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The purpose of this paper is to examine the capital structure determinants and speed of adjustment (SOA) toward the target capital structure of firms.

The study has used the generalized method of moments (GMM) model and two-stage least squares (TSLS) to the panel data of 3,310 Indian firms, from January 2000 to March 2018, to determine the adjustment speed toward target capital structure. Further, the study employed a fully modified ordinary least square technique to shed light on the dynamic nature of the adjustment process.

The results of the GMM estimations indicate that Indian firms are adjusting their capital structure toward the target rate of 10.38 percent per year. Similarly, the findings of TSLS estimate specify a SOA of 15.49 percent per year. The low adjustment speed suggests the prevalence of higher adjustment costs of Indian firms.

Future research can be undertaken by including certain macroeconomic factors such as GDP, inflation and the interest rate, which also affect the SOA since firms are pretentious by market conditions while designing capital structure for firms.

In the current financial and regulatory set-up when there are frequent perturbations in the capital market, the study will be valuable for regulators, firms and academicians. The work would enable the concerned stakeholders to manage their scare resources and capital effectively by a better way to make informed decisions. It will facilitate managers of young companies to identify and regulate the factors that are more pertinent for them to make flexible financial decisions concerning the capital structure.

The study amplifies on previous studies and provides new insights on the speed of the adjustment process of Indian firms, helping to modify and refine their capital structures toward the optimum capital structure. This will not only enhance the financial flexibility in the capital structure of Indian corporates but also be of great value to the policymakers and other stakeholders.

Decentralised autonomous organisations (DAOs) are internet-native self-governing enterprises where individual groups, communities, agencies, consumers and providers work together using blockchain-led smart contracts (SCs). This study aims to examine the role of DAO marketplaces in technology-led autonomous organisation design for enterprise technology sourcing industries, with algorithmic trust and governance.

The authors examined the importance of an enterprise marketplace governance platform for technology sourcing using DAO as a decentralised/democratised business model. A total of 98 DAO products/services are evaluated across 11 industries that envisage DAO as a strategic choice for the governance of decentralised marketplace platforms.

The research findings validate how a DAO-led enterprise marketplace governance platform can create a cohesive collaboration between consumers (enterprises) and providers (solution vendors) in a disintermediated way. The proposed novel layered solution for an autonomous governance-led enterprise marketplace promises algorithmic trust-led, self-governed tactical alternatives to a strategic plan.

The research targets multiple industry outlooks to understand decentralised autonomous marketplace governance and develop the theoretical foundation for research and extensive corporate suitability.

The research underpinnings boost the entrepreneurs’ ability to realise the practical potential of DAO between multiple parties using SCs and tokenise the entire product and service offerings over immutable ledger technologies.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this research is unique and the first of its kind to study the multi-industry role of algorithmic trust and governance in enterprise technology sourcing marketplaces driven by 98 decentralised and consensus-based DAO products across 11 industries.

Foreign divestment of subsidiaries is a growing research field. The global increase in investments has led to more divestments. However, much about the processes and circumstances leading to foreign divestments (FDs) requires further investigation. This study aims to review and consolidate the existing literature on foreign divestment and identify avenues for future research.

This study performs a systematic literature review and bibliometric analysis of studies on FDs to highlight the traditional and emerging perspectives in the field. This work examines foreign divestment theories based on operations, human resources, finance and marketing business functions.

This study sets forth a basic foreign divestment framework and highlights potential research areas. Future studies should expand to emerging economies, explore complex relationships, distinguish foreign divestment types and identify the limits of various theories and perspectives.

This study discusses traditional theories such as economies of scale, portfolio adjustment, reverse eclectic, real options and transaction cost economies. This study also examines emerging perspectives: attention-based, behavioral, committedness, contingency, favoritism, flexibility, hysteresis, legitimation, network and resource-based views. This study uses traditional and emerging theories to explain foreign divestment decisions in different business functions.

Today, business model innovations leverage digital technologies to gain a competitive advantage and transform business processes. Blockchain is still gaining attention in specific fields and bringing value to business models. There is a dearth of research on how blockchain decentralized autonomous organizations impact organization business model innovations. This study attempts to contribute the body of knowledge based on a review of decentralized autonomous organizations and the business model innovation literature using the integrative and generative approach.

The paper offers an analysis of decentralized autonomous organizations based on digital business models built on the well-established work by Osterwalder and Pigneur (2010). The practical multilayered decentralized autonomous organizations architectural implementation model design is achieved using practical archetypes depicted in the proposed decentralized autonomous organizations business model. The paper evaluates a marketplace comprising 13 decentralized autonomous organizations led platforms with core functionalities.

The paper delivers decentralized autonomous organizations led digital business model canvas elements to explain decentralized autonomous organization business model innovations. It presents the underlying multilayered decentralized autonomous organizations architectural implementation model required to conceptualize a practical business model with an enterprise-ready target operating model.

The paper contributes directly to the practical decentralized autonomous organizations business model canvas, exemplifying the nine elements of decentralized autonomous organizations’ characteristics for any organizational transformation. The tools and accelerators (business model, layered architecture, target operating model and product mapping) developed in the paper address the managerial challenges of redesigning the decentralized business models.

The proposed decentralized autonomous organizations smart contract powered business model provide a digital platform to adhere to rules, follow policies, preserve principles and develop consensus without human interventions. The paper shapes the first of its kind decentralized autonomous organizations marketplace evaluation while mapping it to decentralized autonomous organizations layered architecture product requirement considering business model dimension to adopt actionable target operating model.

Digital transformation (DT) leverages digital technologies to change current processes and introduce new processes in any organisation’s business model, customer/user experience and operational processes (DT pillars). Artificial intelligence (AI) plays a significant role in achieving DT. As DT is touching each sphere of humanity, AI led DT is raising many fundamental questions. These questions raise concerns for the systems deployed, how they should behave, what risks they carry, the monitoring and evaluation control we have in hand, etc. These issues call for the need to integrate ethics in AI led DT. The purpose of this study is to develop an “AI led ethical digital transformation framework”.

Based on the literature survey, various existing business ethics decision-making models were synthesised. The authors mapped essential characteristics such as intensity and the individual, organisational and opportunity factors of ethics models with the proposed AI led ethical DT. The DT framework is evaluated using a thematic analysis of 23 expert interviews with relevant AI ethics personas from industry and society. The qualitative data of the interviews and opinion data has been analysed using MAXQDA software.

The authors have explored how AI can drive the ethical DT framework and have identified the core constituents of developing an AI led ethical DT framework. Backed by established ethical theories, the paper presents how DT pillars are related and sequenced to ethical factors. This research provides the potential to examine theoretically sequenced ethical factors with practical DT pillars.

The study establishes deduced and induced ethical value codes based on thematic analysis to develop guidelines for the pursuit of ethical DT. The authors identify four unique induced themes, namely, corporate social responsibility, perceived value, standard benchmarking and learning willingness. The comprehensive findings of this research, supported by a robust theoretical background, have substantial implications for academic research and corporate applicability. The proposed AI led ethical DT framework is unique and can be used for integrated social, technological and economic ethical research.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the impact of mergers and acquisitions (M & A) on corporate performance. It addresses the major question related to the long-term performance of the acquiring firm.

The paper uses the long-term pre- and post-merger financial data to investigate the long-term performance. It compares performance of the acquiring firms before and after M & A. The present work conducts a comprehensive ratio analysis of 14 major ratios related to profitability, efficiency, leverage and liquidity. To ascertain the sources of the better long-term post-M & A returns, the present work decomposes the measure of operating performance into its constituents in terms of Du Pont analysis.

Taking a sample of 305 M & As during the period of January 2003 to December 2008, it has been observed that there is significant improvement in the profitability of the acquiring companies involved in M & A. The results pertaining to profitability, efficiency (in terms of utilization of fixed assets), expense and liquidity ratios show that there is an improvement in performance of the acquiring firms in the post-M & A period. The analysis in terms of Du Pont shows improvement in the long-term operating profit margin of the acquiring firms. This means higher profit is generated per unit net sales by the acquiring firms after the M & A. The higher profits (profit before interest and taxes and non-operating income) are generated primarily due to the better operating margins. The improved operating cash flows are on account of the improvement in the post-M & A operating margins of the acquirers, not due to the efficient utilization of the assets turnover to generate higher sales.

The paper contributes to the existing literature by comparing operating performance and profitability of acquirers before and after M & A using a comprehensive set of 14 ratios for a substantially large sample.

Probiotic fermented foods are fast being recognized as health foods. Most of such developed foods are based on dairy products and much less work is available on cereals/legumes which constitute the staple diet in developing nations. In the present study an attempt has been made to develop a barley‐based probiotic fermented food mixture and report its acceptability and nutritional profile.

Indigenously developed BCGT food mixture containing barley flour, milk coprecipitate, sprouted green gram paste and tomato pulp (2:1:1:1, w/w) was autoclaved (1.5kg/cm², 15min., 121^○C), cooled and fermented with 2 per cent liquid culture (containing 10⁶ cells/ml broth). Two types of fermentations were carried out i.e. single culture fermentation [ L. casei, L. plantarum (37^○C, 24hr.)] and sequential culture fermentation [S. boulardii (25^○C, 24hr.)+L. casei (37^○C, 24hr.); S. boulardii (25^○C, 24hr.)+L. plantarum (37^○C, 24hr.)]. The lyophilized and rehydrated food mixtures were subjected to organoleptic and nutritional evaluation. The data were statistically analysed for analysis of variance in a completely randomized design according to standard methods.

All the fermented and lyophilized food mixtures were found to be organoleptically acceptable to human palate and maintained adequate cell viability. The pH of the fermented products varied from 4.13 to 4.55. They had good nutrient profile with crude protein content ranging from 20.87 to 21.81 per cent.

Since the developed product had good acceptability after one month storage at room temperature, it can be considered for commercialization after establishing its health/therapeutic implications.

Till date dairy foods have preferentially been used as the carrier medium for probiotics. This paper explores the possibility of using staple foods as the carrier medium. The consumption of such food mixtures may be useful in controlling pathogens/antibiotics induced diarrhoea as well as in hypercholesterolemia. To authenticate such claims, the results of trials carried out on mice in our lab shall be reported in future communications.