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This study aims to examine how the theory of planned behaviour and technology acceptance theory can be used to understand the adoption of non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs). The relationships between attitudes, behavioural intentions towards using NPIs, actual use of NPIs and word-of-mouth (WOM) were examined and compared between early and late adopters.

A survey was conducted to test the hypotheses with partial least squares structural equation modelling (n = 278).

The results indicate that relationships between attitudes, intentions and behavioural intentions were positive and significant in the whole data set – and that there were differences between the early and late adopters. WOM had no substantial relationship with actual usage and early adopters’ behavioural intentions.

This research gives a better sense of how WOM impacts attitudes, behavioural intentions and actual usage among early and late adopters of NPIs and highlights the effectiveness of WOM, especially among late adopters of NPIs. Furthermore, using the TAM allows us to make specific recommendations regarding encouraging the use of NPIs. A new three-stage communications model is introduced that uses early adopters as influencers to reduce the NPI adoption time by late adopters.

Health authorities have introduced non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) with the aim of reducing the spread of viruses. Against the backdrop of social marketing, normative and utility theories, the purpose of the paper is to examine the relationships between user centric measures such as perceived effectiveness, user satisfaction, and value for effort on intentions to continue to use NPIs. Furthermore, the moderating role of value for effort on user satisfaction and, subsequently, intentions to continue to use NPIs was also considered.

A cross-sectional online survey was completed in British Columbia, Canada (N = 287). Analysis was done with partial least squares structural equation modeling.

The results show that the relationships between user centric measures are positive and significant on intentions to continue to use NPIs. Furthermore, value for effort moderated the relationship between user satisfaction and intentions to continue to use NPIs – but the relationship was negative. Thus, the higher values of the value for effort construct cause the relationship between user satisfaction and reuse intention to somewhat diminish.

The results confirm the positive and significant relationships between user centric measures in the context of the use of NPIs and introduce a new understanding of the effect of value for effort on the relationship between user satisfaction and intentions to use NPIs. This enables health officials to better understand how to encourage the use of NPIs.

The purpose of this paper is to explore how non-professional investors (NPIs) with varying levels of financial sophistication interpret and perceive corporate disclosures and management credibility, specifically risk factors, when those disclosures are presented in readable and less-readable formats.

The paper uses an online experiment to test hypotheses related to the effects of financial sophistication (measured) and readability (manipulated) on NPIs’ equity valuations and perceptions of management credibility (competence and trustworthiness).

Increased readability appears to counteract less-sophisticated NPIs’ conservatism in equity valuations, such that they are not statistically significantly different from more-sophisticated NPIs’ equity valuations. Further, less-sophisticated NPIs judge management as less competent when disclosures are less readable, while more-sophisticated NPIs judge management as more competent when disclosures are less readable.

The paper has important implications for the SEC’s regulations related to plain English requirements for risk factor and other corporate disclosures. Financial sophistication varies among NPIs, and readability appears to influence these individuals in different ways.

The SEC’s Concept Release (April 13, 2016) acknowledges the need to update and improve risk factor disclosure regulations. This study provides evidence that contributes to those decisions.

The paper extends the research on processing fluency, by examining readability of disclosures with a consistent tone (negative). The NPIs surveyed are directly representative of the population of interest for risk factor disclosure regulations.

Signs saturate and surround society. This article illuminates the significant roles played by documentation within the context of the coronavirus pandemic. It centres, what it terms as, “COVID-19 signage” as essential extensions of nonpharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) into society. It posits that this signage helps materialize, mediate and articulate the pandemic from an unseen phenomenon into tangible objects with which people see and interact.

This article presents a documentary typology of COVID-19 signage to provide a conceptual framework in which to situate, approach and analyse this diverse documentation and its implications for social life and traffic. Further, this article offers a case study of Malta's COVID-19 signage that helped materialize, mediate and articulate the pandemic across the European island nation during its national lockdown in the first half of 2020. This case study helps contextualize these signs and serves as a dual contemporary and historical overview of their creation, implementation and use.

The coronavirus pandemic cannot be seen with the naked eye. It is, in many respects, an abstraction. Documents enable the virus to be seen and the pandemic to be an experienced reality. Specifically, COVID-19 signage materializes the disease and pandemic into tangible items that individuals interact with and see on a daily basis as they navigate society. From personal to environmental to community signs, these documents have come to mediate social life and articulate COVID-19 during this extraordinary health crisis. A material basis of a shared “pandemic social culture” is consequently established by and through this signage and its ubiquity.

This article can serve as a point of departure for analyses of other kinds of COVID-19 signage in various contexts. It can serve as an anchor or example for other investigations into what other signs were used, including why, when and how they were produced, designed, formatted, implemented, enforced, altered and/or removed. For instance, it could be used for comparative studies between different NPIs and their associated signage, or of the signage appearing between different cities or countries or even the differences in signage at various political and socio-temporal points of the pandemic.

It is dually hoped that this article's documentary typology, and historical snapshot, of COVID-19 signage could help inform how current and future NPIs into society are or can be used to mitigate the coronavirus or other potential health crises as well as serve as both a contemporary and historical snapshot of some of the immediate and early responses to the pandemic.

This documentary typology can be applied to approaches and analyses of other kinds of COVID-19 signage and related documentation. By serving as a conceptual framework in which situate, approach and analyse these documents, it is hoped that this article can help create a sense of clarity in reflections on sign-saturated environments as well as be practically employed for examining and understanding the effective implementation of NPIs in this pandemic and other health crises.

The paper aims to propose a novel strategic approach, named a Scorecard‐Markov model, combining an evaluation scorecard and a hidden Markov model (HMM) for new product idea screening (NPIS) decisions.

A scorecard is constructed to evaluate new product ideas on several criteria, including customer needs, marketing strength, competency, manufacturing compatibility, and distribution channels, involving a consideration of risk buy. A HMM is then developed accordingly to predict the overall performance of new ideas in terms of success probability. To implement the model, it is trained and tested by the historical dataset of a world‐class, leading company in the power tools industry through a case study.

The approach is proven to be encouraging and meaningful. The scorecard can serve as a guide for new product idea evaluation to convert experts' linguistic judgments to quantifiable and comparable data, whereas the HMM can determine the success probability of new product ideas to support NPIS decision making based on their computed evaluation performance. The optimal cut‐off value for making either a go or kill decision on each idea can thus be determined. Concerning the case company, a go decision should be made when the probability lies in the interval [0.53, 1].

The model can prevent companies from undertaking risky and failed new product development projects. Further, it is believed that this study can assist decision makers in choosing winning new product ideas towards commercialization in an effective and certain manner, thus enhancing the new product success rate in the innovation industry.

The approach incorporating the scorecard method and HMM is novel. Illustrated by the case study, the application of this approach to NPIS decisions is confirmed to be effective.

Non-profit sector management represent a research topic particularly discussed. This work tries to introduce a potential reaction to the need of managerial techniques and instruments to enhance the comprehension of the phenomenon and to accomplish a more powerful management of Non-profit institutions (NPIs).

The complexity of non-profit sector can be useful for identifying the ideal trajectories of a theoretical model of reference for the management of NPIs.

The main purpose is to outline a probable path for the evolution of the non-profit sector management (at the macroeconomic level) and of NPIs that are part of it (at the microeconomic level) and whose main dimensions are: professionalization, civic-engagement and accountability/corporate social responsibility.

This research tries to fill the gap existing in the international literature and the relative absence of systemic approaches to the management of NPIs, often focused only on some specific aspects of an extremely complex and multifaceted phenomenon.

The purpose of this paper is to develop a simple deterministic model that quantifies previously adopted preventive measures driven by the trend of the reported number of deaths in both Italy and India. In addition, the authors forecast the spread based on some selected quantified preventive measures. The optimal exiting policy is derived using the inverse dynamics of the model. Furthermore, the model developed by the authors is dependent on the daily number of deaths; as such, it is sensitive to the death rate but remains insensitive to trends in deaths.

In the wake of COVID-19, policymakers and health professionals realized the limitations and shortcomings of current healthcare systems and pandemic response policies. The need to revise global and national pandemic response mechanisms has been thrust into the public spotlight. To this end, the authors devise an approach to identify the most suitable governmental non-pharmaceutical intervention (NPI) policies, previously adopted in a community, country or region that serve as the foundation for most pandemic strategies.

Leveraging Italy, the authors compare the aftermath by considering three scenarios: (a) recently adopted preventive measures, (b) strictest preventive measures previously adopted, and (c) the optimal exiting policy. In comparison to the second scenario, the authors estimate about twice the number of recoveries and deaths within five months under the first scenario and about 80 times more under the optimal scenario. Whereas in India, the authors applied one scenario of recently adopted preventative measures to showcase the rapid turnaround of their model. According to the new timeline, almost 90% of all deaths in India could have been prevented if the policies implemented in April 2021 were put in place three months prior, i.e. in January 2021.

The novelty of the proposed approach is in the use of inverse dynamics of a simple deterministic model that allows capturing the trend of contact rate as a function of adopted NPIs, regardless of pandemic type.

At the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, the absence of pharmaceutical agents meant that policy institutions had to intervene by providing nonpharmaceutical interventions (NPIs). To satisfy this need, the World Health Organization (WHO) issued policy guidelines, such as NPIs, and the government of Pakistan released its own policy document that included social distancing (SD) as a containment measure. This study explores the policy actors and their role in implementing SD as an NPI in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic.

The study adopted the constructs of Normalization Process Theory (NPT) to explore the implementation of SD as a complex and novel healthcare intervention under a qualitative study design. Data were collected through document analysis and interviews, and analysed under framework analysis protocols.

The intervention actors (IAs), including healthcare providers, district management agents, and staff from other departments, were active in implementation in the local context. It was observed that healthcare providers integrated SD into their professional lives through a higher level of collective action and reflexive monitoring. However, the results suggest that more coherence and cognitive participation are required for integration.

This novel research offers original and exclusive scenario narratives that satisfy the recent calls of the neo-implementation paradigm, and provides suggestions for managing the implementation impediments during the pandemic. The paper fills the implementation literature gap by exploring the normalisation process and designing a contextual framework for developing countries to implement guidelines for pandemics and healthcare crises.

Social distancing. Travel bans. Confinement. The purpose of this paper is to document that more than 50% of the world population is affected by World Health Organization (WHO) recommendations for the 2020 coronavirus crisis. The WHO admits that the evidence quality for the effectiveness of these recommendations is low or very low.

This self-contradiction is confirmed by a WHO document published in October 2019 as well as supporting documentation from the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control.

This viewpoint concludes that an obvious resolution of this self-contradiction would be to limit restrictions and interventions to those for whose effectiveness the WHO’s document reported that there was at least moderate evidence.

A shift of focus is suggested from discussions on the commensurability and social costs of anti-COVID-19 interventions to their actual effectiveness.

This paper aims to provide a country case study of South Africa’s response during the first six months following its first COVID-19 case. The focus is on the government’s (mis-)management of its non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) (or “lockdown”) to stem the pandemic and the organized business sector’s resistance against the lockdown.

This paper makes use of a literature review and provides descriptive statistics and quantitative analysis of COVID-19 and the lockdown stringency in South Africa, based on data from Google Mobility Trends, Oxford University’s Stringency Index, Johns Hopkins University’s COVID-19 tracker and Our World in Data.

This paper finds that both the government and the business sector’s responses to the COVID-19 pandemic have been problematic. These key actors have been failing to “pull together,” leaving South Africa’s citizens in-between corrupt and incompetent officials on the one hand, and lockdown skeptics on the other. This paper argues that to break through this impasse, the country should change direction by agreeing on a smart or “Goldilocks” lockdown, based on data, testing, decentralization, demographics and appropriate economic support measures, including export support. Such a Goldilocks lockdown is argued, based on available evidence from the emerging scientific literature, to be able to save lives, improve trust in government, limit economic damages and moreover improve the country’s long-term recovery prospects.

The pandemic is an unprecedented crisis and moreover was still unfolding at the time of writing. This has two implications. First, precise data on the economic impact and certain epidemiological parameters was not (yet) available. Second, the causes of the mismanagement by the government are not clear yet, within such a short time frame. More research and better data may be able in future to allow conclusions to be drawn whether the problems that were besetting the country’s management of COVID-19 are unique or perhaps part of a more general problem across developing countries.

The paper provides clear practical implications for both government and organized business. The South African Government should not altogether end its lockdown measures, but follow a smart and flexible lockdown. The organized business sector should abandon its calls for ending the lockdown while the country is still among the most affected countries in the world, and no vaccine is available.

There should be better collaboration between government, business and civil society to manage a smart lockdown. Government should re-establish lost trust because of the mismanagement of the lockdown during the first six months of the pandemic.

The outline of the smart lockdown that is proposed for the country combines NPIs with the promotion of exports, as a policy intervention to help aggregate demand to recover. The paper provides advice on how to resolve an impasse created by mismanagement of COVID-19, which could be valuable for decision-making during a crisis, particularly in developing countries.