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The purpose of this study is to provide a holistic view of the emergence of shareholder activism (SA) in India. However, specifically, this study aims at fulfilling the research gap by discussing the policy and legal advancement in the area of SA and investigating the chronological evolution of SA, manifestations of SA, motives of SA, outcome of SAs and impact of SA on the financial performance of the firm.

This study used a mixed methodology (both qualitative and quantitative) to draw inferences, including content analysis, descriptive statistics, independent sample t-test and paired sample t-test. The data has been collected from the annual reports of the sample companies and the Prowess database. Return on assets and return on equity have been used as measures of financial performance while investigating the difference in financial performance between firms subjected to SA and firms not subjected to SA.

The findings of this study suggest that there has been significant growth in the occurrence of SA incidents in India in the past decade, with shareholders prominently manifesting by opposing the proposals at annual general meetings/extraordinary general meetings, mostly involving governance-related demands. The findings from the independent sample t-tests revealed that there has been a significant difference in the financial performance of the sample subjected to SA and firms not subjected to SA. Furthermore, the results of the paired sample t-test provide strong evidence of significant improvement in the financial performance of firms’ post-SA.

The findings of this study have implications for various stakeholders. The findings of this study suggest that SA has been relatively more successful in the Indian context and may encourage minority shareholders to follow active participation through shareholder proposals and votes rather than a passive strategy to trade and exit. For firms, it can provide valuable inferences about the emergence of SA and how it has a positive impact on the financial performance of the firm, which can lead to a change in the perception of investors and promoters who perceive SA as a threat (Gillan and Starks 2000; Hartzell and Starks, 2003). For policymakers, it can act as a tool to investigate whether the regulatory changes have been able to bring the intended transparency, accountability and enhanced shareholder participation. This will encourage policymakers to be more agile, as their efforts are bearing fruit. This will also act as a guide to formulating future policies and regulations.

This study is an effort to provide a holistic view of SA scenarios in a developing economy setting like India, where SA is a very recent phenomenon. Although there are studies in the area of SA, there is a dearth of studies that have investigated the various dimensions of SA in the Indian context in a very systematic and extensive manner, investigating all the different dimensions of SA. Furthermore, this study also intends to investigate the impact of SA, which is normally perceived as a threat to financial performance and provide valuable contrasting evidence.

This chapter aims to find an optimal way to hedge foreign exchange exposures on three main currency pairs being the EURUSD, EURGBP and EURJPY. Furthermore, it analyses the risk level of each portfolio together with its kurtosis level. This chapter also looks into the relationship between the EURUSD portfolios and the VIX level.

This study is based on a back-testing analysis over a period of seven years starting in January 2007 and ending in December 2014. Two main Foreign Exchange Premium-Free strategies were structured using the Bloomberg Terminal. These were the ‘At-Expiry Forward Extra’ and the ‘Window Forward Extra’. Portfolios were created using FX options strategies, FX spot and FX forwards. The EURUSD portfolios were also analysed and compared with the VIX level in order to see whether volatility has a direct effect on the outcome of the strategies. The statistical significance of the difference between returns of portfolios was analysed using a paired sample t-test. Finally, the histogram and distribution curve of each portfolio were created and plotted in order to provide a more visual analysis of returns.

It was found that the optimal strategies in all cases were the FX option strategies. The portfolios’ risk was analysed and indicated that optimal portfolios do not necessarily derive the lowest risk. It was also found that with a high VIX level, the forward contract was the most beneficial whilst the option strategy benefited from a low VIX level. When testing for statistical significance between returns of different portfolios, in most cases, the difference in returns between portfolios resulted to be statistically insignificant. Although some similarities were noticed in distribution curves, these differed from the normal distribution. When analysing the kurtosis levels, it is found that such levels differed from that of a normal distribution which has a kurtosis level of 3. Interpretation of such histograms, distribution curves and the kurtosis analysis was explained.

Several studies and research related to event study and terrorist bombing acts have different conclusions. Moreover, research on terrorist bombings worldwide has never been conducted. Hence, this research aims at examining the impact of terrorist bombing using the abnormal return variables by looking at all bombings around the world in the past 10 years. This research uses a paired t-test by looking at the abnormal return before, during, and after a bombing act. Results show no significant difference between the abnormal return before, during, and after bombing acts.

This study aims to examine the effects of front-of-package (FoP) labels on the healthy evaluation of Peruvian consumers. This relationship was examined in cases where snacks were healthy and unhealthy. In addition, the study included the role of three consumer purchase objectives (i.e. hedonic, healthy and weight loss) and two types of consumers (high and low use of labelling) in the healthy evaluation.

The sample consisted of 628 Peruvian youngsters aged between 16 and 24 years who frequently consume processed food. The research panel “QueOpinas” oversaw the recruitment of the participants through social media and television. Four types of FoP labels were studied in depth: Nutritional Warnings, Monochrome Guideline Daily Amount (GDA), Polychrome Guideline Daily Amount (GDA-Semaphore) and Traffic Light Labelling. A paired sample t-test and MANOVA were performed to evaluate the research objectives.

The GDA FoP label was found to be insufficient to promote a healthy evaluation. In contrast, the Nutritional Warnings and GDA-Semaphore and Traffic Light FoP labels had a significant and positive effect on the healthy evaluation of the snacks at a 95% confidence level. However, a comparative analysis of the labels revealed that some can be more efficient than others in promoting healthy purchase decisions. For the nutritional warnings (NWs) and traffic light FoP labels, the results revealed that consumers better distinguish unhealthy and healthy cereal bars when these products display traffic light labels.

This research topic has not been investigated in Peru and relevant research in this region is still incipient. In addition, the findings are important for policymakers as the findings will be able to implement specific labelling systems that will help consumers make healthier choices and support the debate about the effectiveness of the main FoP systems.

Recently, with a high volume of users and user’s content in Community Question Answering (CQA) sites, the quality of answers provided by users has raised a big concern. Finding the expert users can be a method to address this problem, which aims to find the suitable users (answerers) who can provide high-quality relevant answers. The purpose of this paper is to find the expert users for the newly posted questions of the CQA sites.

In this paper, a new algorithm, RANKuser, is proposed for identifying the expert users of CQA sites. The proposed RANKuser algorithm consists of three major stages. In the first stage, folksonomy relation between users, tags, and queries is established. User profile attributes, namely, reputation, tags, and badges, are also considered in folksonomy. In the second stage, expertise scores of the user are calculated based on reputation, badges, and tags. Finally, in the third stage, the expert users are identified by extracting top N users based on expertise score.

In this work, with the help of proposed ranking algorithm, expert users are identified for newly posted questions. In this paper, comparison of proposed user ranking algorithm (RANKuser) is also performed with other existing ranking algorithms, namely, ML-KNN, rankSVM, LDA, STM CQARank, and EV-based model using performance parameters such as hamming loss, accuracy, average precision, one error, F-measure, and normalized discounted cumulative gain. The proposed ranking method is also compared to the original ranking of CQA sites using the paired t-test. The experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed RANKuser algorithm in comparison with the existing ranking algorithms.

This paper proposes and implements a new algorithm for expert user identification in CQA sites. By utilizing the folksonomy in CQA sites and information of user profile, this algorithm identifies the experts.

This paper aims to discuss partitioning an air travel service encounter into touchpoints according to elements and phases, which are depth and breadth, respectively, using the conceptual framework of Le Bel. The empirical findings further the dialogue about the service encounter construct.

A total of 12 distinctive touchpoints within the joining and intensive phases of any air travel service encounter are reviewed for importance using travel purpose and nationality as segmentation variables. Respondents participated through an online questionnaire and face‐to‐face approach from a fieldworker; they were not engaged in an air travel service encounter at the time of the study. Data analysis includes descriptive statistics, independent sample t‐tests and paired sample t‐tests where the latter considered a named airline from the region.

The findings indicate touchpoints to be sufficiently distinctive that partitioning a service encounter provides opportunities for quality improvements directed at customer satisfaction outcomes. Notably, greater importance is typically given to the intensive phase touchpoints than those in the joining phases thus placing more emphasis on activities within service encounters' simultaneous production/consumption. Touchpoint preference is evident for travel purpose and passenger nationality segmentation criteria. When an airline is named, respondents appear more discriminating about touchpoint quality compared to those in generic service encounters.

Academically, partitioning strengthens the links between the service encounter construct and service quality and provides additional information beyond expectations‐perceptions results. Industry value is derived for practitioner marketers when distinctive touchpoints are taken from a partitioned service encounter providing opportunities for segmenting and targeting consumers accordingly.

For online experiential products, tactile attributes are important but hard-to-achieve features. This research aims to explore consumers' emotional experiences by incorporating tactile attributes into the online clothing shopping scenario.

This paper presents two online shopping experiments by consumers who purchase online clothing: one experiment involves subjects browsing clothing products on a computer screen; the other one involves subjects touching the clothing fabric while browsing a corresponding product on a computer screen. Based on the stimulus–organism–response (S-O-R) model, a physiological polygraph was used to record the emotional experience of subjects under the stimuli of “sight” and “sight + touch.”

(1) Subjects had a more positive emotional arousal under the stimuli of “sight + touch”; (2) the visual merchandising of clothing and expected touch task affect subjects' overall emotional experience with clothing, and with a good visual experience and expected tactile experience, the subjects showed a more positive emotional valence under the stimuli of “sight + touch”; (3) differing from previous research, this experimental data only supports the hypothesis that the skin conductance indicator is related to the level of emotional arousal, without supporting its correlation with emotional valence. However, the heart rate indicator is correlated with emotional valence but not with emotional arousal.

This work proposes a way to study the tactile attributes of online clothing and enriches the theoretical framework of polygraph and the S-O-R model for the research of online experiential products, and in terms of application, it sheds light on sales strategies of online experiential products for retailers and brand owners.

Vietnam is a land that has seen turbulent past and has faced huge damage as being a land for proxy war between the USA and the USSR, but yet it has risen and liberated itself out by adapting renovation or Doi-Moi as it is formally called in Vietnam. The purpose of this chapter is to identify the major impact of trade liberalization and trade integration on the Vietnamese economy. Through this chapter we have tried to bring out the changes that took place in the Vietnamese economy post liberalization. The structural change that took place in the Vietnamese economy due to liberalization is analyzed in this chapter. We have used paired sample T-test and Chow Test (F-Test) to observe the change as Vietnam joined the WTO. The effect that the various policy and FTA that Vietnam had after joining the WTO will be analyzed through this chapter.

During the current global epidemic, e-learning and mobile learning have been rapidly developed in the field of entrepreneurship education. The effect of these learning methods remains to be confirmed. The purpose of this paper is to explore the effect of mobile business simulation games in entrepreneurship education.

From May 2020 to July 2020, the authors adopted a quasi-experimental design to explore the effect of mobile business simulation games in entrepreneurship education. The authors set up an experimental group to participate in mobile business simulation games, with a total of 105 students, and set up a control group of 100 students. At the beginning and end of the experiment, data on entrepreneurial attitude, self-efficacy, entrepreneurial intention and other related variables were collected. Paired sample T-test and regression analysis were used to analyze the results.

The authors found that mobile business simulation games can improve entrepreneurial attitudes and self-efficacy, but cannot change entrepreneurial intentions. The paired sample T-test in the experimental group showed that the entrepreneurial attitude and entrepreneurial self-efficacy of the participants were significantly improved, but the entrepreneurial intention did not change significantly. The above three variables did not change significantly in the control group. The research results also show that flow experience is very important in mobile business simulation games, which can improve entrepreneurial attitude and entrepreneurial self-efficacy.

The authors’ findings confirm the positive effects of mobile business simulation games in entrepreneurship education, which can improve entrepreneurial attitudes and entrepreneurial self-efficacy. But the disadvantage of mobile business simulation games is that they cannot increase entrepreneurial intention. In addition, the flow experience needs to be valued in mobile business simulation games. The research in this paper has implications for how mobile learning can be used in entrepreneurship education during the COVID-19 pandemic. In addition, research is of great value on how mobile business simulation games can be improved.

The purpose of this paper is to determine the extent to which team processes vary between team types, as well as the relative importance of these processes for different team types.

A survey study evaluated a sample of 316 members of various work teams that were classified as either intellectual (e.g. executive team) or physical (e.g. production team) teams. Independent samples t‐tests, paired samples t‐tests, and confirmatory factor analysis were used to evaluate hypotheses.

Confirmatory analysis indicated transition and action oriented process behaviors were distinct from one another. Intellectual teams were found to value transition processes (planning and strategizing) more highly than physical teams. Intellectual teams also valued transition processes (planning and strategizing), more than action processes (monitoring and coordinating).

Research on team processes tends to focus upon a “one size fits all” approach to teamwork, but this approach has yielded inconsistent frameworks. This study provides evidence that these inconsistencies are due to the changing nature of teamwork. This study was limited in that only two broad types of teams and two types of process competencies were assessed.

Differences in the importance of certain processes for specific team types should be taken into account when implementing systems for team selection, performance appraisal, and training.

This paper provides empirical support for previous theoretical suppositions that different team types differ in the level of importance they place on certain processes.