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Among scholarly analyses of sport demand, few have considered the demand for match replays despite replays' indispensable role in sport broadcasts. Different from live matches, viewers of match replays generally have access to match outcomes. Outcome uncertainty is thus less relevant in attracting viewers. This paper addresses this research gap by analyzing the demand for replays of competitive esports matches.

We collected match replay data for two competitive esports leagues, CrossFire Pro League and King Pro League, from two Chinese esports online platforms, Douyu.com and Huya.com. Drawing on two economic theories of superstar effects—a skilled-based theory and a popularity-based theory, we performed regression analyses and dominance analyses to examine the demand for esports match replays.

Our results indicated skill to be more important in the demand for tactical games while non-skill-popularity is more instrumental in attracting viewers to replays of leisurely games. The platform with knowledge-sharing features also exhibited a stronger skill impact for tactical games.

Findings contribute to the understanding of sport match replays and offer implications for esports organizers and broadcasters to market games effectively.

Global reach, together with rapidly increasing broadband coverage, makes the internet a potentially interesting distribution channel for video highlights and full-match viewings. This study investigateswillingness to pay as well as consumer preferences for type of report to derive marketing implications for soccer clubs. Survey results from more than 12,000 respondents supporting seven soccer clubs in the German first and second divisions underline the potential of this new distribution channel in finding a high average willingness to pay.

The purpose of this paper is to examine whether home advantage (HA), wherein a team is more likely to win, and by a larger margin, when they are playing at home vs away, exists in representative rugby competitions involving teams comprised of “all-star” players from several clubs. It also assesses whether referees are biased in favour of the home team, and whether this is the cause of HA.

A complete consensus of matches from the State of Origin Rugby League and Tri Nations Rugby Union competitions were analysed via hierarchical regression models estimating parameters for favourite/underdog status of teams, general home/away status, team-specific home/away status, and rivalry-specific home/away status.

Significant HA exists in both competitions, and within Tri Nations, the size of the effect varies by team and specific opponent (i.e. rivalry effects). Although there is evidence of referee bias in favour of the home team, the penalty differential between the home and away teams does not mediate HA.

This is the first study examining HA in representative rugby league, and shows a statistically significant effect. Further, the results reported here refute an earlier investigation of the Tri Nations competition, which found little or no evidence of HA. By including a complete census of all matches rather than a small sample, this research finds a statistically significant HA effect, which varies by team and by specific rivalry.

Under club president Florentino Pérez, Real Madrid Football Club appeared to utilise the proto-image of the firm (PIF) management approach. Such a strategy embraces the use of branding, values and mid- to long-term planning to generate income. In the case of Real Madrid, the strategy comprised the recruitment of 'Galácticos', which helped it to become the world's number one club in terms of both turnover and profile. Although the strategy delivered success economically, questions remain regarding its sustainability for a sporting organisation.

The first three articles have been concerned with the substance, the conceptual context and the skills of negotiating. This final section is devoted to the ways and means of learning how to negotiate. Some relevant ideas on learning are discussed and a number of resources are listed to help those who are designing programmes in this area.

Strategy/entrepreneurship/international marketing.

This case is recommended for use in courses on strategy, entrepreneurship, international marketing and joint venture for PGDM and Executive programmes.

International Football Academy (IFA), a leading football development firm, is gearing up to expand its operations to a new geographic market, India. The purpose is to further its international growth plans by establishing a lasting presence in developing markets. Their previous stints in China and Indonesia met with huge success. However, there was a stark difference between those geographies and the Indian market, in terms of political system, economic infrastructure, social framework, cultural practices, technological advancements, legal regulations, etc. In a country where 47 per cent of the 1.2 billion population considered themselves football fans (Nielson survey, 2010), it was ironical that the Indian football market remained one of the most untapped and fragmented of its kind. The question for IFA was: “Would India be another feather in our hat?”

The case highlights the key factors facing firms, when expanding into emerging markets. The students are expected to think through the various dimensions to decision-making, which includes Why (expand), Where (which market), When (right time), What (thrust of strategy) and Who (partners). It also compels the students to appreciate the various challenges involved in exporting a product, which is as unique as “football training”.

Teaching notes are available for educators only. Please contact your library to gain login details or email support@emeraldinsight.com to request teaching notes.

CSS 11: Strategy

An automatic query expansion (AQE) facility in an online catalogue was evaluated in an operational library setting. The Okapi experimental system had other features including: ranked output ‘best match’ keyword searching, automatic stemming, spelling normalisation and cross referencing as well as relevance feedback. A combination of transaction log analysis, search replays, questionnaires and interviews was used for data collection. Findings show that contrary to previous results, AQE was beneficial in a substantial number of searches. User intentions, the effectiveness of the ‘best match’ search and user interaction were identified as the main factors affecting the take‐up of the query expansion facility.

Lecture recording provides learning material for local and distance education. The TeleTeachingTool uses the very flexible screen recording technique to capture virtually any material displayed during a presentation. With its built‐in annotation system teachers can add freehand notes and emphasize important parts. Unlike other screen recorders, our implementation offers slide‐based navigation, full text search and annotated scripts, which are obtained by automated post‐production. This article presents how automated analysis generates indices for slide‐based navigation on the fly and how to achieve live interlinkage of annotations with slides so that annotations disappear when a slide is changed and are made visible again when returning to that slide later during presentation, although screen recorders generally do not provide an association of annotations with slides.

Smart contracts are written in high-level programming languages, compiled into Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) bytecode, deployed onto blockchain systems and called with the corresponding address by transactions. The deployed smart contracts are immutable, even if there are bugs or vulnerabilities. Therefore, it is critical to verify smart contracts before deployment. This paper aims to help developers effectively and efficiently locate potential defects in smart contracts.

GethReplayer, a smart contract testing method based on transaction replay, is proposed. It constructs a parallel transaction execution environment with two virtual machines to compare the execution results. It uses the real existing transaction data on Ethereum and the source code of the tested smart contacts as inputs, conditionally substitutes the bytecode of the tested smart contract input into the testing EVM, and then monitors the environmental information to check the correctness of the contract.

Experiments verified that the proposed method is effective in smart contract testing. Virtual environmental information has a significant effect on the success of transaction replay, which is the basis for the performance of the method. The efficiency of error locating was approximately 14 times faster with the proposed method than without. In addition, the proposed method supports gas consumption analysis.

This paper addresses the difficulty that developers encounter in testing smart contracts before deployment and focuses on helping develop smart contracts with as few defects as possible. GethReplayer is expected to be an alternative solution for smart contract testing and provide inspiration for further research.

Extending on flow theory, the purpose of this paper is to explore how interactivity (human-to-human interactivity and human-to-machine interactivity) and personal beliefs (perceived attractiveness, personal involvement, and perceived uncertainty) impact flow experience; this study also investigates how flow experience is related to replay intention. Furthermore, this is the first study to explore the relationship between perceived uncertainty and challenges in online gaming.

The proposed research model was empirically evaluated using survey data collected from online game players. The evaluation was conducted using partial least squares of structural equation modeling.

The findings revealed that flow experience was a significant predictor of replay intention. Four antecedents of flow (telepresence, focused attention, skills, and challenges) had a positive influence on flow experience. Interactivity (human-to-human interactivity and human-to-machine interactivity) and personal beliefs (perceived attractiveness, personal involvement, and perceived uncertainty) influenced these antecedents. Moreover, human-to-human interactivity exerted a greater impact on the flow experience antecedents than did human-to-machine-associated interactivity. This study reveals that human-to-human interactivity is most crucial to the effective development of online games. In addition, the author find that utilitarian motivations have positive moderating effects on the relationship between flow and replay intention. Finally, additional practical and managerial implications are discussed.

Few empirical studies have explored the moderating role of utilitarian motivations. This original study analyzed how utilitarian motivations moderate the relationships between flow and replay intention of online game players. Moreover, this is one of the first studies to explore the characteristic of uncertainty and its role in the context of online game playing.