need a few hours to complete to complex digital games that require many sessions. Game evaluation should be generally improved as 27 publications can be considered as quasi-experimental or nonexperimental and potentially biased.

Future research should focus on developing new games about process implementation and using other notations besides BPMN. More studies testing the reliability and validity of existing games in different settings and using more rigorous experimental designs are also necessary. Practitioners can identify thoroughly evaluated games relevant to their learning objectives.

This is the first SLR about BPM games. It consolidates the literature, analyzes, describes and categorizes 15 games with respect to their internal characteristics and evaluation reliability.

The purpose of this paper is to determine whether individual investor sentiment and its factors influence investment decision-making behavior in the Indian stock market. The study contributes to the novel conceptual framework that integrates the impact of investor sentiment and outlines the role of its factors (herding, media factor, advocate recommendation and social interaction) during the investment decision-making process.

In this paper, data were collected using a structured questionnaire survey from Indian individual investors. It uses self-reported sources of information collected via a survey of individual investors and estimated the linkage via path modeling. The collected data were analyzed using partial least square structural equation modeling to examine the relationship between the construct, namely, herding, media, advocate recommendation and social interaction with investor sentiment and investment decision-making.

The study shows that herding, media factor, advocate recommendation and social interaction significantly and positively influence the investor sentiment. Among all the factors, social interaction has the lowest influence on investor sentiment. The study also reveals that investor sentiment has a positive impact on investment decision-making.

The study provides valuable insights for the individual investors, financial advisors, policymakers and other stakeholders. Knowledge of behavioral finance would enhance the decision-making capabilities of individual investors in the stock market. Thus, the study calls for the need to increase awareness among Indian investors about behavioral finance and its usefulness in investment decision-making. The paper also sheds light upon the influence of investor sentiment and its antecedents on investment decision-making. The study confirms that the investor relies on their sentiment while making investment decisions. Hence, the stakeholders in the stock market should focus on investor sentiment and other psychological aspects of individual investors as well.

There are very few studies that deal with the behavioral aspects of individual investors in an emerging market context. The study mainly focuses on the antecedent of investor sentiment and its influence on investment decision-making in the Indian stock market. To the best of authors’ knowledge, the present study unique nature that examines the impact of the antecedent of investor sentiment which was not explored in the Indian context and investment decision-making of individual investors.

The purpose of this research is to extend existing knowledge of supply chain agility by identifying the interrelationships among key elements of agility that may impact customer performance improvement when conditions of demand and supply vary from the core assumptions used to design supply chain networks.

The research employs the principles of middle range theorizing (Merton, 1968) to incorporate observations from field interviews and data collected from executives, managers, and analysts from six global manufacturing firms across a range of industries to form research propositions about the nature of relationships among cognitive agility dimensions, antecedent impediments to cognitive agility, and the relationships between cognitive and physical agility to improve performance that can later be subjected to deductive testing.

The supply chain designs used by the participating firms to deliver value for core products were not sufficiently agile to meet desired customer performance levels when certain supply or demand conditions varied significantly from the norm. In collaboration with partner firms, the findings suggest that improving cognitive abilities to see, think and act by deploying information-based tactical initiatives in planning, inventory positioning, and supplier lead time performance monitoring enable improved physical agility that enable a firm to respond to changes swiftly and flexibly in the demand and supply environment. Importantly, the findings also suggest that the dimensions of cognitive agility are correlated and are formative elements of the latent construct of cognitive agility, which is antecedent to physical agility.

These findings are limited in scope to the six companies that participated in this research. Future explorations should generalize to a broader population of firms and conditions. The results do provide evidence of the relationships between the dimensions of agility that are both a contribution and should guide future research on the subject.

From a managerial standpoint, the research findings provide insight into how firms might manage agility to improve performance when demand and supply conditions vary from those for which the core supply chain was originally designed. The findings suggest that improving the ability to capture, process, and disseminate information, i.e. cognitive agility dimensions of alertness, accessibility, and decisiveness, facilitates improved information-based initiatives in planning, inventory positioning, and supplier lead time performance monitoring, which in turn enables improved physical initiatives to swiftly and flexibly respond to changes in the demand and supply environment. Such improvements ultimately result in heightened customer service and inventory performance.

Previous research is mute regarding the interrelationships among the identified dimensions of supply chain agility, specifically those considered to be “cognitive” elements and those that involve physical actions. The finding suggesting that the dimensions of cognitive agility are correlated and are formative elements of the latent construct of cognitive agility provides an important theoretical insight that contributes to enhanced understanding of the nature of supply chain agility to foster future quantitative explorations to better understand the phenomena.

This study aims to present the results of inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry (ICP-MS) determination of economically significant metals including rare-earth elements and Y (REY), Co + Ni + Cu obtained from the Fe-Mn deposits (FMD) of different areas selected along the Atlantic Ocean.

The description of the instrumental part of the analysis was shown in detail, including the choice of the acquisition mode and other settings of the quadrupole ICP-MS Agilent 7700x, which allow to eliminate spectral overlaps as much as possible and to achieve good precision and accuracy of the measurement. The accuracy of the obtained results was controlled by analysis of certified reference materials (CRM) of Fe-Mn nodules of the US Geological Survey – NOD-A-1 and NOD-P-1, as well as the Russian CRM samples of Fe-Mn nodule OOPE 603 (SDO-6) and ore crust OOPE 604 (SDO-7). Statistical processing of the analysis results demonstrated the acceptability of chosen sample preparation technique and ICP-MS tunes for the determination of REY in FMD.

The performed analytical research allowed giving a geochemical characteristic of studied FMD. The precision for the elements to be determined according to the relative standard deviation (RSD) was within 5.0%.

To move away from the subjective visual assessment of the analytical results quality in terms of absence (or presence) of the REE sawtooth distribution, an original objective mathematical method was proposed.