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This paper aims to compare the reflow and Zn diffusion behaviors in Sn-Zn and Sn-8.5Zn-0.5Ag-0.01Al-0.1Ga (5E) solders during soldering on a Ni/Cu substrate under infrared (IR) reflow. The study proposes a model on the effect of various elements particularly Zn diffusion behavior in the solders on the formation of intermetallic compounds (IMCs).

The melting activities of two solders near their melting points on copper substrates are visualized in an IR reflow furnace. Reflowed solder joints were analyzed using scanning electron microscope and energy dispersive X-ray spectroscopy.

Reflow behaviors of the solders are similar. During melting, solder balls are first merged into each other and then reflow on the substrate from top to bottom. Both solders show a reduced amount of Zn in the solder. Theoretical calculations demonstrate a higher Zn diffusion in the 5E solder; however, the amount of Zn actually observed at the solder/substrate interface is lower than Sn-9Zn solder due to the formation of ZnAg3 in the solder. A thinner IMC layer is formed at the interface in the 5E solder than the Sn-Zn solder.

The present work compares the 5E solder only with Sn-Zn solder. Additional research work may be required to compare 5E solder with other solders like Sn-Ag, SnAgCu, etc. to further establish its practical applications.

The study ascertains the advantages of 5E solder over Sn-Zn solder for all practical applications.

The significance of this paper is the understanding of the relation between reflow behavior of solders and reactivity of different elements in the solder alloys and substrate to form various IMCs and their influence on the formation of IMC layer at solder/substrate interface. Emphasis is provided for the diffusion behavior of Zn during reflow and respective reaction mechanisms.

Much of the research on the mental health impacts of the COVID-19 response have been focused on frontline healthcare workers (FHCW). However, other essential workers (OEW) have also faced many mental health challenges due to exposures associated with their employment status, which may be compounded by higher levels of social vulnerability. This chapter describes disparities among FHCW, OEW, and the general public regarding mental health outcomes associated with the pandemic. In addition, it considers the role that structural racism (e.g., historical redlining of neighborhoods and biased lending practices) plays in the higher vulnerability of OEW to the mental health impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic response. Mental health inequities overall, and among essential workers, must be addressed as part of the recovery from COVID-19 to build resilience to future public health emergencies. The model used by New York City to more equitably distribute mental health resources and support services is shared.

Purpose: This chapter aims to find the impact of cultural marketing on consumer buying behaviour and analyse the cultural factors affecting consumers’ buying behaviour. Cultural marketing aims to offer and promote a product, a message, or a service to a group of people who may be their potential purchasers and belong to the same culture or particular demographic.

Methodology: This study uses the published research for different countries viz. India, Canada, Germany, the UAE, the UK, the USA, Japan, etc., in the field of culture, cross-culture, and consumer buying behaviour considering various factors and their impact; but in particular, this study focussed on the cultural factors only and analysed their impact on the consumer behaviour of the different countries.

Findings: The study revealed that different countries have their own unique culture. Cultural factors have a positive relationship with consumers’ buying behaviour and exhibit that consumers behave differently towards the same product as per their perception developed by their culture.

Need of the study: Today, the world has become global, and to become a successful consumer oriented market service provider, marketers have to study the psychology of the customers to procure them. This study focusses on one of the essential factors, that is, culture and how cultural factors affect consumer buying behaviour. The study of culture is the gateway to attracting consumers in the market.

Practical implications: The study would help multinational companies in segmentation, targeting, and positioning and developing several marketing strategies for their products. Companies would be able to understand changes in consumer purchasing behaviours that arise from cultural differences, which helps them cater to the needs of their global consumers.

A customer's journey of searching for a product or service, evaluating it, purchasing it, using it, recommending it, rebuying it or rejecting it is unique in itself. Organisations always have dreamt of getting inside the customers' minds and trying to understand what's happening inside at each of these steps. This chapter explains the customer journey concept and the analysis of the various components of the customer journey. We highlight that the firms need to understand the customer journeys and the multiple touchpoints they interact with to create a worthwhile customer experience. The chapter lists out the various touchpoints, including social/external touchpoints, customer-owned touchpoints, partner-owned touchpoints and brand-owned touchpoints. We discuss three frameworks that can be used by a firm to understand design a customer journey. These frameworks include AIDA (awareness, interest, desire and action), MAI (measure, analyse and improve) and journey maps. The chapter recommends the various steps which a firm can use to create a journey map. In the end, we create a linkage between the customer journey and business transformation. The chapter builds a case for the application of customer journey management by pointing out that it is a complex phenomenon, and the firms should use a structured approach to design and manage the customer journey.

The purpose of this paper is to look into the latest advances in ontology-based text summarization systems, with emphasis on the methodologies of a socio-cognitive approach, the structural discourse models and the ontology-based text summarization systems.

The paper analyzes the main literature in this field and presents the structure and features of Texminer, a software that facilitates summarization of texts on Port and Coastal Engineering. Texminer entails a combination of several techniques, including: socio-cognitive user models, Natural Language Processing, disambiguation and ontologies. After processing a corpus, the system was evaluated using as a reference various clustering evaluation experiments conducted by Arco (2008) and Hennig et al. (2008). The results were checked with a support vector machine, Rouge metrics, the F-measure and calculation of precision and recall.

The experiment illustrates the superiority of abstracts obtained through the assistance of ontology-based techniques.

The authors were able to corroborate that the summaries obtained using Texminer are more efficient than those derived through other systems whose summarization models do not use ontologies to summarize texts. Thanks to ontologies, main sentences can be selected with a broad rhetorical structure, especially for a specific knowledge domain.

The interpretation of the importance/performance map is based on an assumption of independence between importance and performance but many studies question the validity of this assumption. The aim of this research is to develop a new typology for job satisfaction attributes as well as a new importance/performance map that can be an aid for organizations when they prioritize their improvement actions based on a job satisfaction study.

A typology for possible relationships between importance and performance in job satisfaction studies is developed based on theoretical considerations. This typology is then applied and validated on approximately 10,000 responses from the European Employee Index 2002. Ultimately a new importance/performance map for priority setting in job satisfaction studies is developed based on the new typology for possible relationships between importance and performance.

The result of this analysis showed that the assumption of independence between the importance and performance is invalid in certain situations.

The subsets in the analysis are not all independent since a respondent may appear in more than one subset. This is a problem with the data generating process that to some extent might influence the analysis.

Profound impact on the way that the importance/performance map should be interpreted since non‐proportional attributes will move both vertically as well as horizontally in the traditional importance/performance map as performance changes.

This paper gives a theoretical explanation for the presence of non‐proportional satisfiers and develops a new importance/performance map that takes the presence of non‐proportional satisfiers into account.

Choice deferral (making no choice at all) is a common phenomenon, especially when individuals face a difficult decision. This is further exacerbated in the presence of negative incidental emotions which can have a wide-ranging influence on various aspects of decision-making. Previous research suggests that process (vs outcome) accountability might be more effective at mitigating the effect of irrelevant factors. This paper aims to examine whether accountability attenuates emotion effects on choice and examines the differences in the efficacy of the two accountability types.

The paper uses the appraisal tendency framework to propose differences between same valenced emotions on choice deferral and predicts the moderating role of process versus outcome accountability. Two experiments are conducted to test the predictions and the results analyzed using logistic regression.

The authors find that outcome and process accountability have different moderating effects on emotion and choice deferral relationship: under outcome accountability, angry individuals are more likely to defer choice while under process accountability, differences in choice across emotion conditions are attenuated. As predicted, differences between anger and fear on the certainty appraisal and thereby information processing, mediate the effects of emotion on choice deferral in the outcome (but not process) condition.

This research studies the intersection of two developing research streams, affect and accountability, by focusing on specific affective states (anger and fear) and specific accountability types (outcome and process) in the important context of decision avoidance in consumer behavior. Thus, theoretical understanding in both domains is advanced and the benefits of specific accountability types clarified. Key implications for consumers and future research directions are also discussed.

This paper aims at developing an interpretive structural model of drivers for environmentally conscious manufacturing (ECM). It will demonstrate how interpretive structural modeling (ISM) supports policy makers in the government and industry in identifying and understanding interdependencies among drivers for ECM. Interdependencies among drivers will be derived and structured into a hierarchy to derive subsystems of interdependent elements with corresponding driving power and dependency.

ISM has been used to identify hierarchy and inter-relationships among drivers for ECM adoption and to classify the drivers according to their driving and dependence power using MICMAC analysis. The drivers for ECM adoption are identified through the review of literature followed by developing a model of drivers using ISM.

The main findings of the paper include the development of an ISM model of drivers for ECM adoption. The developed model divided the identified drivers into five levels of hierarchies showing their inter-relationship and depicting the driving-dependence relationship. These five levels have been classified into four categories – awareness, external, organizational and benefits.

The developed ISM model is expected to provide a direction to the policy makers in the government and industry and the top management of the organizations to leverage their resources in a timely manner to adopt ECM successfully.

This research aims to study whether consumers differ in their attitudes toward equivalent prices that include vs exclude taxes and fees. In addition, this research will study whether computation ease-based processing fluency and perceived price fairness mediate this relationship in parallel, and whether need for cognition and political beliefs and affiliation moderate the effect.

Two experiments were conducted in which participants evaluated two price formats and then responded to relevant measures.

This research shows that consumers perceive prices that include (vs exclude) taxes and fees to be easier to process, and a fairer price, and subsequently exhibit a higher willingness to buy. Additionally, this effect is moderated by need for cognition, and political beliefs and affiliation.

Future research could investigate potential additional situational moderators (such as price type – total vs unit, consumption category, relative sizes of base price vs taxes and fees) and dispositional moderators (such as price sensitivity and tightwadism/spendthriftism).

This research provides insights to marketers regarding the downstream impact of pricing decisions – such as including vs excluding taxes and fees from total price. Further, depending on the product category and target customer characteristics (political affiliation), marketers can determine whether to include or exclude taxes and fees.

This research highlights the tendency of conservatives to avoid taxes and fees. As such, it adds to the understanding of conservative consumer groups.

This research contributes to existing research on price-framing research by finding an interesting effect related to multi-dimensional pricing and partitioned pricing. Additionally, this research contributes to existing research on computation ease-based processing fluency and price fairness perception. Finally, this contributes to an increasingly important body of research: the effect of political affiliation on consumption. This also provides clear guidance to marketers with regard to deciding service pricing.