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This study aims to explore the chicken and egg paradox in the taxi e-hailing business contributing to define a condition of system emergence. This paradox is a meaningful one as these platforms represent a system where the passengers systems have no reason to participate if they have no drivers-systems to answer their call, but, at the same time, the platform is not useful to the drivers-system if there are no passengers-systems using the platform.

To understand how this paradox has been dealt with in the taxi e-hailing business, this study focused on a case study on a best practice in Italian taxi e-hailing industry (i.e. MyTaxi/FreeNow). This study wants to comprehend which actions have been implemented to solve this paradox and has tried to identify the interconnections between the various strategies to create a closed loop diagram for further testing.

This study has found that the company did not choose a single “subsystem” (passenger or driver), but it has stimulated the creation of several mutually reinforcing motivation for have both subsystems interact to help the company grow.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this paradox has never been studied using the complex adaptive system perspective. This perspective is particularly useful in this case and in the similar ones with several different interacting factors that cannot be really studied without using a higher order perspective.

The behavioral decision-making of digital-self is one of the important research contents of the network of crowd intelligence. The factors and mechanisms that affect decision-making have attracted the attention of many researchers. Among the factors that influence decision-making, the mind of digital-self plays an important role. Exploring the influence mechanism of digital-selfs’ mind on decision-making is helpful to understand the behaviors of the crowd intelligence network and improve the transaction efficiency in the network of CrowdIntell.

In this paper, the authors use behavioral pattern perception layer, multi-aspect perception layer and memory network enhancement layer to adaptively explore the mind of a digital-self and generate the mental representation of a digital-self from three aspects including external behavior, multi-aspect factors of the mind and memory units. The authors use the mental representations to assist behavioral decision-making.

The evaluation in real-world open data sets shows that the proposed method can model the mind and verify the influence of the mind on the behavioral decisions, and its performance is better than the universal baseline methods for modeling user interest.

In general, the authors use the behaviors of the digital-self to mine and explore its mind, which is used to assist the digital-self to make decisions and promote the transaction in the network of CrowdIntell. This work is one of the early attempts, which uses neural networks to model the mental representation of digital-self.

Building Information Modeling (BIM) is a revolutionary innovation in the construction industry to virtually design and mange projects throughout the building lifecycle. Although Estonia is one of the foremost countries in the Information and Communications Technology (ICT) sector, BIM adoption in the Estonian construction industry is still lagging behind other countries. This paper is part of doctoral research that aims to determine the barriers to BIM adoption and develop a framework for effective implementation of BIM in the Estonian construction industry. The purpose of this paper is to examine the status of BIM adoption, BIM benefits and common barriers to BIM adoption in the construction industry worldwide.

The methodology used in this study is a literature review of journal articles, conference proceedings and published reports from various sources.

This study showed BIM benefits through building lifecycle phases and explored the BIM adoption rate in the construction industry of various countries. Eighteen barriers to BIM adoption were also identified.

The study presented is limited to a literature review – some related literature may have been missed.

The main practical significance of this study is that the findings can be used to inform a further survey to model the barriers to BIM adoption in the Estonian construction industry.

This study offers information on BIM adoption in the construction industry and will form the basis of further research.

Managing projects is an important part of operations management, but many projects fail. This study focuses on attribution processes of such disruption from the underrepresented perspective of the project manager. The authors consider two types of causes: the more frequently researched environmental uncertainty (i.e. uncontrollable events) and the scarcely researched uncertainty imposed by non-collaborative project sponsors (i.e. other-controllable events).

The authors test conceptual arguments grounded in attribution theory and the notion of psychological contracts in a scenario-based experiment among 325 practicing project managers.

The findings indicate that non-collaborative project sponsors negatively affect project managers' motivation, whereas uncontrollable disruptions leave hope to achieve positive future outcomes. This latter effect is further strengthened when project managers have an internal attribution style. They tend to blame the disruption on themselves and generally feel in control of achieving success even if they are not.

These socio-psychological insights nuance the economic idea that uncertainty reduces motivation per se in the context of project disruption appraisal. The authors contribute to the behavioral project management literature and general attribution theory and help guide the allocation of resources during the recovery of failed projects.

This paper aims to offer a long-term systematic picture of the evolution of manufacturing offshoring (in terms of intensity, geography and drivers) highlighting the changes in the surrounding context and the resulting transitions points (“points in time”) that have shaped its development path.

Three statistical tools were adopted on a dataset of 644 cases. First, the authors resorted to multiple structural change tests to identify the transition points. Second, the authors explored offshoring geography by conducting a network analysis. Finally, the authors adopted gravity models to shed light on offshoring drivers.

Results highlight three offshoring phases: expansion (2002–2006), reconsideration (2007–2009) and rationalization (2010 onwards). During the first phase, characterized by economic growth, firms were mainly interested in economic savings; offshoring to low-cost countries was the prevailing location strategy. Subsequently, during the economic crisis, the number of cases declined and the main drivers became market-based factors together with the research for cost savings. Finally, in the third phase, when the economy was still stagnating and new manufacturing technologies appeared, the number of offshoring cases has further decreased, and technological- and market-based factors have become the main location drivers.

The study is the first to adopt a systematic, empirical and quantitative approach to analyze the evolution of the manufacturing offshoring considering both the phenomenon itself and the triggering changes in the surrounding context. In doing this, the authors also tested the importance of considering the point in time in offshoring strategies.

This paper aims to analyze the risks faced by the Cambodian rice supply chain (RSC), including risk identification, risk investigation and risk management.

The first qualitative area of exploration from this exploratory sequential design is to identify the potential risks, in which the authors conduct in-depth interviews with ten different experts in Cambodia. Using the structural equation model (SEM) in AMOS and descriptive statistics analysis, this study investigates the risks that affect the RSC performance on an environmental, social and economic basis and subsequently proposes risk management strategies. The authors collect quantitative data from 200 Cambodian farmers through interviews and surveys.

The results illustrate that the farm households face 18 risk factors. The researchers consolidate 18 risk factors into four classifications: supply risks, production risks, demand risks and environmental risks. Nine experts out of the ten who were interviewed (90%) consider themselves “highly vulnerable” (with a rating of 4 or 5 on the Likert scale), while only one expert has a “neutral” stance (with a rating of 3 on the Likert scale); these results concerning risk identification are visualized in the likelihood effect matrix of the RSC. After investigating the risks, the authors found that RSC performance is significantly affected by the RSC risks. In particular, four groups are created, representing two different approaches to mitigate, avoid, transfer and cope with agricultural risks, i.e. ex ante and ex post risk management strategies.

This study fully answers research questions regarding risk identification, risk investigation and risk management.

The recent spate of eminence received by the MOOCs (massive open online courses) from media to academia is revolutionary in higher education. MOOCs are a disruptive technological innovation which offers open learning with the aid of the internet and delivered by the faculty of reputed institutions, globally. Since Coursera being one such significant platform, its exploration would display the broader picture of MOOCs. As a result, studying it from various dynamics has been the motive of the current endeavour.

The quantitative study of the collected data was applied with help of descriptive research methodology to measure the contribution of the top six countries namely US, China, Japan, Germany, India and UK. All these six countries were selected on the basis of GDP (harvested from official website World Bank – data.worldbank.org/ to Coursera––an online platform providing MOOCs. The involvement of these selected countries was gauged (from the official website of Coursera https://www.coursera.org/) in terms of number, type of contributing institutions, number of courses offered by those institutions, type of courses offered, number of instructors and instructor gender ratio.

The findings reveal that the United States (US) is the top contributor in terms of partner institutes (97), courses (Specialization courses – 1,267 and degree courses– 40) and number of instructors (1,290). Interestingly, it was also observed that universities are the major contributor institutes in all six studied countries. Most of the institutes provide specialization courses while a very few provide degree courses. A large number of instructors are involved for imparting these courses online. Instructor gender ratio on average is 2:1 (male: female). It was also observed that there is usually a specific common time of starting courses on Coursera.

Online platforms are the main delivery points for MOOCs; therefore, vibrancy and articulacy of such platforms make this innovation a success, and examining such a platform which exhibits such characteristics would present an overall picture of its functionality, development, evolution and future expansion of the innovation (MOOCs).

The so-called “oil price war” of 2014-2016 took place between several main global oil producers; OPEC (led by Saudi Arabia), Russia and the newcomer; American tight oil or fracking oil. These oil producers were competing against each other over market shares in the global oil market, by maintaining their high oil production rates, even if this led to a decline in oil prices and a reduction in revenues from oil sales. As energy politics need more coverage in International Political Economy (IPE) theory, this paper aims to argue that Saudi Arabia's policies during the oil price war of 2014-2016 reflected a policy of neomercantilism, which is the IPE equivalent of the school of realism in International Relations (IR).

This paper tests for neomercantilism by testing three of its main definitional components. The first definitional component is that the state, as the political authority, intervenes in the economic decisions. The second component is the primacy of the state interests over business corporate profits, or the primacy of political and security considerations over short-term economic and corporate profit considerations. The third is the zero-sum or relative gains nature of dealings between states. Afterwards, this paper tests for neomercantilism in the Saudi policy by examining how each of these definitional components is reflected in the Saudi policy during the oil price war.

As energy politics need more coverage in International Political Economy (IPE) theory, this paper argues that Saudi Arabia's policies during the oil price war of 2014-2016 reflected a policy of neomercantilism, which is the IPE equivalent of the school of realism in International Relations (IR).

As energy politics need more coverage in International Political Economy (IPE) theory, this paper argues that Saudi Arabia's policies during the oil price war of 2014-2016 reflected a policy of neomercantilism, which is the IPE equivalent of the school of realism in International Relations (IR).

Research has supported both feedback’s variable effects on performance and the effect of attributions on subsequent behavior. Managers’ attributions for subordinates’ performance affect how they react to those subordinates and the feedback they give, and subordinates’ own attributions affect their subsequent behavior. It is unclear whether (or how) a manager’s attributions for subordinate behavior affect subordinate behavior. Building on research that shows emotional reactions in response to attributions in feedback, this study aims to examine how recipients’ perceptions and subsequent effort and performance are affected when others’ attributions are shared through feedback.

Drawing on attribution theory and feedback intervention theory, this study conducts a lab experiment using manipulated performance feedback to test the effects of feedback sign and attributions in the feedback. Perceptions of the attribution are also measured to test their effects. The data were analyzed using analysis of variance and regression in SPSS 27.

Results show that perceptions of the attribution communicated in feedback, rather than feedback sign alone, affect perceived valence of the feedback (e.g. feedback with an attribution to luck is generally perceived as negative). These perceptions also affect feedback acceptance and impact subsequent effort and performance more than the “objective” attribution, underscoring the importance of recipient reactions and perceptions in the feedback process.

This paper shows that recipients’ perceptions of others’ attributions included in feedback impact feedback reactions, effort and performance. This is valuable to scholars researching feedback and to practitioners to better understand how feedback they deliver may be interpreted.