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This study aims to test the impact of different institutional quality indicators on two modes of foreign direct investment (FDI)-greenfield investment and cross-border mergers and acquisitions (M&As) for a sample of 110 countries over the period 2003–2017.

The authors develop a model of well-known FDI determinants, such as market size and potential, openness, the value of the national currency and the quality of institutions. The authors examine one-by-one five different institutional factors: law and order, investment profile of the host country, control of corruption (anti-corruption); democratic accountability, and government stability, applying a generalized method of moments (GMM) estimator that assures no endogeneity and reverse causality of the key explanatory variables.

The results point out the fact that fertile institutional conditions for attracting greenfield FDI to developing countries require law and order, good investment conditions and a state of democracy, but not necessarily tight control of corruption and a stable government. On the other hand, the appropriate institutional environment for attracting cross-border M&A sales flows to developing countries includes strong law and order, good investment conditions, strict control of corruption and strong democratic accountability. The results for developed countries show overall smaller importance of institutions as a determinant of both types of FDI.

This is the first study to analyze the differentiated determinants of the two modes of investment. The study holds implications for crafting two different policies for attracting greenfield FDI and M&A sales.

This study aims at offering a comprehensive thesis about the relationship between different cultural values and innovativeness.

Building on the human emancipation perspective and using data from Hofstede’s, Schwartz’s, and Inglehart’s cultural frameworks, the authors conduct a cross-national investigation into the effects of cultural values on national innovativeness.

The analyses show that emancipatory cultural dimensions such as rationality, secularity, self-expression, individualism, low uncertainty avoidance, long-term orientation, mastery and autonomy have significantly positive associations with national innovativeness. The opposing cultural values, such as traditionalism, religiosity, survival, collectivism, high uncertainty avoidance, short-term orientation, harmony and conservatism, have negative associations with national innovativeness.

This study contributes to the literature by putting forward a comprehensive and theory-driven explanation of the relationship between cultural values and innovativeness, by using all of Hofstede’s, Schwartz’s and Inglehart’s dimensions, by incorporating ethnic, linguistic and religious diversities and by applying alternative measures of the national innovativeness.

Reactance theory is applied to investigate consumer responses to “buy local” campaigns initiated by government to counteract the effects of an economic crisis, using the COVID-19 pandemic as an illustrative context.

A conceptual model is developed, aimed at revealing the extent to which “buy local” campaigns – explicitly justified by the need to fight an economic crisis – are likely to lead to (a) compliance (i.e. support for local products/retailers) or (b) freedom restoration (i.e. support for foreign products/retailers). The model is subsequently tested on samples of German (N = 265) and Italian (N = 268) consumers.

“Buy local” campaigns are likely to generate reactance amongst consumers and such reactance can lead to both non-compliance and, albeit less so, freedom restoration outcomes. At the same time, consumer ethnocentrism acts as a countervailing influence by attenuating the effects of generated reactance and its undesirable outcomes.

Psychological reactance theory offers a novel perspective for conceptually approaching the likely responses of consumers towards “buy local” campaigns and the empirical findings support the use of the theory in this context.

Policymakers seeking to encourage consumers to support the local economy during times of an economic crisis need to be aware that “buy local” campaigns may, against their intended communication goals, result in non-compliance as well as consumer responses in the opposite direction. Thus, the reactance-generating potential of such campaigns needs to be explicitly considered at the planning/implementation stage.

The findings confirm the relevance of reactance theory as a conceptual lens for studying the effects of “buy local” campaigns and have important implications for domestic/foreign firms as well as for policy makers seeking to encourage consumers to support the local economy during times of an economic crisis.

Consumers' perceptions of product intelligence affect their willingness to accept smart offerings. This paper explores how people perceive various smart products based on their smartness profiles, composed of five distinct smartness facets. Additionally, the study investigates how these perceptions of product intelligence impact consumers' evaluation of factors that either promote or impede the adoption of smart products. These factors are examined as potential mediators in the adoption process. This paper aims to determine if the value-based adoption model can be applied to a broad range of smart service systems.

Consumers assessed one of 28 smart products in a scenario-based quantitative study. Multilevel structural equation modeling (SEM) is used to test the conceptual model, taking the nested data structure into account.

The findings show that product smartness essentially enhances usage intention via adoption drivers (enjoyment and usefulness) and reduces usage intention via adoption barriers (intrusiveness). In particular, the ability to interact in a humanlike manner increases the benefits consumers perceive, which in turn increases consumer acceptance. Only the smartness characteristic of awareness impairs usage intention, mediated by the perceived benefits of enjoyment and usefulness.

In contrast to previous research, which usually focuses on single smart products, this work examines a variety of different products, which allows for better transferability of the results to other smart offerings. Furthermore, prior research has mainly focused on single facets of product smartness or researched smartness on an aggregated level. By considering the consumer perception of each smartness facet, the authors gain deeper insights into the perceptual differences regarding product smartness and how this affects technology adoption via conflicting key acceptance drivers and barriers.

The role of chief executive officer (CEO) personal characteristics in shaping corporate policies has attracted increasing academic attention in the past two decades. In this review, the authors synthesize extant research on CEO attributes by reviewing 232 articles published in 29 journals from the accounting, finance and management literature. This review provides an overview of existing findings, highlights current trends and interdisciplinary differences in research approaches and identifies potential avenues for future research.

To review the literature on CEO attributes, the authors manually collected peer-reviewed articles in accounting, finance and management journals from 2000 to 2021. The authors conducted in-depth analysis of each paper and manually recorded the theories, data sources, country of study, study period, measures of CEO attributes and dependent variables. This procedure helped the authors group the selected articles into themes and sub-themes. The authors compared the findings in various disciplines and provided direction for future research.

The authors highlight the role of CEO personal attributes in influencing corporate decision-making and firm outcomes. The authors categorize studies of CEO traits into three main research themes: (1) demographic attributes and experience (including age, gender, culture, experience, education); (2) CEO interactions with others (social and political networks) and (3) underlying attributes (including personality, values and ideology). The evidence shows that CEO characteristics significantly affect a wide range of specific corporate policies that serve as mechanisms through which individual CEOs determine firm success and performance.

CEO selection is one of the most crucial decisions made by corporations. The study findings provide valuable insights to corporate executives, boards, investors and practitioners into how CEOs’ personal characteristics can impact future firm decisions and outcomes that can, in turn, inform the high-stake process of CEO recruitment and selection. The study findings have significant practical implications for corporations, such as contributing to executive training programs, to assist executives and directors attain a greater level of self-awareness.

Building on the theoretical foundation of upper echelons theory, the authors offer an integrated theoretical framework to consolidate existing empirical research on the impacts of CEO personal attributes on firm outcomes across accounting and finance (A&F) and management literature. The study findings provide a roadmap for scholars to bridge the interdisciplinary divide between A&F and management research. The authors advocate a more holistic and multifaceted approach to examining CEOs, each of whom embodies a myriad of personal characteristics that comprise their unique identity. The study findings encourage future researchers to expand the investigation of the boundary conditions that magnify or moderate the impacts of CEO idiosyncrasies.

The study investigates how firm-level governance (FL_G) affects the disclosure of voluntary risk information. Likewise, it explores the influence of FL_G on the informativeness of voluntary risk disclosure (VRD). Specifically, it examines how FL_G shapes the nexus between VRD and firm value.

It uses a sample of non-financial firms from the FTSE350 index listed on the London Stock Exchange between 2010 and 2018. The authors utilise an automated textual analysis technique to code the VRD in the annual reports of these firms. The firm value, adjusted for the industry median, is a proxy for investor response to VRD.

The results suggest that UK firms with significant board independence and larger audit committees disclose more risk information voluntarily. Nevertheless, firms with larger boards of directors and higher managerial ownership disseminate less voluntary risk information. Besides, VRD contains relevant information that enhances investors' valuation of UK firms. These results are more pronounced in firms with higher independent directors, lower managerial ownership and large audit committees.

The study rationalises the ongoing debate on the effect of FL_G on VRD. The findings are helpful to UK policy-setters in reconsidering the guidelines that regulate UK VRD and to the UK investors in considering risk disclosure in their price decisions and thus enhancing their corporate valuations.

It contributes to the risk reporting literature in the UK by presenting the first evidence on the effect of a comprehensive set of FL_G on VRD. Besides, it enriches the existing research by shedding light on the role of FL_G on the informativeness of discretionary risk information in the UK.

This paper aims to explore how customer involvement unfolds in the development of a smart product. Smart product development poses new challenges to firms. In particular, the buyers’ and users’ involvement has shown novel dynamics in smart product development. These peculiarities are linked with the specific characteristics of the digital technology embedded into the smart products. This study’s rationale is to analyse the frictions arising from potential divergent objectives between the focal firm and its customers when digital technologies are embedded in traditional products.

This study adopted an explorative and qualitative approach to investigate new emerging dynamics of customer involvement during technological development. A coffee machine producer is selected as a case study to uncover new insights and a novel perspective on the phenomenon of customer involvement in smart product development. Data analysis followed an abductive approach that allowed to identify the dimensions of friction emerging during the technological development process.

The case study analysis depicts that smart product development presents novel customer involvement dynamics. In particular, this study abductively identifies dimensions of friction emerging between the focal firm and buyers/users. Friction arises in the technological interface between the actors involved. These dimensions of friction address the complexities of developing technology in terms of smart products with customer involvement. This study suggests that embedding of technology into an existing product might change how customers are involved.

Even though customer involvement in product innovation has been extensively studied in management literature, this paper focused on a new type of innovation, smart products. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, no previous studies have yet empirically explored customers’ involvement while embedding digital technologies into existing products to create smart products. In particular, this study sheds light on the dimensions of friction emerging between the focal firm and the actors of the business network. This study unfolds novel contributions to the Industrial Marketing and Purchasing literature on technological development.

This paper aims to examine the effects of the social distinction of company directors on firm performance.

The social distinction of company directors adds to the firm’s reputation, allowing the firm to access resources and privileges. The indicators of social distinction this study uses are the prenominal titles of directors in Malaysian companies. As Malaysian companies are known to have directors with political connections and the prenominal titles can be intertwined with these connections, to ascertain the effects of social distinction on firm performance, this study examines whether social distinctions proxy and complement political connections in improving firm performance. This study uses Tobin’s Q (TQ) for longer-term performance and gross sales for current-year performance.

This study finds evidence to suggest that the impact of higher-order titles on Tobin’s Q and sales is greater in politically unconnected firms than in connected firms. This study also finds evidence to suggest that higher-order titles amplify the effect on Tobin’s Q in politically connected firms, whereas lower-order titles amplify sales, both moderated by firm-age. The findings shed light on the mediating variables that contribute to the above, and are robust for alternative performance measures, and account for endogeneity concerns.

The results are generalisable only to countries where social distinctions are of significance.

Future research on political connections should consider social connections that affect firms. Also, such research should prompt the awarders of titles to prohibit the use of titles for pecuniary motives to minimise market imperfections.

Adding to the prior literature on the characteristics of directors and firm performance, this study shows that the social distinctions of directors do matter.

The goal of this paper is to identify the main factors influencing mobile service adoption and define a universally applicable holistic concept capable of explaining all types of mobile service adoption that will be useful to all stakeholders.

A systematic method was used to identify and select relevant articles for appraisal and analysis of their data, as well as to summarize existing research in mobile service adoption studies.

After reviewing and analyzing the articles, 25 major variables were identified. According to the article analysis, usefulness and experience were identified as the primary motivators for adoption, and that negative barriers to adoption must be controlled in order to improve adoption. Demographics play a role in adoption and technology acceptance model (TAM) emerged as the most suitable model to study the variables affecting mobile service adoption.

The generic concept of mobile services adoption will help industry stakeholders and researchers to use a more focused approach to study and encourage adoption and use of mobile services. Empirical testing of the proposed concept is a limitation which can also be a future scope of the study.

The review provides a holistic mobile services adoption process which is able to define adoption for all kinds of mobile services and is universally applicable as well. The study presents potential implications and relevant insights in mobile services adoption and contributes to a better understanding of mobile service adoption process.

Advances in material agency driven by artificial intelligence (AI) have facilitated breakthroughs in material adaptivity enabling smart objects to autonomously provide individualized smart services, which makes smart objects act as social actors embedded in the real world. However, little is known about how material adaptivity fosters the infusion use of smart objects to maximize the value of smart services in customers' lives. This study examines the underlying mechanism of material adaptivity (task and social adaptivity) on AI infusion use, drawing on the theoretical lens of social embeddedness.

This study adopted partial least squares structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM), mediating tests, path comparison tests and polynomial modeling to analyze the proposed research model and hypotheses.

The results supported the proposed research model and hypotheses, except for the hypothesis of the comparative effects on infusion use. Besides, the results of mediating tests suggested the different roles of social embeddedness in the impacts of task and social adaptivity on infusion use. The post hoc analysis based on polynomial modeling provided a possible explanation for the unsupported hypothesis, suggesting the nonlinear differences in the underlying influencing mechanisms of instrumental and relational embeddedness on infusion use.

The formation mechanisms of AI infusion use based on material adaptivity and social embeddedness help to develop the business strategies that enable smart objects as social actors to exert a key role in users' daily lives, in turn realizing the social and economic value of AI.

This study advances the theoretical research on material adaptivity, updates the information system (IS) research on infusion use and identifies the bridging role of social embeddedness of smart objects as agentic social actors in the AI context.