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The thesis that the institutional arrangements, social organizations, and ideology in Eastern Europe are not conducive to the establishment of capitalism, and certainly not the laissez‐faire variety, with Poland cited as the illustrative case. Karl Polanyi′s necessary conditions for laissez‐faire capitalism in the nineteenth century represent the point of origin for the analysis, i.e. the maintenance of rules to permit the self‐regulating market. The focus is on the ongoing process of privatization, citing the primary institutional shortcomings. Also examines governmental structural problems in addition to historical institutional developments. Considers the history of property rights from legal and cultural perspectives. The final concern is to offer a different interpretation of markets, i.e. markets as cultural and political institutions.

The Bureau of Economics in the Federal Trade Commission has a three-part role in the Agency and the strength of its functions changed over time depending on the preferences and ideology of the FTC’s leaders, developments in the field of economics, and the tenor of the times. The over-riding current role is to provide well considered, unbiased economic advice regarding antitrust and consumer protection law enforcement cases to the legal staff and the Commission. The second role, which long ago was primary, is to provide reports on investigations of various industries to the public and public officials. This role was more recently called research or “policy R&D”. A third role is to advocate for competition and markets both domestically and internationally. As a practical matter, the provision of economic advice to the FTC and to the legal staff has required that the economists wear “two hats,” helping the legal staff investigate cases and provide evidence to support law enforcement cases while also providing advice to the legal bureaus and to the Commission on which cases to pursue (thus providing “a second set of eyes” to evaluate cases). There is sometimes a tension in those functions because building a case is not the same as evaluating a case. Economists and the Bureau of Economics have provided such services to the FTC for over 100 years proving that a sub-organization can survive while playing roles that sometimes conflict. Such a life is not, however, always easy or fun.

Despite an increase in businesses started by celebrities, we have limited understanding as to how celebrity entrepreneurs benefit new ventures. Drawing on a reputational capital perspective, we develop the notion of celebrity capital and show how it can be used to uniquely differentiate the venture and to overcome liabilities of newness. We discuss how celebrity capital can negatively influence the venture when negative information about the celebrity surfaces and in terms of limiting the scope of the venture. We discuss the different strategic implications of celebrity capital for ventures using celebrity entrepreneurs versus endorsers.

In every country, specific cultures exist. In comparison most businesses have a variety of different cultures because there are different people working within the company. People with the same religion, language, beliefs and values share a culture. This, in turn, is shared with all types of people in the same cultural system. Here the author examines the art of managing people who are from different cultures, taking into account their different set of values, traditions, and ways of achieving various goals. It exposes some of the problems inherent in the host (local) country where a home (parent company) manager refuses or is incapable of internalizing the local culture in which the expatriate operates. Business tactics are enforced and implemented differently depending on the culture the decision‐maker is from. Therefore, one should always think globally and act locally.

Delivering vaccines to the children who need them requires a supply chain that is efficient and effective. In most of the developing countries, however, the unknown and unresolved supply chain issues are causing inefficiencies in distributing vaccines. There is, therefore, a great need in such countries to recognize the issues that cause delays in vaccine delivery. With this purpose, the present study aims to identify and analyze the key issues in the supply chain of basic vaccines required to immunize children in developing countries.

Based on a field survey of three states of India, in-depth review of relevant literature and experts’ opinions, 25 key issues were recognized as factors of the vaccine supply chain (VSC) and categorized into five main domains. Using integrated interpretive structural modeling and fuzzy analytic network process approaches, the issues have been prioritized to determine their relative importance in the VSC. In addition, a sensitivity analysis has been performed to investigate the priority stability of the issues.

The results of the analysis show that among the five domains of VSC issues, the economic domain with a weight of 0.4262 is the most important domain, followed by the management (0.2672), operational (0.2222), environmental (0.0532) and social (0.0312).

This study focuses on the prioritization of VSC issues; therefore, the results of the present study can provide direction to the decision-makers of immunization programs of developing countries in driving their efforts and resources on eliminating the most important obstacles to design successful vaccination programs.

To the authors’ knowledge, this paper is first to provide a direction to the decision-makers in identifying and managing important issues through the use of an analytical approach.

Swift guanxi and trust can influence consumers’ decision making in social commerce. What factors will influence the formation of swift guanxi and trust between buyers and sellers in social commerce has not been clearly investigated. The purpose of this paper is to identify antecedents and impacts of swift guanxi and trust in social commerce.

An online questionnaire was used to collect the data, and Partial Least Squares Structural Equation Modeling was employed for data analysis. Social support and presence are introduced as the antecedents for swift guanxi and trust, leading to the repurchase intention (RI) and social sharing intention of customers.

The results indicate that social support and presence can influence swift guanxi and trust. Social support and presence are positively associated with swift guanxi and trust which further lead to RI and social sharing intention.

The findings can be used to guide sellers in social commerce platforms to improve their services and make good use of platform features to improve customers’ perception of presence. To attract new customers and retain old customers, sellers should also build swift guanxi and trust through the recommendation and experience sharing of previous buyers on social media.

This study combines social support theory and presence theory to investigate the factors that influence customers’ purchase decision and social sharing intention in the context of social commerce in China. The integration of social support theory and presence theory explains both the social and technical factors that influence swift guanxi and trust in social commerce.

The study seeks to illuminate factors that benefit, or do not benefit, the development of swift trust towards leaders in temporary military groups.

The study group comprised 50 Norwegian cadets, 34 Norwegian military officers, 317 Swedish cadets, and 190 Swedish military officers. Data were gathered using a questionnaire which included two open‐ended questions on aspects which contribute to swift trust (and lack thereof) towards leaders, as well as Likert‐scale questions on temporary group characteristics, and a personality inventory.

A qualitative clustering analysis of the open‐ended responses yielded a hierarchical model of aspects which contribute to swift trust (or the lack thereof) with the following two superior categories: individual‐related characteristics such as emotional stability and relationship‐related characteristics such as encourage involvement and creativity. The latter superior category covaried most strongly with ratings of the groups' performance.

The results need to be substantiated by further research in other professional groups and cultures.

The findings can help leaders of temporary groups become more conscious of how they may affect the group members' development of swift trust.

The hierarchical and detailed model of aspects which contribute to swift trust in leaders of temporary groups is new.

The paper aims to investigate challenges facing small-, medium- and micro-sized enterprises (SMMEs) in public procurement in Botswana from the view of a buyer.

The researchers conducted consultative workshops, succeeded by focus groups and follow-up telephone interviews, to collect and validate data. A total of 75 procurement officers from central government ministries and local governments participated in the study.

Results indicate that SMMEs find it difficult to deal with public procurement because of lack of capacity, unfair bias against SMMEs, inefficient government payment systems, unfair competition from their larger and established counterparts and centralized public procurement. The paper recommends a comprehensive integrated framework, improvement of SMME capacity and adopting policies to ensure greater public procurement market access.

The paper proposes looking at the automation of the incident response (IR) process, through formal, systematic and standardized methods for collection, normalization and correlation of security data (i.e. vulnerability, exploit and intrusion detection information).

The paper proposes the incident response intelligence system (IRIS) that models the context of discovered vulnerabilities, calculates their significance, finds and analyzes potential exploit code and defines the necessary intrusion detection signatures that combat possible attacks, using standardized techniques. It presents the IRIS architecture and operations, as well as the implementation issues.

The paper presents detailed evaluation results obtained from real‐world application scenarios, including a survey of the users' experience, to highlight IRIS contribution in the area of IR.

The paper introduces the IRIS, a system that provides detailed security information during the entire lifecycle of a security incident, facilitates decision support through the provision of possible attack and response paths, while deciding on the significance and magnitude of an attack with a standardized method.