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The topic of CSR and sustainability has gained great popularity in the past 20 years, especially among companies. While companies already have some experience with various approaches and their respective results, the same have not been assessed on national level. This chapter aims at providing an answer to the question “Which governmental approach to CSR leads to better results – active or neutral?”

In the chapter, the concepts of “active” and “neutral” governmental approaches are defined and explored. Having defined and distinguished between the approaches of governments, all EU countries have been assessed and assigned an “active” or “neutral” role. As a second dimension of the study, a sustainability ranking is taken, which compares the results of the countries in fields, often addressed by CSR. The ranking of the EU countries was then compared to their role in search of dependencies.

Clear links between the sustainability results and the government approach to CSR were not established in this study. Some relationships were found between the neutral governmental role and lower sustainability results. Nevertheless, assuming an active approach does not guarantee a top position of the country.

Some of the major limitations of this work were related to the existing sustainability rankings of countries and the limited assessment of the results of governmental actions in the field of CSR. The current rankings and assessment are based on indictors, which sometimes cannot be related to governmental actions or policies, rather to the resources of the country. Additionally, there are hardly any publicly available assessments of the actions or policies of member-state governments.

A comparison of such type can be a useful guideline for governmental decision-making. A more detailed analysis of potential CSR approaches and their effectiveness can be transformed into specific recommendations to public authorities in the EU.

The topic of CSR by definition is driven by social needs and opinions. The current study can be a useful tool in public discussions of governmental policies and their potential outcomes.

This is a novel study which assigns roles to EU governments and cross-references them to existing sustainability results in an attempt to draw conclusions about policy effectiveness.

We examine how different neutral sources and third-party neutral qualification differences relate to mediation and arbitration usage at large US firms. Neutral sourcing is controversial, particularly in employment arbitration, where many have expressed concern that unregulated sourcing arrangements may bias outcomes in favor of employers. We use agency and structure theories to hypothesize that firms will be less likely to use mediation when the neutral is sourced as a result of court-annexed mediation, but that firms may be more likely to use arbitration when the neutral is sourced from a private third-party provider. Utilizing human capital theory, we also hypothesize that organizations will use both mediation and arbitration more frequently when neutrals are perceived to be more highly qualified. Empirically, we rely on data gathered from a survey of US Fortune 1000 corporations to test these hypotheses and find support for each of them. Our results suggest that, while firms uniformly value professionalization in their neutrals, employers may impose structures on themselves in high-stakes circumstances like arbitration to ensure standardized and consistent processes, but prefer agency in lower-stakes circumstances like mediation.

Neutrality has traditionally been considered a key trait of the civil service in Western democracies. The conception of the neutral bureaucracy is closely linked to the notion of the prominent politics–administration dichotomy of the two spheres of politics and administration, as advocated by Max Weber (1980) and Woodrow Wilson (1887). According to conventional wisdom, the firm and encompassing implementation of the merit principle realises the idea of a neutral bureaucracy. In that respect, neutrality and merit-based recruitments are often considered the opposite of politicisation. Conventionally, a neutral bureaucracy is considered to assure competence and immunity against opportunistic ideas brought in by volatile, sometimes erratic political leadership. Because elected politicians come and go with elections, they cannot ensure that political decisions are carried out based on the ‘best’ available knowledge. In that sense, bureaucrats are conceived as neutral, obedient servants that subordinate their behaviour to the will of political masters, to the law and the common good. However, there is no strict politics–administration dichotomy in contemporary politico-administrative systems. Empirical findings from the late 1970s onwards demonstrated that bureaucrats are by no means as neutral and ‘apolitical’ as assumed, but rather remarkably involved in political processes. This chapter discusses the literature on neutral competence and presents an empirical analysis of Danish and British civil servants’ accounts of neutrality. This chapter concludes by suggesting the concept of competent neutrality and discussing implications for our understanding of bureaucratic neutrality.

There is growing empirical evidence that firm heterogeneity is technologically non-neutral. This chapter extends the Gandhi, Navarro, and Rivers (2020) proxy variable framework for structurally identifying production functions to a more general case when latent firm productivity is multi-dimensional, with both factor-neutral and (biased) factor-augmenting components. Unlike alternative methodologies, the proposed model can be identified under weaker data requirements, notably, without relying on the typically unavailable cross-sectional variation in input prices for instrumentation. When markets are perfectly competitive, point identification is achieved by leveraging the information contained in static optimality conditions, effectively adopting a system-of-equations approach. It is also shown how one can partially identify the non-neutral production technology in the traditional proxy variable framework when firms have market power.

This research aims to investigate the influence of building design on the thermal comfort of occupants of naturally ventilated hospital (NVH) wards to identify the aspects with the most significant influence on the thermal comfort of hospital buildings during the hot-dry season in the hot-humid tropics of Southeast Nigeria.

Field measurements, physical observations and a questionnaire survey of 60 occupants of the wards of the Joint Presbyterian Hospital, Uburu in Ebonyi State, Nigeria were undertaken. The data were analysed using Humphreys' neutral temperature formula, descriptive statistics and multiple regression analysis.

The results revealed that the neutral temperature for the wards ranges from 26.2 °C to 29.9 °C, the thermal condition in the wards was not comfortable because it failed to meet the ASHRAE Standard 55 as only 65% of the occupants said the thermal condition was acceptable. The number and sizes of windows, building orientation, the presence of high-level windows and higher headroom significantly influenced the occupants' thermal comfort vote.

This research is valuable in estimating comfort temperature and identifying aspects that require attention in enhancing the capacity of NVH wards to effectively meet the thermal comfort needs of occupants in the hot-humid tropics of Southeast Nigeria and other regions that share similar climatic conditions.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study of this nature that provides valuable feedback for building design professionals on the performance of existing hospital buildings in meeting users' thermal comfort needs in the hot-dry season of the hot-humid tropics in Southeast Nigeria.

This study aims to explore the impact of carbon neutral announcements on “stock market value” of publicly listed companies in China.

The event study approach is adopted. Market, market-adjusted, Carhart four-factor model and a cross-sectional regression model are employed to examine the impacts of carbon neutral announcements on “stock market value” of Chinese companies based on data from 188 carbon neutral announcements.

Carbon neutral announcements positively impact Chinese shareholder value. Carbon neutral announcements at the strategic level have a more positive and significant impact on Chinese stock market value. Innovative carbon neutral announcements do not significantly cause Chinese stock market reactions. Companies have more positive and significant stock market reactions when the companies make carbon neutral announcements that reflect high supply chain network resilience and heterogeneity and strong supply chain network relationships.

The findings uncover the business value of carbon neutral activities and provide operations managers in developing countries insights into how to improve enterprises' market value by actively implementing carbon neutral activities.

This paper is the first trial to apply an event study to examine the relationship between carbon neutral announcements and Chinese stock market value from the perspective of announcement level and type and supply chain networks. This paper introduces corporate reputation theory and enriches the application of corporate reputation theory in the field of low-carbon environmental protections and supply chains.

The purpose of this paper is to empirically analyze the “market-neutral” characteristics of the market-neutral strategy hedge funds in Chinese A-share market.

The analyses in the paper are conducted to study the market-neutral characteristics by means of index analysis, correlation analysis, β-neutral analysis and the three-factor model analysis.

The results show that the performance advantage of the market-neutral strategy hedge funds is obvious. Most market-neutral strategy funds are exposed to market risks and the α strategy funds also have obvious style factor exposure; strictly speaking, all of the market-neutral strategies have not reached the “market-neutral” requirements. This paper also finds that Chinese trading restrictions on stock index futures in September 2015 have a significant impact on Chinese market-neutral strategy hedge funds.

The conclusion of this paper has a certain reference value for understanding the risk characteristics and possible problems of hedge funds in emerging markets, and also has important reference value for investors.

This paper investigates changes in risk-neutral distribution derived from Taiwan stockindex options under different market conditions. The purpose of this paper is to explore whether individual investor sentiment significantly influences the Taiwan option prices.

The authors adopt the optimization method to estimate the risk-neutral distribution from the Taiwan stock index options and use the t-test to examine the difference in risk-neutral skewness, kurtosis, and confidence interval between the pre-crisis and crisis periods. This paper tests the impact of individual investor sentiment on risk-neutral skewness and confidence interval in two sub-periods.

The authors find that errors in individual investors’ expectations significantly influence the Taiwan stock index option prices.

The data concerning the sentiment of speculative institutional investors are incomplete for the Taiwan option market. Therefore, this paper focusses on the analysis of individual investor sentiment. Further research can study the impact of institutional investor sentiment in emerging markets.

The previous literature has suggested that option prices reflect information before the information is revealed in stock prices. Therefore, an important implication is to analyze the information quality revealed in option prices by studying whether the changes in option prices are due to investor sentiment or non-sentiment-related components.

Most of the studies in the literature have focussed on the US option market, and their applicability may vary across different microstructures. This paper shows that the influence of individual investor sentiment in an emerging market is different from that in the US market.

Gift-givers are often confronted with the possibility of choosing gifts that are inconsistent with their own attitudes (“attitude-inconsistent gifts”). For example, a gun opposer may be faced with the possibility of choosing gun paraphernalia as a gift, and a vegetarian might be forced to consider the possibility of choosing a steakhouse gift card as a gift. This study aims to compare givers’ decision-making when they are confronted with the possibility of choosing attitude-inconsistent gifts with their decision-making when they are faced with the possibility of choosing gifts that are neither inconsistent nor consistent with their attitudes (“attitude-neutral gifts”).

Seven experimental studies test the hypotheses. These studies have participants make decisions as givers and use a variety of gifts, giver-recipient relationships, gifting occasions and dependent variables, as well as both consequential and hypothetical decisions.

Givers strategically avoid choosing attitude-inconsistent (vs attitude-neutral) gifts, even when they believe that these kinds of gifts are the ones that recipients desire the most. This aversion emerges because givers anticipate that choosing an attitude-inconsistent (vs attitude-neutral) gift would cause them to experience a higher level of psychological discomfort.

This research documents a novel gift-giving phenomenon (givers’ aversion to attitude-inconsistent gifts), one of the most widespread forms of intentional preference-mismatching in gift-giving (givers’ avoidance of attitude-inconsistent gifts when they believe that these kinds of gifts are the ones that recipients desire the most), and a psychological mechanism that has a strong influence on givers’ decision-making but was yet to be explored in the gift-giving literature (givers’ anticipations of psychological discomfort). Collectively, these facets improve the field’s understanding of consumer gift-giving and call into question the assumption that gift-giving is aimed predominantly at pleasing the recipient.

This research suggests that if gift-givers want to be more financially efficient, they should refrain from contemplating the feelings of psychological discomfort that they would experience from choosing an attitude-inconsistent gift and instead focus on selecting the gift that the recipient desires the most. Moreover, it indicates that gift-givers’ tendency to avoid preferred, attitude-inconsistent gifts can have undesirable social and well-being consequences. Finally, it suggests that firms’ bottom lines may be harmed by givers’ aversion to attitude-inconsistent gifts, and that firms selling products that are likely attitude-inconsistent for segments of consumers should think carefully about advertising those products as gifts.

The gift-giving literature has recently documented multiple cases of givers intentionally refraining from choosing the gifts that they believe best match recipients’ preferences. Yet, the present work shows that there was a considerable gap in this segment of the gift-giving literature. Specifically, the present research documents a previously unexplored, but highly common, instance in which intentional preference-mismatching in gift-giving occurs: whenever a potential gift is attitude-inconsistent. Moreover, this work sheds light on a psychological mechanism that plays an important role in givers’ decision-making but was yet to be explored in the gift-giving literature: givers’ anticipated feelings of psychological discomfort.

Wearable health information systems (IS) open up a new era for personal health self-management, and bring about disruptive changes to individual lives. However, prior studies on IS post-adoptive behavior primarily focused on either continuance or discontinuance, neglecting the mutual transformation process between IS usage and rejection behavior. This behavior is expressed as intermittent discontinuance in the current study. By revising and extending the expectation-disconfirmation model, the purpose of this paper is to understand the factors affecting information system intermittent discontinuance in the context of wearable eHealth.

This study proposes a revised expectation-disconfirmation model by incorporating four new theoretical constructs, i.e. neutral disconfirmation, attitudinal ambivalence, neutral satisfaction, and intermittent discontinuance. An online survey was used to validate the research model, and 428 wearable health device users were recruited in this study.

Empirical results demonstrate that neutral disconfirmation exerts positive effects on neutral satisfaction and attitudinal ambivalence, both of which further have positive effects on intermittent discontinuance. In addition, attitudinal ambivalence also has a positive and significant effect on neutral satisfaction.

This study extends the current understanding on IS post-adoption usage behavior by introducing a new concept, i.e., intermittent discontinuance. In particular, post-adoption usage behavior is viewed as a dynamic process within a changing environment in this study. Some unique features specific to intermittent discontinuance are also identified. In this regard, neutral and conflicting constructs further add new values to IS adoption and diffusion literature. In addition, the integration of eHealth and wearable devices provides a fruitful research context for future research, and this study represents one of the first attempts to empirically explore the intermittent usage problems encountered within this emerging phenomenon.