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The purpose of this study is to extend the research on fashion renting (FR) by investigating how personal and social motives (i.e. “subjective norms”, “perceived behavioural control”, “sustainable orientation” and “FR benefits”) affect consumers’ attitudes and intentions towards it. In addition, personality traits are investigated as potential antecedents of FR, resulting in the proposal of an overall framework that combines the theory of planned behaviour with the trait theory approach.

Data were collected in Italy from a sample of 694 consumers, mainly females (88%), with an average age of 28.8 years and coming from all over the country. The collected data were then processed via structural equation modelling.

The results indicated that intention towards FR is influenced by attitude, which, in turn, is affected by social norms, perceived behavioural control, sustainable orientation and FR benefits. Furthermore, only fashion leadership acts as a direct antecedent of FR attitude, while the need for uniqueness and materialism plays critical roles as predictors of personal and social motives. Subjective norms and perceived behavioural control also serve as mediators of the significant relationships between personality traits and attitudes towards FR.

The study provides useful implications for fashion rental companies in attracting consumers and offers a foundation for further research on transforming traditional consumption into a more sustainable one.

The study presents new knowledge on the rental phenomenon in the fashion sector by responding to the call to deepen the analysis of factors that influence consumers’ adoption of FR from the perspectives of personal and social motives and personality traits.

The study utilized the consumption value theory to explore the motivational factors that define and differentiate the users and nonusers of fashion rental services

A focus group was conducted to generate an initial list of measurement items. These items were refined through a pretest and then used in a self-administered online questionnaire to collect data from a total of 300 users and 300 nonusers. The collected data were analyzed using factor analysis to identify the factors that define users and nonusers. A MANOVA was then conducted to explore the differences in the identified factors between users and nonusers.

Using factor analysis, nine factors were extracted across the five consumption values (functional, social, emotional, conditional and epistemic). MANOVA revealed a significant difference between users and nonusers across all factors. Further analyses suggested that the most differentiating factors are two emotional value factors and one social value factor.

Despite existing studies of fashion rental services, it is debatable whether the phenomenon is fully understood since previous studies primarily focus on consumers who engage in fashion renting services – there is a lack of focus on nonusers. This study provides unique contributions by exploring the phenomenon from both the user's and the nonuser's perspective.

The basic purpose of this paper was to check the perceived impact of socio-economic on the fertility rate (FR) in Pakistan. It also explored the factors which play an important role on FR of urban and rural resident women.

A few studies were carried out this particular issue in Pakistan but this issue was not mentioned in such a way as the current study highlights. Data were collected through questionnaires from rural and urban areas. The main variables were chosen for this purpose were the income of the households, their education level and the mortality rate. FR is measured in terms of number of children which are above 5 years of age and married couple has stopped the further fertility intentions; Monthly income of the families were taken and the education was in the years of schooling. The ordinary least square (OLS) model was used for the estimation.

The results of this study showed that, in urban areas this association is very strong while in rural areas this is relatively weak due to sharp differences in income brackets. Families with high level of income tend to have few children. Female education is also negatively correlated with FR. Higher level of female education has negative effect on FR. Mortality rate has significant positive association with FR. Higher mortality rate compel families to have more birth as probability of living is low. There is inverse association between income and FR.

The best way to determine how birth rates are changing is not the crude birth rate (CBR) but the total fertility rate (TFR). This measure provides an age-controlled estimation of “how many kids a woman beginning her childbearing years now would have over her whole life if current birth rates remain stable”.

Mortality rate has significant positive association with FR. Higher mortality rate compel families to have more birth as probability of living is low. There is inverse association between income and FR.

The study aims to explore the role of reliance and brand image (goods-based and service-based) in risk perceptions related to business-to-business (B2B) purchases. In particular, time risk (TR), performance risk (PR) and financial risk (FR) has been explored in this paper.

A questionnaire-based survey data has been collected from 152 respondents from different industries, and the model was validated using partial least squares structural equation modeling.

The study highlights the importance of reliance and brand image for reducing the effects of perceived risk. While reliance is negatively related to all the risk dimensions, the relationship between reliance and FR is serially mediated by service-based brand image (SBBI) and TR. The same is also mediated by PR. Furthermore, PR and TR are positively related to FR.

The findings of this study highlight the importance of reliance and brand image for reducing the effects of risk dimensions. Reliance plays an important role in reducing all risk perceptions. Findings also highlight the importance of SBBI in reducing TR.

The findings provide managers with key insights for reducing risk perceptions by creating a strong reliance and B2B brand image, leading to long-term relationship strategies.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is one of the few papers in B2B marketing that focuses on the importance of reliance and brand image in reducing the effects of perceived risk.

The purpose of this paper is to analyze the effects of financial restatements (FRs) on the likelihood of the top management team (TMT) dismissal. It investigates the effects of types of FRs [corrective note and reissuance of financial statement (RFS)], of FR severity and of FR related to international financial reporting standards (IFRSs) easy or difficult-to-estimate.

The authors hand-collect: data about 96 FRs from the Italian public oversight board documents; chief executive officer (CEO) name, chairman name, year of the financial statement under investigation, total assets and operating income, from their financial statement. The authors use multivariate regression to test the effects of FRs on the probability of TMT dismissal.

The authors find that the RFS leads to a higher likelihood of chairman dismissal. A greater magnitude of misrepresentation on income statements, and FRs, which decrease net income, increase the likelihood of CEO dismissal. Difficult-to-estimate IFRSs increases the likelihood of CEO dismissal.

FRs are significant determinants of the CEO/chairman dismissal. The authors show that FRs directly involving shareholders (RFS) have negative consequences on the chairman of the board of directors, while the CEO is more affected by FRs that involve technical factors (FR severity or financial statement associated with difficult-to-estimate IFRSs).

Concurrent engineering can help manufacturing enterprises to achieve shorter time to market, reduced development costs, and high‐quality products. In order to realize the concurrent engineering, a lot of integrations are required according to parallel development technique, such as the integration of the people with different disciplines, the integration of the software of design methods and design data, and so on. This paper discusses the integration of the software of existing design methods for concurrent engineering by using axiomatic design. The results show that a very complicated software system for concurrent engineering becomes simple and consists of 26 modules corresponding to 26 design methods and one main module which contains all the junctional properties at each level. The task of the programmer for the integration becomes clear and is mainly programming for the main module.

The purpose of this paper is to report the possible impact of intellectual capital (IC) on firm reputation (FR) and investigates if there is a relationship between FR and market internationalization (MI).

The data were collected from engineering consultancy firms (ECFs) in Turkey. The study employed structural equation modeling to examine the hypothesized relationships between IC, FR, and MI of ECFs.

ECFs with strong human and structural capital can have a good FR. However, healthy relational capital may not lead to the same effect on FR. On the contrary, FR can create high-quality relational capital for ECFs. Lastly, a good FR, based on robust human and structural capital, can provide the success of ECFs’ MI process.

This model may be analyzed for other knowledge-intensive business services. Also, subsequent researches may investigate potential variations in results about other sectors and geographical areas. Moreover, various constructs may be included in the model. However, a greater number of samples could lead to distinctive outcomes.

The research may be a general guide for related professionals and their companies to build long-term strategies, given IC, FR and MI. In this respect, they should take into account human and structural capital for MI.

ECFs that can be active in the international arena may maintain their services by financial sustainability. Thus, the advantage may result in a prosperous society.

The study is first to suggest a model joining IC and FR for the MI process of ECFs. This is suitable for competition of ECFs that are willing to be sustainable firms.

The purpose of this paper is to present empirical evidence of risk balancing behavior by European farmers. More specifically, the authors investigate strategic adjustments in the level of financial risk (FR) in response to changes in the level of business risk (BR).

The authors conducted a correlation relationship analysis and run several linear fixed effects regression models using the European Union (EU)-15 FADN panel data set for the period 1995-2008.

Overall, the paper finds EU evidence of risk balancing. The correlation relationship analysis suggests that just over half of the farm observations are risk balancers whereas the other (smaller) half are not. The coefficient in our fixed effects regression suggests that a 1 percent increase in BR reduces FR by 0.043 percent and has a standard error so low that the existence of non-risk balancers is doubtful. The results reject evidence of strong-form risk balancing – inverse trade-offs between FR and BR keeping total risk (TR) constant – but cannot reject weak-form risk balancing – inverse trade-offs between FR and BR with some observed changes in TR. Furthermore, the extent of risk balancing behavior is found to differ between different European countries and across farm typologies.

This study provides European policy makers a first insight into risk balancing behavior of EU farmers. When risk balancing occurs, BR-reducing agricultural policies induce strategic upwards leverage adjustments that unintentionally reestablish or even increase total farm-level risk.

Making use of the large and unique FADN database, to the best of the authors knowledge, this study is the first that provides European (EU-15) evidence on risk balancing behavior, is conducted at an unprecedented large scale, and presents the first risk balancing evidence across countries and farming systems.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the effect of char on the flame retardancy of fabrics by a cone calorimeter, which is an important factor to compare the flame retardancy of different fabrics.

Cone calorimeter measurements were carried out in a Fire Testing Technology (UK) apparatus at the heat fluxes of 50 and 75 kW/m². Fabrics with one and three layers were employed, with the name of cotton1, cotton3, FR cotton1, FR cotton3, PMIA1 and PMIA3. The dimension of the fabric was 100×100 mm². A cross-steel grid was used to prevent the fabrics from curling during burning. The distance between the bottom of the cone heater and the top of the sample was 25 mm.

This work was generously supported by National Key R&D Program of China (Project No. 2017YFB0309000), Natural Science Foundation of Shandong Province of China (Project No. ZR2019BEM026), Natural Science Foundation of China (Project No. 51803101) and China postdoctoral science foundation funded project (Project No. 2018M632619).

The present research provides insight into the effect of the char formation on the flame retardancy of the fabrics, and a method to comprehensively investigate the char influence in the flame retardancy of the fabrics by a cone calorimeter is proposed.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the effect of substrate material and thickness on the thermal cycling reliability of flip chip joints assembled with anisotropic conductive adhesives (ACA).

Four test lots are assembled using three different substrates. Two of the substrates are made of FR‐4. The thicknesses of these substrates are 600 and 100 μm. The third substrate is made of liquid crystal polymers (LCP) and is flexible. With the thicker FR‐4 substrate two test lots are assembled using both normal and two‐step bonding profiles to study how the bonding profile affects the deformation of the substrate. Four different bonding pressures are used to study the effect of pressure on reliability and the failure mechanism of the ACA joints. The reliability of the test samples is studied using a temperature cycling test.

The reliability of the test lot with the LCP substrate is considerably better than that of the test lots with the FR‐4 substrates. Additionally, the thinner FR‐4 substrate has better reliability than the thicker FR‐4 substrate. The failure mechanisms found varied among the test lots. The effect of the two‐step bonding process on the deformation of the substrate is found to be minor compared with the effect of the glass fibres.

The work shows that the thermal cycling reliability of ACA flip chip joints is markedly influenced by the thickness and material of the substrate. It is also seen that the substrate used influences the failure mechanisms formed during thermal cycling testing.