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The paper seeks to examine the evolving international strategies of Europe's incumbent telecommunications operators. The aim is to develop a typology of how these different operators have sought to position themselves within an internationalising marketplace.

The objectives of the paper were addressed through a multiple case study analysis of 15 incumbent telecommunication operators within Western Europe. The approach was essentially strategic, seeking to develop an awareness of how each of these operators' corporate strategy has adapted to the challenges of internationalisation. The nature of this response will be defined by a broad typology.

Four types of strategy were found to exist, most of which were defined by the scale of the business. The research found that most operators were developing international strategies based on developing an effective competitive presence in the European region. There was only limited evidence of operators developing a global strategy. Some operators have attempted such a strategy but have since retreated from such offensive strategies.

The work highlights how businesses that have a dominant core domestic market are affected by internationalisation in both a proactive and a reactive manner.

This study inquires into emotion work performed by call center operators. Twelve call center operators were interviewed. Qualitative methodological strategies were utilized, where the focus of the thematic content analysis was on comprehension of the call center operator's work characteristics, the organization's display rules, and the emotional self-management strategies utilized. Two types of emotional self-management strategies were found: cognitive and behavioral. The organization acknowledged that people are not always able to handle the affective cost in relation to emotion work, offering emotional support and models concerning affective self-management strategies to be used. This organizational assistance strongly influenced the choice of strategies, for the call center operators most frequently used strategies taught by the organization. Emotion work was influenced by variables concerning the work context, factors that either favored or made the work, perceptions, evaluations, and the workers and the customers' affective states problematic. Emotion work was crucial in the call center operators' working routine, whenever the customers became aggressive, and social support made the task of displaying predominantly positive feelings less arduous.

The competitive strategies of international tour operators have had a negative effect on the sustainability of some tourist destinations. British tour operator strategies are analysed as an example to show the effects of vertical integration amongst tour operators, travel retailers and airlines and how this influences pricing and contracting methods in resorts. Also considered are developments in market segmentation and tour operator branding which have accelerated the trend towards standardised holiday products. The consolidation of ownership amongst European tour operators in likely to increase the power of companies vis‐à‐vis destinations. The study concludes by outlining policies to counteract the negative effects of tour operator strategies and suggests ways of developing a more balanced partnership between mass market tour operators and tourist destinations.

This paper aims to focus on the interplay between the market of contents and telecom operators. Traditional telecom operators are vulnerable to the new markets and services that appear as a consequence of accessibility to the Internet and, in particular, in the face of over-the-top content as Netflix.

The authors build a conceptual framework to analyze the response strategies by telecom operators in the context of an evolving TV technology.

They argue that the technology that enabled bundling of services was the entry door of telecom operators to the content market and that, nowadays, online TV may be their exit door if they do not display innovative strategies to remain in this market.

This is the first paper exploring the interplay between the market of contents and telecom operators with a focus in countries from Latin America.

The purpose of this paper is to consider extending the Porter “five forces” model for business strategy to encompass nonmarket actions in the telecommunications sector.

The Porter five forces model is reviewed in terms of a heavily regulated sector, examining each force in turn, with examples of the use by market players of lobbying and litigation to affect market outcomes.

The “five forces” model is a useful tool in analysing advocacy, lobbying and litigation by players in a heavily regulated market.

The extension opens the way to research in a number of areas to examine issues of structure and strategy, effectiveness in coupling market and nonmarket strategies.

Business strategy is infrequently analysed in the telecommunications sector and only rarely considers lobbying and litigation. This article provides a framework for such analyses and opens up new areas of research.

The purpose of this paper is to provide an improved genetic algorithm to solve 0/1 multidimensional knapsack problem (0/1 MKP), by proposing new selection and crossover operators that cooperate to explore the search space.

The authors first present a new sexual selection strategy that significantly improves the one proposed by (Varnamkhasti and Lee, 2012), while working in phenotype space. Then they propose two variants of the two-stage recombination operator of (Aghezzaf and Naimi, 2009), while they adapt the latter in the context of 0/1 MKP. The authors evaluate the efficiency of both proposed operators on a large set of 0/1 MKP benchmark instances. The obtained results are compared against that of conventional selection and crossover operators, in terms of solution quality and computing time.

The paper shows that the proposed selection respects the two major factors of any metaheuristic: exploration and exploitation aspects. Furthermore, the first variant of the two-stage recombination operator pushes the search space towards exploitation, while the second variant increases the genetic diversity. The paper then demonstrates that the improved genetic algorithm combining the two proposed operators is a competitive method for solving the 0/1 MKP.

Although only 0/1 MKP standard instances were tested in the empirical experiments in this paper, the improved genetic algorithm can be used as a powerful tool to solve many real-world applications of 0/1 MKP, as the latter models several industrial and investment issues. Moreover, the proposed selection and crossover operators can be incorporated into other bio-inspired algorithms to improve their performance. Furthermore, the two proposed operators can be adapted to solve other binary combinatorial optimization problems.

This research study provides an effective solution for a well-known non-deterministic polynomial-time (NP)-hard combinatorial optimization problem; that is 0/1 MKP, by tackling it with an improved genetic algorithm. The proposed evolutionary mechanism is based on two new genetic operators. The first proposed operator is a new and deeply different variant of the so-called sexual selection that has been rarely addressed in the literature. The second proposed operator is an adaptation of the two-stage recombination operator in the 0/1 MKP context. This adaptation results in two variants of the two-stage recombination operator that aim to improve the quality of encountered solutions, while taking advantage of the sexual selection criteria to prevent the classical issue of genetic algorithm that is premature convergence.

Under the big data background, there are many influencing factors for investors of new energy vehicles (NEV), and government subsidies promote the sustainable development of the new energy vehicle industry. Therefore, the purpose of the study is to provide solutions for the sustainable development of NEV.

The sustainable marketing strategy of NEV in China is put forward. This paper first analyzes the subsidy policy effect of NEV under the background of big data. It then establishes the online optimal leasing strategy under multiple strategy choices and the online leasing strategy of multiple vehicles under the inflation market.

With the fixed cost of NEV in each lease period, the optimal competition ratio of online decision-makers will continue to decrease with the increase of the difference between prepaid funds and government subsidies. In the decision-making of renting and purchasing multiple vehicles, the general strategy competition ratio is 2.922, while the optimal competition ratio of the online renting and purchasing strategy proposed by the research is 2.723.

The research is limited by the limited data and information collected, so the optimal decision-making model has some limitations. The authors need to find more representative data to optimize the model.

As an emerging industry, NEV have developed rapidly in recent years. Based on the online algorithm and competitive ratio theory, this paper solves the decision-making problem of operators and gives the optimal strategy to promote the green development of the new energy vehicle industry.

This paper proposes the optimal strategy for online investors of new energy vehicle operators by combining online algorithm and competitive ratio theory. The numerical analysis results of the optimal online model under multi strategy selection show that with the same difference between prepaid funds and government subsidies, the time point will be delayed and the time point will be advanced as the cost of leasing NEV in each period increases.

This paper sets out to recognise the complexity of the internationalisation process of telecommunications operators via an examination of the metanational forces influencing strategy of European incumbents. Thus as part of a broad strategy of strategic defence incumbents may seek to tap into metanational forces.

The utilisation of metanational forces for the purposes of strategic defence was examined via a dual case analysis. These were chosen to reflect two different strategic scenarios. The first case (Belgacom) has a purely defensive strategy, while the second (Telefonica) has dual‐faceted strategy based on defence alongside a more offensive international strategy.

Across both of these cases, there was evidence of emergent metanational strategies. These incumbents accessed the global resource pool to retrieve or acquire skills, capabilities or resources that would aid the competitive positioning of incumbents within their home market. It was found that the strong market position aided their ability to gain access to “valuable” resources. This raises evident policy issues.

A dual case analysis only offers a limited perspective on the influence of metanationality. However, the trend does highlight the increasingly complex nature of international strategy in telecommunications.

The value of the paper lies in understanding that the competitive advantage of incumbent operators can lie beyond their own national borders. This raises issues over the nature of strategic defence for incumbents in an increasingly internationalised marketplace.

This paper seeks to contribute to the debate about the regulation of termination rates in the context of Africa.

The methodology is based on analysis of secondary data and a case study of a regulatory intervention in Namibia and its impact.

Mobile call termination is a monopoly and not one side of a two‐sided market. Cost‐based termination rates increase competition between operators and lead to lower prices, more subscribers and more investment.

The case of Namibia is presented as an example of termination rate benchmarking as an alternative regulatory strategy to overcome regulatory and institutional bottlenecks in Africa.

African regulators are presented with a tool for removing market distortions.

Cost based termination rates will lead to lower retail prices and allow more people to use mobile phones.

The paper presents theoretical and empirical evidence against the waterbed effect and the two‐sided market argument.