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This study explores the reasons behind the popularity of majoring in Public Relations as opposed to Journalism or Digital Media among mass communications undergraduates in Oman. It attempts to gain insight into the factors influencing students’ decision-making process in selecting their major. It explores factors such as choice of major and sources of information that shape students’ knowledge and perception of the majors, using variables such as knowledge of job market, knowledge of curriculum, information sources and personal influences shaping major choice and selection. The study confirms that perception of the job market is a crucial factor in the selection of the majors. It also reveals that family plays a crucial role in influencing students’ decision-making process while choosing a major. The study concludes that strengthening the role of the academic advisor and educating students on course content and learning outcomes can increase the acceptance of less popular majors among communication undergraduates. The study is relevant in the context that the falling numbers of student enrolments in some areas of media studies could lead to a decline in teaching and research activities in those areas, in addition to a possible shortfall of specific skilled professionals in the national labour market pool.

This article discusses the consequences of unethical leadership, particularly, the leader-follower relationship in the delivery of agricultural advisory services in Tanzania. It analyses the means through which ethical leadership framework can be used to address the problem of unethical leadership in this context.

The article uses a comparative case study design to explain the position of ethical leadership in the delivery of agricultural advisory services in two local governments: Morogoro Municipality in Eastern Tanzania, and Hai District in Northern Tanzania.

The research shows that the delivery of agricultural extension services in Tanzania is guided by formal rules, which define the roles and responsibilities of local government officials and field workers. These roles and responsibilities are driven by national-level guidelines written by the Ministry of Agriculture. The guidelines define the key responsibilities of village, Ward and District level Agricultural Extension Officers. In developing the working schedule, agricultural extension workers at the village and ward levels are guided by an annual calendar that defines the seasons of the year and the relevant knowledge required by farmers. Nevertheless, the implementation of these schedules is compromised by a lack of resources and morale of field workers who in turn, cope through charging for the services, which is considered as their prime motives.

The findings can be of interest to national and local government policymakers and officials dealing with the delivery of agricultural advisory services in Tanzania.

The purpose of this study is to understand the profit implications of analytics-driven centralized discriminatory pricing at the headquarter level compared with sales force price delegation in the purchase of an aftermarket good through an indirect retail channel with symmetric information.

Using individual-level loan application and approval data from a North American financial institution and segment-level customer risk as the price discrimination criterion for the firm, the authors develop a three-stage model that accounts for the salesperson’s price decision within the limits of the latitude provided by the firm; the firm’s decision to approve or not approve a sales application; and the customer’s decision to accept or reject a sales offer conditional on the firm’s approval. Next, the authors compare the profitability of this sales force price delegation model to that of a segment-level centralized pricing model where agent incentives and consumer prices are simultaneously optimized using a quasi-Newton nonlinear optimization algorithm (i.e. Broyden–Fletcher–Goldfarb–Shanno algorithm).

The results suggest that implementation of analytics-driven centralized discriminatory pricing and optimal sales force incentives leads to double-digit lifts in firm profits. Moreover, the authors find that the high-risk customer segment is less price-sensitive and firms, upon leveraging this segment’s willingness to pay, not only improve their bottom-line but also allow these marginalized customers with traditionally low approval rates access to loans. This points out the important customer welfare implications of the findings.

Substantively, to the best of the authors’ knowledge, this paper is the first to empirically investigate the profitability of analytics-driven segment-level (i.e. discriminatory) centralized pricing compared with sales force price delegation in indirect retail channels (i.e. where agents are external to the firm and have access to competitor products), taking into account the decisions of the three key stakeholders of the process, namely, the consumer, the salesperson and the firm and simultaneously optimizing sales commission and centralized consumer price.

This study aims to apply new modifications by changing the nonlinear logarithmic calculation steps in the method based on the removal effects of criteria (MEREC) method. Geometric and harmonic mean from multiplicative functions is used for the modifications made while extracting the effects of the criteria on the overall performance one by one. Instead of the nonlinear logarithmic measure used in the MEREC method, it is desired to obtain results that are closer to the mean and have a lower standard deviation.

The MEREC method is based on the removal effects of the criteria on the overall performance. The method uses a logarithmic measure with a nonlinear function. MEREC-G using geometric mean and MEREC-H using harmonic mean are introduced in this study. The authors compared the MEREC method, its modifications and some other objective weight determination methods.

MEREC-G and MEREC-H variants, which are modifications of the MEREC method, are shown to be effective in determining the objective weights of the criteria. Findings of the MEREC-G and MEREC-H variants are more convenient, simpler, more reasonable, closer to the mean and have fewer deviations. It was determined that the MEREC-G variant gave more compatible findings with the entropy method.

Decision-making can occur at any time in any area of life. There are various criteria and alternatives for decision-making. In multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM) models, it is a very important distinction to determine the criteria weights for the selection/ranking of the alternatives. The MEREC method can be used to find more reasonable or average results than other weight determination methods such as entropy. It can be expected that the MEREC method will be more used in daily life problems and various areas.

Objective weight determination methods evaluate the weights of the criteria according to the scores of the determined alternatives. In this study, the MEREC method, which is an objective weight determination method, has been expanded. Although a nonlinear measurement model is used in the literature, the contribution was made in this study by using multiplicative functions. As an important originality, the authors demonstrated the effect of removing criteria in the MEREC method in a sensitivity analysis by actually removing the alternatives one by one from the model.