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The aim of this paper was to determine fitting parameters in grain density of the magnesium primary phase function in AZ91/SiC composite heterogeneous nucleation model. Nucleation models have parameters, which exact values are usually not known and sometimes even their physical meaning is under discussion. Those parameters can be obtained after statistical analyze of the experimental data. Specimens of fourteen different composites were prepared. The matrix of the composite was AZ91 and the reinforcement was SiC particles. The specimens differs in SiC particles size (10 μm, 40 μm, 76 μm) and content (0 wt.%, 0.1 wt.%, 0.5 wt.%, 2 wt.%, 3.5 wt.%). They were taken from the region near to the thermocouple, to analyze the undercooling for different composites and its influence on the grain size. The specimens were polished and etched. The mean grain size for each specimen was measured. Specific undercooling for each composite was found from characteristic points on cooling rate curve. Microstructure and thermal analyze gave set of values that connect SiC particles content, their size and alloy undercooling with grain size. Those values were used to approximate nucleation model adjustment parameters. Obtained model can be very useful in modelling composites microstructure.

The purpose of this paper is to develop an original model and a solution procedure for solving jointly three main strategic fleet management problems (fleet composition, replacement and make-or-buy), taking into account interdependencies between them.

The three main strategic fleet management problems were analyzed in detail to identify interdependencies between them, mathematically modeled in terms of integer nonlinear programing (INLP) and solved using evolutionary based method of a solver compatible with a spreadsheet.

There are no optimization methods combining the analyzed problems, but it is possible to mathematically model them jointly and solve together using a solver compatible with a spreadsheet obtaining a solution/fleet management strategy answering the questions: Keep currently exploited vehicles in a fleet or remove them? If keep, how often to replace them? If remove then when? How many perspective/new vehicles, of what types, brand new or used ones and when should be put into a fleet? The relatively large scale instance of problem (50 vehicles) was solved based on a real-life data. The obtained results occurred to be better/cheaper by 10% than the two reference solutions – random and do-nothing ones.

The methodology of developing optimal fleet management strategy by solving jointly three main strategic fleet management problems is proposed allowing for the reduction of the fleet exploitation costs by adjusting fleet size, types of exploited vehicles and their exploitation periods.

Retailers are increasingly considering the introduction of service robots in their stores to support or even replace service staff. Service robots can execute service scripts during the service encounter that can influence customer interactions and the overall experience. While the role of service agents is well documented, more research is needed to understand customer responses to a technology-infused servicescape and to investigate the value of service robots as interaction partners. The purpose of this study is to examine the degree of customer immersion in human-human or human-robot interactions across different stages of the service experience and to understand how immersion affects store visit duration under each condition.

An experimental field study was developed to test the research hypotheses. The study was conducted in a retail store selling premium Italian leather goods with 50 respondents randomly allocated to one of two experimental conditions, interaction with a service robot or interaction with a human sales associate. Participants’ biometrics were collected to measure their immersion in the service encounter and to assess its impact on store visit duration.

The interaction with a service robot increases the level of customer immersion during the service encounter’s welcome and surprise moments. Immersion positively affects visit duration. However, participants exposed to a robot sales associate reported a shorter visit duration as compared to those who interacted with a human sales associate.

This study contributes to the emerging service and retail marketing literature on service robot applications applying a neuroscientific approach to the study of human–robot interactions across different moments of the service encounter. For managers, this study shows the conditions under which service robots can be successfully implemented in retail stores in accordance with the type of task performed and the degree of immersion generated in customers.

This paper aims to explore the potential of the awareness and knowledge of Islamic social finance (zakat, waqf and Islamic microfinance) to alleviate poverty during the COVID-19 pandemic with the moderating effect of ethical orientation.

The data were collected through the administration of paper-based and electronic questionnaires to 400 respondents out of which only 277 were found valid for analysis.

The study showed that by direct relationship, the awareness and knowledge of Islamic social finance instruments have a potentially significant positive contribution to poverty alleviation during the COVID-19 pandemic except for zakat that has an insignificant positive contribution. Ethical oriental has also a significant positive contribution. Contrary to expectation, the moderating effect of ethical orientation has changed zakat and waqf to have significant negative and insignificant positive contributions, respectively. Only Islamic microfinance has endured the moderating effect to continue contributing significantly and positively to the reduction of poverty.

The study explored only the potential impact of the awareness and knowledge of Islamic social finance to mitigate the extreme poverty caused by the COVID-19 pandemic in Nigeria.

This study clearly showed the need to create enabling laws and policies to support the operations of zakat and waqf institutions to achieve their objectives effectively and efficiently. These two institutions should be integrated with Islamic microfinance for the possibility of getting better outcomes.

There should be massive campaigns to restore religious, social and political ethics to enhance the socio-economic development of Nigerians based on the principles of brotherhood.

This study provides unexpected and unusual results showing the inability of zakat and waqf institutions to alleviate poverty due to poor ethical orientation.

This study aims to review the relationship between neurological processes and financial behavior from an interdisciplinary perspective. Individual decision-making is influenced by cognitive and affective biases; hence, it becomes pertinent to understand the origin of these biases. Neurofinance is an emerging field of finance budding from neuroeconomics and explains the relationship between human brain activity and financial behavior, drawn from interdisciplinary fields, including neurology, psychology and finance.

This conceptual paper extensively reviews the extant literature and performs meta-analysis to attain its research objectives.

The paper highlights the use of neuroimaging techniques in mapping the brain areas to help understand the processes in the higher cognitive areas of brain. The paper raises some new questions regarding individual preferences and choices while making financial or non-financial decisions.

The special focus on dysfunctions arising in brain because of injury and their impact on decision-making is also a key point in this paper and is summarized using meta-analytic forest plot. The existing literature provides instances where emotional processing is altered by injury in brain and may lead to more advantageous decisions, especially in risky situations.

Diffusion levels of broadband internet access vary across triad countries and emerging markets alike. Major industrialised nations face criticism for allegedly “lagging behind” in broadband development. This study aims to highlight drivers of broadband take‐up that help explain and properly evaluate the diffusion situation of a country.

The study investigates worldwide broadband internet access take‐up in terms of fixed and mobile broadband penetration and broadband launch lead time by drawing on a wide range of variables of which some have not been examined in previous studies (e.g. home office workers, service sector activities or local call prices).

Results show that broadband internet take‐up significantly benefits from economic prosperity and computer penetration. Moreover, general regulatory quality has a significant influence. The effect of other regulatory and market environment variables is declining over time with associations becoming insignificant in 2009 data.

Further research based on findings and limitations of the present study should incorporate quality of broadband, more accurate/differentiated measurement of broadband, conditionality, moderating effects, non‐linearity, as well as broadband implications for economic development.

This study covers a broad set of indicators and includes time lags in multivariate analysis to generate a holistic picture of broadband development drivers and their relevance over time.

The purpose of this paper is to propose an integrative framework bringing together results from neuroplasticity and decision-making from a neuroscience perspective with those from market plasticity, i.e. with which practices market actors shape markets.

Provided that developments in neuroscience indicate that training the brain for orientation toward efficient decision-making processes under uncertainty is possible, an in-depth analysis can be conducted by using the integrative framework, which was set up by the authors for advancing research efforts in neuroeconomics and neurofinance on these lines.

Markets have a plastic character; they can change shape and form and remain in that way thereafter. The marketers have always been causing this change to succeed in their marketing strategies and efforts. Plasticity, hitherto considered by marketing, market sociology and evolutionary economics, has a potential in financial decision-making processes, especially regarding its role in training the brain for stable financial decisions.

The theoretical approach can be incorporated for delivering an alternative representation of the knowledge processes associated with financial decisions.

The practical approach can be used for improving the practical aspects of financial decision-making processes.

The contribution is the first of its kind which integrates neuroscience approaches of plasticity and decision-making with the concept of market plasticity from the literature on economics and management, showing their similarities and opening a new front of discussion on how these two approaches can learn from each other to increase the explanatory power of financial decision-making processes and to gain new insights for financial decision makers on how to make more efficient financial decisions in the times of uncertainty.

Neuroeconomics and neurofinance are emerging as intriguing fields of research, despite sharing ambiguity with the concepts of neuroscience. The relationship among the concepts of economics, finance and neuroscience is not explicitly defined in the past literature, which distorts the use of neuroeconomics and neurofinance approaches in real-world practice for financial decision-making. The purpose of this paper is to consolidate the literature in the field of neuroeconomics and neurofinance to set up the research agenda for the upcoming scholarship in the field.

The purpose of this paper is to consolidates the extant literature in the fields of neuroeconomics and neurofinance by conducting an extensive systematic literature review to investigate the current state and define the relationship between economics, finance and neuroscience.

This paper identifies and explains the explicit relationship between different sub-fields of neuroscience with neuroeconomics and neurofinance and providing instances for future research studies.

The exclusive and extensive literature survey in the form of systematic literature review is undertaken for understanding the fields of neuroeconomics and neurofinance and is the key highlight of this paper. Another, interesting fact lies with matching the literature in neuroeconomics and neurofinance with further sub-fields of neuroscience such as neurophysiology, neuroanatomy, molecular neuroscience and cognitive neuroscience.

An engaged workforce has never been more important than it is now. Research continues to reveal a strong link between engaged employees and employee performance. Consequently, different strategies continue to be developed to enhance employee engagement (EE) in organisations. Unfortunately, many of these strategies have not worked due to the lack of trust that some employees may have towards organisational leaders. Thus, it is argued that the first step in building an effective EE is building trust, which will erode all sorts of suspicion of the intention of leaders in the organisation. Unfortunately, the literature is not clear about how to build such trust, especially in developing countries where the organisational environment is much different from that in developed ones; making the applicability of models in the developed world quite difficulty in these countries. How can public sector leaders build trust in the organisations in an environment where informality appears to be the norm? The purpose of this paper is therefore to ascertain how trust can be built in public organisations.

In order to answer the research questions, as well as obtain in-depth understanding of what is being done, the authors used the mixed methods approach in the data collection for the paper. In using mixed method data collection, the authors took both quantitative and qualitative approaches. Both qualitative and quantitative data were, however, collected concurrently. This was done for the sake of convenience, as there is little study on how to build trust or, even, EE in the Ghanaian context. The authors set out to explore these issues, and the only way for the authors to do so was to undertake the data collection simultaneously.

The paper examined critically four main areas to help leadership build trust: credibility, fairness, respect and communication. The study shows that both managers and employees firmly believe in building trust. Leaders were able to discuss the efforts they make to ensure that issues concerning trust building are addressed. At the same time, employees also agreed on the need to strengthen these variables.

The research identifies areas on which both leadership and employees can continually work to help bridge the gap between them if public organisations are to reap the benefits of EE. The authors are convinced that if the issues discussed here are addressed, and parties work on them, individuals will succeed in their own areas, but so will the organisations, which in turn will help in the development of he country.

From a theoretical perspective, it extends the work on EE, and offers new insight into this emerging concept from a developing countries perspective, where informality in the public sector is common. Most of the research on trust and EE has been either qualitative or quantitative in nature. Using the mixed methods approach means the authors will be explaining how both can help us better understand the “how” in building trust in the public sector. Thus, the paper is one of the few papers that have used the mixed methods approach to examine how trust can be built in public organisations.

The purpose of this paper is to present a review as well as a synthesis of the extant literature in the field of Neurofinance. The paper has been divided into eight parts. The first and second parts introduce the paper and dwell upon the brain functions in financial decisions. Part three presents the origin of Neurofinance and part four explains the difference between traditional finance, behavioural finance and neurofinance. Part five and six of the paper look into the research studies in Neurofinance and their application. Part seven gives a brief discussion on the limitations of neurofinance studies and part eight gives the conclusion.

The existing body of academic literature pertinent to the domain of Neurofinance was reviewed so as to provide an integrated portrayal and synthesis of the current level of knowledge in this field. This paper covers the insights on the subject for developing a deeper understanding of the investor's psychology.

Neurofinance is a very young discipline. It tries to relate the brain processes to the investment behaviour. Most of the researches in the domain of neurofinance focus on trading behaviour. It would be interesting to explore the workings of the brain for other investment behaviours too like personal financial planning decisions, etc.

Neurofinance is emerging as an alternate field of study and practice and this paper is an attempt to look at the development of Neurofinance and its role in developing a better understanding of the investor behaviour.