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The purpose of this paper is to explore the “perceptive concordance” – the proximity of perceptions of the business- between key managers and customers of two small family-owned and managed businesses (“FBs”) and two larger non-FBs in Cagliari, Italy as a preliminary basis for understanding how small retail businesses that are typically family owned have continued to compete and thrive in many Western European cities.

The authors asked how small FBs have been able to compete in an advanced European economy despite apparent competitive disadvantages relative to large superstores selling the same products. In addressing this question the authors drew on a qualitative research methodology in which the authors interviewed senior managers and surveyed customers of the four businesses and applied an original statistical model to assess the degree of their perceptive concordance with over 100 customers of each business.

The study's findings suggest a significant difference between key managers and customers of the sampled FBs and non-FBs in the perceptive concordance of the respective businesses held by those managers and customers.

Based on the research in this study the authors have developed a number of scholarly and managerial implications in the way that both FBs and non-FBs may retain old customers and gain new ones by anticipating and not merely responding to their product and service preferences.

This paper extends the literature on customer relations management (“CRM”) in FBs by explaining how small High Street FBs in competitive retail businesses have continued to thrive in Western Europe where owner-managers have developed and successfully leveraged their tacit knowledge of the requirements of repeat customers.

Drawing on the phenomenological concepts of “empathy” and “communal emotions” developed by Edith Stein (1917, 1922), the purpose of this paper is to discuss the co-existence both of the legitimacy and accountability perspectives in voluntarily delivered social and environmental reporting (SER), based on different “levels of empathy” towards different stakeholders.

The paper adopts an interpretive research design, drawn from Stein’s concept of empathy by using a mixed-method approach. A manual content analysis was performed on 393 cooperative banks’ (CB) social and environmental reports from 2005 to 2013 in Italy, and 14 semi-structured interviews.

The results show that CBs voluntarily disclose information in different ways to different stakeholders. According to Stein, the phenomenological concept of empathy, and its understanding within institutions, allows us to interpret these multiple perspectives within a single social and environmental report. Therefore, when the process of acquiring knowledge in the CB–stakeholder relationship is complete and mentalised (level 3, re-enactive empathy), the SER holds high informative power, consistent with the accountability perspective; on the contrary, when this process is peripheral and perceptional (level 1, basic empathy), the SER tends to provide more self-assessment information, attempting to portray the bank in a positive light, which is consistent with the legitimacy perspective.

The concept of empathy introduced in this paper can assist in interpreting the interactions between an organisation and different stakeholders within the same social and environmental report. Moreover, the approach adopted in this paper considers different stakeholders simultaneously, thus responding to previous concerns regarding the lack of focus on multiple stakeholders.

This paper aims to apply intuition theory to clarify consumers’ assortment evaluations. For each decision process, this paper explores how perceptions of organization and variety influence consumers’ attitudes and purchase intentions.

In total, 504 observations were collected across three product categories. Perceived choice, time and expertise in the product category provide proxies to distinguish between intuitive and deliberative systems. The intuitive system further consists of intuition based on either expertise or heuristics.

It was revealed that distinct decision processes (deliberative, intuitive based on expertise and intuitive based on heuristics) affect the link between assortment perceptions and consumers’ assortment evaluations. Consumers’ evaluations in deliberative- and heuristic-based intuitive systems rely more on perceptions of organization than of variety; whereas intuitive judgments based on expertise depend almost equally on both perceptions.

Some limitations have to be underlined. The approximations used could be more precise and are subjective in nature. Moreover, the ordinary product categories that were studied might encourage more intuitive decisions by consumers. If so, the deliberative mode of thinking might have been underrepresented in this sample.

Despite the limitations, this research is, to our knowledge, the first to explore the influence of intuition theory on ordinary shopping and in particular on assortment perception. As such, it contributes to a deeper understanding of this theory in the field.

The purpose of this study is to provide insights and guidance for practitioners in terms of ensuring rigorous ethical and moral conduct in artificial intelligence (AI) hiring and implementation.

The research employed two experimental designs and one pilot study to investigate the ethical and moral implications of different levels of AI implementation in the hospitality industry, the intersection of self-congruency and ethical considerations when AI replaces human service providers and the impact of psychological distance associated with AI on individuals' ethical and moral considerations. These research methods included surveys and experimental manipulations to gather and analyze relevant data.

Findings provide valuable insights into the ethical and moral dimensions of AI implementation, the influence of self-congruency on ethical considerations and the role of psychological distance in individuals’ ethical evaluations. They contribute to the development of guidelines and practices for the responsible and ethical implementation of AI in various industries, including the hospitality sector.

The study highlights the importance of exercising rigorous ethical-moral AI hiring and implementation practices to ensure AI principles and enforcement operations in the restaurant industry. It provides practitioners with useful insights into how AI-robotization can improve ethical and moral standards.

The study contributes to the literature by providing insights into the ethical and moral implications of AI service robots in the hospitality industry. Additionally, the study explores the relationship between psychological distance and acceptance of AI-intervened service, which has not been extensively studied in the literature.

The paper aims to identify and assess quantitatively the influences of a few dimensions of climate awareness on people's preference for adaptation against sea level rise (SLR).

From the literature survey “familiarity with”, “perception about” and “intuitive knowledge about” climate change‐sea level rise (CC‐SLR) have been identified as dimensions of “climate awareness”. Empirical research was done through administering questionnaires among 285 respondents selected randomly from three coastal villages in Bangladesh. After principal component analysis, data sufficiency and colinearity test, a total of 18 variables were entered into a multinomial logistic regression model. The reference category “evacuation” was compared with other two choices, i.e. in situ adaptation with “same occupation” and “changed occupation”.

For the SLR scenario of 2050‐2075 occupational engagement, use of radio for climate information, exposure to rainfall, salinity and perception about CC‐SLR appeared as the most significant predictors of people's preference for evacuation or in situ adaptation (LR χ²=183.38, pseudo R²=0.54, p<.001). Similarly, for the SLR scenario of 2080‐2100, in addition to the factors cited above, some other factors such as educational attainment, exposure to flood, climate perception and familiarity appeared as the most significant predictor of respondent's preference (LR χ²=202.08, pseudo R²=0.60, p<0.001).

Two dimensions of climate awareness, i.e. familiarity with and perception about CC‐SLR may significantly influence the people's preference for adaptation choice. Launching a programme to enhance climate awareness without further delay may help people planning for anticipatory in situ adaptation against CC‐SLR.

The purpose of this study was to investigate the perception of trade-based money laundering in Letters of Credit (“L/C”) transactions among trade finance practitioners in the UK banking sector and to compare it to the perception of the same risk by the Financial Conduct Authority (“FCA”), the regulator of the UK’s banking sector.

A survey was used to carry out research among financial services professionals engaged in trade finance in the UK.

This paper contributes to the existing literature in a number of ways. First, it investigates the perception of trade-based money laundering risk from the perspective of financial services professionals, which has not previously been done. Second, it argues that the perception of trade-based money laundering in financial services is overly focussed on placement, layering and integration, and that the full extent of the offence under the Proceeds of Crime Act 2002 is less well known. It further found that financial services firms need to improve their understanding of the nature of trade-based money laundering under UK law.

This study argues that the financial services sector’s perception of trade-based money laundering risk in trade finance is underdeveloped and makes suggestions on how to improve it.

It provided unique insight into the perception of trade-based money laundering risk among financial services professionals.

The purpose of this paper is to examine how the purchase intention of functional food is influenced by the perception of carrier-ingredient fit, that is, to what extent the carrier product and functional ingredient are intuitively perceived to be matched, and how such influence is moderated by consumers’ prior nutrition knowledge and provided health claim.

Through two phases of experimental studies on 30 hypothetical functional foods, this paper analyzed the relationship between perceived carrier-ingredient fit and purchase intention which were reported by participants with different nutrition knowledge levels and in conditions that differed in the content of health claim.

Phase 1 (n=62) found that the positive influence of perceived fit on purchase intention of functional products was moderated by one’s prior nutrition knowledge; compared to those knowledgeable in food/nutrition fields, consumers with less knowledge relied more heavily on the perceived carrier-ingredient fit when making purchase decision. The results of study 2 Phase 2 (n=93) revealed that the perceived fit was more important to predict purchase intention in the condition without health claim. A further analysis revealed that health claim increased the purchase intention particularly for functional foods receiving poor perceived carrier-ingredient fit.

For innovative functional foods, the product development and market penetration may be benefit from fine-grained segmentation and positioning strategies that are based on the understanding of interaction between intuitive perception and cognitive knowledge.

The present work highlights consumers’ perception of the carrier-perception fit, interacting with nutrition knowledge and health claim, as a critical factor determining the acceptance of functional foods.

This paper aims to examine the role of the creation task–technology fit (CTTF) in the knowledge creation performance (KCP). The creation task features represented by goal-driven, goal-free and goal-frame modes (GDM, GFM and GRM) and information and communication technology (ICT) supportive features are considered. The moderation effect of cognitive style represented by analytical and intuitive styles is explored. Contributions and implications are addressed.

The literature review on creation task, ICT, cognitive behavior and fit theory, and the research gap with respect to the antecedents of KCP are presented. The research arguments are then hypothesized and the research model developed to describe that the proposed role is examined empirically.

Research findings are obtained on the basis of the data analysis of 258 valid subjects from research institutes as well as manufacturing and service industries. The effect of CTTF on creation outcomes is significantly confirmed. The ICT supportive functions are unlikely significantly related to CTTF for the analysis-styled group, but the intuition-styled group shows a likely significance because of the different means of dealing with information and knowledge processing. The analysis-styled group disagrees with the significant link of the GDM with CTTF, whereas the intuition-styled group presents the significant effects of GDM, GFM and GRM on CTTF.

The unique features of knowledge creation differentiate it from other tasks. With respect to whether the knowledge creation task presented by goal is defined or not, and how ICT better suits the creation task features to benefit the creation outcomes are yet to be discussed. The individual cognitive style is confirmed to alternate the effect of ICT and GDM on CTTF in the proposed model. The research findings are particularly obvious because a transition gap, less covered by the literature, might exist with regard to the perception connection of knowledge creation service providers, agencies, consultants and context creators.

This paper aims to propose a numerical definition-based systematic design approach (NDSDA) to generate an explicit numerical definition of the product form profile and to establish the correlation between the product form features and the corresponding consumers’ image perceptions.

To illustrate the feasibility of the proposed method, this study considers the design of a two-dimensional automobile profile for illustration purposes and commences by developing a detailed numerical definition of an automobile profile using Bézier curves. A series of automobile image evaluations are conducted to examine the relationship between the characteristics of an automobile profile and its associated consumer image perception. Finally, the evaluation results are analyzed statistically, and the statistical results are used to construct mathematical models formalizing the correlations between the automobile profile design variables and the consumers’ perceptions of the product image.

The results of the evaluation trials are used to construct mathematical models capable of predicting the likely consumer response to any automobile profile designed in accordance with the numerical definition. Furthermore, the evaluation data enable the critical design variables and form features to be determined such that the efficacy of the design process in creating automobiles which better meet the consumers’ image aspirations can be improved.

The major contribution of the NDSDA methodology presented in this study is the ability it gives to designers to specify the product form in a detailed yet highly efficient manner. Furthermore, the numerical definition of the product form not only provides a suitable basis for identifying the critical design variables and form features of the product but also provides an understanding of how these variables should be manipulated to obtain or reinforce the desired product image.

This paper aims to investigate the effect of learning styles on HyFlex learning towards equity of learning in higher education.

A quantitative approach was used, with data collection through a structured online questionnaire. The study participants were undergraduate students (n = 451) studying at various public and private universities in Indonesia. Measurement analysis is used to test the validity of the instrument used. Analysis of structural equations is used to test the relationships between the constructs under study.

Survey instruments have satisfactory internal validity and consistency. The learning style of students in higher education positively influences the use of HyFlex’s three learning modalities. All three modalities of HyFlex learning positively affect learning equity, especially the asynchronous online modality. However, the synchronous online effect is insignificant. Active/reflective learning styles only affect face-to-face mode but do not significantly affect the two online modalities, synchronous and asynchronous. Some of the learning style dimensions have an indirect effect on equity through three HyFlex learning modalities. Face-to-face and online asynchronous mediate well the indirect relationship between learning style and equity. The impact of gender and higher education status was not shown to strengthen the relationship between learning styles, HyFlex learning modalities and equity.

This study will provide valuable understanding for lecturers, educators and developers to adapt and develop HyFlex learning strategies based on the positive dimensions of the Felder–Silverman learning style that can support equitable and inclusive learning. The study forms a foundation for researchers to investigate more constructs that could improve HyFlex learning in future studies.

This research is a pioneer in using learning styles to investigate trends in using three HyFlex learning modalities, particularly emphasising modalities that can provide equitable learning.