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This study aims to simultaneously examine the interrelated influence of antecedents involved in developing fast-food restaurant customer loyalty. A conceptual model which incorporates service quality attributes, price fairness, customer satisfaction, brand image and trust and the resultant effect on customer loyalty is proposed to better understand how fast-food restaurant customer loyalty can be optimized.

A quantitative research methodology adopting structural equation modelling was used to understand the interrelatedness and influence of antecedents involved in optimizing fast-food restaurant customer loyalty.

The findings indicate that service quality attributes (food quality and employee service quality) and price fairness significantly influence customer satisfaction and brand image, while physical environment quality has no significant influence. Additionally, customer satisfaction was found to influence brand trust and customer loyalty, while the brand image does not influence customer satisfaction but does influence brand trust and customer loyalty.

Understanding the interrelatedness and influence of antecedents involved in developing fast-food restaurant customer loyalty would enable academics and practitioners to formulate honed marketing and operational strategies to optimize customer loyalty and fast-food restaurant profitability.

This research addresses the paucity of research and marketing gaps regarding the interrelatedness and influence of antecedents involved in optimizing fast-food restaurant customer loyalty in Small Island Developing States (SIDS).

This study explores consumers' intentions to utilize online food delivery services (OFDS) in a shared economy beyond the COVID-19 pandemic, employing the protection motivation theory (PMT) as the underlying framework.

Utilizing a random sampling technique, a quantitative approach was employed to gather responses from 347 Australian consumers. The proposed model was tested through covariance-based structural equation modelling.

The findings of this study demonstrate significant positive relationships between restaurant credibility, food quality, e-service quality, price, online food delivery applications, consumer e-satisfaction and e-loyalty. It reveals that consumers satisfied with OFDS may continue exhibiting e-loyalty intentions in a shared economy beyond COVID-19. The relationship between consumer e-satisfaction and e-loyalty intention is moderated by consumer-perceived COVID-19 risk.

This study offers practical implications for online food delivery providers, restaurants, regulators, application developers and policymakers. These implications aim to enhance the e-service quality, price value, usefulness and security of OFDS, along with strategies to improve the online food delivery application.

This study contributes to the existing body of knowledge by examining a unique selection of antecedents, including the OFDS app, to determine consumer e-satisfaction and e-loyalty in the context of a shared economy beyond COVID-19. The utilization of the OFDS app as a second-order construct adds a meaningful contribution to the OFDS literature. Furthermore, this study investigates and contributes to the limited understanding of the moderation effect of consumer-perceived COVID-19 risk on consumer e-satisfaction and their intended continued use of OFDS.

The purpose of this paper is to examine how leadership is shaped by a changing cultural context.

This is an exploratory study based on semi-structured interviews with leaders of Fijian cooperatives.

The political and cultural environment in Fiji has changed over time, and these changing arrangements shape expectations of what is considered to be appropriate leadership in Fijian cooperatives. To be consistent with changing societal values, leaders of Fijian cooperatives employ a context-sensitive hybrid leadership style in which legitimacy is an important dimension.

Researchers need to examine the cultural context as a dynamic influencing element of leadership.

Leaders of cooperatives and similar values-based organizations would benefit from applying a legitimate and context-sensitive hybrid leadership style.

This study contributes new understandings of the cultural influences on organizational leadership.

The purpose of this study is to investigate the effect of fast-food restaurant service quality (compound effect of food quality, physical environment quality and employee service quality) and its dimensions (when acting independently) on customer perceived value, satisfaction and behavioural intentions.

Data was collected from 400 fast-food restaurant customers in Fiji using a public-intercept survey. The study used descriptive and inferential analysis. This research also used backward elimination multiple regressions to test the hypotheses of this study.

The compound effect of fast-food restaurant service quality dimensions on customer perceived value revealed food quality and physical environment quality are significant determinants of customer perceived value, however employee service quality is not. In contrast, the effect of the fast-food service quality dimensions acting independently on customer perceived value revealed the three dimensions are significant determinants of customer perceived value. Results also confirmed that customer perceived value is a significant determinant of customer satisfaction and customer satisfaction is a significant determinant of behavioural intentions.

This study highlights to fast-food restaurateurs and marketers the importance of determining the compound effect of fast-food restaurant service quality dimensions, delivering the right combination of fast-food restaurant service quality dimensions to customers and not singling out dimensions in an attempt to enhance restaurant service quality.

This study makes important contributions towards understanding the compound effect of fast-food restaurant service quality dimensions and the independent effect of these dimensions on the formation of customer perceived value, customer satisfaction and behavioural intentions.

The purpose of this study is to determine the effect of service quality on customer satisfaction and loyalty and the mediating role of customer satisfaction in the supermarket sector.

In total, 480 supermarket customers participated in an intercept survey in four urban centres of Fiji. Descriptive statistics were used to determine the level of service quality provided by supermarkets, and inferential statistics to determine the gap between customer's service quality expectations and perceptions and to test the research hypotheses.

The findings indicate service quality of supermarkets is perceived as being unsatisfactory, service quality significantly affects customer satisfaction and loyalty and customer satisfaction partially mediates the relationship between service quality and customer loyalty reducing customer's perceptions of service quality, leading to lower customer loyalty.

This study provides an indication as to where supermarkets should target their marketing attention and scarce corporate resources and may help in their efforts to service, satisfy, retain and attract more long-term loyal customers in the increasingly competitive supermarket sector. This research could inform government policy makers in sequencing the supermarket sector transformation and assist local supermarkets to adapt to this changing retail landscape.

This study advances our understanding of the effect of service quality on customer satisfaction and loyalty and the mediating role of customer satisfaction in the supermarket sector.

The hospitality industry experienced an unanticipated challenge from the COVID-19 pandemic. However, research in this area is scarce. Accordingly, this study aims to unfold a three-angled research agenda to intensify the knowledge advancement in the hospitality sector. It proposes a theoretical framework by extending the protection motivation theory (PMT) to explain the guest’s intent to adopt artificial intelligence (AI) and robotics as a protective measure in reaction to COVID-19.

The research is centered on outlining the pertinent literature on hospitality management practices and the guest’s transformed behavior during the current crisis. This study intends to identify a research agenda based on investigating hospitality service trends in today’s changing times.

The study sets out a research agenda that includes three dimensions as follows: AI and robotics, cleanliness and sanitation and health care and wellness. This study’s findings suggest that AI and robotics may bring out definite research directions at the connection of health crisis and hospitality management, taking into account the COVID-19 crisis.

The suggested research areas are anticipated to propel the knowledge base and help the hospitality industry retrieve the COVID-19 crisis through digital transformation. AI and robotics are at the cusp of invaluable advancement that can revive the hotels while re-establish guests’ confidence in safe hotel practices. The proposed research areas are likely to impart pragmatic lessons to the hospitality industry to fight against disruptive situations.

This study stands out to be pioneer research that incorporated AI and robotics to expand the PMT and highlights how behavioral choices during emergencies can bring technological revolution.

This paper aims to optimize the erosion wear analysis of slurry impeller material. Stainless steel (SS-410) was used as the pump impeller material. This erosion test was established to influence the rotational speed, solid concentration, time period and particle size. Fly ash was used as the erodent material.

The erosion wear experiments were performed at different particle size, rotational speed, time duration and solid concentration (by weight). These tests were performed at four different speeds of 750, 1,000, 1,250 and 1,500 rpm, and the time durations of these experiments are 75, 120,165 and 210 min. For protective coating, high-velocity oxygen-fuel spray process was used for depositing WC-10Co-4Cr coating on stainless steel. To investigate the influence of controlled process parameters on slurry erosion wear of pump impeller material, Taguchi method was used.

Results show that significant improvement in erosion wear resistance has been observed by using WC-10Co-4Cr coating. The process parameters affecting the erosion wear loss were in following order: time > rpm > concentration > particle size. The means of signal-to-noise ratio of stainless steel SS410 with and without coating vary from 93.56 to 54.02 and from 86.02 to 48.18, respectively.

For the erosion wear rate of both uncoated and coated stainless steel, the most powerful influencing factor was identified as time. The erosion test reveals that the coating exhibits ductile erosion mechanism and shows better erosion wear resistance (approximately two times) compared to uncoated stainless steel.

This paper aims to investigate the relationship between employee training and bank risk to verify whether and to what extent an increase in employee training, as a soft component of total quality management (TQM), affects bank risk.

The research adopts a panel regression, based on a unique dataset of a sample of Italian banks over the period 2011–2018, to test whether employee training affects bank risk, measured alternatively in terms of Z-score, a proxy of bank stability and non-performing loans (NPLs)/gross loans ratio as a proxy of credit risk.

Research findings reveal that increasing employee training leads to growing bank stability. In contrast, credit risk is not affected by employee training. However, by investigating training heterogeneity, this study found that the increase in the number of managerial training hours, as a proxy for soft skills training, negatively impacts credit risk. Therefore, an increase in soft skills leads to a reduction in bank credit risk.

This study provides empirical evidence in support of the relationship between employee training and bank risk, which seems novel in the literature. From a managerial point of view, this study highlights the need for banks to pay attention to the skills, particularly soft skills, that banks' employees must possess to effectively manage bank risk and, more specifically, the core bank risk.

Empirical evidence on the relationship between employee training, soft/hard skills and bank risk appears limited if not absent. Therefore, the findings provide insights for a more nuanced interpretation of variables that affect bank risk.

The purpose of this paper is to provide insight into the impact of customer perceived value and its dimensions on customer satisfaction in a developing country, and practical suggestions for marketing strategies.

A cross-sectional survey collected data from five-hundred supermarket customers in Fiji. SPSS was used to provide descriptive and inferential analysis.

Results reveal that customer perceived value (CPV) has a positive impact on customer satisfaction; and functional value (price/value for money) has more positive impact than social value, emotional value has a negative impact and functional value (performance/quality) has no significant impact on customer satisfaction.

Considering this research was undertaken in the supermarket sector of only one country, other researchers are urged to replicate this research in Fiji and other developing countries, to yield further insight into the context-specific nature of CPV.

It is suggested that marketers note these findings (to understand better the conceptualisation and context-dependent nature of CPV, its dimensional interrelationships and its impact on customer satisfaction) in order to enhance CPV and ultimately customer satisfaction.

This study makes several contributions to research on CPV by providing insight into how developing country customers perceive the value of supermarkets from a construct and multidimensional perspective, the inter-relatedness of CPV dimensions and the impact of CPV and its dimensions on customer satisfaction.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the relationship between CEOs' inside debt holdings (pension benefits and deferred compensation) and the operating leverage of the firms they manage, with the aim to examine whether CEO incentives play a role in corporate risk-taking.

The authors investigate the relation between CEO inside debt holdings (CIDH) (pension benefits and deferred compensation) and the operating leverage (DOL) of the firms they manage. Using a sample of 11,145 US firm-year observations over the period 2006–2017, the authors find a strong negative association between CIDH and DOL. Additional analyses reveal that the relationship between CIDH and DOL is more pronounced in firms with heightened agency issues, powerful CEOs and for CEOs with stronger professional networks. The results are robust to various sensitivity and endogeneity tests.

The authors find strong evidence confirming the expected negative association between CEO inside debt and DOL suggesting that firms with higher inside debt tend to maintain lower levels of operating leverage. These findings continue to hold with the alternative measure for the inside debt and operating leverage, and across a range of tests designed to rule out the possibility that the primary findings are in any way driven by potential endogeneity. In addition, the findings demonstrate that the presence of manager-shareholder agency conflicts can strengthen the inside debt–DOL relationship suggesting the strong role of inside debt in reducing firm risk.

Findings in this paper have implications for design of compensation structures so that corporate boards can establish incentives as a tool for risk management. A limitation of this study is that it is focused on one market, i.e. US listed companies, so the findings may not be applicable on a global scale.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study that links firm-level management of operating leverage through design of CEO inside debt incentives (two obvious choices for risk-reduction at the CEOs’ disposal include reducing financial risk through reduction of firm leverage and reducing operating risk through reduction of operating leverage). While use of firm leverage as an instrument of choice has been explored in the past, use of operating leverage to achieve risk reduction when CEO possess high inside holding, has received very little attention.